With the end of 2011, many news outlets have proffered their lists of the year's biggest stories.
The list from the Wired Danger Room includes the killing of Osama bin Laden and other setbacks to al-Qaida; the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (and the international intervention there); the "end" of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq - while a substantial force of private contractors remains behind and the covert, "shadow" side of the War on Terror intensifies; and the revelation of startling anti-Muslim ignorance and bigotry in FBI training materials.
As these stories demonstrate, the list is rather focused on the War on Terror and the Middle East, but it also includes problems with high-tech aircraft programs (the grounding of the F-22 fleet, the beleaguered F-35 program), the revelations of previously secret programs (like the stealth helicopter used in the operation against bin Laden, and Pentagon research into crowdsourcing), the activities of Mexican drug cartels, and the U.S. armed forces' reaction to the massive budget cuts facing them in the coming years.
Still, there is much that the quick recaps of those items misses. The discussion of the Arab Spring is far from complete without mention of events in states besides the three North African nations that got so much press – like Bahrain (which responded with a brutal crackdown, in which it was backed by Saudi and UAE forces, events which were underreported, and which Western governments generally shied away from criticizing) and Yemen (where events have also turned bloody), which are not even mentioned in the Danger Room round-up. Additionally, the U.S. is not the only country recently forced to make sharp cuts in defense spending by its economic difficulties. (In relative terms, Britain's cuts seem far more dramatic, and are not irrelevant to the U.S. given the import of British participation in American-led interventions in the past two decades.)
One might add that during 2011 China reached two milestones in the modernization (repeat, modernization, not build-up) of its forces – its testing of a fifth-generation fighter, the J-20, and the maiden voyage of its first aircraft carrier. (The significance of these events – which represent only an early stage in the development of both those capabilities - has been grossly exaggerated by scare-mongers, but I can't help feeling that an overview of the year would not be complete without mention of them.)
Offering a more global view (in contrast with the strongly American outlook of the Danger Room), as well as greater attention to less "traditional" (but arguably more important) issues is the list of The New Security Beat's most-viewed posts. Six of the top ten explicitly discuss demographics in some way (among other things, the role it played in the revolution in Tunisia, the implications for food security, and the revelation of a new, higher UN estimate about where population growth will go in the 21st century), two deal with water security issues, and one with the interaction between the two ("Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions"). There is also an attempt at developing a big picture ("In Search of A New Security Narrative").
However, the items presented by The New Security Beat is less news-y and more analytical than the Danger Room, so that while the pieces discussed above certainly demand attention, they do not quite function as a comprehensive round-up of the year's events. Indeed, two of the biggest stories in energy and environmental security during 2011 are not mentioned in it – the Fukushima nuclear disaster (the most dramatic nuclear energy incident in a generation, which will profoundly affect our handling of this energy source) and the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (the agreement produced by which represents a step further than we have gone before, but even on paper is short on both the commitment and ambition needed to tackle the problem, while in real life carbon emissions continue to shoot up).
At the same time, there is the matter of the world's financial system, which remains deeply troubled as one G-7 member after another sees its credit rating suffer (the U.S. got downgraded in August), and the Eurozone crisis tediously drags on and on and on – simply some of the more conspicuous signs of the continuation of the 2008 economic crisis. It would be simplistic to set this problem above the others – economic security is hardly extricable from the kinds described above – but it seems to me the area of greatest short-term vulnerability. Unfortunately, as recent events show, nothing significant has been done about any aspect of this (not trade imbalances, or income inequality, or stagnant consumption, or the destabilizing overfinancialization of the world economy). Indeed, the problem hardly seems to have been acknowledged – precisely because such acknowledgment flies in the face of the neoliberalism that remains the orthodoxy, even as it has been shown to be bankrupt again and again, and the fact seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
SOPA Blackout Protest
I found out about the protest against SOPA (H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act") too late to participate properly. So I'm posting this message to indicate my solidarity with the protestors - and offering this link to blackout participant Wikipedia's FAQ on the subject.
Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.
This blog will resume its normal operations then.
Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.
This blog will resume its normal operations then.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Artificial Intelligence?
One possibility that has appeared in discussions of the sixth-generation fighter is that it might be unmanned. The advantages of such an approach are obvious. Eliminating the pilot means being able to do away with the space and weight needed for human accommodation, while the aircraft's performance would no longer be constrained by human endurance. Additionally, this eliminates the risk of human losses in aerial operations. That at least some of the next generation of fighters might be remotely piloted seems plausible enough, given the increased use of such aircraft in reconnaissance and strike missions.
More radical, however, is the question of aircraft which are fully autonomous. Doing away with remote control would reduce the reliance on a vulnerable communications link, on the inevitable time-delay and disruptions to the data transfer between the aircraft and a distant operator, and human reflexes. Additionally, a fully autonomous aircraft would greatly simplify the trouble and expense of training operators.
However, this mode of operation is far less common at this point, requiring as it does more advanced artificial intelligence than anything available. Yet, those who are bullish on this issue speculate that human-grade artificial intelligence might be available by the 2020s, just in time to be an option for the designers of the first crop of sixth-generation fighters. And of course, assuming continued progress on AI past that point, better-than-human artificial intelligence would set the standard, pushing human beings out of the cockpit once and for all.
Still, even if the optimists are right about this trajectory, it is unlikely to come about all at once. We might see intermediate steps, such as smarter aircraft systems, like the "intelligent flight control system" currently under study in some research programs, and sufficient automation to enable designers of strike aircraft like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-18F Super Hornet to dispense with Weapons Systems Officers. This is not the limit of present ambition, however; Russian publicists for the PAK-FA promise the aircraft will have an expert system with near-human capability. And capability which is merely "near-human" might still be seen as adequate for an autonomous aircraft because of the other advantages it offers.
More radical, however, is the question of aircraft which are fully autonomous. Doing away with remote control would reduce the reliance on a vulnerable communications link, on the inevitable time-delay and disruptions to the data transfer between the aircraft and a distant operator, and human reflexes. Additionally, a fully autonomous aircraft would greatly simplify the trouble and expense of training operators.
However, this mode of operation is far less common at this point, requiring as it does more advanced artificial intelligence than anything available. Yet, those who are bullish on this issue speculate that human-grade artificial intelligence might be available by the 2020s, just in time to be an option for the designers of the first crop of sixth-generation fighters. And of course, assuming continued progress on AI past that point, better-than-human artificial intelligence would set the standard, pushing human beings out of the cockpit once and for all.
Still, even if the optimists are right about this trajectory, it is unlikely to come about all at once. We might see intermediate steps, such as smarter aircraft systems, like the "intelligent flight control system" currently under study in some research programs, and sufficient automation to enable designers of strike aircraft like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-18F Super Hornet to dispense with Weapons Systems Officers. This is not the limit of present ambition, however; Russian publicists for the PAK-FA promise the aircraft will have an expert system with near-human capability. And capability which is merely "near-human" might still be seen as adequate for an autonomous aircraft because of the other advantages it offers.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Reliving British Decline?
History may repeat itself, but it never does so exactly, one reason why historical analogies often mislead. (Consider, for instance, what scholar Jeffrey Record has to say about the "Munich" analogy in American policymaking.) Yet, the same can be said of just about any intellectual tool used improperly – or disingenuously.
The analogy so often drawn between today's United States and the British Empire is no exception to the pattern. Certainly the analogy has often been misused – in recent years, by the neoconservatives in particular. Yet, the parallels between their trajectories are well worth considering nonetheless, and one way of making such a comparison more useful might be (as I suggested in a previous posting) to not simply ask whether the U.S. is comparable to Imperial Britain, but, remembering how both have evolved, to ask which point in British history parallels the present moment.
Given the renewed prominence of declinism in current debates, it makes sense to start with the moment in which the United States was most prominent internationally. This is generally recognized as having been about 1945. At that time, like Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, it was the victor in a conflict that established it as the global hegemon, putting it in a position to shape the international order (politically through the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American-led institutions, economically through the Bretton Woods system). In part because its economy had boomed while Europe and East Asia were savaged by the conflict (another parallel with Britain circa 1815), its economy is widely reckoned to have accounted for a third of world output. Additionally, its armed forces enjoyed (until 1949) a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, as well as a preponderance of air and sea power, and unmatched power projection capabilities (much as the Royal Navy ruled the waves through the nineteenth century).
Just as Britain continued to prosper in subsequent decades, enabling it to recover from the staggering debt it had accumulated (268 percent of GDP by 1822, according to Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus), the United States enjoyed a generation of rapid growth after World War II (an amazing 4 percent a year from 1950 to 1973), sharply reducing the burden of the debt it had amassed winning its war (which shrank from 121 to 32 percent of U.S. GDP between the end of World War II and 1980).
Nonetheless, the Cold War, which is so often thought of as an unalloyed triumph for the American system, started to take its toll from right after World War II. Massive U.S. expenditures on the conflict accelerated the running down of the Bretton Woods economic system (inevitable given the rebuilding of Europe and Asia, and the spread of development beyond these regions). This led to the suspension of the gold standard in 1971 (ending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, just as Britain did with the pound in 1919). The U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict with large forces (1964-1973) resulted in a protracted, costly, confidence-shaking trauma (arguably paralleling the Boer War in many respects). The U.S. defense build-up of the 1980s contributed powerfully to the quadrupling of the U.S. national debt in twelve years, and the U.S.'s prioritization of its defense sector came at the expense of its broader economy, not so well-served by military Keynesianism as had once been the case. And in the course of it all, the U.S. lost its industrial edge, all but ceding critical sectors to foreign competitors (like machine tools), while shortsightedly concentrating on finance, just one way in which it reflected vested interests rather than the interests of the nation as a whole (a tendency common to great economic powers in decline, Britain included). Unsurprisingly, the U.S. from the 1970s on began its pattern of running trade deficits year in and year out, and the American dollar weakened substantially against the yen and the mark, leading to the currency devaluation of the 1985 Plaza Accord (a parallel to the devaluations that have marked British decline as a hegemon), and made the U.S. the world's largest international debtor (such as Britain became as a result of World War I).
It might be suggested, then, that by the end of the Cold War the position of the U.S. was not unlike that of Britain in 1918, when it had defeated its principal rival, Germany (and even extended its empire, mainly through the acquisition of former Ottoman territories), but at great cost to itself. After World War I, it seemed that Britain was due to pass the position of international leadership to another power, the U.S. (which declined to assume such a role), while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that the U.S. was likely to cede world economic leadership to Japan or a German-led Europe (though neither actor proved able to take on that role).
Just like the 1920s were for Britain, the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s was an ambiguous one for the United States where its direction was concerned, ambiguous enough that the idea of American decline (and indeed, substantive debate about the U.S.'s direction) was marginalized after 1995, not least because of the economic boom the U.S. enjoyed in the latter part of that decade. Additionally, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made talk of global American empire newly popular (with the recent boom making such a course seem economically bearable to those optimistic about such a path).
Still, as the memory of the boom of the '90s receded and the economy returned to its earlier, mediocre performance, and the costs of the War on Terror (particularly the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) mounted, and the old problems(deindustrialization, debt, etc.) worsened; as the distribution of international economic power continued to change, shifting away from the U.S. to China, and in less dramatic ways, to the European Union and to oil exporting countries like Russia, change reflected in the continued weakening of the dollar; such a stance increasingly seemed unrealistic, opening the door to new questions. Is the 2008 financial crisis analogous to the Wall Street crash, the global economic crisis that followed an analog to the Great Depression, many wondered? Is the War on Terror, so often compared to World War II by pundits, taking a toll on the U.S. comparable to that which the Second World War took on Britain? For the time being, this is rather less clear, but perhaps we are in some ways reliving Britain's experience in the 1930s, or the 1940s – or even, as Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute suggests, the 1960s.
Of course, even assuming that this is the case, there is plenty of room for disagreement about the implications. Those anticipating a repeat of the 1930s might wonder about the prospect of a new round of great power warfare with fascist revanchists or others of their ilk. This seems to me rather unlikely now, and I find myself instead thinking about the disparity between British resources and foreign policy ambitions in those times, the preoccupation of much of its elite with unrealistic fantasies of the empire's continuation - and the country's need to get its house in order. Simply put, the most pressing security threats at the moment, and through the foreseeable future, are not the traditional ones, making the need to focus on the latter the really relevant lesson for our time.
The analogy so often drawn between today's United States and the British Empire is no exception to the pattern. Certainly the analogy has often been misused – in recent years, by the neoconservatives in particular. Yet, the parallels between their trajectories are well worth considering nonetheless, and one way of making such a comparison more useful might be (as I suggested in a previous posting) to not simply ask whether the U.S. is comparable to Imperial Britain, but, remembering how both have evolved, to ask which point in British history parallels the present moment.
Given the renewed prominence of declinism in current debates, it makes sense to start with the moment in which the United States was most prominent internationally. This is generally recognized as having been about 1945. At that time, like Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, it was the victor in a conflict that established it as the global hegemon, putting it in a position to shape the international order (politically through the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American-led institutions, economically through the Bretton Woods system). In part because its economy had boomed while Europe and East Asia were savaged by the conflict (another parallel with Britain circa 1815), its economy is widely reckoned to have accounted for a third of world output. Additionally, its armed forces enjoyed (until 1949) a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, as well as a preponderance of air and sea power, and unmatched power projection capabilities (much as the Royal Navy ruled the waves through the nineteenth century).
Just as Britain continued to prosper in subsequent decades, enabling it to recover from the staggering debt it had accumulated (268 percent of GDP by 1822, according to Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus), the United States enjoyed a generation of rapid growth after World War II (an amazing 4 percent a year from 1950 to 1973), sharply reducing the burden of the debt it had amassed winning its war (which shrank from 121 to 32 percent of U.S. GDP between the end of World War II and 1980).
Nonetheless, the Cold War, which is so often thought of as an unalloyed triumph for the American system, started to take its toll from right after World War II. Massive U.S. expenditures on the conflict accelerated the running down of the Bretton Woods economic system (inevitable given the rebuilding of Europe and Asia, and the spread of development beyond these regions). This led to the suspension of the gold standard in 1971 (ending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, just as Britain did with the pound in 1919). The U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict with large forces (1964-1973) resulted in a protracted, costly, confidence-shaking trauma (arguably paralleling the Boer War in many respects). The U.S. defense build-up of the 1980s contributed powerfully to the quadrupling of the U.S. national debt in twelve years, and the U.S.'s prioritization of its defense sector came at the expense of its broader economy, not so well-served by military Keynesianism as had once been the case. And in the course of it all, the U.S. lost its industrial edge, all but ceding critical sectors to foreign competitors (like machine tools), while shortsightedly concentrating on finance, just one way in which it reflected vested interests rather than the interests of the nation as a whole (a tendency common to great economic powers in decline, Britain included). Unsurprisingly, the U.S. from the 1970s on began its pattern of running trade deficits year in and year out, and the American dollar weakened substantially against the yen and the mark, leading to the currency devaluation of the 1985 Plaza Accord (a parallel to the devaluations that have marked British decline as a hegemon), and made the U.S. the world's largest international debtor (such as Britain became as a result of World War I).
It might be suggested, then, that by the end of the Cold War the position of the U.S. was not unlike that of Britain in 1918, when it had defeated its principal rival, Germany (and even extended its empire, mainly through the acquisition of former Ottoman territories), but at great cost to itself. After World War I, it seemed that Britain was due to pass the position of international leadership to another power, the U.S. (which declined to assume such a role), while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that the U.S. was likely to cede world economic leadership to Japan or a German-led Europe (though neither actor proved able to take on that role).
Just like the 1920s were for Britain, the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s was an ambiguous one for the United States where its direction was concerned, ambiguous enough that the idea of American decline (and indeed, substantive debate about the U.S.'s direction) was marginalized after 1995, not least because of the economic boom the U.S. enjoyed in the latter part of that decade. Additionally, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made talk of global American empire newly popular (with the recent boom making such a course seem economically bearable to those optimistic about such a path).
Still, as the memory of the boom of the '90s receded and the economy returned to its earlier, mediocre performance, and the costs of the War on Terror (particularly the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) mounted, and the old problems(deindustrialization, debt, etc.) worsened; as the distribution of international economic power continued to change, shifting away from the U.S. to China, and in less dramatic ways, to the European Union and to oil exporting countries like Russia, change reflected in the continued weakening of the dollar; such a stance increasingly seemed unrealistic, opening the door to new questions. Is the 2008 financial crisis analogous to the Wall Street crash, the global economic crisis that followed an analog to the Great Depression, many wondered? Is the War on Terror, so often compared to World War II by pundits, taking a toll on the U.S. comparable to that which the Second World War took on Britain? For the time being, this is rather less clear, but perhaps we are in some ways reliving Britain's experience in the 1930s, or the 1940s – or even, as Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute suggests, the 1960s.
Of course, even assuming that this is the case, there is plenty of room for disagreement about the implications. Those anticipating a repeat of the 1930s might wonder about the prospect of a new round of great power warfare with fascist revanchists or others of their ilk. This seems to me rather unlikely now, and I find myself instead thinking about the disparity between British resources and foreign policy ambitions in those times, the preoccupation of much of its elite with unrealistic fantasies of the empire's continuation - and the country's need to get its house in order. Simply put, the most pressing security threats at the moment, and through the foreseeable future, are not the traditional ones, making the need to focus on the latter the really relevant lesson for our time.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?
The first sixth-generation fighter remains a long way off, and at this point, much of the talk about them remains pure guesswork, far too much of it wish lists of improvement in familiar areas of performance (like greater stealth or connectivity) unconnected with a technical basis for such improvements, or the realization of science fiction-al concepts (like hypersonic, laser cannon-firing invisible jets). Still, it is worth noting that virtually all of the features regarded as standard on the fifth-generation fighter, after all, actually appeared in earlier aircraft, if in a less sophisticated form: stealth (in the F-117 and B-2); super-cruising capability (seen in the British Lightning interceptor); thrust-vectoring engines (seen in the Harrier and Yak-38 Forger); phased array radar (seen in the MiG-31); infra-red search and track systems (seen in the MiG-29, MiG-31 and SU-27 fighters); and helmet-mounted sights (as in the MiG-29 and SU-27).
It therefore stands to reason that many of the features that will be standard on sixth-generation fighters will appear in other aircraft long before the first generation six jet goes on its first test flight, and this seems especially likely to be the case with the flight control systems for this next generation of aircraft. The fly-by-wire controls all but standard on today's fighters may be replaced by other systems, such as fly-by-optics, which substitutes optical fibers for wires, permitting faster data transmission and greater security against electromagnetic interference, such as will be seen on the Mitsubishi ATD-X fighter, Japan's fifth-generation fighter; or fly-by-wireless, dispensing with wiring of all kinds to relay information to the actuators controlling the flight surfaces, an approach seen in the experimental Portuguese UAV known as AIVA. The hydraulic actuators which actually control the flight surfaces might also be replaced by electric circuits ("power-by-wire"), an approach the designers of the F-35 are using in that aircraft. (Both fly-by-wireless, and power-by-wire, are expected to reduce aircraft weight and reduce the maintenance burden.)
Even more exotic are approaches which integrate flight control systems into an aircraft's wings to reduce mass and cost, as well as improve performance, and at least two are objects of interest at the moment, namely flexible wings, with which NASA has experimented using a modified F-18 (dubbed the X-53); and fluidics, which British researchers are experimenting with in the Demon drone that first flew last year.
We might also see the advent of intelligent flight control systems, which would enable onboard computers to automatically compensate for the failure of particular aircraft systems, or for damage incurred in flight. (This too is reportedly planned for the ATD-X.)
For the time being, though, it remains to be seen which, if any, of these approaches will set the next generation's standard.
It therefore stands to reason that many of the features that will be standard on sixth-generation fighters will appear in other aircraft long before the first generation six jet goes on its first test flight, and this seems especially likely to be the case with the flight control systems for this next generation of aircraft. The fly-by-wire controls all but standard on today's fighters may be replaced by other systems, such as fly-by-optics, which substitutes optical fibers for wires, permitting faster data transmission and greater security against electromagnetic interference, such as will be seen on the Mitsubishi ATD-X fighter, Japan's fifth-generation fighter; or fly-by-wireless, dispensing with wiring of all kinds to relay information to the actuators controlling the flight surfaces, an approach seen in the experimental Portuguese UAV known as AIVA. The hydraulic actuators which actually control the flight surfaces might also be replaced by electric circuits ("power-by-wire"), an approach the designers of the F-35 are using in that aircraft. (Both fly-by-wireless, and power-by-wire, are expected to reduce aircraft weight and reduce the maintenance burden.)
Even more exotic are approaches which integrate flight control systems into an aircraft's wings to reduce mass and cost, as well as improve performance, and at least two are objects of interest at the moment, namely flexible wings, with which NASA has experimented using a modified F-18 (dubbed the X-53); and fluidics, which British researchers are experimenting with in the Demon drone that first flew last year.
We might also see the advent of intelligent flight control systems, which would enable onboard computers to automatically compensate for the failure of particular aircraft systems, or for damage incurred in flight. (This too is reportedly planned for the ATD-X.)
For the time being, though, it remains to be seen which, if any, of these approaches will set the next generation's standard.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version
My article "Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey" appears in the current issue of the U.S. Army War College Quarterly Parameters. Below is a short version.
In looking at the development of the international system during the last two decades, six trends appear paramount:
1. Great power conflict, as it has manifested in arms races, proxy conflicts and armed confrontations, has receded, not only from Europe after the end of the Cold War division, but Asia as well, with improved relations among Russia, China, India and Japan. Indeed, the number of objects which might plausibly produce such situations has tended to shrink, with disputes over the remaining issues growing less intense (as has been the case with the issue of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, let alone the 1950s).
2. The shift from interstate warfare to intrastate warfare as the dominant form of political violence has continued. Even as the outbreak of war has become more frequent, interstate warfare has grown less frequent, increasingly confined to the margins of the international system, and more limited in length, scale and intensity.
3. Neoliberal globalization has only deepened, but has proven problematic, contributing to the stagnation of global economic growth (which may have worsened every decade from the 1970s on), as well as increased financial instability; sharper inequality; and the social and political stresses feeding ethnic and sectarian conflict.
4. Global output, world manufacturing and the balance of trade have shifted toward East Asia, and especially China (more than offsetting the impact of Japan's relative decline on the region's overall position), while the consolidation and extension of the European Union have conduced to the preservation of Europe's economic weight (despite Germany's relative decline). Meanwhile, the U.S.'s changed – likely, weakened – position is understated even by its smaller share of Gross World Product, given its more rapidly shrinking share of world industrial production (perhaps already eclipsed by China), and its trade imbalances.
5. Resource politics have only grown more pressing, rather than being diminished, a problem highlighted by the politics of energy, which have seen energy exporters (like Russia and Venezuela) enhance their wealth and status, while energy importers (like the United States) have seen their trade balances and their economic growth suffer.
6. International cooperation on global issues has proven consistently disappointing, compared with the high hopes seen in the early 1990s regarding a more powerful United Nations, and action on alleviating global poverty and environmental problems (symbolized by the Rio Summit, the Kyoto Protocol and the Millennium Declaration), and nuclear nonproliferation.
The result has been a more complex, diffuse international distribution of economic and political power (even as the U.S. remains in a class of its own militarily, and to a lesser extent, economically), while the international community as a whole faces a host of problems (like climate change) requiring unprecedented levels of cooperation – with the results of the efforts made to date underwhelming. The 2008 financial crisis has exposed key vulnerabilities in every actor – China's unsustainable export-oriented path, and Europe's troubled finances and lack of political cohesion for instance – while offering a reminder that the "declinists" of the '80s and '90s were essentially correct in their reading of the U.S.'s situation. Not only has the country seen the mediocre growth observed since the 1970s continue, but its deindustrialization, balance of payments problems and mounting debt have only worsened, inside a context of greater economic integration and ecological strain, and it all poses bigger problems for the U.S. than "traditional" security considerations. The article goes on to advocate a focus on addressing these problems (the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and manufacturing and energy bases in recognition of the new realities), while cooperating with other nations in a "broader, sustained effort to redress the imbalances and vulnerabilities of the international economic system."
In looking at the development of the international system during the last two decades, six trends appear paramount:
1. Great power conflict, as it has manifested in arms races, proxy conflicts and armed confrontations, has receded, not only from Europe after the end of the Cold War division, but Asia as well, with improved relations among Russia, China, India and Japan. Indeed, the number of objects which might plausibly produce such situations has tended to shrink, with disputes over the remaining issues growing less intense (as has been the case with the issue of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, let alone the 1950s).
2. The shift from interstate warfare to intrastate warfare as the dominant form of political violence has continued. Even as the outbreak of war has become more frequent, interstate warfare has grown less frequent, increasingly confined to the margins of the international system, and more limited in length, scale and intensity.
3. Neoliberal globalization has only deepened, but has proven problematic, contributing to the stagnation of global economic growth (which may have worsened every decade from the 1970s on), as well as increased financial instability; sharper inequality; and the social and political stresses feeding ethnic and sectarian conflict.
4. Global output, world manufacturing and the balance of trade have shifted toward East Asia, and especially China (more than offsetting the impact of Japan's relative decline on the region's overall position), while the consolidation and extension of the European Union have conduced to the preservation of Europe's economic weight (despite Germany's relative decline). Meanwhile, the U.S.'s changed – likely, weakened – position is understated even by its smaller share of Gross World Product, given its more rapidly shrinking share of world industrial production (perhaps already eclipsed by China), and its trade imbalances.
5. Resource politics have only grown more pressing, rather than being diminished, a problem highlighted by the politics of energy, which have seen energy exporters (like Russia and Venezuela) enhance their wealth and status, while energy importers (like the United States) have seen their trade balances and their economic growth suffer.
6. International cooperation on global issues has proven consistently disappointing, compared with the high hopes seen in the early 1990s regarding a more powerful United Nations, and action on alleviating global poverty and environmental problems (symbolized by the Rio Summit, the Kyoto Protocol and the Millennium Declaration), and nuclear nonproliferation.
The result has been a more complex, diffuse international distribution of economic and political power (even as the U.S. remains in a class of its own militarily, and to a lesser extent, economically), while the international community as a whole faces a host of problems (like climate change) requiring unprecedented levels of cooperation – with the results of the efforts made to date underwhelming. The 2008 financial crisis has exposed key vulnerabilities in every actor – China's unsustainable export-oriented path, and Europe's troubled finances and lack of political cohesion for instance – while offering a reminder that the "declinists" of the '80s and '90s were essentially correct in their reading of the U.S.'s situation. Not only has the country seen the mediocre growth observed since the 1970s continue, but its deindustrialization, balance of payments problems and mounting debt have only worsened, inside a context of greater economic integration and ecological strain, and it all poses bigger problems for the U.S. than "traditional" security considerations. The article goes on to advocate a focus on addressing these problems (the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and manufacturing and energy bases in recognition of the new realities), while cooperating with other nations in a "broader, sustained effort to redress the imbalances and vulnerabilities of the international economic system."
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Twenty Years After the Fall
In 1991 Robin Blackburn published the anthology After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991), offering a round-up of responses to the demise of the Soviet/Communist camp and the end of the Cold War from a wide array of prominent leftist thinkers, touching on everything from the role of the peace movement in bringing the Cold War to an end, to the condition of women in the Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, it might fairly be said that the question dominating the book is the one implicit in the subtitle--"the Failure of Communism, and the Future of Socialism." In acknowledging the failings of twentieth century Communist parties in and out of power the authors are unanimous in recognizing the Soviet-style combination of a one-party state with a command economy as a deeply flawed approach, time and again resulting in repressive, stagnant, bureaucratic regimes that never approached Western levels of economic and technological development--with the gap widening after the onset of the "information age." Many of them also agree with the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union not just failed to cope with computerization and the newer communications technology, but that this was a challenge it was intrinsically incapable of meeting or even surviving, and that the impetus for the overthrow of the system came principally from below.1
However, this should not be confused with a simplistic vindication of the pieties of orthodox economics, let alone of conservative triumphalism more generally. While highly critical of the Soviet system and its imitators, these writers do not equate the Cold War with a meaningful test of "capitalism against socialism," or take the failings of Soviet-style socialism as some proof of the intrinsic irrelevance, futility or evil of the socialist project, or the Marxist critique of capitalism. Nor do they slight the role of Communism in such progress as the twentieth century did see. In "Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes," Ralph Miliband discusses the unpromising circumstances of the establishment of Communist governments, which virtually without exception took place in underdeveloped countries without a substantial history of democracy or even independence, often at a point in which they were badly traumatized by civil and foreign war, and forced to contend with the hostility of the non-Communist world from this position of weakness through their history (Russia, China, Vietnam). Fred Halliday observes in "The Ends of Cold War" that, despite those problems, many Communist states still made significant advances over their earlier material condition, industrializing and modernizing their countries, and elevating the living standards of their populations.
Other contributors to the volume make the case that, in various ways, socialism played a crucial role to progress outside the "Second World." In "Goodbye to All That," Eric Hobsbawm points out the fact that the capitalist states incorporated a great deal of socialism into their systems in the form of Keynesian planning, welfare states and often national ownership of the "commanding heights" of the global economy (especially in their period of greatest success, from the 1940s to the early 1970s), without which they would be far less successful, and far less attractive places to live--while the handful of developing nations which succeeded in catching up to the industrialized world also followed strongly statist courses in doing so (contrary to the mythology propounded by neoliberal "Bad Samaritans," and of course, neoliberal disasters the world over, from Pinochet's Chile to contemporary Iraq). And in "Radical as Reality," Alexander Cockburn celebrates the role of Communism in such progress as the West has achieved in the areas of civil rights and social justice, and globally in the fights against colonialism and apartheid, while the Soviet Union, through its role as competitor and counterweight, made possible for the newly independent nations of the Third World a measure of autonomy they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
Moreover, the authors argue for the continued relevance of socialism given its capacity to address problems with which capitalism is ill-equipped to cope, like the protection of the environment, social inequality and the human values for which the market cares nothing, as Eric Hobsbawm notes in the volume's closing essay, "Up From the Ashes." There is, too, a sense that many of socialism's potentials have never been tapped. Robin Blackburn's excellent long essay "Fin de Seicle: Socialism After the Crash" offers a reminder that the command economy's weaknesses were recognized by prominent Marxists all along, from Karl Kautsky to Leon Trotsky to Che Geuvara, and that many of them wrestled with the problem of developing a "socialized market" combining market mechanisms with economic democratization and social imperatives--an idea Diane Elson and Andre Gorz explore in "The Economics of a Socialized Market," and "The New Agenda," respectively. Giovanni Arrighi's "Marxist Century, American Century" even offers an argument for why the twentieth century did not bear out Marx's predictions--and why the twenty-first century might prove closer to it.2 Edward Thompson's rejoinder to Fred Halliday's "The Ends of Cold War" even envisaged Eastern Europe pioneering a third way between its Stalinist past and the neoliberalism proffered by the West.
In short, the Soviet Union was finished, and with it the one party state-command economy approach to socialism, but according to all these authors, socialism (and Marxism) as such did not die with it. Still, the neoliberal wave continues two decades later. Certainly no advanced industrial country has accepted programs quite as radical as those routinely imposed on developing states, but even there privatization and deregulation (often of reckless kinds) have been the order of the day, organized labor has been weakened (in cases, virtually crippled), wages have been held down (or eroded), welfare states and public services scaled back (albeit, due to a chipping away by conservative reformers rather than shock therapy in these states) and tax systems become more regressive. If anything, the economic crisis that began (or perhaps, simply deepened) in 2008 seems to have perversely accelerated the trend, the political right making most of the gains in its aftermath, despite its policies' precipitating the crisis in the first place. And of course, what goes for the world's economic challenges goes, too, for the ecological ones, as the astonishingly tepid response to the energy-climate crisis makes all too clear.
All this seems unsurprising today, but it did not seem inevitable to the writers represented in this collection. The end of the confrontation between the superpowers also raised a genuine prospect of a peace dividend, and alleviated one of the weapons the right used against liberals and leftists: the claim that they were the agents or dupes of a hostile foreign power intent on world domination. This coincided with a questioning of the Anglo-American version of capitalism that was not be seen again until the 2008 crisis. That the left so thoroughly failed to capitalize on these opportunities, so completely failed to prevent a triumphalist right from defining the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse and the politics of the two decades that followed, has to be regarded by its sympathizers as a profound disappointment.
NOTES
1. For an alternative view of the role of the IT revolution in the Soviet collapse, see my blog post, "Reconsidering the IT Revolution's Place in History." For an alternative view of the dismantling of the Soviet system more broadly, see David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Nonetheless, it might fairly be said that the question dominating the book is the one implicit in the subtitle--"the Failure of Communism, and the Future of Socialism." In acknowledging the failings of twentieth century Communist parties in and out of power the authors are unanimous in recognizing the Soviet-style combination of a one-party state with a command economy as a deeply flawed approach, time and again resulting in repressive, stagnant, bureaucratic regimes that never approached Western levels of economic and technological development--with the gap widening after the onset of the "information age." Many of them also agree with the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union not just failed to cope with computerization and the newer communications technology, but that this was a challenge it was intrinsically incapable of meeting or even surviving, and that the impetus for the overthrow of the system came principally from below.1
However, this should not be confused with a simplistic vindication of the pieties of orthodox economics, let alone of conservative triumphalism more generally. While highly critical of the Soviet system and its imitators, these writers do not equate the Cold War with a meaningful test of "capitalism against socialism," or take the failings of Soviet-style socialism as some proof of the intrinsic irrelevance, futility or evil of the socialist project, or the Marxist critique of capitalism. Nor do they slight the role of Communism in such progress as the twentieth century did see. In "Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes," Ralph Miliband discusses the unpromising circumstances of the establishment of Communist governments, which virtually without exception took place in underdeveloped countries without a substantial history of democracy or even independence, often at a point in which they were badly traumatized by civil and foreign war, and forced to contend with the hostility of the non-Communist world from this position of weakness through their history (Russia, China, Vietnam). Fred Halliday observes in "The Ends of Cold War" that, despite those problems, many Communist states still made significant advances over their earlier material condition, industrializing and modernizing their countries, and elevating the living standards of their populations.
Other contributors to the volume make the case that, in various ways, socialism played a crucial role to progress outside the "Second World." In "Goodbye to All That," Eric Hobsbawm points out the fact that the capitalist states incorporated a great deal of socialism into their systems in the form of Keynesian planning, welfare states and often national ownership of the "commanding heights" of the global economy (especially in their period of greatest success, from the 1940s to the early 1970s), without which they would be far less successful, and far less attractive places to live--while the handful of developing nations which succeeded in catching up to the industrialized world also followed strongly statist courses in doing so (contrary to the mythology propounded by neoliberal "Bad Samaritans," and of course, neoliberal disasters the world over, from Pinochet's Chile to contemporary Iraq). And in "Radical as Reality," Alexander Cockburn celebrates the role of Communism in such progress as the West has achieved in the areas of civil rights and social justice, and globally in the fights against colonialism and apartheid, while the Soviet Union, through its role as competitor and counterweight, made possible for the newly independent nations of the Third World a measure of autonomy they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
Moreover, the authors argue for the continued relevance of socialism given its capacity to address problems with which capitalism is ill-equipped to cope, like the protection of the environment, social inequality and the human values for which the market cares nothing, as Eric Hobsbawm notes in the volume's closing essay, "Up From the Ashes." There is, too, a sense that many of socialism's potentials have never been tapped. Robin Blackburn's excellent long essay "Fin de Seicle: Socialism After the Crash" offers a reminder that the command economy's weaknesses were recognized by prominent Marxists all along, from Karl Kautsky to Leon Trotsky to Che Geuvara, and that many of them wrestled with the problem of developing a "socialized market" combining market mechanisms with economic democratization and social imperatives--an idea Diane Elson and Andre Gorz explore in "The Economics of a Socialized Market," and "The New Agenda," respectively. Giovanni Arrighi's "Marxist Century, American Century" even offers an argument for why the twentieth century did not bear out Marx's predictions--and why the twenty-first century might prove closer to it.2 Edward Thompson's rejoinder to Fred Halliday's "The Ends of Cold War" even envisaged Eastern Europe pioneering a third way between its Stalinist past and the neoliberalism proffered by the West.
In short, the Soviet Union was finished, and with it the one party state-command economy approach to socialism, but according to all these authors, socialism (and Marxism) as such did not die with it. Still, the neoliberal wave continues two decades later. Certainly no advanced industrial country has accepted programs quite as radical as those routinely imposed on developing states, but even there privatization and deregulation (often of reckless kinds) have been the order of the day, organized labor has been weakened (in cases, virtually crippled), wages have been held down (or eroded), welfare states and public services scaled back (albeit, due to a chipping away by conservative reformers rather than shock therapy in these states) and tax systems become more regressive. If anything, the economic crisis that began (or perhaps, simply deepened) in 2008 seems to have perversely accelerated the trend, the political right making most of the gains in its aftermath, despite its policies' precipitating the crisis in the first place. And of course, what goes for the world's economic challenges goes, too, for the ecological ones, as the astonishingly tepid response to the energy-climate crisis makes all too clear.
All this seems unsurprising today, but it did not seem inevitable to the writers represented in this collection. The end of the confrontation between the superpowers also raised a genuine prospect of a peace dividend, and alleviated one of the weapons the right used against liberals and leftists: the claim that they were the agents or dupes of a hostile foreign power intent on world domination. This coincided with a questioning of the Anglo-American version of capitalism that was not be seen again until the 2008 crisis. That the left so thoroughly failed to capitalize on these opportunities, so completely failed to prevent a triumphalist right from defining the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse and the politics of the two decades that followed, has to be regarded by its sympathizers as a profound disappointment.
NOTES
1. For an alternative view of the role of the IT revolution in the Soviet collapse, see my blog post, "Reconsidering the IT Revolution's Place in History." For an alternative view of the dismantling of the Soviet system more broadly, see David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Review: The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, by Emmanuel Todd.
Translated by John Waggoner. New York: Karz Publishers, 1979, pp. 236.
French social scientist Emmanuel Todd's biggest claim to fame is his prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union in a book he published in France in 1976, The Final Fall (which was translated into English three years later). He was neither the first, nor the last, to make such a prediction, but his subsequent researches have brought Todd renewed attention, notably his 2003 book After the Empire (also published in English, with a foreword by Michael Lind).
Todd, making oblique use of foreign trade and demographic data (Soviet imports of machinery, motor vehicles and foodstuffs and exports of raw materials, a spike in infant mortality) and anecdotal evidence (regarding such matters as the quality of its industrial output, and the growth of the informal sector) to compensate for Westerners' poor access to the Soviet system, concluded that the Soviet Union had not just become stagnant by the 1970s, but done so at a point at which it was still deeply backward compared with the advanced industrial nations.1 Less developed than quasi-developed, its social structure was not like that of a contemporaneous Western country, let alone a realization of socialist aspirations, but rather a mix of the "Asiatic mode of production" identified with "Oriental despotism," with a Victorian level of inequality and exploitation in the relationship between its ruling apparatchiks and its workers, whose living standard he suggested had not increased appreciably since World War II.2
Accordingly, the Soviet Union was not only falling behind the West (and for that matter, ascendant Third World countries like Brazil), but its own satellites in Eastern Europe. While Todd repeated the old saws about the folly of replacing markets with central planning, and the conflict between the incompatibility of authoritarianism and innovation, he argued that
The result was that the Warsaw Pact offered the bizarre spectacle of a poor, repressed core and a comparatively rich, free periphery, a situation he regarded as ultimately untenable – in part because of its implications for the domestic situation of the Soviet Union itself. Todd posited that a literate population (and literacy was universal in the Soviet Union, as he pointed out) cannot long be managed through totalitarian methods, and that in contrast with the peasants living under many a Third World dictatorship, they were decreasingly passive, and increasingly Western in their outlook and attitudes (as reflected in low birth rates, and the alienation evident in high suicide rates and the worker discontent which were major factors in the economy's low productivity). It appeared to him that their consciousness of the difference between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe only fed their discontent (through, among other things, the experiences of the Soviets' own occupying forces).
The resulting mess was increasingly held together through a combination of a permanent war economy, and a turn by an elite which no longer believed in its system and ideology (but remained committed to the protection of that system because of the privileges that system afforded it) to nationalism, militarism, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-intellectualism and cultural stupefaction – in short, to fascism – to legitimize the Soviet state and control dissent.3 However, these all fell short of actually resolving the problem, a fact testified to by the Soviets' reliance on wheat imports from the West. Quite the contrary, Todd argued that nothing short of deep, structural reforms to the end of increasing production, raising living standards and liberalizing society could have alleviated these problems.
Any conceivable reform process, however, carried grave dangers for the regime. Decentralization would have meant suffering a greater shift of labor and material from the rest of the economy to the informal sector, inflation, and the elevation of short-term expectations beyond what the Soviet government could hope to deliver on the way to any real, concrete gains, which were themselves no sure thing. Despite these obstacles the Soviets' East European satellites did manage such transitions in his analysis, but the Soviet Union faced a significant challenge that they did not – their country's multitude of repressed nationalisms (and also the developmental disparities between its nationalities, with the non-Russian republics in an intermediate position between Russia and East European states like Hungary), which such a reform process would turn turn into a centrifugal force, breaking up the Soviet sphere. At the same time, continued avoidance of those reforms would make the Soviet Union only more backward and brittle, and the inevitable changes more dangerous when it did decide on them.
In retrospect Todd seems prescient in anticipating that clumsily executed reforms aimed at revitalizing the Soviet economy would open the door to the break-up of the Soviet sphere, with Eastern Europe, and then the non-Russian republics breaking away from Moscow. Additionally, those who tend toward the more extreme views of the Soviet economy's weakness (as now seems to be the conventional wisdom) would also applaud his diagnosis of the country's ills from the limited information available to him.
However, Todd was far off the mark on a great many other points, not least the endurance of Keynesian capitalism (which he regarded as having been the salvation of capitalism, in practical and political terms), apparently missing how in his own period the reversion to a pre-1930s attitude toward labor was already underway. Unsurprisingly, he also failed to foresee that the Third World countries which at the time appeared to be following a dynamic course (like Iran and Brazil) would, excepting a few East Asian states, remain "developing" countries thirty-five years later.
Moreover, few now pay much mind to the distance between the Soviet Union and its satellites in the unraveling of the Soviet sphere, emphasizing instead the gap between Eastern Europe and Western Europe (and generally preferring to regard states like East Germany as Soviet-style messes rather than as the functional, advancing states as which he depicts them). Where the collapse of the Soviet Union is concerned, they generally note the increased military pressure of elevated U.S. defense spending; falling oil prices in the 1980s; the arrival of the age of fourth-generation computing and digital communications, which are frequently held to mark a point beyond which Soviet-style socialism cannot pass; the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan; or simply the personal role of Mikhail Gorbachev.
This differing view of Eastern Europe's Communist-era development may or may not be a mistake that denies Todd the proper credit. However, disagreement is hardly surprising. Over fifteen centuries after the overthrow of Romulus Augustus, we continue to debate the causes of Rome's fall, not least because the debate still has some stakes for us. The comparative roles of the material and the moral in making or breaking a society and polity, the questions of technological and ecological constraints, the ability of cultures to absorb foreign elements or coexist in a larger polity, the likelihood of regressive "dark ages," among other matters prominent in this historiography, are very much relevant to our own concerns. It seems unlikely that it will be much different with the Soviet Union, though to be fair there has been little in the way of real debate and a great deal more of smug gloating over its corpse.
NOTES
1. In this analysis the informal sector is not a complement to the former, but parasitic on it because of the sources of its inputs (material stolen from state businesses, and the transfer of workers' time and effort from their state jobs to this area), and the limited nature of its outputs (services like plumbing and medicine, handicrafts, and produce grown on private plots – rather than, for instance, significant industrial activity).
2. Todd holds the Soviet Union to be like these societies in its leaders being "inaccessible demi-gods, whose will cannot be questioned" (158), and its possession of a centralized, ubiquitous bureaucracy ruling over a population which is "ignorant of private property" (79) and relatively equal "as far as the more privileged masses are concerned" (158). The analogy extends to those societies having an initial, dynamic phase which lays down the key infrastructure (here, the Stalin era), after which the "bureaucratic machine proves itself stronger than technological progress" (79), stifling development and producing stagnation – a mode of operation which might be viable were the Soviet Union isolated, but not in the competitive, globalized world of the late twentieth century.
3. This was also indicative of a fundamental shift in the attitude of Soviet elites. Todd characterizes the 1917-1962 as a period of "false consciousness," in which, for all their aberrations, atrocities and failures, they believed in their system and its ideology. Near the end of this period Khrushchev, for instance, could attempt to elevate Soviet living standards because "no one yet was resigned to the reality of economic exploitation and class antagonism" (36). By the Brezhnev era (1962–), however, the Soviet leadership was simply resigned to the inequities and limitations of their system, and cynically devoted to protecting their privilege within it. Accordingly, the deluded "false consciousness" of the earlier era gave way to a "bad conscience" in which the "people are feared" (139) by elites who had actually come to see the Marxism for which the Soviet system was supposed to stand as subversive of it (as the country had uncannily come to resemble Marx's description of industrial capitalism in Todd's view), forcing them to neutralize it by converting it into empty rhetoric.
The shift from "false consciousness" to "bad conscience" is also reflected in the Soviet Union's loss of cultural dynamism and external appeal. As Todd puts it, before 1950 the Soviet Union was an ideological threat to the West (especially amid the Great Depression and World War II), which was in turn a military threat to the Soviet Union; while by the 1960s this situation was reversed, with the Soviet Union a military threat to the West which it had come to find ideologically threatening.
French social scientist Emmanuel Todd's biggest claim to fame is his prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union in a book he published in France in 1976, The Final Fall (which was translated into English three years later). He was neither the first, nor the last, to make such a prediction, but his subsequent researches have brought Todd renewed attention, notably his 2003 book After the Empire (also published in English, with a foreword by Michael Lind).
Todd, making oblique use of foreign trade and demographic data (Soviet imports of machinery, motor vehicles and foodstuffs and exports of raw materials, a spike in infant mortality) and anecdotal evidence (regarding such matters as the quality of its industrial output, and the growth of the informal sector) to compensate for Westerners' poor access to the Soviet system, concluded that the Soviet Union had not just become stagnant by the 1970s, but done so at a point at which it was still deeply backward compared with the advanced industrial nations.1 Less developed than quasi-developed, its social structure was not like that of a contemporaneous Western country, let alone a realization of socialist aspirations, but rather a mix of the "Asiatic mode of production" identified with "Oriental despotism," with a Victorian level of inequality and exploitation in the relationship between its ruling apparatchiks and its workers, whose living standard he suggested had not increased appreciably since World War II.2
Accordingly, the Soviet Union was not only falling behind the West (and for that matter, ascendant Third World countries like Brazil), but its own satellites in Eastern Europe. While Todd repeated the old saws about the folly of replacing markets with central planning, and the conflict between the incompatibility of authoritarianism and innovation, he argued that
the Soviet crisis is not the crisis of Communism. It is the crisis of a particular Communist country which had the misfortune of having glutted itself with territory in the past (221).Whether the issue was the standard of living, or the restrictions on the mobility of citizens or the scope allowed to dissenters, states like East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary appeared to him more prosperous, and freer, than the Soviet Union. Instead of the mix of Oriental despotism and Dickensian Coketown that seems to him characteristic of the Soviet Union itself, those countries reminded him of Western Europe in the 1950s, and Hungary of the France in that period, which gave him the impression that these states were not merely functional, but catching up to the West. (Todd attributed this difference in performance to their smaller sizes "proportionately reduc[ing] the inconveniences of centralized control" (95) compared with the vast Soviet Union, their lighter security spending, and their greater leeway to make pragmatic adaptations and innovations – in part, because of revolts like Hungary's in 1956, and the Soviet Union's declining ability to control their internal policies.)
The result was that the Warsaw Pact offered the bizarre spectacle of a poor, repressed core and a comparatively rich, free periphery, a situation he regarded as ultimately untenable – in part because of its implications for the domestic situation of the Soviet Union itself. Todd posited that a literate population (and literacy was universal in the Soviet Union, as he pointed out) cannot long be managed through totalitarian methods, and that in contrast with the peasants living under many a Third World dictatorship, they were decreasingly passive, and increasingly Western in their outlook and attitudes (as reflected in low birth rates, and the alienation evident in high suicide rates and the worker discontent which were major factors in the economy's low productivity). It appeared to him that their consciousness of the difference between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe only fed their discontent (through, among other things, the experiences of the Soviets' own occupying forces).
The resulting mess was increasingly held together through a combination of a permanent war economy, and a turn by an elite which no longer believed in its system and ideology (but remained committed to the protection of that system because of the privileges that system afforded it) to nationalism, militarism, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-intellectualism and cultural stupefaction – in short, to fascism – to legitimize the Soviet state and control dissent.3 However, these all fell short of actually resolving the problem, a fact testified to by the Soviets' reliance on wheat imports from the West. Quite the contrary, Todd argued that nothing short of deep, structural reforms to the end of increasing production, raising living standards and liberalizing society could have alleviated these problems.
Any conceivable reform process, however, carried grave dangers for the regime. Decentralization would have meant suffering a greater shift of labor and material from the rest of the economy to the informal sector, inflation, and the elevation of short-term expectations beyond what the Soviet government could hope to deliver on the way to any real, concrete gains, which were themselves no sure thing. Despite these obstacles the Soviets' East European satellites did manage such transitions in his analysis, but the Soviet Union faced a significant challenge that they did not – their country's multitude of repressed nationalisms (and also the developmental disparities between its nationalities, with the non-Russian republics in an intermediate position between Russia and East European states like Hungary), which such a reform process would turn turn into a centrifugal force, breaking up the Soviet sphere. At the same time, continued avoidance of those reforms would make the Soviet Union only more backward and brittle, and the inevitable changes more dangerous when it did decide on them.
In retrospect Todd seems prescient in anticipating that clumsily executed reforms aimed at revitalizing the Soviet economy would open the door to the break-up of the Soviet sphere, with Eastern Europe, and then the non-Russian republics breaking away from Moscow. Additionally, those who tend toward the more extreme views of the Soviet economy's weakness (as now seems to be the conventional wisdom) would also applaud his diagnosis of the country's ills from the limited information available to him.
However, Todd was far off the mark on a great many other points, not least the endurance of Keynesian capitalism (which he regarded as having been the salvation of capitalism, in practical and political terms), apparently missing how in his own period the reversion to a pre-1930s attitude toward labor was already underway. Unsurprisingly, he also failed to foresee that the Third World countries which at the time appeared to be following a dynamic course (like Iran and Brazil) would, excepting a few East Asian states, remain "developing" countries thirty-five years later.
Moreover, few now pay much mind to the distance between the Soviet Union and its satellites in the unraveling of the Soviet sphere, emphasizing instead the gap between Eastern Europe and Western Europe (and generally preferring to regard states like East Germany as Soviet-style messes rather than as the functional, advancing states as which he depicts them). Where the collapse of the Soviet Union is concerned, they generally note the increased military pressure of elevated U.S. defense spending; falling oil prices in the 1980s; the arrival of the age of fourth-generation computing and digital communications, which are frequently held to mark a point beyond which Soviet-style socialism cannot pass; the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan; or simply the personal role of Mikhail Gorbachev.
This differing view of Eastern Europe's Communist-era development may or may not be a mistake that denies Todd the proper credit. However, disagreement is hardly surprising. Over fifteen centuries after the overthrow of Romulus Augustus, we continue to debate the causes of Rome's fall, not least because the debate still has some stakes for us. The comparative roles of the material and the moral in making or breaking a society and polity, the questions of technological and ecological constraints, the ability of cultures to absorb foreign elements or coexist in a larger polity, the likelihood of regressive "dark ages," among other matters prominent in this historiography, are very much relevant to our own concerns. It seems unlikely that it will be much different with the Soviet Union, though to be fair there has been little in the way of real debate and a great deal more of smug gloating over its corpse.
NOTES
1. In this analysis the informal sector is not a complement to the former, but parasitic on it because of the sources of its inputs (material stolen from state businesses, and the transfer of workers' time and effort from their state jobs to this area), and the limited nature of its outputs (services like plumbing and medicine, handicrafts, and produce grown on private plots – rather than, for instance, significant industrial activity).
2. Todd holds the Soviet Union to be like these societies in its leaders being "inaccessible demi-gods, whose will cannot be questioned" (158), and its possession of a centralized, ubiquitous bureaucracy ruling over a population which is "ignorant of private property" (79) and relatively equal "as far as the more privileged masses are concerned" (158). The analogy extends to those societies having an initial, dynamic phase which lays down the key infrastructure (here, the Stalin era), after which the "bureaucratic machine proves itself stronger than technological progress" (79), stifling development and producing stagnation – a mode of operation which might be viable were the Soviet Union isolated, but not in the competitive, globalized world of the late twentieth century.
3. This was also indicative of a fundamental shift in the attitude of Soviet elites. Todd characterizes the 1917-1962 as a period of "false consciousness," in which, for all their aberrations, atrocities and failures, they believed in their system and its ideology. Near the end of this period Khrushchev, for instance, could attempt to elevate Soviet living standards because "no one yet was resigned to the reality of economic exploitation and class antagonism" (36). By the Brezhnev era (1962–), however, the Soviet leadership was simply resigned to the inequities and limitations of their system, and cynically devoted to protecting their privilege within it. Accordingly, the deluded "false consciousness" of the earlier era gave way to a "bad conscience" in which the "people are feared" (139) by elites who had actually come to see the Marxism for which the Soviet system was supposed to stand as subversive of it (as the country had uncannily come to resemble Marx's description of industrial capitalism in Todd's view), forcing them to neutralize it by converting it into empty rhetoric.
The shift from "false consciousness" to "bad conscience" is also reflected in the Soviet Union's loss of cultural dynamism and external appeal. As Todd puts it, before 1950 the Soviet Union was an ideological threat to the West (especially amid the Great Depression and World War II), which was in turn a military threat to the Soviet Union; while by the 1960s this situation was reversed, with the Soviet Union a military threat to the West which it had come to find ideologically threatening.
Review: After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, by Emmanuel Todd.
Translated by C. Jon Delogu.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 233.
While some continue to embrace the idea of American empire (like George Friedman in The Next Decade), the more grandiose conceptions, at least, have fallen by the wayside, and the outlook regarding the United States' position has become rather bleaker. It may be that this will pass, but for the time being, at least, Emmanuel Todd would seem to have been ahead of the curve when in 2003 he published After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order.
Todd's argument in this book is that the U.S. is not "growing into" the role of imperial power, but losing its imperial position, in large part because of a material decline underappreciated by both domestic and foreign observers. This is not just a question of such widely discussed phenomena as the country's declining share of Gross World Product or industrial production since its post-World War II peak, or even the trade deficits and debt accumulation attested to in official statistics. America's fiscal position is, in his view, founded on an unsustainable form of "foreign tribute"--the influx of foreign capital into the United States that enables the country to live beyond its means (classed as tribute because the nation's trade deficits, low interest rates and inflation rate make it unwarranted) as America's own economy reverts to an older world of "masters and servants," with lawyers, accountants and private security personnel serving the wealthy in the manner of yesteryear's butlers (euphemistically termed "the service economy"). All of this makes the picture less rosy than the numbers attesting to America's economic growth suggest--while there is room for doubt about the numbers themselves, Todd contending that the numbers may just be the product of accounting fraud on a massive scale, as hinted at by scandals like Enron and Arthur Andersen.
This severe and worsening economic frailty is matched by the frailty of the U.S.'s military lead over other nations, above and beyond the extent to which economic weakness must eventually produce military weakness. The country, lacking a "tradition of . . . military might on the ground" (82), and no longer able to control pillars of the world economy like Germany and Japan, obscures the fact through "theatrical micro-militarism" directed against weak Third World nations. This style of militarism is, furthermore, reinforced and shaped by broader tendencies in American culture making it less universalist and more "differentialist."1 Just as American multiculturalism reflects the country's treatment of its ethnic minorities as "unassimilable," the United States behaves toward other countries in parallel ways, the U.S. more provocative toward other major powers (Russia, China), more disdainful of countries it has long regarded as allies (like France and Germany), and prone to treat the Arab countries as foreign counterparts to those unassimilable domestic populations. Along with the prioritization of control of world oil supplies by American strategy, the military weakness of Muslim nations, and a cultural enmity toward Middle Eastern nations (into which a "dogmatic and aggressive" (136) American version of feminism plays), the result is an "obsession" with the Arab-Muslim world far beyond what realpolitik calculations would mandate.
The net result is that the U.S. is now nothing short of threatening to Europe. Its economic behavior disrupts the world economy, directly through its actions and indirectly through its promotion of its social model, which Todd views as undermining Europe's social and political systems. (He flatly criticizes neoliberal globalization as the cause of the world economy's slow growth since the 1970s, as well as stagnating and falling living standards and rising inequality, through its suppression of the demand crucial to economic growth.) Making matters worse, American military actions in the Muslim world also exacerbate tensions between the mainstream of European societies, and their immigrant populations.
This situation confronts Europe with the choice of either being a subordinate element in an American empire that is increasingly inimical to its well-being, or asserting its independence (the choice he favors). Europe's declaration of independence would be strengthened by a partnership with Russia, which he sees as viable given the country's essentially universalist culture, and moreover, the bottoming out of its demographic and economic collapse. The country would also bring to the table its vast energy and other natural resources, as well as its military capability--particularly its strategic nuclear arsenal, the only one in the world comparable to that of the U.S.. (In a reversal of the Cold War situation, Todd views Russian military might as a potential guarantor of European freedom in the face of American challenges.2) Britain's giving up its "special relationship" with the U.S. in favor of a closer relationship with Europe (to which it would bring a G-7 economy, and the only other financial center comparable with Wall Street) would complete the process of consolidation.
The assertion of independence by such a European bloc would, in Todd's view, end American hegemony. Ultimately, the U.S. would be reduced to living within its means, just one pole among many in a multi-polar world. With America no longer sponsoring neoliberal globalization, the way will be cleared for what he views as a necessary turn away from free trade toward neoprotectionism on some basis, to benefit working people and revive the demand essential to restoring economic growth, while international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank change accordingly (the former giving Japan a permanent seat on the Security Council, the latter being relocated to Eurasia).
Todd's viewpoint is an interesting one, given his previous scholarship (notably, his prescient writing on another superpower in decline), and his apparent freedom from the pieties of right and left.3 He also refrains from setting up the U.S. as an antithesis of Europe (other "old democracies" like Britain and France also traveling down the oligarchic path he identifies).
There is, however, no disputing the book's significant failings. Todd's analysis of military affairs (well outside his area of expertise) is brief and shallow. One might argue that geographic factors and economics have conduced to make the U.S. an air and sea power, rather than a land power, and that changes affecting all of the developed countries (aging populations, the decline of civic militarism, etc.) are the reason for the U.S.'s low tolerance of casualties (which in Iraq and Afghanistan proved not to be so low as some held).
There are also some serious flaws in his reading of the international balance of power, and what it may mean. China's profile is surprisingly low in his analysis. Anyone discussing the distribution of industrial power today would have to count it in among Europe and Japan given its share of world production (already much larger than that of Germany or Japan, and perhaps even larger than the U.S.'s)--and indeed, the short shrift he gives it would have been problematic even a decade ago. His discussion of Russia easily seems overoptimistic in light of the country's course under Putin. It is also far from clear that a turn away from neoliberalism in Europe or globally such as he describes are at all plausible, as European elites seem just as enthusiastic about such policies as their American (or Anglo-American) counterparts, and have actually been moving further in this direction since the 2008 economic crisis.
Nonetheless, Todd's use of demographic data, on which he relies heavily (certainly more heavily than in The Final Fall), is frequently innovative and compelling, especially where he uses it to explain global patterns, and the development of Islamic countries, his analysis of which is persuasive.4 His discussion of economic globalization is one of the book's strongest points, and the subject of many of his sharpest observations--like the distinction he draws between "fake" and "real" nonconformists in the economics establishment (with Paul Krugman correctly placed in the former category), and the note he takes of the end of meaningful economic debate in the United States after 1995 (which seems to have gone unnoticed by almost everyone else). His observations about American cultural attitudes are at the very least thought-provoking, and despite some overstatements and questionable inferences, seem to me to contain more truth than one can acknowledge without jeopardizing their respectability. All of this makes Todd's analysis, which may have more immediate relevance now in 2011 than it did at the time of its publication, well worth serious attention.
NOTES
1. Todd holds that this tendency toward a more differentialist culture is also evident in the country's becoming less democratic and more oligarchic in the manner Michael Lind described in The Next American Nation (which described an American "overclass" in detail).
2. The idea of Europe and the U.S. diverging to such a degree may surprise those accustomed to thinking of Europe and North America as part of a common West. However, Todd points to differences between the U.S. and Europe in attitudes toward religion, violence, the relationship between the citizen and the state, and the use of natural resources, among other things, that he regards as deep enough to be civilizational. (Indeed, on a point like the use of natural resources, he views Europe as closer to other Eurasian and Old World countries than to America, speaking of the Old World's heritage of peasant labor, and the hard lesson it taught that natural resources are finite, and must be carefully conserved--quite contrary to the American experience of the frontier analyzed by observers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Thorstein Veblen.)
3. Todd is critical not just of American feminism and multiculturalism, but also the "revisionist" view of American history that holds U.S. foreign policy to have always been driven by national (e.g. elite) economic interests, predatory, hypocritical and disdainful of international opinion, with its conduct after September 11 just a brasher version of the usual. He does not argue this position in any meaningful way, however, apart from his criticism of what he sees as its exaggerated perception of American power.
4. Islamist terrorism, in Todd's view, is less an indication of some "clash of civilizations" than the disorientation that is a byproduct of the often painful transition to modernity, such as is experienced by every culture, albeit in different ways. As his figures demonstrate, the Islamic world is a participant in the trend toward higher literacy rates and falling fertility rates that make for an active, modern, democratic outlook--and the impracticability of authoritarianism, Islamist or otherwise. The "Arab Spring" would seem to substantiate such a view.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 233.
While some continue to embrace the idea of American empire (like George Friedman in The Next Decade), the more grandiose conceptions, at least, have fallen by the wayside, and the outlook regarding the United States' position has become rather bleaker. It may be that this will pass, but for the time being, at least, Emmanuel Todd would seem to have been ahead of the curve when in 2003 he published After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order.
Todd's argument in this book is that the U.S. is not "growing into" the role of imperial power, but losing its imperial position, in large part because of a material decline underappreciated by both domestic and foreign observers. This is not just a question of such widely discussed phenomena as the country's declining share of Gross World Product or industrial production since its post-World War II peak, or even the trade deficits and debt accumulation attested to in official statistics. America's fiscal position is, in his view, founded on an unsustainable form of "foreign tribute"--the influx of foreign capital into the United States that enables the country to live beyond its means (classed as tribute because the nation's trade deficits, low interest rates and inflation rate make it unwarranted) as America's own economy reverts to an older world of "masters and servants," with lawyers, accountants and private security personnel serving the wealthy in the manner of yesteryear's butlers (euphemistically termed "the service economy"). All of this makes the picture less rosy than the numbers attesting to America's economic growth suggest--while there is room for doubt about the numbers themselves, Todd contending that the numbers may just be the product of accounting fraud on a massive scale, as hinted at by scandals like Enron and Arthur Andersen.
This severe and worsening economic frailty is matched by the frailty of the U.S.'s military lead over other nations, above and beyond the extent to which economic weakness must eventually produce military weakness. The country, lacking a "tradition of . . . military might on the ground" (82), and no longer able to control pillars of the world economy like Germany and Japan, obscures the fact through "theatrical micro-militarism" directed against weak Third World nations. This style of militarism is, furthermore, reinforced and shaped by broader tendencies in American culture making it less universalist and more "differentialist."1 Just as American multiculturalism reflects the country's treatment of its ethnic minorities as "unassimilable," the United States behaves toward other countries in parallel ways, the U.S. more provocative toward other major powers (Russia, China), more disdainful of countries it has long regarded as allies (like France and Germany), and prone to treat the Arab countries as foreign counterparts to those unassimilable domestic populations. Along with the prioritization of control of world oil supplies by American strategy, the military weakness of Muslim nations, and a cultural enmity toward Middle Eastern nations (into which a "dogmatic and aggressive" (136) American version of feminism plays), the result is an "obsession" with the Arab-Muslim world far beyond what realpolitik calculations would mandate.
The net result is that the U.S. is now nothing short of threatening to Europe. Its economic behavior disrupts the world economy, directly through its actions and indirectly through its promotion of its social model, which Todd views as undermining Europe's social and political systems. (He flatly criticizes neoliberal globalization as the cause of the world economy's slow growth since the 1970s, as well as stagnating and falling living standards and rising inequality, through its suppression of the demand crucial to economic growth.) Making matters worse, American military actions in the Muslim world also exacerbate tensions between the mainstream of European societies, and their immigrant populations.
This situation confronts Europe with the choice of either being a subordinate element in an American empire that is increasingly inimical to its well-being, or asserting its independence (the choice he favors). Europe's declaration of independence would be strengthened by a partnership with Russia, which he sees as viable given the country's essentially universalist culture, and moreover, the bottoming out of its demographic and economic collapse. The country would also bring to the table its vast energy and other natural resources, as well as its military capability--particularly its strategic nuclear arsenal, the only one in the world comparable to that of the U.S.. (In a reversal of the Cold War situation, Todd views Russian military might as a potential guarantor of European freedom in the face of American challenges.2) Britain's giving up its "special relationship" with the U.S. in favor of a closer relationship with Europe (to which it would bring a G-7 economy, and the only other financial center comparable with Wall Street) would complete the process of consolidation.
The assertion of independence by such a European bloc would, in Todd's view, end American hegemony. Ultimately, the U.S. would be reduced to living within its means, just one pole among many in a multi-polar world. With America no longer sponsoring neoliberal globalization, the way will be cleared for what he views as a necessary turn away from free trade toward neoprotectionism on some basis, to benefit working people and revive the demand essential to restoring economic growth, while international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank change accordingly (the former giving Japan a permanent seat on the Security Council, the latter being relocated to Eurasia).
Todd's viewpoint is an interesting one, given his previous scholarship (notably, his prescient writing on another superpower in decline), and his apparent freedom from the pieties of right and left.3 He also refrains from setting up the U.S. as an antithesis of Europe (other "old democracies" like Britain and France also traveling down the oligarchic path he identifies).
There is, however, no disputing the book's significant failings. Todd's analysis of military affairs (well outside his area of expertise) is brief and shallow. One might argue that geographic factors and economics have conduced to make the U.S. an air and sea power, rather than a land power, and that changes affecting all of the developed countries (aging populations, the decline of civic militarism, etc.) are the reason for the U.S.'s low tolerance of casualties (which in Iraq and Afghanistan proved not to be so low as some held).
There are also some serious flaws in his reading of the international balance of power, and what it may mean. China's profile is surprisingly low in his analysis. Anyone discussing the distribution of industrial power today would have to count it in among Europe and Japan given its share of world production (already much larger than that of Germany or Japan, and perhaps even larger than the U.S.'s)--and indeed, the short shrift he gives it would have been problematic even a decade ago. His discussion of Russia easily seems overoptimistic in light of the country's course under Putin. It is also far from clear that a turn away from neoliberalism in Europe or globally such as he describes are at all plausible, as European elites seem just as enthusiastic about such policies as their American (or Anglo-American) counterparts, and have actually been moving further in this direction since the 2008 economic crisis.
Nonetheless, Todd's use of demographic data, on which he relies heavily (certainly more heavily than in The Final Fall), is frequently innovative and compelling, especially where he uses it to explain global patterns, and the development of Islamic countries, his analysis of which is persuasive.4 His discussion of economic globalization is one of the book's strongest points, and the subject of many of his sharpest observations--like the distinction he draws between "fake" and "real" nonconformists in the economics establishment (with Paul Krugman correctly placed in the former category), and the note he takes of the end of meaningful economic debate in the United States after 1995 (which seems to have gone unnoticed by almost everyone else). His observations about American cultural attitudes are at the very least thought-provoking, and despite some overstatements and questionable inferences, seem to me to contain more truth than one can acknowledge without jeopardizing their respectability. All of this makes Todd's analysis, which may have more immediate relevance now in 2011 than it did at the time of its publication, well worth serious attention.
NOTES
1. Todd holds that this tendency toward a more differentialist culture is also evident in the country's becoming less democratic and more oligarchic in the manner Michael Lind described in The Next American Nation (which described an American "overclass" in detail).
2. The idea of Europe and the U.S. diverging to such a degree may surprise those accustomed to thinking of Europe and North America as part of a common West. However, Todd points to differences between the U.S. and Europe in attitudes toward religion, violence, the relationship between the citizen and the state, and the use of natural resources, among other things, that he regards as deep enough to be civilizational. (Indeed, on a point like the use of natural resources, he views Europe as closer to other Eurasian and Old World countries than to America, speaking of the Old World's heritage of peasant labor, and the hard lesson it taught that natural resources are finite, and must be carefully conserved--quite contrary to the American experience of the frontier analyzed by observers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Thorstein Veblen.)
3. Todd is critical not just of American feminism and multiculturalism, but also the "revisionist" view of American history that holds U.S. foreign policy to have always been driven by national (e.g. elite) economic interests, predatory, hypocritical and disdainful of international opinion, with its conduct after September 11 just a brasher version of the usual. He does not argue this position in any meaningful way, however, apart from his criticism of what he sees as its exaggerated perception of American power.
4. Islamist terrorism, in Todd's view, is less an indication of some "clash of civilizations" than the disorientation that is a byproduct of the often painful transition to modernity, such as is experienced by every culture, albeit in different ways. As his figures demonstrate, the Islamic world is a participant in the trend toward higher literacy rates and falling fertility rates that make for an active, modern, democratic outlook--and the impracticability of authoritarianism, Islamist or otherwise. The "Arab Spring" would seem to substantiate such a view.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
New Review: The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills
New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, pp. 423.
In the course of his classic book, The Power Elite, Charles Wright Mills repeatedly references Thorstein Veblen, which is wholly appropriate. Like that earlier sociologist, Mills is a debunker of American myths, with this book no exception to that pattern. Its principal contention is that, contrary to the classical liberal (e.g. conservative) theory of representative government and free market economics, the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, and the civics-class pieties that constitute the orthodoxy in American political thought, the idea that no one is in control because everyone is in control, that "we all possess equal powers to make history . . . is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" (22).
Rather, American political life is dominated by the concentration of power in massive economic, governmental and military institutions (particularly business corporations of national scale, the expanded executive branch of the Federal government, the large peacetime military establishment that emerged after World War II), and accordingly, by those who hold the commanding positions of these institutions. Together they constitute a (national) "power elite," which is not monolithic, but nonetheless united to a great extent by a significant convergence in perspective, interest and conduct, which is reinforced by the movement of office-holders among these institutions (perhaps exemplified by the revolving door between the Defense Department and industry, or between particular businesses and the regulatory bodies governing those same businesses).
Mills notes, too, that this elite is disproportionately drawn from the upper social classes, which consists not of Horatio Alger-style self-made men or successful inventor-entrepreneurs, let alone immigrants who realized the American Dream by going from rags to riches, but primarily native-born East Coast white Protestants from comfortable backgrounds. Generally the sons of businessmen (or professionals, typically lawyers) they are educated in prep schools and colleges, typically Ivy League colleges, with such education more a mark of their families' privilege than a cause of their later success. Additionally, the proportion of the rich not fitting this profile had as of his time steadily shrunk since the nineteenth century, indicating that self-made men (and upward social mobility of this dramatic type), always a great rarity, were becoming less rather than more common.1 Indeed, he notes, blue-blooded old money did not get shunted aside by the rise of the corporate rich, but fused with it (while the New Deal did not eliminate the upper strata of privilege, which was still doing quite well – with not insignificant help from tax shelters and expense accounts).
Mills also rejects the idea that the ascent to the top of these institutions is meritocratic in some meaningful way. Rather than people "starting at the bottom and working their way to the top" of a bureaucratic ladder, the pattern he finds is instead the progressive accumulation of "corporate advantages" in which inheritance plays a prominent role (e.g. dad's or granddad's positions being stepping stones for their own advancement). Questions of nepotism aside, it is striking that as one moves up the managerial ladder, toward the top executive positions, the measures of performance become ever more intangible, criteria like "managerial ability" perhaps so vague as to be nonexistent.
Rather the "merit" sought by the "top men" selecting their subordinates and successors is not "formal competence" of any kind, but "conformity" to their culture, which is characterized by, of course, loyalty to the interests and prejudices of those top men, and a standard of "leadership" and "soundness" that sets agreeableness above intellect and strength of personality (145). In line with these a propensity to "make the truism seem like the deeply pondered notion," "soften the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," and speak "to the well-blunted point" (142), while never, ever personally saying "No" (142) is highly valued, while the prevailing ethics is the "higher immorality" of doing whatever it takes to get oneself ahead.
In short, the makers of the big decisions are selected from a pool largely determined by inherited privilege, with adherence to upper-class norms of outlook and conduct, mealy-mouthed mediocrity (not much different from the "organization man" mentality William Whyte famously described a few years earlier), and a determination to look out for Number One above all else the qualifications that set the winners apart from the losers.
This is obviously not a happy state of affairs (especially given the momentous decisions this elite now makes in an age of Cold War and hydrogen bombs, as Mills points out), and unfortunately those institutions which might check the worst tendencies of such an elite, like a "civil service linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility," "nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues" and "voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision" (361), are absent. As Mills recounts, the United States never had a proper, politically neutral civil service, the spoils system carrying all before it. The professional politician is very much a mid-level player in the hierarchy of power as it exists now. And instead of the public envisaged in classical liberalism, what exists is a mass society, which is essentially passive before a mass media which defines its grasp of reality, and unable to relate its personal experience to national affairs on the levels of thought or action. Far from being middle-class in the sense of being small but independent property owners, the white-collar workers with which the term is typically identified are instead "property-less wage workers" (262), politically distinct from their blue-collar counterparts principally in their being even less organized. Meanwhile, the expansion of public education has failed to compensate for the situation, consisting as it does principally of instruction in "intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else" (320). The result is a "politically fragmented, and . . . increasingly powerless" (324) populace leading lives of "impersonal drift" (310) – their disorganization a counterpoint to the cohesion of the power elite. And the prevailing "conservatism" (a problematic ideology given American history, as Mills demonstrates in the chapter he devotes to the subject) is a reflection of such drift more than anything else.
Few works confront Mills' subject so directly and comprehensively, and his argument is indeed a formidable one. However, that argument is also fifty years old now, and those years have not been uneventful ones. There have been significant changes in the positions of the relatively junior institutions in the power structure (organized labor being rather weaker today than in the 1950s, for instance), and even the balance among his Big Three. The executive branch, for instance, would seem to have lost power relative to the private sector (certainly to go by analyses like Thomas Frank's in The Wrecking Crew).
Additionally, Mills' discussion of military influence seems open to question. Certainly writers like Charles Dunlap Jr. and Andrew Bacevich have sounded warnings about a militaristic turn in American culture, and a "military-industrial complex" remains. Yet, Mills' assessment still seems more reflective of the prestige of the armed forces in the post-World War II period; of the era of universal conscription, and the devotion of a tenth of the Gross Domestic Product to defense in peacetime; of the Admirals' Revolt, and the Caesarism of Douglas MacArthur, and the election of Dwight Eisenhower President for two terms; of the urgency of the early Cold War, the experience of the Korean War and the enshrinement of "massive retaliation" as military doctrine; and perhaps, of the shock of these developments compared with the state of things in the 1930s; than they do of our own time.
Some might wonder, too, if the passing of the postwar boom that was the backdrop to his critique, and the social changes of the last five decades, have not changed matters in important ways (as discussed by Michael Lind in The Next American Nation); if our "age of networks" has not rendered his critique of mass media obsolete, and given new meaning to the idea of "the public" (as seen among Evgeny Morozov's "cyber-utopians"); and if national elites have not been eclipsed by the global elite represented by the Davos Men (as David Rothkopf argues in Superclass).
Nonetheless, power in modern society remains concentrated in large institutions (national and global) of the types to which he refers, and those who command them. One would certainly be hard-pressed indeed to argue that inherited privilege, mealy-mouthed mediocrity and "the higher immorality" have ceased to be key to getting ahead. (Indeed, the data on social mobility, the epidemic of corporate short-termism and dubious accounting, and the prevailing standard of political rhetoric and debate, suggests matters have got worse rather than better in this area.) One would also be hard-pressed to show that institutions capable of addressing those flaws have actually materialized, that the new technologies which make dissent more widely heard also make it more effective. (Again, one can more easily argue that the opposite is the case for the time being.) So long as these facts remain unchanged, Mills' classic will remain relevant to any understanding of how the modern world really works.
1. Mills notes, however, that this profile is less characteristic of those who rise through the armed forces than their counterparts in government and business.
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In the course of his classic book, The Power Elite, Charles Wright Mills repeatedly references Thorstein Veblen, which is wholly appropriate. Like that earlier sociologist, Mills is a debunker of American myths, with this book no exception to that pattern. Its principal contention is that, contrary to the classical liberal (e.g. conservative) theory of representative government and free market economics, the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, and the civics-class pieties that constitute the orthodoxy in American political thought, the idea that no one is in control because everyone is in control, that "we all possess equal powers to make history . . . is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" (22).
Rather, American political life is dominated by the concentration of power in massive economic, governmental and military institutions (particularly business corporations of national scale, the expanded executive branch of the Federal government, the large peacetime military establishment that emerged after World War II), and accordingly, by those who hold the commanding positions of these institutions. Together they constitute a (national) "power elite," which is not monolithic, but nonetheless united to a great extent by a significant convergence in perspective, interest and conduct, which is reinforced by the movement of office-holders among these institutions (perhaps exemplified by the revolving door between the Defense Department and industry, or between particular businesses and the regulatory bodies governing those same businesses).
Mills notes, too, that this elite is disproportionately drawn from the upper social classes, which consists not of Horatio Alger-style self-made men or successful inventor-entrepreneurs, let alone immigrants who realized the American Dream by going from rags to riches, but primarily native-born East Coast white Protestants from comfortable backgrounds. Generally the sons of businessmen (or professionals, typically lawyers) they are educated in prep schools and colleges, typically Ivy League colleges, with such education more a mark of their families' privilege than a cause of their later success. Additionally, the proportion of the rich not fitting this profile had as of his time steadily shrunk since the nineteenth century, indicating that self-made men (and upward social mobility of this dramatic type), always a great rarity, were becoming less rather than more common.1 Indeed, he notes, blue-blooded old money did not get shunted aside by the rise of the corporate rich, but fused with it (while the New Deal did not eliminate the upper strata of privilege, which was still doing quite well – with not insignificant help from tax shelters and expense accounts).
Mills also rejects the idea that the ascent to the top of these institutions is meritocratic in some meaningful way. Rather than people "starting at the bottom and working their way to the top" of a bureaucratic ladder, the pattern he finds is instead the progressive accumulation of "corporate advantages" in which inheritance plays a prominent role (e.g. dad's or granddad's positions being stepping stones for their own advancement). Questions of nepotism aside, it is striking that as one moves up the managerial ladder, toward the top executive positions, the measures of performance become ever more intangible, criteria like "managerial ability" perhaps so vague as to be nonexistent.
Rather the "merit" sought by the "top men" selecting their subordinates and successors is not "formal competence" of any kind, but "conformity" to their culture, which is characterized by, of course, loyalty to the interests and prejudices of those top men, and a standard of "leadership" and "soundness" that sets agreeableness above intellect and strength of personality (145). In line with these a propensity to "make the truism seem like the deeply pondered notion," "soften the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," and speak "to the well-blunted point" (142), while never, ever personally saying "No" (142) is highly valued, while the prevailing ethics is the "higher immorality" of doing whatever it takes to get oneself ahead.
In short, the makers of the big decisions are selected from a pool largely determined by inherited privilege, with adherence to upper-class norms of outlook and conduct, mealy-mouthed mediocrity (not much different from the "organization man" mentality William Whyte famously described a few years earlier), and a determination to look out for Number One above all else the qualifications that set the winners apart from the losers.
This is obviously not a happy state of affairs (especially given the momentous decisions this elite now makes in an age of Cold War and hydrogen bombs, as Mills points out), and unfortunately those institutions which might check the worst tendencies of such an elite, like a "civil service linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility," "nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues" and "voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision" (361), are absent. As Mills recounts, the United States never had a proper, politically neutral civil service, the spoils system carrying all before it. The professional politician is very much a mid-level player in the hierarchy of power as it exists now. And instead of the public envisaged in classical liberalism, what exists is a mass society, which is essentially passive before a mass media which defines its grasp of reality, and unable to relate its personal experience to national affairs on the levels of thought or action. Far from being middle-class in the sense of being small but independent property owners, the white-collar workers with which the term is typically identified are instead "property-less wage workers" (262), politically distinct from their blue-collar counterparts principally in their being even less organized. Meanwhile, the expansion of public education has failed to compensate for the situation, consisting as it does principally of instruction in "intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else" (320). The result is a "politically fragmented, and . . . increasingly powerless" (324) populace leading lives of "impersonal drift" (310) – their disorganization a counterpoint to the cohesion of the power elite. And the prevailing "conservatism" (a problematic ideology given American history, as Mills demonstrates in the chapter he devotes to the subject) is a reflection of such drift more than anything else.
Few works confront Mills' subject so directly and comprehensively, and his argument is indeed a formidable one. However, that argument is also fifty years old now, and those years have not been uneventful ones. There have been significant changes in the positions of the relatively junior institutions in the power structure (organized labor being rather weaker today than in the 1950s, for instance), and even the balance among his Big Three. The executive branch, for instance, would seem to have lost power relative to the private sector (certainly to go by analyses like Thomas Frank's in The Wrecking Crew).
Additionally, Mills' discussion of military influence seems open to question. Certainly writers like Charles Dunlap Jr. and Andrew Bacevich have sounded warnings about a militaristic turn in American culture, and a "military-industrial complex" remains. Yet, Mills' assessment still seems more reflective of the prestige of the armed forces in the post-World War II period; of the era of universal conscription, and the devotion of a tenth of the Gross Domestic Product to defense in peacetime; of the Admirals' Revolt, and the Caesarism of Douglas MacArthur, and the election of Dwight Eisenhower President for two terms; of the urgency of the early Cold War, the experience of the Korean War and the enshrinement of "massive retaliation" as military doctrine; and perhaps, of the shock of these developments compared with the state of things in the 1930s; than they do of our own time.
Some might wonder, too, if the passing of the postwar boom that was the backdrop to his critique, and the social changes of the last five decades, have not changed matters in important ways (as discussed by Michael Lind in The Next American Nation); if our "age of networks" has not rendered his critique of mass media obsolete, and given new meaning to the idea of "the public" (as seen among Evgeny Morozov's "cyber-utopians"); and if national elites have not been eclipsed by the global elite represented by the Davos Men (as David Rothkopf argues in Superclass).
Nonetheless, power in modern society remains concentrated in large institutions (national and global) of the types to which he refers, and those who command them. One would certainly be hard-pressed indeed to argue that inherited privilege, mealy-mouthed mediocrity and "the higher immorality" have ceased to be key to getting ahead. (Indeed, the data on social mobility, the epidemic of corporate short-termism and dubious accounting, and the prevailing standard of political rhetoric and debate, suggests matters have got worse rather than better in this area.) One would also be hard-pressed to show that institutions capable of addressing those flaws have actually materialized, that the new technologies which make dissent more widely heard also make it more effective. (Again, one can more easily argue that the opposite is the case for the time being.) So long as these facts remain unchanged, Mills' classic will remain relevant to any understanding of how the modern world really works.
1. Mills notes, however, that this profile is less characteristic of those who rise through the armed forces than their counterparts in government and business.
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