tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40587662870773824312024-03-15T21:11:09.933-04:00Understanding SocietyDaniel LittleDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger1545125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-86331167852656912992024-02-28T17:46:00.001-05:002024-02-28T17:46:59.079-05:00EP Thompson's break with Stalinism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7YM-rYaxt9_8ICdP_9cvszJ6vvbYNUL4rnhEtJg1fUBUwaCb1KbCvqGl4G-6FY0-EQUKypCwOrXT-mi4xapM0Pp37yh09vJ2eKTU8uwdkVbqYBMaw2JfeUw_7De8seG1nHLvfU04kjbpbzcIduefS1mSYnD9PRrL_UebVIMIIUKdGHLL8ayVep-IP9rBc/s4315/ep%20thompson.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4315" data-original-width="3840" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7YM-rYaxt9_8ICdP_9cvszJ6vvbYNUL4rnhEtJg1fUBUwaCb1KbCvqGl4G-6FY0-EQUKypCwOrXT-mi4xapM0Pp37yh09vJ2eKTU8uwdkVbqYBMaw2JfeUw_7De8seG1nHLvfU04kjbpbzcIduefS1mSYnD9PRrL_UebVIMIIUKdGHLL8ayVep-IP9rBc/w356-h400/ep%20thompson.webp" width="356" /></a></div><br />E. P. Thompson was one of the great social historians of the twentieth century (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-was-e-p-thompson-up-to.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/08/marxism-and-british-historiography.html">link</a>). He was also a committed socialist from youth to the end of his life. His 1963 book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3Ii19hW">The Making of the English Working Class</a>, transformed the way that historians on the left conceptualized “social class”, and it was one of the formative works of "history from below". Thompson was a member of the British Communist Party (CPGB) until 1956, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev"s "secret speech" revealing some of Stalin's crimes. Thompson remained a staunch advocate of English socialism throughout his life. But as a Communist, he showed an unwelcome degree of intellectual and political independence, and he broke with the CPGB very publicly in 1956 with a manifesto criticizing the party leadership, “Winter wheat in Omsk” (Thompson 1956) and “Socialist humanism” (Thompson 1957). Christos Efstathiou describes Thompson (along with John Saville and Lawrence Daly) in these terms:<p></p><p><i>What united these three men, and, at the same time distinguished them from other Communist dissidents, was that they did not hesitate to fight the Party’s policies. (Efstathiou 2016: 29)</i></p><p>Consider Thompson’s break with Stalinism in “Socialist humanism” (1957; <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm">link</a>). The essay is decisive in rejecting Stalin’s “ideology” and his bureaucratic dogmatism and domination of the whole of society. Thompson writes eloquently about the need within socialism for open debate and discussion. But the essay does not give primary emphasis to the crimes of the Stalinist state: the Holodomor, the purges, the Show Trials, the Gulag, or the pervasive totalitarianism created by the Soviet state. Thompson does refer to “monsters of iniquity like Beria and Rakosi” and mentions their crimes – “destroying their own comrades, incarcerating hundreds of thousands, deporting whole nations”. And he gives a short summary of the show trial of the Bulgarian Communist leader Traicho Kostov. (The narrative is worthy of Koestler in <a href="https://amzn.to/48ySaUg">Darkness at Noon</a>.) Here is how Thompson writes about travesties like the trial of Kostov (and, presumably, the better known trials of Bukharin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders):</p><p><i>We feel these actions to be wrong, because our moral judgements do not depend upon abstractions or remote historical contingencies, but arise from concrete responses to the particular actions, relations, and attitudes of human beings. No amount of speculation upon intention or outcome can mitigate the horror of the scene. Those moral values which the people have created in their history, which the writers have encompassed in their poems and plays, come into judgement on the proceedings. As we watch the counsel for the defence spin out his hypocrisies, the gorge rises, and those archetypes of treachery, in literature and popular myth, from Judas to Iago, pass before our eyes. The fourteenth century ballad singer would have known this thing was wrong. The student of Shakespeare knows it is wrong. The Bulgarian peasant, who recalls that Kostov and Chervenkov had eaten together the bread and salt of comradeship, knows it is wrong. Only the “Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist” thinks it was – a mistake. (119)</i></p><p>Elsewhere in the text Thompson refers to "British socialists who see men who claim ‘Marxism’ as their guide, banner, and ‘science’ perpetrating vile crimes against their own comrades and gigantic injustices against many thousands of their fellow men". By "British socialists" he means primarily the group of former communist intellectuals who left the British communist party in 1956 and contributed to efforts to create a new Left labor movement in Britain through the <i>New Reasoner</i> and various new organizations. And here he is explicit in mentioning the "crimes and gigantic injustices" committed by the Stalinist state. </p><p>But these points about Stalin's crimes are incidental, not focal to Thompson’s critique of Stalinism. Thompson’s actions and words in 1956 reflect a revolt against “dogmatism” and the effort of the Party to control thought and debate. But his critique does not extend to a thorough-going indictment of the crimes committed by the Stalinist state. The murders and injustices to which Thompson refers here seem to encompass the terror and show trials of the 1930s, though Thompson is not explicit. But I do not find anywhere in his writings an explicit recognition of the atrocities of collectivization and the Holodomor in 1932-33. Reference to the Gulag appears in later writings (for example, in a passage quoted below from "The Poverty of Theory"). But, once again, Thompson does not provide a sustained and thorough critique of these crimes against individuals and groups by the Soviet state. Rather, the central focus of his critique of Stalinism in "Socialist Humanism" is the dogmatism and ideological purity demanded by the Stalinist state. </p><p><i>This is – quite simply – a revolt against the ideology, the false consciousness of the elite-into-bureaucracy, and a struggle to attain towards a true (“honest”) self-consciousness; as such it is expressed in the revolt against dogmatism and the anti-intellectualism which feeds it. Second, it is a revolt against inhumanity – the equivalent of dogmatism in human relationships and moral conduct – against administrative, bureaucratic and twisted attitudes towards human beings. In both sense it represents a return to man: from abstractions and scholastic formulations to real men: from deceptions and myths to honest history: and so the positive content of this revolt may be described as “socialist humanism.” It is humanist because it places once again real men and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration, instead of the resounding abstractions – the Party, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, the Two Camps, the Vanguard of the Working-Class – so dear to Stalinism. It is socialist because it re-affirms the revolutionary perspectives of Communism, faith in the revolutionary potentialities not only of the Human Race or of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but of real men and women. (Thompson 1957: 108)</i></p><p>Thompson framed his critique of Stalinism somewhat more pointedly two decades later in his polemical essay against Althusser, “The Poverty of Theory” (1978) .</p><p><i>We are not only (please remember) just talking about some millions of people (and most of these the ‘wrong’ people) being killed or gulaged. We are talking about the deliberate manipulation of the law, the means of communication, the police and propaganda organs of a state, to blockade knowledge, to disseminate lies, to slander individuals; about institutional procedures which confiscated from the Soviet people all self-activating means (whether in democratic modes or in forms of workers’ control), which substituted the party for the working class, the party’s leaders (or leader) for the party, and the security organs for all; about the confiscation and centralisation of all intellectual and moral expression, into an ideological state orthodoxy — that is, not only the suppression of the democratic and cultural freedoms of ‘individuals’: ... it is not only this, but within the confiscation of individual ‘rights’ to knowledge and expression, we have the ulterior confiscation of the processes of communication and knowledge-formation of a whole people, without which neither Soviet workers nor collective farmers can know what is true nor what each other thinks. ("The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors", Thompson 1978: 328-29) </i></p><p>Here Thompson is more explicit in naming the crimes of the Stalinist state -- mass murder, the Gulag. But here too Thompson seems most concerned about the dogmatism and thought control of the Stalinist state, "the suppression of the democratic and cultural freedoms of 'individuals'".</p><p><i>Stalinism, in its second sense, and considered as theory, was not one ‘error’, nor even two ‘errors’, which may be identified, ‘corrected’, and Theory thus reformed. Stalinism was not absent-minded about crimes: it bred crimes. In the same moment that Stalinism emitted ‘humanist’ rhetoric, it occluded the human faculties as part of its necessary mode of respiration. Its very breath stank (and still stinks) of inhumanity, because it has found a way of regarding people as the bearers of structures (kulaks) and history as a process without a subject. It is not an admirable theory, flawed by errors; it is a heresy against reason, which proposed that all knowledge can be summated in a single Theory, of which it is the sole arbitor and guardian. It is not an imperfect ‘science', but an ideology suborning the good name of science in order to deny all independent rights and authenticity to the moral and imaginative faculties. It is not only a compendium of errors, it is a cornucopia out of which new errors ceaselessly flow (‘mistakes’, ‘incorrect lines’). Stalinism is a distinct, ideological mode of thought, a systematic theoretical organisation of ‘error’ for the reproduction of more ‘error.’ (331)</i></p><p>These passages seem to capture the heart of Thompson's conception of socialist humanism: that socialism must ensure that its institutions are designed for real, free human beings -- not for the abstract theoretical assumptions of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine. And a genuine commitment to freedom of expression and thought is both a means and an end in this effort: freedom of expression and thought is necessary (as John Stuart Mill too argued) in order to allow the socialist order to progress; and free and equal human beings are the ultimate good of a socialist society.</p><p>Certainly Thompson was aware of Stalin's vast crimes by 1956. There was a great deal of information publicly available in the 1930s about the most important crimes of Stalin’s dictatorship, including the Holodomor, the Terror, the show trials, and the Gulag. Malcolm Muggeridge's reporting about the Ukraine devastation was widely available during 1933. And Welsh journalist Gareth Jones traveled through Ukraine and reported the facts of starvation as he observed them firsthand in articles in the Cardiff <i>Western Mail</i> and the <i>London Evening Standard</i> in 1933 as well as a published letter to the <i>Manchester Guardian</i> on May 8, 1933, corroborating Malcolm Muggeridge’s reporting on the famine in that newspaper. </p><p>Thompson's independence of mind as a historian is unquestionable, and his willingness to follow his conscience in his relationship to communism was manifest in his actions and writings of 1956 and following years. He rejected the moral authority of the CPGB and the ultimate authority of the party line. But unlike other observers like Orwell, Koestler, or Muggeridge, Thompson seems not to have fully addressed the atrocious crimes of the Stalinist period. He did not squarely confront the atrocities represented by the Holodomor, the Gulag, or the pervasive and repressive use of the security apparatus (NKVD, KGB) to maintain totalitarian control over the citizens of the USSR. </p><p>So we are left with a question: why did E.P. Thompson fail to clearly and unequivocally address the Holodomor, the Gulag, and the regime of terror established by Stalin's state?</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-44334671051038925752024-01-31T21:26:00.000-05:002024-01-31T21:26:10.476-05:00Defining disciplinary research in the social sciences<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoosxSBG8nxwzD067RL7ESkFMSou1w59jRl-kkG2sdXC3855ay0g-hfsmopjk4aSyxaQYZ4U7_jIu1xVRS8edcp0pjyOq6RxcKt2eQ7b7gzaDQKTET66VGRuS5Abmpl_ugt3sz4yFKu9s8WkQoVcMzifOPGkQe5uKfxfZAaQkEVLUHELASv43aPMEGkbg4/s1024/founders-of-sociology.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="1024" height="80" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoosxSBG8nxwzD067RL7ESkFMSou1w59jRl-kkG2sdXC3855ay0g-hfsmopjk4aSyxaQYZ4U7_jIu1xVRS8edcp0pjyOq6RxcKt2eQ7b7gzaDQKTET66VGRuS5Abmpl_ugt3sz4yFKu9s8WkQoVcMzifOPGkQe5uKfxfZAaQkEVLUHELASv43aPMEGkbg4/w400-h80/founders-of-sociology.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s gave most of its attention to the development of the physical sciences -- especially physics itself. (See Tom Nickles' essay "Historicist Theories of Scientific Rationality" in the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i> for a detailed account of this development in the philosophy of science; <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=rationality-historicist">link</a>.) Historian-philosophers like Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos studied the development of astronomy, physics, and chemistry as research communities involving complex social arrangements -- networks of practitioners, training institutions, laboratories, journals, and universities and research institutes -- and shifting but shared cognitive frameworks. They argued that scientific research and knowledge always proceeds through organized research communities that regulate the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Kuhn emphasized the specificity and contingency of the cognitive frameworks (disciplinary matrix or paradigm) that guided a research community, insights that in part reflected his own reading of Ludwik Fleck's earlier work on the history of biology and medicine and the idea of a "<i>denkkollektiv</i>" (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2021/10/ludwik-fleck-and-thought-styles-in.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2022/06/paradigms-conceptual-frameworks-and.html">link</a>). Here is Alexander Bird's description of Kuhn's view in his essay on Kuhn in the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i>:<p></p><p><i>He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. </i>(<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/">link</a>)</p><p>Well and good for astronomy and fundamental physics. But what about the social sciences? How should we think about the sub-disciplines of fields in the social sciences like sociology? The idea is sometimes expressed, including by Kuhn himself, that the social sciences are not yet "mature sciences" precisely <i>because</i> they lack strong and definitive paradigms. Here is Bird again in the SEP:</p><p><i>The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress.</i><i> </i>(<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/">link</a>)</p><p>This view perhaps once had a seductive appeal, but it is no longer convincing. The social sciences are different from the natural sciences because social phenomena are different from the phenomena of the world of chemistry and physics, and the unity of science was a dogma from logical positivism that we are well rid of (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/02/dis-unity-of-social-science.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2009/09/vienna-circle-on-interdisciplinary.html">link</a>). Here is how I've tried to formulate the differences that exist between the social sciences and the physical sciences:</p><p><i>Rather than unity, we should expect eclectic theories, piecemeal explanations, and a patchwork of inquiries at a range of levels of description. Some explanatory theories will turn out to be more portable than others. But none will be comprehensive, and the social sciences will always remain open-ended and extensible. Instead of theoretical unification we might rather look for a more and more satisfactory coverage, through a range of disciplines and methods, of the aspects of the social world we judge most interesting and important. And these judgments can be trusted to shift over time. And this means that we should be skeptical about the appropriateness of the goal of creating a unified social science. (Understanding Society; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/02/dis-unity-of-social-science.html">link</a>)</i></p><p>This view of the social world suggests that sociological research does not require strict paradigms or dogmatic commitment to a "disciplinary matrix" of theory and methodological commitments in order to make progress. Instead, sociology should embrace a pluralistic range of research approaches and cognitive frameworks that can address different aspects of the social world. We gain insight and understanding of the social world through overlapping and pluralistic methods and theoretical frameworks.</p><p>That said, it is plain enough that there are distinct (sometimes overlapping) research families within sociology. Any large sociology department at a research university will have members who identify with different approaches and methodologies. Social movement researchers disagree with large-N quantitative researchers in many important ways, and an ethnomethodologist might find the work of both these sets of colleagues to be somewhat foreign. How should we characterize these differences across extended research groups within sociology? </p><p>Several ideas are available. Weakly, a group of researchers might be said to belong to a <i>research tradition</i> if they share a number of common assumptions about the nature of the social world, the methodology that is most suitable to sociological research, and some core examples of sociological explanation. Most commonly this situation would arise from the fact of a common genealogy for a group of researchers -- a founder (Durkheim or Tarde, let's say), and a few generations of researchers who followed in their footsteps. But notice how weak this account is. It does not refer to shared research institutions, social networks of researchers, or definitive processes of research evaluation.</p><p>A stronger conception of a <i>research community</i> may begin with the weak conception, but then provide a specification of how research proceeds in this field or that. This stronger analysis aims to describe the institutional framework within which "X sociology" is carried out, evaluated, disseminated, and incorporated into the training of the next generation of sociologists in the X approach. What is added here is an account of the institutional infrastructure of the sub-discipline, the institutions and actor networks through which sociological research is carried out and shared. This more elaborate description is one of the guiding assumptions of the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/sociology-of-knowledge-camic-gross-and.html">link</a>).</p><p>But this specification remains incomplete in a crucial way: it says little about the intellectual content of the target sociological sub-field, the cognitive frameworks and theoretical ideas to which practitioners within the field adhere and that guide their research. This is the aspect that is the most novel and interesting feature of Kuhn's theory of the paradigm and Fleck's conception of the thought-collective. Kuhn, Fleck, and others in this line of thought emphasize that scientific research is not "blue-sky" theory, but rather proceeds on the basis of a contestable set of beliefs about the nature of the phenomena under investigation. According to this line of thought, the scientist's imagination is framed and directed by a set of assumptions about the world from which the discipline itself discourages deviation. The sub-discipline is indeed "disciplined" to conform to the existing paradigm. </p><p>In the case of the social sciences, the role of "paradigm beliefs" is complicated and ambiguous. On the one hand, various areas of the social sciences are notorious for their rigid adherence to certain methodological principles -- the primacy of large-N quantitative studies, the value of formal models, lack of respect for case studies and comparative studies. (This was the point of the Perestroika debate in political science some years ago, and subsequent methodological debates in sociology more recently; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/04/perestroika-debate-in-political-science.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/07/discipline-method-hegemony-in-sociology.html">link</a>.) On the other hand, there is a very wide range of different assumptions (ontological beliefs) about social entities and processes in the social world across the social sciences and within each discipline. And it is rare to find a high level of consensus about these issues within a social science discipline. (Economics departments in research universities in the United States are an exception, but an unrewarding one: a high level of commitment to a specific set of methods, but a low level of empirical or policy success.) It seems, then, that the full-blooded idea of a "paradigm" as a unified cognitive framework spanning a broad network of researchers is not to be found in the social sciences. So perhaps our assessment of this topic in the social sciences might be: yes to research communities and networks, no to paradigm-driven research communities.<br /></p><p>My interest in this question is fairly specific. I've been thinking about the emerging sub-discipline of analytical sociology over the past twenty years, and it would be useful to provide an analysis of the field in terms of the ideas sketched above. Do the manifestos of important advocates like Hedström and Demeulenaere constitute a "disciplinary matrix" in something like the sense that Kuhn had in mind? Do new areas of computational sociology (agent-based modeling, for example) represent something analogous to the body of laboratory techniques and procedures that Kuhn or Hanson included in the disciplinary matrix of physics? Do the strict assumptions of structural individualism advocated by the primary voices constitute a component of a "paradigm" for sociological research that helps to guide productive investigation and theory formation? In short, is analytical sociology a reasonably well-defined research community unified by a specific disciplinary matrix that is enforced by the regulative institutions of allied journals and institutes?</p><p>It is useful to compare the field of analytical sociology with other families of research in sociology today. For example, we might consider </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>"processual sociology" described by Andrew Abbott (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2016/12/processual-sociology.html">link</a>) </li><li>"field sociology" inspired by Pierre Bourdieu (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/bourdieus-field.html">link</a>)</li><li>"ethnomethodology and microsociology" inspired by Goffman (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/goffmans-programme.html">link</a>) and Garfinkel (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2011/05/garfinkel-on-social-competence.html">link</a>)</li></ul><p></p><p>Abbott offers a vision of the nature of the social world -- an alternative social ontology -- and his writings provide quite a bit of methodological advice for sociologists interested in exploring these kinds of social phenomena. But it is hard to find the "processual sociology network" of researchers that is carrying out detailed empirical research under this banner. So it is hard to say that processual sociology constitutes a research community at present. The Bourdieu case is different. Many young sociologists make use of Bourdieu's ideas and theories about cultural fields. Bourdieu has a great deal of influence. But it is not obvious that there is a cumulative body of work that "Bourdieu-theory" can claim credit for as a research framework, and it is difficult to articulate the premises of a disciplinary matrix for conducting sociological research for this approach. So here too, perhaps we are forced to conclude that Bourdieu-theory too is less than a research community, in spite of its influence and the frequency of citations of Bourdieu in sociology journals. (According to a table titled "Most referenced authors in 42 sociology journals" reproduced by Gerardo Munck on X (<a href="https://twitter.com/GerardoMunck/status/1748314373053915294">link</a>), Bourdieu is #1 with 9853 citations, and Weber is #2 with 6135 citations!) And though Goffman and Garfinkel are still part of the corpus of "theory" in sociology, it is hard to find instances of research networks proceeding along the lines described by ethnomethodologists fifty years ago. So analytical sociology seems to be a live candidate for an example of a research community organized by an active research matrix, whereas the other examples do not.</p><p>(This topic is an appropriate subject for study within the "new sociology of knowledge"; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/sociology-of-knowledge-camic-gross-and.html">link</a>.) </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-81249629489430890182023-12-18T10:35:00.002-05:002023-12-19T09:19:17.179-05:00Mistakes by organizations<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8vyFmPBkkLSWITuU1cg532j6zhpgFPDL__7XYEXq25CcdkodjlLbOvTI_da2mhxMlq_Y3yKp01LCHmRGtS0nb3vna8WjfV-0lIOx5BFaHZ94epvcUh0h-r-1klM0z_HZpbKhurrOSs3QgGhlVZaiPXtg-QH4TWNqHNbZ-0dJ6jTBIw8-igbwf7RCdBOyx/s840/wrong%20way%20touchdown.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="840" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8vyFmPBkkLSWITuU1cg532j6zhpgFPDL__7XYEXq25CcdkodjlLbOvTI_da2mhxMlq_Y3yKp01LCHmRGtS0nb3vna8WjfV-0lIOx5BFaHZ94epvcUh0h-r-1klM0z_HZpbKhurrOSs3QgGhlVZaiPXtg-QH4TWNqHNbZ-0dJ6jTBIw8-igbwf7RCdBOyx/w320-h274/wrong%20way%20touchdown.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In 1964 Jim Marshall, a defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, committed a mistake by recovering a fumble by the San Francisco 49ers and running it into the end zone – at the wrong end of the field. In the early 1990s the US Congress made a mistake by ordering continued development of the Osprey VTOL aircraft. Did these two “actors” do the same sort of thing? Is an organization’s mistake similar to an individual’s mistake? At a superficial level it is easy enough to agree that these are the same kinds of things. The wrong outcome resulted from a series of apparently intentional and calculated actions. But a closer look makes it clear that they are not so similar after all.<p></p><p>Making a mistake by an individual arises in situations of quasi-rational actors deciding on an action based on the consequences the actor hopes to bring about. The actor is “intentional” — he or she has a plan for bringing about a desired consequence or benefit, has calculated a sequence of actions designed to achieve the goal, and has estimated the circumstances within which he/she acts over time. A mistake happens when the actor miscalculates something that he/she should have correctly calculated — the way one action can be expected to lead to an intermediate outcome, the features of the environment in which the action is to be carried out, the predictable events that might interfere with the sequence of actions and their intended outcome. Miscalculation is the essence of individual mistakes. The actor is a unified perceiver and observer who chooses a sequence of actions designed to achieve the goal, but miscalculates some part of the underlying assumptions guiding the action.</p><p>Is miscalculation the primary source of mistakes when a complex organization’s strategy goes awry? Sometimes. Lyndon Johnson miscalculated the goals and reasoning of Ho Chi Minh and escalated US involvement in the Vietnam War. But the most interesting causes of organizational mistakes have little to do with miscalculation. The reason for this is that organizations, unlike individuals, are not unified perceivers, planners, and actors. Instead, organizations are loose configurations of lower-level actors who are only weakly coordinated by a single managing intelligence – a top level executive. Loose linkages across sub-units of an organization raise the possibility that each sub-unit is approximately rational, and yet the aggregate result of the complex interaction is quite different from what was intended by the key executive. In the case of the design of the Ford Pinto, the top corporate executive did not intend to release a vehicle design that endangered vehicle safety, and yet a series of loose linkages across units led to exactly that outcome. </p><p>Several key organizational dysfunctions have been identified that contribute to organizational mistakes … even though each sub-unit is acting rationally. Dysfunctions that have been discussed in earlier posts can all lead to organizational failures: principal-agent problems, conflicting cognitive frameworks, conflicting local priorities, external pressures on decision makers, poor communication and information-sharing. (<a href="https://amzn.to/48noQjX">A New Social Ontology of Government</a> discusses these dysfunctions in greater detail.)</p><p>It is clear, then, that an organization’s mistakes are often quite different from the mistakes made by a reasonably rational individual. They often derive from dysfunctions that appear to be systemic in organizations, and from the important fact that organizations are unavoidably dis-unified. Intentions, information, belief formation, cognitive framing, coordination of underlying assumptions all depend on separate teams of decision makers and actors, and large organizations often miss the mark with their decision processes precisely because of this fact. Sources of bad collective or corporate decisions include problems of conflicting priorities and interpretations of the action environment, principal-agent problems, imperfect communication and information sharing, slow “updating” of knowledge of the action environment, and unintended consequences of one line of action that interfere with other actions. In the end the organization fails to accomplish its action goal, and from the outside it looks like a series of incomprehensible blunders. </p><p>The public diagnosis of governmental and corporate "mistakes" is often a simple one: “Mistakes were made”, with the implication that more intelligent or experienced managers would have been more successful. But this impression is often mistaken. Intelligent people in different parts of the organization made resourceful and resilient efforts to carry out their part of the plan. And yet the compound of these sub-actions is something that turns out to be stunningly ineffective. Dien Bien Phu was a military disaster for the French army in Indochina. And yet there were reasons for each intermediate decision that led to the eventual debacle.</p><p>This suggests that citizens and policy makers need to think about organizational errors differently from mistakes made by individuals. Organizations need to be more “disaster-resistant”, so that the dysfunctions mentioned here have less likelihood of resulting in a catastrophic failure. “Be more careful” is not useful advice. Instead, organizational designers and leaders need to take specific measures to soften the potential impact of information failure, conflicting cognitive frames, and conflicting priorities in different parts of the organization. Redundancy is one potential source of resilience. Better training in procedures and cognitive frameworks is another. (For example, accidents have occurred in nuclear fuel processing plants because workers were not taught about the importance of the geometry of holding vessels on the critical mass of liquids with dissolved radioactive materials; <a href="https://amzn.to/3RsOtcr">Atomic Accidents</a>.) And we need to bear in mind always that the loose linkages and weak forms of intentionality that are unavoidable features of large organizations pose permanent risks for effective organizational action.</p><div><br /></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-72867245270111458792023-11-02T21:11:00.001-04:002023-11-05T09:31:01.038-05:00Brecht on Galileo on science<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzA-ppLmym4yeAYgpDQx5SKXiattO8IWhdrKGrGUPzCvHMLA8N76uj-gbUVWh_jH1sqjXYYbAqJk2GoeUEXEgjwtMkXDD8TkgkO6oLg2lJ9J6ptdSzC0piYIt2QaWW8zvZHVsvq9otBGWlw1Ns-TOZU6eaZ6ZbfLJlfo0nUYjayqSocCUt3ZqoIiGXEJFK/s1400/Discorsi.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzA-ppLmym4yeAYgpDQx5SKXiattO8IWhdrKGrGUPzCvHMLA8N76uj-gbUVWh_jH1sqjXYYbAqJk2GoeUEXEgjwtMkXDD8TkgkO6oLg2lJ9J6ptdSzC0piYIt2QaWW8zvZHVsvq9otBGWlw1Ns-TOZU6eaZ6ZbfLJlfo0nUYjayqSocCUt3ZqoIiGXEJFK/w400-h400/Discorsi.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Bertolt Brecht composed his play <i>Life of Galileo</i> (1939) (<a href="https://people.fmarion.edu/llarsen/LifeofGalileo.pdf">link</a>) while on the run in Denmark from Nazi Germany in 1938. Brecht was a determined anti-Nazi, and he was an advocate of revolutionary Marxism. It is fascinating to read one of the longest speeches he composed for Galileo at the end of the play, in which Galileo reflects on his recantation of the heliocentric theory of planetary motion. Rather than celebrating "pure science" over the oppression of the Church, Brecht has Galileo reflect bitterly on the corruption of science and its subservience to the powerful. This speech occurs in scene 14, near the end of the play. Galileo's disciple Andrea Sarti is interested in showing that Galileo's recantation was a wily move, allowing him to pursue the higher truths of science. And he is delighted to learn that Galileo has been secretly writing his <i>Discorsi</i> (<i>Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences</i>), which demonstrates to him that Galileo continues to pursue the highest values of science. Galileo disagrees, and offers a harsh criticism of the role of science in society altogether. The whole scene is worth reading carefully, but here is an important excerpt.<div>__________________________<br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>A large room with table, leather chair and globe. Galileo, old now and half blind, is carefully experimenting with a bent wooden rail and a small ball of wood. In the antechamber sits a monk on guard. There is a knock on the door. The monk opens it and a peasant comes in carrying two plucked geese. Virginia emerges from the kitchen. She is now about forty years old.</i></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">...</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea: You gained the leisure to write a scientific work which could be written by nobody else. If you had ended up at the stake in a halo of flames the other side would have won.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: They did win. And there is no scientific work that can only be written by one particular man.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea: Why did you recant, then?</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea: No!</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: They showed me the instruments.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea: So it wasn't planned?</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: It was not.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Pause.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea <i>loudly</i>: Science makes only one demand: contribution to science.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: And I met it. Welcome to the gutter, brother in science and cousin in betrayal! Do you eat fish? I have fish. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[a]</span></b> What stinks is not my fish but me. I sell out, you are a buyer. O irresistible glimpse of the book, the sacred commodity! The mouth waters and the curses drown. The great whore of Bablylon, the murderous beast, the scarlet woman, opens her thighs and everything is altered. Blessed be our horse-trading, whitewashing, death-fearing community!</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Andrea: Fearing death is human. Human weaknesses don't matter to science.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: Don't they? -- My dear Sarti, even as I now am I think I can still give you a tip or two as to what matters to that science you have dedicated yourself to.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">A short pause</span></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo <i>professorially, folding his hands over his stomach</i>: </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In my spare time, of which I have plenty, I have gone over my case and considered how it is going to be judged by that world of science of which I no longer count myself a member. Even a wool merchant has not only to buy cheap and sell dear but also to ensure that the wool trade continues unimpeded. The pursuit of science seems to me to demand particular courage in this respect. It deals in knowledge procured through doubt. Creating knowledge for all about all, it aims to turn all of us into doubters. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[b]</span></b> Now the bulk of the population is kept by its princes, landlords, and priests in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws which cloak what these people are up to. The poverty of the many is as old as the hills, and from pulpit and lecture platform we hear that it is as hard as the hills to get rid of. Our new art of doubting delighted the mass audience. They tore the telescope out of our hands and trained it on their tormentors, the princes, landlords and priests. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[c]</span></b> These selfish and domineering men, having greedily exploited the fruits of science, found that the cold eye of science had been turned on a primaeval but contrived poverty that could clearly be swept away if they were swept away themselves. They showered us with threats and bribes, irresistible to feeble souls. But can we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists? <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[d]</span></b> The movements of the heavenly bodies have become more comprehensible, but the peoples are as far as ever from calculating the moves of their rulers. The battle for a measurable heaven has been won thanks to doubt; but thanks to credulity the Rome housewife's battle for milk will be lost time and time again. Science, Sarti, is involved in both these battles. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[e]</span></b> A human race which shambles around in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws, too ignorant to develop its own powers, will never be able to develop those powers of nature which you people are revealing to it. To what end are you working? Presumably for the principle that science's sole aim must be to lighten the burden of human existence. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[f]</span></b> If the scientists, brought to heel by self-interested rulers, limit themselves to piling up knowledge for knowledge's sake, then science can be crippled and your new machines will lead to nothing but new impositions. You may in due course discover all that there is to discover, and your progress will nonetheless be nothing but a progress away from mankind. The gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror. -- As a scientist I had a unique opportunity. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[g]</span></b> In my day astronomy emerged into the market place. Given this unique situation, if one man had put up a fight it might have had tremendous repercussions. Had I stood firm the scientists could have developed something like the doctor's Hippocratic oath, a vow to use their knowledge exclusively for mankind's benefit. <b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">[h]</span></b> As things are, the best that can be hoped for is a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for any purpose. What's more, Sarti, I have come to the conclusion that I was never in any real danger. For a few years I was as strong as the authorities. And I handed my knowledge to those in power for them to use, fail to use, misuse -- whatever best suited their objectives.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Virginia has entered with a dish and come to a standstill.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Galileo: I betrayed my profession. A man who does what I did cannot be tolerated in the ranks of science.</span></p><p>__________________________</p><p>What are the messages here about the relationship between science and society, between science and class? The view is unequivocal: science has been corrupted. Against the idealism offered by Sardi, Galileo asserts that science has come to serve the interests of the powerful, and it might have been different. Galileo's long speech here (plainly expressing Brecht's own social criticisms) offers a harsh and negative assessment of the role of science in society. And much of this speech derives, not from an unexpectedly radical sixteenth-century mathematician, but from the Marxist theories that Brecht had studied in the early 1930s.</p><p><b>[a]</b> Galileo begins this diatribe with self-contempt. He looks at his work as a scientist as "selling out" -- offering the products of his intelligence and creativity for sale to the highest bidder. Science has been commodified, like the woolen-good trade. Galileo stinks like a rotten fish.</p><p><b>[b]</b> Society is divided into rich and poor, powerful and powerless; and the rich and powerful dominate and exploit the poor and powerless. This fundamental reality is obscured by the "fog" of myth and misconception, or what Marx refers to as ideology. "Good" science can tear through the mystifications of popular beliefs and myths; but all too often the scientists refrain from providing the tools needed (the microscopes and telescopes) to penetrate the mists of common misconception about the social world.</p><p><b>[c]</b> Science could have been a revolutionary force; it could have helped to "sweep away" the mystifications of the rich and powerful. Instead, the rich and powerful have bought and intimidated the scientists. The poor Roman housewife's quest for milk will be permanently difficult because the Roman proletariat has failed to see the necessity of sweeping away the class oppression of patrician and plebian social life. </p><p><b>[d]</b> The point here is that Galileo has allowed human beings to see the real motions of the planets, but they still have not discovered the "laws of motion" of the social world. They continue to live in a world of illusions about how the social world works (like the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic conceptions of the planetary system). From Marx's <i>Capital</i>, Preface to the German Edition: "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." </p><p><b>[e]</b> When ideology and mystification are allowed to persist, exploitation, domination, and poverty will persist as well.</p><p><b>[f]</b> Science is distorted when it is put to service in the interests of the powerful. It no longer serves to benefit humanity, but rather only the landlords and the priests. And without science, ideology and mystification will continue to mislead the poor.</p><p><b>[g]</b> Galileo seems to believe that the struggles with the Church over the Copernican Revolution during the Inquisition represented turning points for human emancipation, and there was a choice. Science could have become a permanent force for progress, or it could become a tool of enrichment for the powerful. Because scientists (including Galileo) lacked the courage to stand up, science became a tool of exploitation. The chance to orient science towards its own "Hippocratic oath" of allegiance to progress to humanity was lost. </p><p><b>[h]</b> Here Galileo (Brecht) is contemptuous of scientists and inventors who do their work for commercial and monetary gain -- the smart people who put their imagination and intelligence to work for the highest bidder. And almost always the highest bidder is the exploiter -- the capitalist and the landlord who uses the products of science to enhance his wealth.</p><p>In this section of the play, then, Brecht breaks with a common narrative about the Galileo story: the pure and rational scientist who is forced to change his beliefs by an unthinking and authoritarian Church. In that story the scientist is the isolated individual courageously pursuing the truth for its own sake, and the Church is an authoritarian structure which is the antithesis of intellectual freedom. Instead, Brecht tells a more complicated story. It is not just the question of recanting "unacceptable" beliefs; it is the question of devoting one's scientific talents in service to the rich and powerful. Galileo's [Brecht's] fundamental critique is that "science" is allied with "the ruling class". </p><p><br /></p></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-90717102659329307832023-10-31T16:24:00.003-04:002023-10-31T16:24:52.253-04:00Thinking about social class<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtSpvNiL6sVZqGrV1qbOIayhlffYTMR-zC5_ob2NNxbKpX9CcqbOk_-Ugy5kI0mNtVYBs-ow0Tknydilo1UOUGpI7Ic2kLwD_gRErBlMdSuToPGEizmSuaZ93XklJQC0Wla_Azc0oqNeGKTITEReKvgd4_7hA4vfwoZFsolfTiHh0KdBhI_jEc2c4XQmZ5/s1400/UAWstrike.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="787" data-original-width="1400" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtSpvNiL6sVZqGrV1qbOIayhlffYTMR-zC5_ob2NNxbKpX9CcqbOk_-Ugy5kI0mNtVYBs-ow0Tknydilo1UOUGpI7Ic2kLwD_gRErBlMdSuToPGEizmSuaZ93XklJQC0Wla_Azc0oqNeGKTITEReKvgd4_7hA4vfwoZFsolfTiHh0KdBhI_jEc2c4XQmZ5/w400-h225/UAWstrike.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />Marx's theory of social class is founded on the idea of conflict of interest defined by the property system. Marx puts the point this way in the Communist Manifesto: “History is a history of class conflict.” And his inference from this fact: “Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains” (Marx and Engels 1848). Individuals belong to classes depending on their position within the social property system. The social property system defines the access and use enjoyed by different groups of the resources available to a society at a given period of history. The primary resources are capital, land, and labor. (We might now want to add "knowledge" and "data" to this list of categorical resources.) Individuals belong to classes defined by the type of access and use they have to what kinds of resources. <p></p><p>This is a structural definition of the concept of class. A person’s class is defined by his or her position within a system of property relations, defining one’s location with a structure of domination, control, and exploitation. The group of people who share a similar position within the property relations of a society constitute a class. Their circumstances, resources, and opportunities are similar to those of others in the class, and they have common interests that are in opposition to members of some other classes. So class works as a social sorting process: individuals are tracked into one class or another through specific sociological mechanisms (schooling, parental attitudes, neighborhood). And it works to assign very different ranges of material outcomes to members of the various groups; working-class families wind up more poorly educated, less healthy, and more vulnerable to economic fluctuations than their counterparts in the landlord class, the financial elite class, or the capitalist class. Part of the challenge of developing a sociology of class involved identifying some of the concrete pathways of difference created by class with respect to specific opportunities – education, health, adequate nutrition, access to creative work, and other important social resources. </p><p>Status and consciousness are also part of the sociology of class. And, of course, there is the concrete sociological task of better understanding the lived experience of people who wind up in the various segments of the class system. Individuals develop specific features of mentality out of the experience they have in the class environments of their parents, their schools, and their workplaces. And these differences in turn give rise to differences in behavior -- consumer behavior, political behavior, and inter-group behavior. And members of a class may acquire a common perspective on their situation -- they may come to diagnose the social relations around them in a similar way, they may come to a common “class consciousness” that leads them to engage in collective action together.</p><p>Evidently, the groups that own capital and land have access to material resources that owners of labor power do not; so capitalists and landlords have social advantages lacked by proletarians. Proletarians gain access to material goods by selling their labor power to owners of capital and land; they become wage laborers. Class relations create substantial differences of material wellbeing and substantial inequalities of wealth and income. By controlling the wealth constituted by capital and land, these privileged classes are able to take a disproportionate share of society's wealth. The great modern social classes, in Marx's historical analysis, are the bourgeoisie (capital and land) and the proletariat (wage labor). In feudalism the great classes were the feudal aristocrats (owners of land and rights in the labor of serfs) and serfs (usufruct of small parcels of land, labor obligations to the lord).</p><p>Class and property are thus conceptually intertwined. An economic structure can be defined as a system for producing social wealth in which productive resources and the results of production are unevenly divided across different groups. Classes are the major social positions within an existing economic structure. Producers create wealth through their labor and creativity; property owners extract a part of this wealth through a system of social relations that privilege them. Another way of putting the point is to ask: where does the individual gain his/her income -- from the sale of labor time, from the sale or rent of physical assets, or from the sale or rent of expertise? Workers derive their income from the sale of their labor time; capitalists, financiers, and landlords derive their income from their ownership of physical and financial resources, and professionals, experts, and intellectuals derive their income from their possession of scarce expert knowledge and skills. </p><p>In nineteenth-century France we might have classified the population into land owners, capital owners, wage laborers, artisans, professionals (accountants, architects), intellectuals, government officials, civil service workers, small merchants, smallholding farmers, tenant farmers, landless workers, and lumpenproletariat. And these groups can be roughly triangulated according to their ownership of three major elements: labor power, valuable skills and knowledge, and economic assets (land, property, wealth). Within any society there are groups that fall outside the primary classes -- small traders, artisans, small farmers, intellectuals. But it is central to Marx's theory of class, that there is a primary cleavage between owners of the means of production and the direct producers, and that this cleavage embodies a fundamental conflict of interest between the two groups. </p><p>Classes, according to Marx, also constitute a system of exploitation: a system in which a substantial share of the fruits of social production are transferred from one group to another, through the normal workings of the social-property system. The producing class is exploited by the ascendant class: wealth is transferred from producers to owners. Serfs and lords, slaves and masters, workers and owners represent the primary classes of feudalism, ancient slavery, and nineteenth century capitalism. The proletariat produces surplus value, and the bourgeoisie gains ownership of this surplus through the workings of the property system, in the form of profits, interest, and rents. As Marx puts it in <i>Capital</i>:</p><p><i>He, who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.</i></p><p>Finally, the theory of class suggests the need for a theory of class consciousness: the ways in which members of distinct classes understand their roles in society, and the social relationships that largely determine their fates. Marx’s concept of ideology is intended to express the notion that large system of ideas serve a social function of concealing the conflictual nature of the property and class system in which people find themselves. The concept of false consciousness falls within this notion; members of a class possess false consciousness when they seriously misconstrue the nature of the social relations within which they live.</p><p>The explanatory thrust of the theory of class goes along the lines of a sociological hypothesis: people who have a similar location within a system of property relations will also develop other important similarities: similarities of thought, values, style, behavior, and politics, for example. And so Marx believed that structurally-defined classes of people were likely to further develop a similar class consciousness -- a similar framework of thought in terms of which they understand the social forces around them; and he expected that classes of people would come to share a signature framework of political motivation -- a set of ideas, interpretations, and values that would motivate them to engage in collective action together. </p><p>(Several earlier posts have focused on social class as well; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/12/sociology-of-class.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/12/class-in-america.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-was-e-p-thompson-up-to.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2007/11/does-historical-materialism-have-place.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2009/06/marxs-theory-of-political-behavior.html">link</a>.)</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-74434164620816517262023-09-20T12:48:00.001-04:002023-09-20T12:48:31.117-04:00Orwell on historical truth<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoD6g7DvgYglRgFNzFvoEljrMdH6ZOsSJ6GRqevMxogkVBZXtt9c-Dkh8Zaiz-PlTrKKWcywwPDF38FJJD_Fd_EFkgbbrh1IinhiWyOG9irjEHipQTU7nh9oGvFJPmVwtG_0C5uEIAtBrGyJy4jnpxdgf9fnudIv1OUSZZwmu421-qGQCM0P-RhXLavW7X/s1268/May_Days%20Barcelona.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="829" data-original-width="1268" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoD6g7DvgYglRgFNzFvoEljrMdH6ZOsSJ6GRqevMxogkVBZXtt9c-Dkh8Zaiz-PlTrKKWcywwPDF38FJJD_Fd_EFkgbbrh1IinhiWyOG9irjEHipQTU7nh9oGvFJPmVwtG_0C5uEIAtBrGyJy4jnpxdgf9fnudIv1OUSZZwmu421-qGQCM0P-RhXLavW7X/w400-h261/May_Days%20Barcelona.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />George Orwell is celebrated for his recognition of the role of political lies in the conflicts of his time. For example: "Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Part of his awareness of self-serving lies about history by states and political partisans developed through his experience in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Events that he himself had observed and participated in -- for example, the street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937 -- were grossly misrepresented by the Communists. Ultimately his own faction, the POUM, was accused by the Communists of having engaged in conspiracy and having fomented the street violence that occurred during these weeks. Orwell was a participant, and he knew first-hand that this was untrue. It is instructive to read <a href="https://amzn.to/3LxkNZw">Homage to Catalonia</a> from the lens of "historical truth".<p></p><p>So what were the facts about Barcelona in spring 1937?</p><p><i>IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eyewitnesses whom I believe to be reliable. I can, however, contradict some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the affair into some kind of perspective. (70)</i></p><p>In what follows Orwell offers a judicious account of the events and pronouncements that preceded and followed the beginning of street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937 -- first between the anarchists (CNT) and the Guardia Civil, then with several parties of the left joining with the CNT on the barricades. He makes an effort to recover documents and contemporary news articles to piece together the sequence of events that culminated in the suppression of the POUM. And he finds that reportage in the press was almost invariably incorrect, whether purposefully or not. The Communist line was consistently antagonistic to the anarchists and the Trotskyists (POUM). </p><p><i>A tremendous dust was kicked up in the foreign anti-Fascist press, but, as usual, only one side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result the Barcelona fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal Anarchists and Trotskyists who were ‘stabbing the Spanish Government in the back’, and so forth. The issue was not quite so simple as that. Undoubtedly when you are at war with a deadly enemy it is better not to begin fighting among yourselves; but it is worth remembering that it takes two to make a quarrel and that people do not begin building barricades unless they have received something that they regard as a provocation. (73)</i></p><p>In particular, the Communists were active in constructing a propaganda platform against both POUM and the anarchists.</p><p><i>Since the beginning of the war the Spanish Communist Party had grown enormously in numbers and captured most of the political power, and there had come into Spain thousands of foreign Communists, many of whom were openly expressing their intention of ‘liquidating’ Anarchism as soon as the war against Franco was won. In the circumstances one could hardly expect the Anarchists to hand over the weapons which they had got possession of in the summer of 1936. (73-74)</i></p><p>Orwell explicitly considers his own position and potential bias in constructing the narrative that he offers. He credibly offers a commitment of his own intention to report honestly what he has observed.</p><p><i>I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the Communist press. It is necessary to examine the Communist version, because it was published all over the world, has been supplemented at short intervals ever since, and is probably the most widely accepted one. ... In the Communist and pro-Communist press the entire blame for the Barcelona fighting was laid upon the P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided ‘uncontrollables’. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot, carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The P.O.U.M. was ‘Franco’s Fifth Column’ —a ‘Trotskyist’ organization working in league with the Fascists. (74)</i></p><p>Throughout he establishes the ideological and propagandist "line" taken by the Communists, and he demonstrates its deliberate mendacity.</p><p><i>In a moment I will give some more extracts from the accounts that appeared in the Communist press; it will be seen that they are so self-contradictory as to be completely worthless. But before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons why this version of the May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible. (75)</i></p><p>...</p><p><i>The alleged Fascist plot rests on bare assertion and all the evidence points in the other direction. We are told that the plan was for the German and Italian Governments to land troops in Catalonia; but no German or Italian troopships approached the coast. As to the ‘Congress of the Fourth International’ and the ‘German and Italian agents’, they are pure myth. So far as I know there had not even been any talk of a Congress of the Fourth International. There were vague plans for a Congress of the P.O.U.M. and its brother-parties (English I.L.P., German S.A.P., etc., etc.); this had been tentatively fixed for some time in July—two months later—and not a single delegate had yet arrived. The ‘German and Italian agents’ have no existence outside the pages of the Daily Worker. Anyone who crossed the frontier at that time knows that it was not so easy to ‘pour’ into Spain, or out of it, for that matter. (65-776_</i></p><p>And Orwell proceeds with a point-by-point refutation of the anti-Anarchist propaganda narrative offered by the Communists.</p><p><i>It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice. Hence, for instance, such statements as Mr Pitcairn’s in the Daily Worker of 11 May that the ‘rising’ was suppressed by the Popular Army. The idea here is to give outsiders the impression that all Catalonia was solid against the ‘Trotskyists’. But the Popular Army remained neutral throughout the fighting; everyone in Barcelona knew this, and it is difficult to believe that Mr Pitcairn did not know it too. (78)</i></p><p>By contrast with the organized and coordinated Communist narrative, Orwell's account of the street fighting in Barcelona in 1937 has the authenticity of an honest participant who offers his own account of events in which he participated. It is plain that he had sympathies -- for example, he refused the invitation to leave POUM and join the Communist International Brigade because he was not willing to risk being ordered to fire his rifle against Spanish workers (anarchists). But his sympathies do not appear to have interfered with his critical eye and his willingness to tell his story unflinchingly and honestly.</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-28460183871466834432023-09-13T19:33:00.000-04:002023-09-13T19:33:37.417-04:00An absolutist Socrates<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwnUkN095UlZl6ukPtqdgZc9xL5il8egNyW7dcs_rnaZUVM3n1UrSeEyNnNkSV8tH_2CR5QZdhjJACoQASfepq1TISPpb6_c-i5M6syvjXHPOwTwG2pUFI-DuTFk14Lwh8C12Tn7GSuJJ4z5LzTdLqQQxdf2OgisdkJG8c9lu2fq7Ox3WMjy-G16YLWp0z/s1280/hoplite%20warfare.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="873" data-original-width="1280" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwnUkN095UlZl6ukPtqdgZc9xL5il8egNyW7dcs_rnaZUVM3n1UrSeEyNnNkSV8tH_2CR5QZdhjJACoQASfepq1TISPpb6_c-i5M6syvjXHPOwTwG2pUFI-DuTFk14Lwh8C12Tn7GSuJJ4z5LzTdLqQQxdf2OgisdkJG8c9lu2fq7Ox3WMjy-G16YLWp0z/w400-h272/hoplite%20warfare.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />We often think of Socrates as the ultimate "critical free thinker". He antagonized many in Athens through his relentless questioning of shared assumptions about ethics, the gods, and the nature of knowledge and belief. And, as a result, he was also thought to have "corrupted the youth", leading many young men of the Athenian elite into a skeptical rejection of the knowledge, wisdom, and authority of their seniors. <div><br /></div><div>So what are we to make of Socrates' principled rejection of the efforts of Crito and other friends to persuade him to flee Athens and avoid the sentence of death to which his trial led? Crito offers a series of pragmatic reasons why Socrates should flee: the welfare of his children, the avoidance of harm for his friends, who will be thought to have been too afraid or too penurious to help Socrates escape, his own ability to lead a happy and fulfilling life in another city.</div><div><br /></div><div>Socrates' reply is that he is not willing to consider reasons of self-interest (or the interests of others) until he has satisfied himself on what virtue or justice requires of him. Socrates insists that he wants to make the virtuous choice, not the most advantageous choice. He focuses on what justice requires of a citizen when the laws of the city have led to a command that requires great sacrifice of the citizen. In his own case, the laws of the city have been observed: charges have been lawfully brought forward; he has been given the opportunity to rebut the charges; and a majority of the jury has found him guilty of the charges and a separate majority has voted in favor of the penalty of death. The laws of the city have spoken; so what now is the unconditional obligation of the citizen?</div><div><br /></div><div>Socrates' reasoned answer is unequivocal. He concludes that the lawfully enacted commands of the city create unconditional obligations of compliance for the citizen.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>So: Do we say that we should never willingly act unjustly, or that we should in some instances and not in others? Or is acting unjustly never good or noble, as we often agreed on previous occasions? (Crito 49a)</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>...</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>So: And so one must never act unjustly.</i></div><div><i>Cr: By no means.</i></div><div><i>So: And so one should not repay an injustice with an injustice, as the many think, since one should never act unjustly. (49b)</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Here Socrates believes he has established the unconditional, unqualified obligation to act justly. So all that remains is to determine whether "acting justly" requires complying with the lawfully executed commands of the state. But first, are there exceptions to this principle -- for example, in cases where the state's commands are themselves unjust? And second, are there qualifications about the "legitimate" state that must be respected in order to create obligations at all?</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>Or will we say to them "The city treated us unjustly and did not decide the case properly"? Will we say this or something like it?</i></div><div><i>Cr: By Zeus, that's what we'll say, Socrates. (50c)</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Socrates emphatically rejects this idea: there is no exception for "unjust commands" by the state.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>So: What if the laws then said, "Socrates, did we agree on this, we and you, to honor the decisions that the city makes?" And if we were surprised to hear them say this, perhaps they would say, "Socrates, don't be surprised at what we're saying but answer, since you are used to participating in questioning and answering. Come then, what reason can you give us and the city for trying to destroy us? Did we not, to begin with, give birth to you? And wasn't it through us that your father married your mother and conceived you? So show those of us, the laws concerning marriages, what fault you find that keeps them from being good?" "I find no fault with them," I would say. (50c)</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>And the crucial lines:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"Well, then. Since you have been born and brought up and educated, could you say that you were not our offspring and slave from the beginning, both you and your ancestors? And if this is so, do you suppose that justice between you and us is based on equality, and do you think that whatever we might try to do to you, it is just for you to do these things to us in return? (50e)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The authority of the city, then, depends on two things: the citizen's agreement (explicit or implicit) to comply with decisions the city makes; and the idea that the city created the citizen and rightly "owns" the citizen as offspring and slave. The first reason is fundamentally a social-contract argument for the origins of political obligation, while the second is an even older argument based on the idea of "moral parentage" of the citizen by the city and its laws. And, conjoined with arguments described above, the obligations described here are unconditional: the city has the inherent right to command (enact its laws) without limitation, and the citizen has the absolute duty of compliance. The city and its laws have a moral status higher than that of the citizen.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is an absolutist theory of the state and its authority. It is, among other things, a complete refutation of the legitimacy of principled civil disobedience; disobedience and non-compliance are never "just". It is also a procedural conception of justice: if the laws stipulate that capital cases must be decided in a day, then there is no place for argument or resistance to the effect that this requirement is unjust to the accused. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is worth noticing that Socrates (or Plato) stacks the deck a bit here, by considering only the city's command and the consequence for the individual citizen. The citizen must comply, no matter what the cost to his own interests. But surely this is a special case. If the individual wishes to sacrifice his own interests or life in obedience to the commands of the state, perhaps we should simply regard this as an individual choice. However, the arguments seem to have the same force if the city's commands require the citizen to inflict harm on others -- innocent civilians, members of family, other citizens. If the laws had allowed as punishment for the crimes for which Socrates was convicted the execution of the accused <i>and</i> his children, would Socrates be equally obliged by the requirement of justice to comply? More historically, if the city had commanded that Cleon had unlimited authority to choose the means of war against Sparta (delegating its unconditional right to command) and Cleon had ordered the massacre at Melos, would any Athenian soldier have the moral right to refuse the order? It appears that Socrates' arguments to Crito would persist in holding that the authority to command is absolute; therefore soldiers must comply.</div><div><br /></div><div>This argument for the duty of compliance appears to present a theory of the state that is wholly unlimited in its justification of the unconstrained authority of the state. There are no limits on the actions the state can undertake; there are no rights of citizens that the state must respect; there is no recourse for the citizen against "illegitimate or mistaken" commands by the state. There is no constitution or bill of rights defining the legitimate scope and limits of state power, and nothing that secures an inviolable zone of protection for the rights of the individual citizen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Socrates was executed by a judicial process conducted under the terms of Athenian democracy. But what about the commands of the city and its laws during the rule of the Tyrants? Were Athenian citizens equally obligated to comply with the commands of the Tyrants during the period in which they ruled? If so, what distinguishes a legitimate state from an illegitimate one? For that matter, how are we to understand Socrates' own refusal to do the bidding of the Tyrants? Why did he not regard their commands as being as absolute and binding as those of the democracy?</div><div><br /></div><div>Athens' condemnation of Socrates for his speech and teaching is one thing; legitimation of the massacres committed by Cleon in the name of Athens is another. And yet the arguments offered by Socrates in the Crito seem to equally support both. (See these earlier posts for more discussion of crimes of war committed during the Peloponnesian War; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2021/09/socrates-hoplite.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/">link</a>.) This suggests that the political theory defended in Crito is fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a very deep way. It provides an absolutist, even totalitarian, basis for thinking about the relationship between state and citizen that is antithetical to the idea of the moral autonomy of the citizen.</div><div><br /></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-82896059939980666932023-09-04T14:09:00.001-04:002023-09-04T14:10:00.681-04:00A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPEAcXB0cA3kNn8ftDWQUI1lMpgq15E5Q0K0vvtBC7UdEO1hKm9y16Ew-nEhMJgqt3Am5Asol3XU3WPHJOeyprIWpo1PkO-WQKkjb-2g6MZk2cIbG7zRMEIj3Ya7nAvUAuoNPJnGg86RPKi-JnjczVtBP6Ed-ZCsLs8y1Ry09qpzWPfTKsBQG01Gz04-8/s950/all%20india%20democratic%20wonmes%20association.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="950" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPEAcXB0cA3kNn8ftDWQUI1lMpgq15E5Q0K0vvtBC7UdEO1hKm9y16Ew-nEhMJgqt3Am5Asol3XU3WPHJOeyprIWpo1PkO-WQKkjb-2g6MZk2cIbG7zRMEIj3Ya7nAvUAuoNPJnGg86RPKi-JnjczVtBP6Ed-ZCsLs8y1Ry09qpzWPfTKsBQG01Gz04-8/w400-h226/all%20india%20democratic%20wonmes%20association.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />A recurring theme in <i>Understanding Society</i> for the past several years is the occurrence of unfathomable atrocity in the twentieth century. Many of the examples considered occurred in Europe. But atrocities have occurred in many countries and civilizations. A horrific example occurred in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1968. In the small rural village of Keezhvenmani, some 44 dalit people, mostly women and children, were gathered into a hut by the strongmen of local landlords, the hut was set afire, and all 44 innocent dalit people died a horrifying, torturous death. The exact number of victims is uncertain.<span> </span><p></p><p>The term "dalit" refers to the lowest caste of people in the Indian caste system, now officially designated as "Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe", and the massacre at Keezhvenmani was only one of a number of mass murders of dalits in Tamil Nadu since independence. (Here is a detailed report by Human Rights Watch on violence against dalit women in India (<a href="https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-11.htm">link</a>). A central finding of the report: "The lack of law enforcement leaves many Dalit women unable to approach the legal system to seek redress. Women are often also unaware of the laws; their ignorance is exploited by their opponents, by the police, and, as illustrated by the cases below, by the judiciary. Even when cases are registered, the lack of appropriate investigation, or the judge’s own caste and gender biases, can lead to acquittal, regardless of the availability of evidence or witnesses. The failure to successfully prosecute cases of rape also allows for crimes against women to continue unabated, and in the caste context, encourages the use of rape as a tool to punish and silence Dalit communities.")</p><p>The young scholar Nithila Kanagasabai (herself a resident of Tamil Nadu) attempted to provide an evidence-based reconstruction of the Keezhvenmani massacre in "The Din of Silence: Reconstructing the Keezhvenmani Dalit Massacre of 1968" (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306078996_The_Din_of_Silence_-_Reconstructing_the_Keezhvenmani_Dalit_Massacre_of_1968">link</a>). </p><p>The background of the 1968 killings was the conflict between landlords who owned or controlled the rice paddy of the region (mirasdar) and the landless workers (often formerly bonded laborers) who were the primary workforce. These agricultural workers were dalits and they were extremely poor. When these workers and families began to support the mobilizing efforts of the increasingly active presence of several Communist parties in the region, the landlords began to use violence against these workers and families. A number of murders occurred in the months preceding the December 1968 massacre at Keezhvenmani. Here is Kanagasabai's description of the December 25 massacre:</p><p><i>According to eye witness accounts, on 25th December 1968, at around 10 p.m., the mirasdars and their henchmen came in police lorries and surrounded the cheri (hutments), cutting off all routes of escape. They shot at the labourers and their families who could only throw stones to protect themselves or flee from the spot. They also started burning the huts in the vicinity. Many of the women and children, and some old men, sought protection in a hut that was 8 ft x 9 ft. The hut was burnt down, and the people with it. Both the sessions court and the high court that later heard the case, held that those who committed the arson were not aware of the presence of people in that particular hut (Krishnakumar, 2005). But eye witness accounts by the survivors point to an altogether different truth. (111)</i></p><p>The accused perpetrators of this atrocity were charged, tried, and convicted, but their convictions were set aside by the Madras High Court. "The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to identify and punish the guilty” (114).</p><p>This event illustrates the workings of oppression involving both caste and class. The landless workers were predominantly dalit -- the lowest caste. And they were the poorest of the poor, with very little power to assert a fair share of the harvest. Land owners were in a position to resist increases in wages (the primary demand of the workers in this dispute), both through their structural advantage within the property system (land ownership) and their coercive power (through their ability to call upon armed thugs to carry out their violence against the dalit protests). A solution for the property disadvantage for the dalit workers is land reform, and during the years following the Keezhvenmani massacre there was a reasonably strong organization dedicated to land reform and dalit land ownership, the <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Land for Tillers Freedom (LAFTI). However, land reform based on NGO activism is likely to remain small-scale, in comparison to state-wide land reform programs.</span></p><p>Kanagasabai<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> quotes </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">V Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran in </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">the introduction to My</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">thily Sivaraman's </span><a href="https://amzn.to/44ES8IL" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Haunted by Fire</a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (2013):</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><i>That episode and visit brought home to Mythily the starkness of life in this grain rich part of Tamil Nadu... She realised that the price for dignity, for daring to declare oneself a communist was very high in these parts – many had paid with their lives... Unsurprisingly, in her subsequent reflections, she refused to concede that the monstrous incident at Kilvenmani was only a wage dispute gone wrong, and argued passionately for it to be recognised for what it was: class struggle in the countryside. (Geetha & Karunakaran, 2013)</i></span></p><div>Class struggle in the countryside, indeed -- landlords exercising horrendous violence against landless workers.</div><div><br /></div>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-80322240795319983902023-08-31T21:15:00.001-04:002023-09-01T14:11:18.203-04:00Moses Finley's persecution by McCarthyism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilXVA4IIU2yh7zms5G0T91j8LEGcByTHRaL2vIX7vWJjFYJ_u8N0K9jr9knF0uUyv5X60PtzC-GN_NweDJ99Csgo7TDq7Vv9j-jDHJVhZZjQfiESoOiZmJH5BugUrWZ1I1Dckt89y1L2Tz6w2j4OZl8CGqINJaJEb0348jpPlC5Q-wWX-dOW5M24IfyFzc/s768/mccarthy.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilXVA4IIU2yh7zms5G0T91j8LEGcByTHRaL2vIX7vWJjFYJ_u8N0K9jr9knF0uUyv5X60PtzC-GN_NweDJ99Csgo7TDq7Vv9j-jDHJVhZZjQfiESoOiZmJH5BugUrWZ1I1Dckt89y1L2Tz6w2j4OZl8CGqINJaJEb0348jpPlC5Q-wWX-dOW5M24IfyFzc/w400-h266/mccarthy.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxqmG68FNDcphcn7qeOuaZ_NEMBR68Wx9AwV34g_RImqRmLIYzFqmZQ0AqyTOhFFZQmEAOnmpNOKl2HZ4PKNZ0SQ3r0ygoZ0Ve_TW0buj7Xqb2lMx37Xry9wKfl3RWNW49kf3z643o8M3_YGSDcyz6OmpT8Lkmc6POOU85a9InebeUmvl89gK35wIj5phO/s720/moses_finley_2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="720" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxqmG68FNDcphcn7qeOuaZ_NEMBR68Wx9AwV34g_RImqRmLIYzFqmZQ0AqyTOhFFZQmEAOnmpNOKl2HZ4PKNZ0SQ3r0ygoZ0Ve_TW0buj7Xqb2lMx37Xry9wKfl3RWNW49kf3z643o8M3_YGSDcyz6OmpT8Lkmc6POOU85a9InebeUmvl89gK35wIj5phO/w400-h189/moses_finley_2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />MI Finley (1912-1986) played a transformative role in the development of studies of the ancient world in the 1960s through the 1980s. He contributed to a reorientation of the field away from purely textual and philological sources to broad application of contemporary social science frameworks to the ancient world. His book <a href="https://amzn.to/47Xsbqr">The Ancient Economy</a> (1973) was especially influential. <p></p><p>Finley was born in the United States, but most of his academic career unfolded in Britain. The reasons for this "brain drain" are peculiarly America. Like many other Americans -- screenwriters, actors, directors, government officials, and academics -- Finley became enmeshed in the period of unhinged political repression known as McCarthyism. Finley was named as a member of the Communist Party of the United States by fellow academic Karl Wittfogel in his own sworn testimony to the McCarran Committee (United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security). (Pat McCarran (D-NEV) was also the primary sponsor of the Subversive Activities Control Act (1950), which provided for mandatory registration of members of the Communist Party and created the legal possibility of "emergency detention" of Communists. Police state institutions!) When Finley was called to testify under oath to the committee, he declined to answer any questions based on his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. He was subsequently fired by Rutgers University for his refusal to answer the committee's questions. (Daniel Tompkins' essay "Moses Finkelstein and the American Scene: The Political Formation of Moses Finley, 1932-1955" provides some valuable information about the first half of Finley's career until he departed the United States; <a href="https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261693_003">link</a>.)</p><p>It should be noted that one's Fifth Amendment rights do not allow the witness to pick and choose which questions he or she is willing to answer. Many of the witnesses who took the Fifth during this period were fully willing to discuss their own activities but were not willing to name associates -- for example, Case Western Reserve professor Marcus Singer. Here is a brief summary of Singer's case taken from his <i>New York Times </i>obituary (October 11, 1994).</p><p><i>In 1953, when he was on the Cornell University faculty, Dr. Singer was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about his political affiliations. He admitted having been a Communist until 1948, although he said he had never held a party card. He refused to name Communists he had known while teaching at Harvard, from 1942 to 1951, on grounds of "honor and conscience" and invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.</i></p><p><i>In 1956, he was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $100 and given a three-month suspended sentence in Federal District Court in Washington, which ruled that he had waived the Fifth Amendment's protection. In 1957 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the conviction, saying its ruling was required by a Supreme Court decision in a similar case. The court sent the case back to Federal District Court with instructions to enter a judgment of not guilty.</i></p><p>In hindsight the willing participation of university presidents, law professors, and other faculty in the effort to exclude Communists or former Communists from faculty positions, and to fire professors who chose to plead the fifth amendment rather than provide testimony to the various congressional committees about their associates seems to reflect an almost incredible level of hysteria and paranoia. Ellen Schrecker documents the compliant actions of many administrators, trustees, and fellow faculty members (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4638328">link</a>). This was a betrayal of the principles of academic and personal freedom. One does not need to be an advocate of the Communist Party in order to defend a strong principle of academic freedom for all professors; and yet administrators and faculty at many leading universities were eager to find ways of supporting these anti-Communist measures. Schrecker quotes an official statement of the AAU in 1953 that provided grounds for firing faculty for membership in the Communist Party and for refusal to testify about their activities (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4638328">link</a>):</p><p><i>The professor owes his colleagues in the university complete candor and perfect integrity, precluding any kind of clandestine or conspiratorial activities. He owes equal candor to the public. If he is called upon to answer for his convictions, it is his duty as a citizen to speak out. It is even more his duty as a professor. Refusal to do so, on whatever legal grounds, cannot fail to reflect upon a profession that claims for itself the fullest freedom to speak and the maximum protection of that freedom available in our society. In this respect, invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society. (325)</i></p><p>The AAUP eventually issued a statement condemning firing of professors for these reasons in 1956; but the damage was done.</p><p>But what about MI Finley? Was he a member of the CP-USA? And did this membership influence his thinking, teaching, and writing? Was he unsuitable to serve as a professor at an American university? F.S. Naiden answers the first question unequivocally: "Incontrovertible evidence now shows that Moses Finkelstein, as he was then named, joined the Party in 1937–8. The Party official who enrolled him, Emily Randolph Grace, reported this information in a biographical note she wrote about Finley in order to prepare for an international conference in 1960" (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/48545444">link</a>). And Naiden suggests that his membership continued through the mid-1940s. </p><p>Let's take Naiden's assessment as accurate; so what? Should Finley's membership in the 1930s be viewed as basis for disqualification as a professor fifteen years later? Here the answer seems clear: Finley's choices in the 1930s reflected his political and social convictions, his ideas and thoughts, and should fairly be seen as falling within his rights of freedom of thought, speech, and association. If his political ideas led him to commit substantive violations of the law, of course it would be legitimate to charge him under the relevant law; but there is no suggestion that this was the case. So Finley's persecution in 1953 -- along with the dozens of other faculty members who were fired from US universities for the same reason -- is just that: <i><u>persecution</u></i> based on his thoughts and convictions.</p><p>And what about his teaching? Did his previous membership in the Communist Party interfere with his professional responsibilities to his students or to the academic standards of his discipline? Again, the answer appears to be unequivocal. Finley, like the great majority of other professors dismissed for their Communist beliefs, appeared to make a strong separation between his personal political beliefs and the content of his teaching. He did not use the classroom to indoctrinate his students. And his activism in the 1930s -- organizing, leafletting, efforts to persuade others -- was clearly separated from his academic performance. (He had not even completed his PhD during the prime years of his membership in the Communist Party.) So any unbiased observer from Mars would judge that Finley was a fully ethical academic.</p><p>Finally, what about his research and writing? Did his membership in the Communist Party distort his scholarship? Did it interfere with his ethical standards of honesty and evidence-based historical research? Again, by the evidence of his writing, this charge too seems wholly unsupportable. Finley was a superb scholar, and his research is grounded in a reasonable and extensive marshaling of evidence about the social and economic realities of the ancient world. Finley was not a communist hack; he was not a dogmatic ideologue; rather, he was a dedicated and evidence-driven scholar -- with innovative theoretical and methodological ideas.</p><p>It is especially interesting to read Finley's short essay on the trial of Socrates in the context of his political persecution in the United States in 1953 (<a href="https://amzn.to/3qTpJ3B">Socrates on Trial</a>, first published in slightly different form in <a href="https://amzn.to/3L45YgP">Aspects of Antiquity</a> in 1960). Though there is an obvious parallel between the trial of Socrates and the encounter between Finley and the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security -- in each case the accused is brought to legal process based on his thoughts and criticisms of the society in which he lives -- there is no indication in this text that Finley wishes to draw out this comparison. Instead, most of his essay focuses on the point that much of the trial of Socrates has been mythologized for political purposes -- to attack direct democracy and the tyranny of the majority. Plato's text is a work of literature, not a transcription of the details of the accusations and the responses of Socrates. </p><p><i>Paradoxically, it is not what Socrates said that is so momentous, but what Meletus and Anytus and Lycon said, what they thought, and what they feared. Who were these men to initiate so vital an action? Unfortunately, little is known about Meletus and Lycon, but Anytus was a prominent patriot and statesman. His participation indicates that the prosecution was carefully thought through, not merely a frivolous or petty persecution.</i></p><p>And Finley attempts to understand the thinking of the jurors themselves by placing the trial in the context of the massive Athenian trauma of the Peloponnesian War and two devastating plagues:</p><p><i>One noteworthy fact in their lives was Athens had been engaged in a bloody war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 B.C. and did not end (though it was interrupted by periods of uneasy peace) until 404, five years before the trial. The greatest power in the Greek world, Athens led an exceptional empire, prosperous, and proud -- proud of its position, of its culture, and, above all, of its democratic system. But by 404 everything was gone: the empire, the glory, and the democracy. In their place stood a Spartan garrison and a dictatorship (which came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants). The psychological blow was incalculable, and there was not a man on the jury in 399 who could have forgotten it.</i></p><p>So Finley offers a historically dispassionate reading of the trial of Socrates. But we might draw out the essential parallel between the two cases anyway. We might say that Finley, like Socrates, was attacked because he "denied the gods of the city" -- in Finley's case, he challenged the unquestioned moral superiority of capitalism over socialism; and because he threatened to "corrupt the youth" -- to teach through his classroom and his example an unwholesome inclination to "communism". Might we say that the "crimes" of Socrates and Finley were similar after all, in the minds of their persecutors: they were too independent-minded and too critical of their society for the good of society?</p><p>I.F. Stone's <a href="https://amzn.to/3QYPoTj">Trial of Socrates</a> offers a fascinating perspective on Socrates that is relevant to these connections to Finley; and in fact, Stone suggested to Finley that he should write a memoir of his experience (Tompkins (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261693_003">link</a>) p. 5). In <i>Trial of Socrates</i> he writes: "Was the condemnation of Socrates a unique case? Or was he only the most famous victim in a wave of persecutions aimed at irreligious philosophers? ... Two distinguished scholars ... have put forward the view that fifth-century Athens, though often called the Age of the Greek Enlightenment, was also ... the scene of a general witch-hunt against freethinkers." The same words could apply to MI Finley and the dozens of other faculty members who lost their careers to McCarthyism, and to the regrettable failure of liberal democracy in those decades of ideological warfare against critics of capitalism.</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-48113726036864455692023-08-15T19:13:00.218-04:002023-08-20T22:58:46.575-04:00Memory and culture after 1989 in Central Europe<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6z7HIuiW1-tPOIMZqBp6tpgpOiqaZbsgFEyoceUaaeT1QayH9ckdFidD9sJkqKLYWCyCgIQWTLFbkpIJFdCFWpg7oRxgiwMcPUnPMCDdcr5_gESy9KKn9x3wRvT4HUvWe5jFnoy83L05fxHl1WzzieUecpuGO5Ilz4tZ8V5BJbi8-L8Hy20ezhVBSHhV6/s1280/berlin-wall-falling.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6z7HIuiW1-tPOIMZqBp6tpgpOiqaZbsgFEyoceUaaeT1QayH9ckdFidD9sJkqKLYWCyCgIQWTLFbkpIJFdCFWpg7oRxgiwMcPUnPMCDdcr5_gESy9KKn9x3wRvT4HUvWe5jFnoy83L05fxHl1WzzieUecpuGO5Ilz4tZ8V5BJbi8-L8Hy20ezhVBSHhV6/w400-h225/berlin-wall-falling.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The years following the collapse of the socialist-Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe were not comfortable for the people of the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and many other countries. The economic arrangements of a centrally planned economy abruptly collapsed, and new market institutions were slow to emerge and often appeared indifferent to the needs of the citizens. The results of "shock therapy" were prolonged and severe for large segments of these post-socialist countries (Hilmar 6-8). Till Hilmar's <a href="https://amzn.to/3s4VAi0">Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain</a> tries to make sense of the period -- and the ways in which it was remembered in following decades. <div><br /></div><div>Here is how Hilmar defines his project:<p><i>I ask: how it is possible that people who underwent disruptive economic change perceive its outcomes in individual terms? A common answer is to say that we live in neoliberal societies that encourage people to put their self-interest first and to disregard others around them. People have become atomized and isolated, the argument goes, and they have unlearned what it means to be part of a community. They have forgotten what we owe each other. Yet something is not quite right about this diagnosis. It assumes that we live our lives today in a space that is somehow devoid of morality. It thereby misses a crucial fact: people are embedded in social relations, and they therefore articulate economic aspirations and experiences of a social dynamic. In this book, I daw on in-depth interviews with dozens of people who lived through disruptive economic change. Based on this research, I show that it is precisely the concern of what people owe each other -- the moral concern -- that drives how many people reason about economic outcomes. They perceive them, I demonstrate, through the lens of moral deservingness, judgments of economic worth that they pass on each other. (3)</i></p><p>The central topic, then, is how individual people remember and make sense of economic changes they have experienced. Hilmar places a locally embodied sense of justice at the center of the work of meaning-making that he explores in interviews with these ordinary people affected by a society-wide earthquake.</p><p>Hilmar's method is an especially interesting one. He compares two national cases, Czechoslovakia and the GDR, and he bases his research on focused interviews with 67 residents in the two countries during the transition. The respondents are drawn from two categories of skilled workers, engineers and healthcare workers. His approach "enabled a focus on people's work biography and their sense of change in social relations" (15). </p><p>His central theoretical tool is the idea of a moral framework against which people in specific times and places interpret and locate their memories. "The memory of ruptures is guided by concerns about social inclusion. What makes a person feel that he or she is a worthy member of society? In our contemporary world, the answer to this question has a lot to do with economics" (17). Or in other words, Hilmar proposes that people understand their own fates and those of others around them in terms of "deserving-ness" -- deserving their successes and deserving their failures. And Hilmar connects this scheme of judgment of "deserving" to a more basic idea of "social inclusion": the person is "included" when she conforms to existing standards and expectations of "deserving" behavior. "A person's sense of accomplishment and confidence -- in the professional, in the civic, as well as in the private realms -- are all part of a social and normative ensemble in which the grounds for acclaim are social and never just individual" (18). And he connects this view of the social and economic world to the ideas of "moral economy" offered by E.P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi. A period of inequality and suffering for segments of the population is perceived as endurable or unendurable, depending on how it fits into the prevailing definitions of legitimacy embodied in the historically specific moral economy of different segments of society. In the Czech and German cases Hilmar considers, social inclusion is expressed as having a productive role in socialism -- i.e., having a job (39), and the workplace provided the locus for many of the social relationships within which individuals located themselves.</p><p>The central empirical work of the project involves roughly seventy interviews of skilled workers in the two countries: engineers and healthcare workers. Biographies shed light on large change; and they also show how individual participants structured and interpreted their r memories of the past in strikingly different terms. This is where Hilmar makes the strongest case for the theoretical ideas outlined above about memory and moral frameworks. He sheds a great deal of light on how individuals in both countries experienced their professional careers before 1989, and how things changed afterwards. And he finds that "job loss", which was both epidemic and devastating in both countries following the collapse of socialism, was a key challenge to individuals' sense of self and their judgments about the legitimacy of the post-socialist economic and political arrangements. Privatization of state-owned companies is regarded in almost all interviews as a negative process, aimed at private capture of social wealth and carried out in ways that disregarded the interests of ordinary workers. And the inequalities that emerged in the post-1989 world were often regarded as profoundly illegitimate, based on privileged access rather than. merit or contribution:</p><p><i>People grew skeptical of the idea that above-average incomes and wealth could in fact be attained through hard work. Instead they began to associate it with nepotism and dishonesty. On these grounds, researchers posit that the principle of egalitarianism returned as the dominant justice belief after the bout of enthusiasm for market society. (94)</i></p><p>This is where the idea of "deservingness" comes in. Did X get the high-paid supervisor job because he or she "earned" it through superior skill and achievement, or through connections? Did Y make a fortune by purchasing a state-owned shoe factory for a low price and selling to a larger corporation at a high price because he or she is a brilliant deal maker, or because of political connections on both ends of the transactions?</p><p>The discussion of social relations, informal relations, and trust in post-socialist societies is also very interesting. As Delmar puts the point, "you can't get anything done without the right friends" (118). And social relationships require trust -- trust that others will live up to expectations and promises, that they will honor their obligations to oneself. Without trust, it is impossible to form informal practices of collaboration and cooperation. And crucially: how much trust is possible in a purely market society, if participants are motivated solely by their own economic interests? And what about trust in institutions -- either newly private business firms or government agencies and promises? How can a worker trust her employer not to downsize for the sake of greater profits? How can a citizen trust the state once the criminal actions of Stasi were revealed (138)? What was involved in recreating a basis for trust in institutions after the collapse of socialism?</p><p>Through these interviews and interpretations the book provides a very insightful analysis of how judgments of justice and legitimacy exist as systems of interpretation of experience for different groups, and how different those systems sometimes are for co-existing groups of individuals facing very different circumstances. And the concrete work of interview and interpretation across the Czech and German cases well illustrates both the specificity of these "moral frameworks" and some of the ways in which sociologists can investigate them. The book is original, illuminating, and consistently insightful, and it shows a deep acquaintance with the literature on memory and social identity. As such <i>Deserved</i> is a highly valuable contribution to cultural sociology.</p><p>(It is interesting to recall Martin Whyte's discussion of generational differences in China about the legitimacy of inequalities in post-Mao China. The Mao generation is not inclined to excuse growing inequalities, whereas the next several generations were willing to accept the legitimacy of inequalities if they derived from merit rather than position and corrupt influence (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-sense-of-injustice-in-china.html">link</a>). This case aligns nicely with Hilmar's subject matter.) </p><p><br /></p></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-58770655679236290102023-08-15T13:21:00.000-04:002023-08-15T13:21:46.695-04:00Are organizations emergent?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgznVIBI3BJbcREhN3jRy0OQX6tRe2OB_qzE12clXmiwuKdyvk78Q9X6dRsJABYoTgd0AFgvJgFLY7pwQSE8N1c2O0ncane3tw8jS9EQ2mk8T7FH3YN2s4Du7llY-ErIpUV1W_o3rovkgtL4cBjr4aUvN19ibiC28yOrrzMkMKXDCALrrCgjIFcTRJk-D_F/s660/chemical%20plant.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="660" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgznVIBI3BJbcREhN3jRy0OQX6tRe2OB_qzE12clXmiwuKdyvk78Q9X6dRsJABYoTgd0AFgvJgFLY7pwQSE8N1c2O0ncane3tw8jS9EQ2mk8T7FH3YN2s4Du7llY-ErIpUV1W_o3rovkgtL4cBjr4aUvN19ibiC28yOrrzMkMKXDCALrrCgjIFcTRJk-D_F/w400-h266/chemical%20plant.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Do organizations have properties that are in some recognizable way independent from the behaviors and intentions of the individuals who inhabit them? In <a href="https://amzn.to/3qssGrR">A New Social Ontology of Government</a> I emphasized the ways in which organizations fail because of actor-level features: principal-agent problems, inconsistent priorities and goals across different working groups, strategic manipulation of information by some actors to gain advantage over other actors, and the like. With a nod to Fligstein and McAdam's theory of strategic action fields (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/04/organizations-and-strategic-action.html">link</a>), I took an actor-centered approach to the workings (and dysfunctions) of organizations. I continue to believe that these are accurate observations about the workings of organizations and government agencies, but now that I've reoriented my thinking away from a strictly actor-centered approach to the social world (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/01/is-ontological-individualism-still.html">link</a>), I'm interested in asking the questions about meso-level causes I did not ask in <i>A New Social Ontology</i>. <p></p><p>For example: </p><p><b>(a)</b> Are there relatively stable meso-level features of organizations that constrain and influence individual behavior in consistent ways that produce relatively stable meso-level outcomes? </p><p><b>(b)</b> Are there routine behaviors that are reproduced within the organization by training programs and performance audits that give rise to consistent patterns of organizational workings? </p><p><b>(c)</b> Are there external structural constraints (legal, environmental, locational) that work to preserve certain features of the organization's scheme of operations? </p><p>It seems that the answer to each of these questions is "yes"; but this in turn seems to imply that organizations have properties that persist over time and through changes of personnel. They are not simply the result of the sum of the behaviors and mental states of the participants. These meso-level properties are subject to change, of course, depending on the behaviors and intentions of the individuals who inhabit the organization; but they are sometimes stable across extended periods of time and individual personnel. Or in other words, there seem to be meso-level features of organizations that are <i>emergent</i> in some moderate sense. </p><p>Here are possible illustrations of each kind of "emergent" property.</p><p>(a) Imagine two chemical plants Alpha and Beta making similar products with similar industrial processes and owned by different parent corporations. Alpha has a history of occasional fires, small explosions, and defective equipment, and it was also the site of a major chemical fire that harmed dozens of workers and neighbors. Beta has a much better safety record; fires and explosions are rare, equipment rarely fails in use, and no major fires have occurred for ten years. We might then say that Alpha and Beta have different meso-level safety characteristics, with Alpha lying in the moderate risk range and Beta in the low risk range. Now suppose that we ask an all-star team of industrial safety investigators to examine both plants, and their report indicates that Alpha has a long history of cost reduction plans, staff reductions, and ineffective training programs, whereas Beta (owned by a different parent company) has been well funded for staffing, training, and equipment maintenance. This is another meso-level property of the two plants -- production decisions guided by profitability and cost reduction at Alpha, and production decisions guided by <i>both</i> profitability and a commitment to system safety at Beta. Finally, suppose that our team of investigators conducts interviews and focus groups with staff and supervisors in the two plants, and finds that there are consistent differences between the two plants about the importance of maintaining safety as experienced by plant workers and supervisors. Supervisors at Alpha make it clear that they disagree strongly with the statement, "interrupting the production process to clarify anomalous temperature readings would be encouraged by the executives", whereas their counterparts at Beta indicate that they agree with the statement. This implies that there is a significant difference in the safety culture of the two plants -- another meso-level feature of the two organizations. All of these meso-level properties persist over decades and through major turnover of staff. Supervisors and workers come and go, but the safety culture, procedures, training, and production pressure persist, and new staff are introduced to these practices in ways that reproduce them. And -- this is the key point -- these meso-level properties lead to different rates of failure at the two plants over time, even though none of the actors at Alpha intend for accidents to occur. </p><p>(b) This example comparing industrial plants with different safety rates also serves to answer the second question posed above about training and oversight. The directors and staff who conduct training in an industrial organization can have high commitment or low commitment to their work -- energetic and focused training programs or perfunctory and forgettable training programs -- and the difference will be notable in the performance of new staff as they take on their responsibilities. For example, training for control room directors may always emphasize the importance of careful annotation of the day's events for the incoming director on the next shift. But the training may be highly effective, resulting in informative documentation across shift changes; or it may be ineffective and largely disregarded. In most cases poor documentation does not lead to a serious accident; but sometimes it does. So organizations with effective training on procedures and operations will have a better chance of avoiding serious accidents. Alpha has weak training programs, while Beta has strong training programs (and each dedicates commensurate resources to training). Routine behaviors at Alpha lead to careless implementation of procedures, whereas routine behaviors at Beta result in attentive implementation, and as a result, Beta has a better safety performance record.</p><p>(c) What about the external influences that have an effect on the overall safety performance of an industrial plant? The corporate governance and ownership of the plant is plainly relevant to safety performance through the priorities it establishes for production, profitability, and safety. If the corporation's highest priority is profitability, then safety procedures and investments take the back seat. Local budget managers are pressed to find cost reductions, and staff positions and equipment devoted to safety are often the easiest category of budget reduction to achieve. On the other hand, if the corporation's guidance to plant executives is a nuanced set of priorities within which both production goals and safety goals are given importance, there is a better chance of preserving the investments in process inspectors, better measurement instruments, and on-site experts who can be called on to offer advice during a plant emergency. This differentiating feature of corporate priority-setting too is a meso-level property that contributes to the level of safety performance in a chemical plant, independent of the knowledge and intentions of local plant managers, directors, and workers.</p><p>These brief hypothetical examples seem to establish a fairly mundane form of "emergence" for organizational properties. They provide examples of causal independence of meso-level properties of organizations. And significantly, each of these meso-level features can be identified in case studies of important industrial failures -- the Boeing 737 Max (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2019/03/regulatory-failure-and-737-max-disasters.html">link</a>), the Deepwater Horizon disaster (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2010/05/system-safety-engineering-and-deepwater.html">link</a>), or the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-us-chemical-safety-board.html">link</a>).</p><p>It may be noted that there are two related ideas here: the idea that a higher-level property is <i>emergent</i> from the properties of the constituent entities; and the idea that a higher-level feature may be <i>causally persistent</i> over time and over change of the particular actors who make up the social entity. The connection is this: we might argue that the causally persistent property at the meso-level is different in nature and effect from the causal properties (actions, behaviors, intentions) of the individuals who make up the organization. So causal persistence of meso-level properties demonstrates emergence of a sort.</p><div><br /></div><p> </p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-54361191134675247212023-08-14T12:50:00.001-04:002023-08-14T14:01:57.721-04:00Marxism and British historiography<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie92Da172wlxWO3aN4f1b5oHcopeYAGzvlcETKbx9Kf-vB8DUrk3M0ia4d7BYFb-DcdDlo-wHg__-BAhDte-c9KylEaIF8uDUXrrF7KMZoyG5a2yBOFDnqQL6JgG81UECaUD2imeB9fo-_Vib1uF1ZpkGtTOSe6xd_9l_Qo4lHaALbjr50eo1NJZWckBI8/s800/historians%20past%20and%20present.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="800" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie92Da172wlxWO3aN4f1b5oHcopeYAGzvlcETKbx9Kf-vB8DUrk3M0ia4d7BYFb-DcdDlo-wHg__-BAhDte-c9KylEaIF8uDUXrrF7KMZoyG5a2yBOFDnqQL6JgG81UECaUD2imeB9fo-_Vib1uF1ZpkGtTOSe6xd_9l_Qo4lHaALbjr50eo1NJZWckBI8/w400-h343/historians%20past%20and%20present.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>It is noteworthy that some of the very best historical research and writing of the 1930s through 1970s in Britain was carried out by a group of Marxist historians, including E.P. Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and a few others. Many belonged to the British Communist Party and were committed to the idea that only sweeping revolution of economy and politics could bring to an end the exploitation and misery of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism. These historians did not align with the democratic socialists of the Fabian and Labour varieties (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2022/10/democratic-socialism-in-1930s.html" style="text-align: left;">link</a><span style="text-align: left;">), and the chief demarcation line had to do with the feasibility of gradual reform of advanced market economies. These were gifted and rigorous historians with a particular set of ideological commitments (</span><a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/06/eric-hobsbawms-history-of-historians.html" style="text-align: left;">link</a><span style="text-align: left;">).</span><div><br /><div>All of these historians researched some aspect or other of the history of "capitalism", an effort that required dispassionate and objective inquiry and assessment of the facts. Equally, all of them embraced a view of capitalism and a stylized history of capitalism that derived from Marx's writings -- especially <i>Capital</i> and the scattered writings defining the theory of historical materialism. Third, all of them had an ideological apple to peel (as a Dutch friend of mine used to say): they took the view that exploitation and misery were so intimately bound up in the defining institutions of capitalism that only wholesale revolution could root them out. And finally, most of them were politically committed to a party and a movement -- the Communist Party -- which itself made harsh demands on the thinking and writing of its adherents. The "party line" was not merely a form of discipline, it was an expression of loyalty to the cause of communism. And since Soviet communism dominated throughout the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, the party line was almost always "Stalinist" in the most dogmatic sense of the term. So the difficult question arises: how is it possible to reconcile a commitment to "honest history" with a commitment to Marxism and revolution?<div><br /></div><div>Harvey Kaye's <a href="https://amzn.to/47uq9xR">British Marxist Historians</a> provides a detailed treatment of many of these historians, including Dobb, Hilton, Hill, Thompson, and Hobsbawm. Kaye fully recognizes the dual nature of the thinking of these historians: "I consider their work to be of scholarly <i>and</i> political consequence" (x). Kaye evidently believes that the scholarly and political commitments of these historians are in no way in conflict. But this is an assumption that must be examined carefully.</div><div><br /></div><div>Kaye's book can be read as an effort to establish a careful geography of Marxist theoretical ideas about the development of capitalism and how those ideas were both used and transformed in the hands of these historians. His account of Dobb offers a detailed account of Dobb's view of a "non-economistic" historical treatment of capitalism, and he expends a great deal of effort towards identifying the key criticisms offered of Dobb's views by Paul Sweezy, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and others. The chapter can be read as a meticulous dissection of the definition of key ideas ("mode of production", "relations of production", "feudalism", "class conflict", ...) and the theoretical use that these various Marx-inspired historians make of these ideas to explicate "capitalist development" and the notion of "transition from feudalism" in its various historical settings. Most compelling is Kaye's treatment of E.P. Thompson's historical and theoretical writings. He makes it clear that Thompson provides a highly original contribution to the idea of "class determination" through his insistence on the dynamic nature of the formation of consciousness and experience in the men and women of the British laboring classes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Kaye makes clear in his treatment of each of these historians that their research never took the form of a dogmatic spelling-out of ideas presented in Marx's writings, but rather a much more rigorous effort to make sense of the historical record of feudalism, the English Revolution, the early development of capitalist property relations, and the like. These were not Comintern hacks; they did not treat Marxism as a more-or-less complete theory of history, but rather as a set of promising insights and suggestions about historical processes that demand detailed investigation and analysis. And none of the books of these historians that Kaye discusses can be described as "orthodox Comintern interpretations" of historical circumstances. Kaye quotes Christopher Hill (102): "A great deal of Marxist discussion went on in Oxford in the early thirties. Marxism seemed to me (and many others) to make better sense of the world situation than anything else, just as it seemed to make better sense of seventeenth-century English history." And later in this chapter he quotes Hobsbawm (129): "An advantage of our Marxism -- we owe it largely to Hill ... was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These comments seem to point the way to partial resolution of the apparent conflict between political commitments and historical integrity: Marx's writings about capitalism, class, and historical materialism constitute something like a research programme or analytical framework for these historians, without eliminating the need for historical rigor and objectivity in searching out evidence concerning the details of historical development (in England, in France, or in Japan). </div><div><br /></div><div>If we wanted to assess the possible distortions of historical selection and analysis created by party commitments with regard to historical writing and inference, one natural place to look would be at the selection of topics for research. Are there topics in British history that are especially relevant to the ideological concerns of the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, and did the British Marxist historians stay away from those topics? Kaye remarks on Hobsbawm's own assessment of the role the party line played in defining issues and positions for the British Marxist historians: very little, according to Hobsbawm (15). He quotes Hobsbawm: "There was no 'party line' on most of British history,' at least as far as they were aware at the time." So we can reasonably ask: when these historians treat "politically sensitive" topics, do the analyses they offer seem to reflect ideological distortions? </div><div><br /></div><div>Kaye notes that one topic that should be of interest to Marxist historians is the history of the labor movement in Britain. "The 'modern' historians of the Group were naturally most anxious to pursue and make known the history of the British labour movement and, no doubt, were encouraged in their efforts by the British Communist Party. And yet this was the one field in which constraint was felt in relation to the Party. As Hobsbawm has stated on a number of occasions, there were problems in pursuing twentieth-century labour history because it necessarily involved critical consideration of the Party's own activities" (12). Kaye also quotes from an interview Hobsbawm offered in 1978:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>[Hobsbawm] acknowledges that he took up nineteenth-century history because when "I became a labour historian you couldn't really be an orthodox Communist and write publicly about, say, the period when the Communist Party was active because there was an orthodox belief that everything had changed in 1920 with the foundation of the C. P. Well I didn't believe it had, but it would have been impolite, as well as probably unwise, to say so in public". (134)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>This passage makes it clear that Hobsbawm avoided twentieth-century British labor history precisely because the party line was in conflict with the historical realities as Hobsbawm saw them. So Hobsbawm refrained from writing about this period.</div><div><br /></div><div>So a preliminary assessment is perhaps possible. When these Marxist historians went to work on a given historical topic, they exercised rigor and care in their assessments of the past; they enacted fidelity to the standards of honesty we would wish that historians universally embrace. And indeed, the historical work done by these historians does indeed conform to high standards of honesty and independence of mind -- even as the research focus on "capitalism" is framed in terms of Marxist concepts. But the example of Hobsbawm's statements about twentieth-century labor history imply that certain topics were taboo, precisely because independence of analysis would run counter to the party line. (Kaye also suggests that Hobsbawm's continuing adherence to the 'base-superstructure' model derived from his deference to the orthodox Party line on the nature of the mode of production; 135.)<br /><div><br /></div><div>But we can also ask an even more fundamental question: did the historians of this group take any public notice of the crimes of Stalinist USSR -- the Holodomor, the terror, the show trials, the Gulag? Or was explicit condemnation of systemic actions like the Holodomor or the Gulag too much of a repudiation of the Communist Party for these historians to accept? Should they have made public mention and condemnation of these occurrences? Does their silence cast doubt on their honesty as historians? To this question Kaye's book provides no clear basis for an answer.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is intriguing to ask about Harvey Kaye's own ideological orientation. He makes it clear in the Preface that his book is a sympathetic treatment of the circle of British Marxist historians, and in fact he acknowledges feedback and comments from several of these authors. His later book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3OCYYs2">The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History</a>, is likewise committed to defending the insights offered by Western Marxist historians. So his is something of an insider's account of the Historians' Group. We can ask, then, whether Kaye's own sympathies have colored his assessment of the objectivity and rigor of the historians in this group. Does he bring the necessary critical edge that we would expect from an historiographic assessment of a group of historians? (I should confess too that the historians that Kaye studies are also among my list of favorites as well. I would add Marc Bloch and a few others from French and German history, but the broad framework of historical narrative and analysis developed by Dobb, Hilton, Thompson, and Hobsbawm is one that has been powerful for me as well.) </div><div><br /></div><div>My own assessment is that Kaye's sympathies do <i>not</i> distort his interpretations of these historians. Rather, he offers a careful, reflective, and knowledgeable analysis of the development of their historical ideas and the relations that emerged among them, and he documents the willingness of these historians to avoid the dogmas of CP-driven "party lines" about history. For example, Kaye's critique of Hobsbawm's continuing use of the base-superstructure model illustrates Kaye's willingness to apply a critical eye to these historians (154 ff.). Only obliquely does he address the hardest question, however: did these historians speak out about the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism? Many of these figures (not including Hobsbawm or Dobb) rejected Stalinism through their decision to leave the British Communist Party after the Soviet brutal use of force against Hungary in 1956. But this is still less than forthright recognition of the horrendous crimes of the Soviet dictatorship throughout the 1930s and 1940s, extending through the death of Stalin and beyond.</div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>The penultimate paragraph of the book appears to encapsulate Kaye's own perspective as well as the collective view he attributes to the group of Marxist historians he considers:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>In other words, they [British Marxist historians] have accepted that the making of a truly democratic socialism -- or libertarian communism, requires more than 'necessity' -- the determined struggle against exploitation and oppression -- and more than organization. It also requires the desire to create an alternative social order. And yet, even that is not enough. There must be a 'prior education of desire' for, as William Morris has warned: 'If the present state of society merely breaks up without a conscious effort at transformation, the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome.'</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>And this passage perhaps expresses an appealing resolution as well to the question of how to reconcile political commitment with historical objectivity.</div><div><br /></div><div>(Ronald Grigor Suny has written quite a bit of interesting material on the falsifications offered by "Stalinist history". A few snapshots of his views can be found here: "Stalin, Falsifier in Chief: E. H. Carr and the Perils of Historical Research Introduction" and "The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century".)</div><div><br /></div></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-36702232255901172592023-08-04T12:00:00.000-04:002023-08-04T12:00:02.077-04:00A curious convergence between social ontology and process metaphysics<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxoULcYhJ1m78o4fAPJBKnd4rJXVo1AizY80-C7DGHAldU9OkrJiFW7rYViZXKCJhAnP3h3Lsfpou-bw8HLZYYtG3FrqWEYxhuSoxcKtFhVJ6qd1TuUgZTLN-hJIFp2MEsYGchcJGY_yvg83u2yYjbiRvJRVLq52hmyY_JBjJ1zDkqxxNCAfwFOcQQ4AGs/s1920/tin%20spheres%20SEM%20image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1275" data-original-width="1920" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxoULcYhJ1m78o4fAPJBKnd4rJXVo1AizY80-C7DGHAldU9OkrJiFW7rYViZXKCJhAnP3h3Lsfpou-bw8HLZYYtG3FrqWEYxhuSoxcKtFhVJ6qd1TuUgZTLN-hJIFp2MEsYGchcJGY_yvg83u2yYjbiRvJRVLq52hmyY_JBjJ1zDkqxxNCAfwFOcQQ4AGs/w400-h266/tin%20spheres%20SEM%20image.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Mu9tj65sAP5V_bBLA6ntMP0zyx-4I4BKmDLIp9TdvuUU16BPNzOW708VZzPI8BgKI8PdDkeGV1Jir4m4usYX1xU3CzbQzcITsU5_mVNpbGOwQ1cuWr9EUEIWfP46IRyskWaEq4932NbpXj8q3SVP9aLf1bmMc9p-7xDuo1uaGBVEefSam8knuIGpcRrB/s2456/montgomery%20bus%20boycott.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1388" data-original-width="2456" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Mu9tj65sAP5V_bBLA6ntMP0zyx-4I4BKmDLIp9TdvuUU16BPNzOW708VZzPI8BgKI8PdDkeGV1Jir4m4usYX1xU3CzbQzcITsU5_mVNpbGOwQ1cuWr9EUEIWfP46IRyskWaEq4932NbpXj8q3SVP9aLf1bmMc9p-7xDuo1uaGBVEefSam8knuIGpcRrB/w400-h226/montgomery%20bus%20boycott.jpg" width="400" /></a></i></div><p></p><p>For the past six months or so I've been wrestling with how to reformulate my own thinking about the nature of the social world -- the nature of "social reality" (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/01/is-ontological-individualism-still.html">link</a>). I've come to realize that the position I've defended for years -- ontological individualism -- is still too dependent on the view of "social entities sitting on top of individual actors", which is no longer convincing to me. And I've reformulated what I have to say about "actor-centered sociology" and "microfoundations" accordingly. I am now more satisfied with the position I've come to -- a diachronic view of intertwined and mutually influencing processes at the social level and the individual-actor level, and an associated view that suggests that both social arrangements and features of individual agency are fluid and "fluxy". Here are two key statements from "Rethinking Ontological Individualism" in its final draft:</p><p><i>Actors and structures are linked in inseparable loops of mutual influence over time, with both actors and </i><i>structures dependent on the current ensemble of “actors-within-structures” within which they have developed, changed, and persisted. The social world is thus inherently indeterminate, reflecting unpredictable changes in all its elements over time. </i></p><p><i>...</i></p><p><i>This view has important ontological implications. For one thing, it implies that neither actors nor structures have “essential natures” or fixed and unchanging properties. Rather, the properties of social structures are influenced by the past and present actions and thoughts of actors and the prior characteristics of structures; while the mental characteristics of present actors are shaped by the ambient social arrangements within which they develop. (There is a biological precondition: human beings must be the kinds of “cognitive-practical machines” that can embody very extensive change; Gibbard 1990.) Further, actors are influenced by ambient structures (external causes); but a given generation of actors is capable of genuine innovation and creativity (internal causes). Susan B. Anthony was influenced by her suffragist predecessors and contemporaries, but she also brought her own innovative thinking to the struggle for full rights of citizenship for women in 1872. And likewise, structures are modified by generations of actors (external causes), but structures also create opportunities for structural innovation (internal causes).</i></p><p>What is striking to me now that this process of exploration and reformulation has come to something like a conclusion is how much the resulting position sounds like a version of "process metaphysics" -- the idea that processes of change rather than fixed underlying particles should be the fundamental ontological category. (The images above are selected to illustrate the two metaphysical perspectives: the orderly composition of a metal from its constituent atoms (substance metaphysics) and the contingent and entangled creation of a social movement (process metaphysics).) Process metaphysics is distinctly a minority position in analytical philosophy today, so it is striking to me that some of the basic intuitions of that view developed organically out of a consideration of how social structures, institutions, and actors interact to constitute the social world -- "social reality". I didn't begin with the premises of process metaphysics, but rather developed a conception that bore important similarities to process metaphysics.</p><p>What is process philosophy? Consider the opening sentences of Johanna Seibt’s treatment of process philosophy in the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i>:</p><p><i>Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is dynamicity or becoming—if it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically? (<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/">link</a>)</i></p><div>Substitute "the social world" for "being" and "reality" in this text and you have a statement about social ontology that is very similar to the reformulation I propose in reconsidering ontological individualism. </div><div><br /></div><div>Seibt notes that process philosophy has important affinities with American pragmatism (as well as ancient Greek philosophy and continental philosophy). George Herbert Mead offers a particularly clear example in his theory of the self in <a href="https://amzn.to/3s1Ldf6">Mind, Self, and Society</a> (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/george-herbert-mead-on-self.html">link</a>). Here Mead takes a position on the nature of the self -- the "me" -- that is broadly suggestive of the premises of process philosophy:</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>Our contention is that mind can never find expression, and could never have come into existence at all, except in terms of a social environment; that an organized set or pattern of social relations and interactions (especially those of communication by means of gestures functioning as significant symbols and thus creating a universe of discourse) is necessarily presupposed by it and involved in its nature. (222)</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>The self is not a "substance", but rather a something in a continual process of change.</div><div><br /></div><div>Process metaphysics may be considered by contemporary philosophers of science as an implausible account of the physical world. Copper atoms are not a "process of becoming"; rather, they have a (quantum mechanical) set of properties that are fixed over time. But perhaps physics and chemistry are bad models for thinking about metaphysics in general. Significantly, philosopher of biology John Dupré argues in <a href="https://amzn.to/3Qs3fkO">Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology</a> and elsewhere that process metaphysics is indeed well suited to the science of biology and evolution. And, like the arguments against "social kinds" and essentialism that result from the rethinking of ontological individualism, Dupré too rejects the idea of “biological essences” (<a href="https://amzn.to/44XxgNQ">The Metaphysics of Biology</a>: 16-17): </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Normally, essential properties pertain to a thing as members of a kind for which the property provides a condition of membership, and it is widely supposed that to be the same thing over time an entity must belong to, and continue to belong to, a particular kind. As I shall discuss in the next section, however, it is widely agreed that the empirical facts of biology are not consistent with there being any such essence-determined kinds.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>So perhaps we might say that process metaphysics -- whatever its virtues in application to other areas of knowledge -- offers a reasonable description of the nature of the social world (and perhaps the biological world). This in turn suggests that philosophy should exercise a reasonable degree of modesty in the generality of the theories it formulates. Perhaps there is no "general and universal" basis for philosophical metaphysics. Rather, we need to formulate different metaphysical frameworks for different areas of knowledge and experience. This would indeed constitute a philosophical position of "metaphysics naturalized". (Here are some prior reflections on the grounds of metaphysical theorizing in philosophy; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-thinking-about-metaphysics.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/kaidesojas-naturalistic-social-ontology.html">link</a>.) </div><div><br /></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-8569348498117092442023-07-30T13:42:00.003-04:002023-07-31T23:28:18.848-04:00A new course on the terrible twentieth century<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQyGYrieUSGrjxCxM71D-xBPreSl_qF3GvVm_FgJC588OxVWroKJVgCvqIu1nnrh03WkiOaUbyhN0MOmHabDbKkMxdpVPLY17lo1-q68THdgf3DEweZq_Cr6MZv9zXQK0xMYh5PpgoIObOkqVwMDi8atkWiOjjniDjuoQMyGorlYPZKySh9TEm4Swjy7Pn/s2400/scottsboro.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1056" data-original-width="2400" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQyGYrieUSGrjxCxM71D-xBPreSl_qF3GvVm_FgJC588OxVWroKJVgCvqIu1nnrh03WkiOaUbyhN0MOmHabDbKkMxdpVPLY17lo1-q68THdgf3DEweZq_Cr6MZv9zXQK0xMYh5PpgoIObOkqVwMDi8atkWiOjjniDjuoQMyGorlYPZKySh9TEm4Swjy7Pn/w400-h176/scottsboro.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />I've spent the last several weeks designing a new honors course for juniors on the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It's not a "history" course, and it's not a philosophy course. Instead, I conceive of it as a learning experience for our honors students aimed at deepening one's capacity for coming to understand the past as human reality. It is practice for taking historical knowledge seriously, and how to do so. I've tried to pick out readings that both illustrate the human intensity of the catastrophes and the individual experiences of several especially evocative contemporary observers. Here is the course description:<p></p><p>
<i>The course takes on the largest challenges of the twentieth century – war, genocide, racism,
socialism, dictatorship, and fascism. It considers the catastrophes that states and dictators have
created for millions of human beings, and it looks as well at some of the ways in which human
beings can strive for freedom and equality in the modern world. Many of the readings are
chosen in order to find a single person’s human voice on these enormous catastrophes.</i></p><p></p><p>There are a handful of permeating issues that are woven through the topics and readings: the harsh inequalities of life created by the capitalisms of the 1930s; the recurring racisms that occur in the American South, Nazi Germany, and Hindu-Muslim hatreds in India; the powerful creations of fascist dictatorship that arose in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. And there is an overriding philosophical question throughout the course as well: is it possible to create a working social democracy that ensures the freedoms and equality of all members of society? </p><p>These are general historical questions. But the course aims to help students to gain an experiential understanding of the practical human circumstances represented by these moments of suffering and catastrophe that occurred from Wigan to West Bengal, from Babi Yar to Kursk, and from Alabama to Oklahoma. George Orwell's <a href="https://amzn.to/3KfWluL">Road to Wigan Pier</a> offers an honest and specific account of the lives of coal miners and their families. Arthur Koestler's <a href="https://amzn.to/3DCbPFM">Invisible Writing</a> expresses Koestler's particular experiences of Communism, Stalinism, the Holodomor, and the Gulag. Vasily Grossman's writings about Treblinka and "Ukraine without Jews" passionately express this honest journalist's observations and compassion in reaction to the murder of the Jews of Berdichev (his home city and the place his mother was murdered by the Nazis) and throughout Poland and Ukraine. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem <i>Babi Yar</i> expresses vividly the horror of the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Kiev -- and the silence of the USSR about this atrocity. The <i>Brown Book of the Hitler Terror</i> offers students a contemporary description of the murderous violence of the Nazi dictatorship -- and a case study in propaganda and the Big Lie. Varlam Shalamov's short stories about the Gulag in <a href="https://amzn.to/3YdYH38 ">Kolyma Tales</a> are personal and gripping. Tom Joad, the protagonist of Steinbeck's <a href="https://amzn.to/3qiGqoN">Grapes of Wrath</a>, speaks for many of the powerless men and women destroyed by the Great Depression, and the photography of Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers help to make these testimonies vivid for students. The poetry of Langston Hughes and a narrative of the Scottsboro case give students a direct exposure to the violence of the Jim Crow regime. And V.K. Ramachandran's extensive interviews with an Indian landless worker trapped in debt bondage (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2019/03/guest-post-vk-ramachandran-on-details.html">link</a>) will give students a much deeper understanding of oppression, domination, and exploitation in India. In each case my goal is to help students connect to these historical human experiences in ways that give them a more intense sense of engagement with these human realities.</p><p>I find it intriguing that many of the texts I've chosen are far from "canonical" -- in fact, most of them have probably had almost no readers in decades. Who has read Koestler's autobiography, <i>The Invisible Writing</i>? And yet Koestler offers a powerful and engaging first-person account of many of the most terrible events of the century. It is sobering that such expressive and truthful voices from the relatively recent past can disappear so quickly from popular imagination. Even the <i>Road to Wigan Pier</i>, though not forgotten entirely, is rarely read or discussed when the question of a just social system is considered.</p><p>Whenever I create a new course I find that I learn new and unexpected things. In this case I learned about the 1933 book, <i>The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag</i>. The Reichstag fire was the stimulus to Hitler's seizure of dictatorial powers and the beginning of his rule by massive violence. But there is a mystery: who was responsible for this arson? Koestler refers to the <i>Brown Book</i> in <i>Invisible Writing</i>, and I thought it might be a useful contemporary assessment of the Hitler dictatorship. According the the title page of the book, it was "prepared by the world committee for the victims of German fascism with an introduction by Lord Marley". The book gained wide exposure internationally, and it offered as fact a conspiracy theory of the arson: that the arsonist Arinus van der Lubbe had acted on the instructions of Nazi officials (Göring and Goebels) for the purpose of providing an incident justifying Hitler's seizure of extra-constitutional power. The Nazi theory of the arson was equally conspiratorial; the Nazis claimed that van der Lubbe was a Communist agent working at the orders of higher-level Communist officials. But the facts turn out to be quite different. The <i>Brown Book</i> was not the product of "neutral anti-fascist activists", but rather the work of the propaganda office of the Communist International. And there was no supporting evidence whatsoever for <i>either</i> the <i>Brown Book</i> claim <i>or</i> the official Nazi story about the conspiracy. Both narratives, it now seems certain, were pure propaganda, and van der Lubbe acted alone. There was no conspiracy.</p><p>Here is the summary offered by Anson Rabinbach in "Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror" (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27669222">link</a>):</p><p><i>The campaign around the Brown Book and the trial of Georgi Dimitrov and the other defendants in Leipzig from September to December 1933 was so skillfully managed that it persuaded many observers outside Germany as well as reputable historians until the 1960s that the fire was the work of a Nazi conspiracy. (97)</i></p><p><i>The book and the campaign that accompanied it was the creation of Willi Münzenberg, the renowned international communist impresario and Reichstag deputy who earned the title "Red Hugenberg" for his organizational empire, which included the International Workers Aid (IAH), numerous dailies and weeklies, journals, and the highly successful illustrated weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), with a circulation of nearly half a million. (100) </i></p><p>And, it emerges, Arthur Koestler himself had a minor role in the Comintern propaganda machine. Here are comments from <i>Invisible Writing</i>:</p><p><i>I ARRIVED in Paris in the middle of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which was holding Europe spellbound. The day after my arrival I met for the first time Willy Muenzenberg, Western Propaganda Chief of the Comintern. The same day I started work at his headquarters, and thus became a minor participant in the great propaganda battle between Berlin and Moscow. It ended with a complete defeat for the Nazis—the only defeat which we inflicted on them during the seven years before the war. (237)</i></p><p><i>The 'we' in this context refers to the Comintern's propaganda headquarters in Paris, camouflaged as the 'World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism.' I arrived in Paris, as I have said, in the middle of the battle, and my part in it was a subordinate one. I had to follow the repercussions of the trial, and of our propagands, in the British Press and in the House of Commons, to study currents of British public opinion, and draw the appropriate tactical conclusions. For a while I also edited the daily bulletins which we distributed to the French and British press. (242)</i></p><p><i>And so the homeric battle of blind-man's-buff between the two giants ended. It had taught me that in the field of propaganda the half-truth was a weapon superior to the truth, and that to be on the defensive is to be defeated. It taught me above all that in this field a democracy must always be at a disadvantage against a totalitarian opponent. My years with Muenzenberg have made me sceptical regarding the West's chances of waging 'psychological warfare' against opponents like Hitler and Stalin. For to wage effective psychological war the West would have to abandon precisely those principles and values in the name of which it fights. (249)</i></p><p>This is an important topic for students to consider when they think about the twentieth century: how can we sort out the lies from the truths and half-truths about important historical realities? Spin, conspiracy theories, concealment, and obfuscation are strategies of falsification of history that are all too familiar -- whether in the political journalism of the 1930s, the French De Gaulle government's narrative of the fate of French Jews during the occupation, or the pervasive lies that shape public opinion on social media today. (Once, while visiting a university in Asturias, Spain, I overheard a passionate disagreement between the provost and the head librarian over whose troops had attacked the university during the Civil War -- Franco's troops or anarchist miners. Each person had family stories and memories, and their accounts were diametrically opposed.) How can ordinary citizens cultivate their capacity for critical reading and thinking that will help them sort out the truth about issues they care about?</p><p>This is one reason that I have such admiration for Marc Bloch and his <a href="https://amzn.to/3ObrUat">Historian's Craft</a> (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/09/marc-blochs-philosophy-of-history.html">link</a>). Bloch embodies what are for me the central moral commitments of the historian: fidelity to the facts as he or she has uncovered them, and a willingness to allow the historical evidence to be the final arbiter for historical belief. This is not to doubt that there are problems for debate about the interpretation and validation of historical data; but the historian should not put a thumb on the scale to support his or her own preferred ideology.</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-22144616095178314102023-07-24T14:05:00.000-04:002023-07-24T14:05:33.511-04:00The generation of the Freedom Riders<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheOL3Hk8uqNS5dwkq_3leN_Y5ofOVoD1JXph_2EEso75HBPLXP3mxywF0efyfF27A_C4yGG8rskQT0ve0MZUGphbUqy1oY59CVI1CW4tkSTihC6By2tUCx_4Qb9E5vjeHvQX8KbL7AC09njD77103loX003TxybRtiLKOkxtmNJQLxY8Ls7dPbrW3DiLYW/s1085/Burks-Brooks.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1085" data-original-width="1085" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheOL3Hk8uqNS5dwkq_3leN_Y5ofOVoD1JXph_2EEso75HBPLXP3mxywF0efyfF27A_C4yGG8rskQT0ve0MZUGphbUqy1oY59CVI1CW4tkSTihC6By2tUCx_4Qb9E5vjeHvQX8KbL7AC09njD77103loX003TxybRtiLKOkxtmNJQLxY8Ls7dPbrW3DiLYW/w400-h400/Burks-Brooks.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The courageous Catherine Burks-Brooks passed in early July in Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of 83. The <i>New York Times</i> ran an extensive and moving obituary for her this weekend (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/us/catherine-burks-brooks-dead.html">link</a>), and the piece is important reading in today's world of "forgetting" of our recent history of racist violence in the United States. Burks-Brooks and her fellow Freedom Riders risked their lives to bring Jim Crow racism and oppression to an end. Violent organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, abetted by segregationist public officials, did everything in their power to prevent change in the segregated south. And yet the Freedom Riders continued.<p></p><p>Burks-Brooks was an inspiring example in 1961 when, as a senior at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University, she joined with hundreds of other courageous young people in defying the Jim Crow South's stubborn refusal to comply with the 1946 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation on interstate buses and trains (<a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-rides">link</a>). With leadership and support from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, nonviolent but determined groups of students boarded buses in defiance of racial segregation of seating. The violence that met these Freedom Riders was brutal and unchecked. </p><p>And yet these young people persisted, and as a result of their courage and persistence the Kennedy administration finally asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce the law of the land. </p><p>It is vital to recall that the struggle for justice and equality was not waged on "social media", and it was not simply a question of safely demonstrating in the streets. Rather, it was an organized resistance to injustice that exposed these young Americans to violence, jail, and occasional murder. Only three years later civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were brutally and viciously murdered in Mississippi. This atrocious crime occurred only months after the Mississippi murders of Medgar Evers, Clifton Walker, Henry Dee, and Charles Moore, and two years before the murder of Vernon Dahmer. Burks-Brooks herself was jailed several times and spent nearly a month in a brutal Mississippi state prison. The stakes were incredibly high, and these young people had the courage to rise to the task. </p><p>It is a very sad fact that the most cherished goals of these young heroes from sixty years ago are still in doubt: full racial equality, and full rights of democratic participation and voting. The continuing effort in southern states to limit voting rights and to gerrymander districts to reduce the impact of African-American voters; the effort by politicians in states like Florida and Texas to tell "happy stories" about the history of slavery and racism in the region; the persisting disparities that exist across racial groups (of all incomes) with regard to health, education, employment, and property ownership -- all of these facts show that the work that brave young activists like Catherine Burks-Brooks and her contemporaries is not finished. And the threats and violence that she and others faced with equanimity should remind us that resisting injustice is never easy, never safe -- and yet permanently important for ourselves and future generations.</p><p>Governor DeSantis, how do you propose to address the wide gap in health system performance scores between black and white Floridians (<a href="https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2021-11-19/a-report-from-the-commonwealth-fund-highlights-racial-inequities-in-floridas-health-care-system">link</a>)? Are you satisfied that "Mortality amenable to health care (per 100,000 population)" for black Floridians (137) is 67% higher than that for white Floridians (82)? Do your job, Governor, and stop lying about the history of racism and slavery in the United States!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YRoFQFwXz_TGQNBdnZcKg3hCJ9q69juBZcnzGGViY1VCxk5lhUUEyUTgcY26QIG93Vuu_hb6COhyvXQmMFoFaE1bDx9ryAsfj0L6oCk3g28mjNeC34CbbF-h8jkNrFLrEfZ2O0nR6HuykyclIqnCPBIx9X60pcIGNc51Cco487ZKKaHtd8PIxyMB5LBO/s1732/racial%20health%20disparities%20by%20state.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1318" data-original-width="1732" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YRoFQFwXz_TGQNBdnZcKg3hCJ9q69juBZcnzGGViY1VCxk5lhUUEyUTgcY26QIG93Vuu_hb6COhyvXQmMFoFaE1bDx9ryAsfj0L6oCk3g28mjNeC34CbbF-h8jkNrFLrEfZ2O0nR6HuykyclIqnCPBIx9X60pcIGNc51Cco487ZKKaHtd8PIxyMB5LBO/w400-h305/racial%20health%20disparities%20by%20state.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfyEZwJav1FTnLFsv9_5HgAQFpGAMbW0YQXPAvzbqJzCvva5tmvpYyC_S2JHBJdHDTDbmaYsPcZgD37njzVDdt_koo92C8OZV2-PmeWRHH-5eCsHEKqmXVQJ0COgJkVXGeuX13yKdGH2INDE_acpqgXotVWIPfcyA_cGwO0ExNMBpdkAYoSxTWlGdPKeV6/s1474/Florida%20health%20disparities.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1120" data-original-width="1474" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfyEZwJav1FTnLFsv9_5HgAQFpGAMbW0YQXPAvzbqJzCvva5tmvpYyC_S2JHBJdHDTDbmaYsPcZgD37njzVDdt_koo92C8OZV2-PmeWRHH-5eCsHEKqmXVQJ0COgJkVXGeuX13yKdGH2INDE_acpqgXotVWIPfcyA_cGwO0ExNMBpdkAYoSxTWlGdPKeV6/w400-h304/Florida%20health%20disparities.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-68647804644405294402023-07-22T17:54:00.001-04:002023-07-23T00:54:02.422-04:00Regulatory failure in freight rail traffic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBPSwwB0vs6xzsDQzqsPuj9Y3J9iuTZV4-J2jdwMBh1-5yHmM2v5OsBLZZakSW3bS_GeiTgIpLRCDWW8M0V6x9eeqmfEbHk6O1rq8RUmEddKxp2LpW24RKw8NeCVQaAqqAehczQqEB7SAZYnhm49_7104lgf8HMfxlEYj9Kc8JauA75xXhlAnpcNi58tOy/s4032/PXL_20210811_143905389.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBPSwwB0vs6xzsDQzqsPuj9Y3J9iuTZV4-J2jdwMBh1-5yHmM2v5OsBLZZakSW3bS_GeiTgIpLRCDWW8M0V6x9eeqmfEbHk6O1rq8RUmEddKxp2LpW24RKw8NeCVQaAqqAehczQqEB7SAZYnhm49_7104lgf8HMfxlEYj9Kc8JauA75xXhlAnpcNi58tOy/w400-h300/PXL_20210811_143905389.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>On any given day some 7,000 freight trains are in motion around the United States, with perhaps 70,000 individual freight cars and intermodal units in transit daily (<a href="https://www.aar.org/news/weekly-rail-traffic-for-the-week-ending-july-15-2023/">link</a>). (Here is the US DOT Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) <a href="https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview">website</a>, which provides a fair amount of information about the industry.) Freight rail is big business, with record profits over the past several years. And it is occasionally an industry prone to accidents, failures, and disasters. Most recently was the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train, resulting in the release of a large amount of vinyl chloride, a flammable and toxic chemical, near the town of Palestine, Ohio. The full extent of this catastrophe is not yet known. </p><p>Derailments, crashes, fires, and explosions make the news. But there is a more insidious process at work as well: the relentless effort by the large freight rail companies to increase profits by increasing the volume of freight and reducing costs. And -- as is true in many other risky business operations -- reducing costs has worrisome consequences for safety (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/05/sources-of-technology-failure.html">link</a>). Reducing personnel is one way of reducing costs, and crew size on freight trains has been reduced substantially. There were only two crew members on the Palestine, Ohio train (engineer and conductor) that derailed, and the industry wants to preserve the freedom to reduce the cabin crew to a single engineer (<a href="https://www.aar.org/issue/crew-size/">link</a>). Increasing the number of cars -- and therefore the length of individual trains -- is another way of reducing costs for a ton-mile of transportation; and sure enough, trains are now traveling around the country that are substantially more than a mile long. Another strategy for cost "containment" is the strategy of tightening operations in and around large rail yards, streamlining the process of re-mixing cars into trains with different destinations. And the tighter the schedules become, the more tightly-linked the system becomes. So a disruption in St. Louis can lead to congestion in Pittsburgh.</p><p>The railroad companies and the Association of American Railroads make the case that the rail safety safety record has improved significantly over recent years; <a href="https://www.aar.org/">link</a>. And it is of course true that there is a business case for maintaining safe operations. However, it is plain that voluntary efforts at maintaining public safety are insufficient when they conflict directly with other business priorities. </p><p>Rail operations and business management plainly involve risks for the public; so government regulation of the industry is crucial. But the economic power of railroads -- today as well as in the 1880s -- allows the companies, their associations, and their lobbyists to block sensible regulations that plainly serve the interests of the public (plainly, at least, to neutral observers). Because railroads are largely a form of interstate commerce, states and local authorities have little or no ability to regulate safety. Instead, this authority is assigned to the Congress and the Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration. And yet the hazards created by railroads are inherently local, and local and state authorities have almost no jurisdiction. </p><p>Consider the photo above. It is a freight train stopped across an unguarded rural rail crossing in Michigan. The train will sit across the road for an extended period of time, from ten minutes to an hour. And the relatively few people who use the road to get to work, to take children to school, to go shopping or bowling (yes, we have bowling alleys in Michigan) -- these people will simply have to wait, or to take a circuitous route around the obstruction. Fortunately in this local instance in Michigan the blockages are relatively short and there are other routes that drivers can take.</p><p>But turn now to York, Alabama, as reported in the July 15, 2023 <i>New York Times</i> (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/business/blocked-rail-crossings-congress.html">link</a>). Peter Eavis, Mark Walker, and Niraj Chokshi describe a chronic problem in this small town on a rail line owned by Norfolk Southern. "Freight trains frequently stop and block the roads of York, Ala., sometimes for hours. Emergency services and health care workers can't get in, and those trapped inside can't get out." "On a sweltering election day in June 2022, a train blockage lasted more than 10 hours, forcing many people, some old and ill, to shelter in an arts center." And the problem is getting worse, as freight trains become longer and longer, with more frequent (and longer) periods in which a train blocks a crossing. </p><p>The article makes the point that state and local laws aimed at regulating these blockages have been regularly overturned by the courts, and efforts to introduce Federal remedies have failed. "Congressional proposals to address the issue have failed to overcome opposition from the rail industry." The article indicates that the lobbying efforts of the rail companies and their industry associations are highly effective in shaping legislation and regulation that affects the industry. They report that the rail companies and the AAR have spent $454 million in lobbying over the past twenty years, including campaign contributions to key legislators. They also make the point that the extent of the problem of extended blockages of rail crossings is poorly documented, since there are more than 200,000 rail crossings and and only a low level of reporting of individual blockages. Long freight trains are part of the problem, because trains longer than a mile exceed the length of many sidings that were previously used to manage train traffic without blocking crossings. </p><p>This is a familiar problem -- the problem of industry capture of regulatory agencies through the use of their financial and political resources. The industry wants to have the freedom to organize operations as they see fit; and their first goal is to maintain and increase profits. The public needs regulatory agencies that depend on neutral expert assessment and rule-setting that protects the safety of the families who are affected by the industry; and yet -- as Charles Perrow argued in "Cracks in the Regulatory State", all too often the regulatory process defers to the business interests of the industry (<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2329496515589855">link</a>). He writes:</p><p><i>Almost every major industrial accident in recent times has involved either regulatory failure or the deregulation demanded by business and industry. For more examples, see Perrow (2011). It is hard to make the case that the industries involved have failed to innovate because of federal regulation; in particular, I know of no innovations in the safety area that were stifled by regulation. Instead, we have a deregulated state and deregulated capitalism, and rising environmental problems accompanied by growing income and wealth inequality. (210).</i></p><p>Blocked crossings are an inconvenience of everyday life for many people. But they can also lead to life-threatening situations when ambulances and fire vehicles cannot gain access to scenes of emergency. Leaving the problem of blocked crossings to the railroad companies -- rather than a sensible set of FRA rules and penalties -- is surely a prescription for a worsening problem over time. As Willie Lake, the mayor of York, put the point in the <i>New York Times</i> article: "They have no incentive" to make substantial changes in their operations to substantially improve the blocked-crossing problem. The FRA needs to provide clear and sensible regulations that give the companies the incentives needed to address the problem.</p><p>(The <i>Washington Post</i> ran an extensive story in May on blocked rail crossings, with examples from Leggett, Texas; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/long-trains-block-intersections-paramedics/">link</a>. The National Academy of Science is conducting a study of the safety implications of freight trains longer than 7,500 feet (<a href="https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/impacts-of-trains-longer-than-7500-feet">link</a>).)</p><div><br /></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-90855999220357779332023-07-18T17:51:00.000-04:002023-07-18T17:51:18.437-04:00Trump, Hitler, and the politics of legality<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDN20lxv6xFHDf_eqHbcdYgN7gRTJDlSYRSPW97HqeuWS-V4c6LIlXN6GFhORU5ML_z4OiEUH16ke-RZwvLfAceGrT07RdBPplGdElUNSc1Out0tnChux0DMKKjSe0U53D7jnykg2iMBEfMpF1XP7fKoCpH5kNbJbeWaxwCzYjLkb5uBNH3pRE2m3KhPmk/s4032/stop%20orban.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2952" data-original-width="4032" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDN20lxv6xFHDf_eqHbcdYgN7gRTJDlSYRSPW97HqeuWS-V4c6LIlXN6GFhORU5ML_z4OiEUH16ke-RZwvLfAceGrT07RdBPplGdElUNSc1Out0tnChux0DMKKjSe0U53D7jnykg2iMBEfMpF1XP7fKoCpH5kNbJbeWaxwCzYjLkb5uBNH3pRE2m3KhPmk/w400-h293/stop%20orban.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Christopher Browning is a noted and respected historian of the Nazi period and the Holocaust (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-thinking-about-european-genocide.html">link</a>). His October 2022 article in the <i>Atlantic</i> on "the politics of legality" during Hitler's march to power is an extremely serious warning to all of us who care about our democracy in the United States (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/nazi-germany-hitler-democracy-weimar/671605/">link</a>). It is a brilliant and sobering analysis -- all the way down to the role played in Hitler's rise by "The Big Lie". Highly relevant to the situation of far-right extremism and MAGA in the US today is this shift of Hitler's strategy described by Browning:<p></p><p><i>Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch was that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality” rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy. As Hitler’s associate Joseph Goebbels said, the Nazis would come to the Reichstag, or Parliament, as wolves to the sheep pen. By 1929, the press empire of Alfred Hugenberg had embraced and even financed Hitler as a right-wing spokesperson, giving him nationwide exposure and recognition.</i></p><p>Hitler's "legal" seizure of power began with the irregular appointment of Hitler as chancellor in 1933. This office (with the support of President von Hindenburg) gave Hitler the powers he needed to legally suppress (and ultimately to violently eliminate) all opposition. (The term "legal revolution" derives from Karl Dietrich Bracher's account of the period; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/04/actor-centered-history.html">link</a>.) </p><p><i>In short order, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were suspended. An extrajudicial power to arrest and detain people without trial voided normal due process, and this provided a legal basis for the Nazi concentration-camp system. In addition, non-Nazi state governments were deposed, and full legislative powers were vested in the chancellor instead of the Reichstag—in effect allowing rule by fiat. That enabled Hitler to disband labor unions, purge the civil service, and outlaw, one by one, opposing political parties. Within five months, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and a police state.</i></p><p>Browning did not envision a Hitler-like seizure of power in the United States, even as recently as fall 2022. Rather, he suggested that an authoritarian future for the US might take the form of an "illiberal democracy" along the lines of Orbán's Hungary. But given the disclosures offered in the <i>New York Times</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i> this week, Browning's prognosis seems woefully optimistic. Real anti-democratic extremists seem to be in control of the MAGA agenda, including pro-authoritarian firebrands like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.</p><p>Consider the <i>New York Times</i> analysis of the plans Donald Trump and his supporters have made for a possible Trump victory in 2024. The key goals of this "putsch" faction are summarized in the opening paragraphs of the <i>Times</i> article by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html">link</a>).</p><p><i>Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.</i></p><p><i>Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.</i></p><p><i>Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.</i></p><p><i>Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.</i></p><p>This is a plan for MAGA dictatorship, sweeping aside all checks and balances within the Federal government. Given the rulings made in the recent past by Federal courts and the Supreme Court, citizens can have little confidence that the courts will intervene to preserve democracy. Like the extreme right in late-stage Weimar politics, MAGA activists and policy theorists work to demonize their opponents as socialists and enemies of the people. Here are Trump's words at a recent political rally in Michigan:</p><p><i>“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”</i></p><p>This is fascist language.</p><p>The extremist policy advocates and MAGA think-tanks described in the <i>Times</i> article make their plans under an openly authoritarian legal theory: the unitary executive.</p><p><i>The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.</i></p><p>Such a theory would give the strong-man president -- a Trump or a DeSantis, for example -- unconstrained power to carry out his agenda.</p><p>In the <i>Washington</i> <i>Post</i> during the same week Philip Bump adds to the <i>Times</i> analysis by analyzing worrisome shifts in public opinion about the value and efficacy of democratic institutions (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/17/trump-second-term-democracy/">link</a>). After analyzing recent public-opinion results conducted by Associated Press-NORC indicating that only about 50% of adults believe that "democracy is working somewhat or extremely well", Bump highlights the substantial differences that exist between Republicans and Democrats on this and related questions. The clear indication is that Republican voters are turning away from traditional commitments to democratic institutions -- including the idea that elected officials are only in office to serve as stewards for the interests of the whole of US society. Bump writes:</p><p><i>What Trump proposes, though, is a collapse of the idea of a democratic government with temporary stewards, an extension of his own misunderstanding of the position he once held to a wide array of federal departments. If polling is any indicator, much or most of his party wouldn’t object.</i></p><p>These signals need to be a source of real alarm for anyone who cares about our constitutional democracy. There is a powerful anti-democratic movement that is determined to fundamentally destroy our democratic institutions and traditions, and it is gaining wide support among its followers. The stakes in the 2024 presidential election could not be higher.</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-79397721461046189312023-07-09T12:13:00.001-04:002023-07-09T17:14:51.193-04:00The air traffic control system and ethno-cognition<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxr3ftWlftllUs83-bG27bbi52-v5dS-c7klM88_miOeAjonpr4XOO9C5k8xppbAwE7uuIK80NDn79-SSz_LDhBacLM0sj_eC2th7N1XXDHoN_ZbbJoaLsvf0aDVz4xrdIx9Thn4_4HKThVj1Ydnxrfkc9iYmq6bRn5zDyb9UwcqRuVCx7rGLt2rgwU_cy/s1134/1956_Grand_Canyon_mid-air_collision.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="766" data-original-width="1134" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxr3ftWlftllUs83-bG27bbi52-v5dS-c7klM88_miOeAjonpr4XOO9C5k8xppbAwE7uuIK80NDn79-SSz_LDhBacLM0sj_eC2th7N1XXDHoN_ZbbJoaLsvf0aDVz4xrdIx9Thn4_4HKThVj1Ydnxrfkc9iYmq6bRn5zDyb9UwcqRuVCx7rGLt2rgwU_cy/w400-h270/1956_Grand_Canyon_mid-air_collision.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF8NR4B5Tfxkcks-q5dKbz3tV8T2FpLgNg2H1lfd9aL5EohYT2t79ZgxhSdjsWK7ev-z67I0BxA7SGtiXCWr8vQxjPK4vLBr--phkeG0VY_faK8yKlH9NK5f6ck9QOVDjVOOXRwhTDaKHEGwVYxgS2O9YTxTxCf05zBLuvKGdjKA-9phRzjW2smrskRnHb/s1919/air%20traffic%20control%20tower.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1002" data-original-width="1919" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF8NR4B5Tfxkcks-q5dKbz3tV8T2FpLgNg2H1lfd9aL5EohYT2t79ZgxhSdjsWK7ev-z67I0BxA7SGtiXCWr8vQxjPK4vLBr--phkeG0VY_faK8yKlH9NK5f6ck9QOVDjVOOXRwhTDaKHEGwVYxgS2O9YTxTxCf05zBLuvKGdjKA-9phRzjW2smrskRnHb/w400-h209/air%20traffic%20control%20tower.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Diane Vaughan's recent <a href="https://amzn.to/44gjVjf">Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk</a> is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex socio-technical systems. The book is an ethnographic study of the workspaces and the men and women who manage the flow of aircraft throughout US airspace. Her ethnographic work for this study was extensive and detailed. She is interested in arriving at a representation of air traffic control arrangements as a <i>system</i>, and she pays ample attention to the legal and regulatory arrangements embodied in the Federal Aviation Administration as the administrator of this system. As an organizational sociologist, she understands full well that "institutions matter" -- the institutions and organizations that have been created and reformed over time have specific characteristics that influence the behavior of the actors who work within the system, and influence in turn the effectiveness and safety of the system. But her central finding is that it is the situated actors who do their work in control towers and flight centers who are critical to the resilience and safety of the system. And what is most important about their characteristics of work is the embodied social cognition that they have achieved through training and experience. She uses the term "ethno-cognition" to refer to the extended system of concrete and embodied knowledge that is distributed across the corps of controllers in air traffic control centers and towers across the country.<p></p><p>Vaughan emphasizes the importance of “situated action” in the workings of a complex socio-technological system: “the dynamic between the system’s institutional environment, the organization as a socio-technical system, and the controllers’ material practices, interpretive work, and the meanings the work has for them” (p. 11). She sees this intellectual frame as a bridge between the concrete activities in a control tower and the meso-level arrangements and material infrastructure within which the work proceeds. This is where "micro" meets macro and meso in the air traffic control system.</p><p>The key point here is that the skilled air traffic controller is not just the master of an explicit set of protocols and procedures. He or she has gained a set of cognitive skills that are “embodied” rather than formally represented as a system of formal rules and facts. “Collectively, controllers’ cultural system of knowledge is a set of embodied repertoires – cognitive, physical, emotional, and material practices – that are learned and drawn upon to craft action from moment to moment in response to changing conditions. In constructing the act, structure, culture, and agency combine” (p. 122). Vaughan's own process of learning through this extended immersion sounds a great deal like Michael Polanyi’s description in <a href="https://amzn.to/3NMB64X">Personal Knowledge</a> of the acquisition of “tacit knowledge” by a beginning radiologist; she learned to “see” the sky in the way that a trained controller saw it. The controllers have mastered a huge set of tacit repertoires that permit them to understand and control the rapidly changing air spaces around them.</p><p>A special strength of the book is the detailed attention Vaughan gives to the historicity and contingency of institutions and organizations. Vaughan’s approach is deliberately “multi-level”, including government agencies, institutions, organizations, and individuals in their workplaces. Vaughan takes full account of the fact that institutions change over time as a result of the actions of a variety of actors, and changes in the institutional settings have consequences for the workings of embedded technological systems. She points out, moreover, that these changes are almost always “patch-work” changes, involving incremental efforts to fit new technologies or team practices into existing organizational forms. “Incrementally, problem-solving people and organizations inside the air traffic control system have developed strategies of resilience, reliability, and redundancy that provided perennial dynamic flexibility to the parts of the system structure, and they have improvised tools of repair to adjust innovations to local conditions, contributing to system persistence” (p. 9). Institutions and organizations change largely through processes of "social hacking" and adjustment, rather than wholesale redesign, and she finds that the small number of instances of efforts to fully redesign the system have failed.</p><p>Particularly valuable in Vaughan’s narrative is her fluid integration of processes and factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. High-level features like economic pressures on airlines, budget constraints within the Federal government (e.g. delaying implementation of long-range radar in the air traffic control system; 83), and military imperatives on the movements of aircraft (83); meso-level features like the regulatory system for air traffic safety as it emerged and evolved; and micro-level features like the architecture of the workspaces of controllers over time and the practices and problem-solving abilities that were embodied in their work – all these levels are represented in almost every page of the book. And Vaughan points out that all of these processes have the potential of creating unanticipated system dysfunctions beyond their direct effects. Even the facts of the diffusion of high-speed commercial jets and the rise in military staffing demands during the Vietnam War had important and unanticipated system consequences for the air traffic control system.</p><p>Vaughan refers frequently to the causal role that “history” plays in complex technology systems like the air traffic control system. But she avoids the error of reification of “history” by carefully paraphrasing what this claim means to her: <i>“History has a causal effect on the present only through the agency of multiple heterogeneous social actors and actions originating in different institutional and organizational locations and temporalities that intersect with a developing system and through its life course in unanticipated ways…. </i>Causal explanations of historical events, institutions, and outcomes are best understood by storylike explanations that capture the sequential unfolding of events in and over time, revealing the interaction of structures and social actions that drive change” (p. 42). This clarification correctly disaggregates the causal powers of “history” into the actors, institutions, and processes whose influences over time have contributed to the current workings of the socio-technical system. Further, it provides a useful contribution to the literature on institutional change with its granular level of detail concerning the “career” of the air traffic control system over several decades. (Here she draws on the work of sociologists like Andrew Abbott on the role of temporality in social explanations.)</p><p>One illustration of Vaughan’s attention to historical details occurs in her account of the extended process of invention, design, test, and publicity undertaken by the Wright brothers. This narrative illustrates the multi-level influences that contributed to the establishment of a paradigm of heavier-than-air flight in the early decades of the twentieth century – individual innovation, networks of transmission of ideas, institutional context, and the authority and reputation of the magazine <i>Scientific American</i> (pp. 49-63). And, like Thomas Hughes' historical account of the development of electric power in the United States in <a href="https://amzn.to/3O82eNf">Networks of Power</a>, her account is fully attentive to the contingency and path-dependency of these processes. This material makes a genuine contribution to science and technology studies and to recent work in the history of technology. </p><p>Vaughan sounds a cautionary note about the safety and resilience of the air traffic system, and its (usually) excellent record of preventing mid-air and on-ground collisions among aircraft. She has argued persuasively throughout the book that these features of safety and resilience depend crucially on the well-trained and experienced controllers who observe and control the airspace. But she notes as well the perennial desire of both private businesses and government agencies to squeeze costs and "waste" out of complex processes. In the context of the air traffic control system, this has meant trying to reduce the number of controllers through "streamlined" processes and more extensive technologies. Her reaction to these impulses is clearly a negative one: reducing staff in air traffic control towers is a very good way of making unlikely events like mid-air collisions incrementally more likely; and that fact translates into an increasing likelihood of loss of life (and the business and government losses associated with major disasters). We should not look at reasonable staffing levels in control towers as a "wasteful" organizational practice.</p><p>(Here is an earlier post on "Expert Knowledge" that is relevant to Vaughan's findings; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/expert-knowledge.html">link</a>.)</p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-76169034263040351972023-07-08T12:28:00.000-04:002023-07-08T12:28:22.722-04:00Life and memory in Lviv<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlLoKth4R6GdMtNS9jobDggCCqq7nOacfbdoxeJ9qjmGiTSul3b5hurLXn6ahSFC6Z3FIP7D9zO-wCwkV9qtn5Vrm0wlixM_zPFHb9p3PJ9_uyf1wY7LdER2uISeYbQzNRjLMXzTJKcz9nJUvfaj_rK1rmpKxCM9bohmeOJzkPhMUCV6SuVUgy7bmZmXFV/s1280/missile%20damage%20Kramatorsk.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlLoKth4R6GdMtNS9jobDggCCqq7nOacfbdoxeJ9qjmGiTSul3b5hurLXn6ahSFC6Z3FIP7D9zO-wCwkV9qtn5Vrm0wlixM_zPFHb9p3PJ9_uyf1wY7LdER2uISeYbQzNRjLMXzTJKcz9nJUvfaj_rK1rmpKxCM9bohmeOJzkPhMUCV6SuVUgy7bmZmXFV/w400-h300/missile%20damage%20Kramatorsk.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The tragic death of Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk, Ukraine on June 27 in a Russian missile attack against civilian targets makes me think of her writings about Ukraine. Here is a good example -- "Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened" (<a href="https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/nothing-bad?fbclid=IwAR2MBUX4gIXAVLA3JKYoeZWEfXUWDXy_yZae1u7si_y9Nv2hzj2Js9wlrnM">link</a>), published in <i>Arrowsmith</i>. Amelina refers to Timothy Snyder's use of the phrase "bloodlands" to refer to both the geography and the history of atrocity, genocide, and murder that unfolded over two decades across Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and the USSR, and that has now resumed in Ukraine. Here is a moving obituary in the <i>Guardian</i> (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/07/victoria-amelina-obituary">link</a>). <p></p><p>Here are several sentences from "Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened" about Lviv:</p><p><i>My hometown is located right in the middle of the “bloodlands” — in western Ukraine. Lviv was founded in 1256 by Danylo, King of Ruthenia. However, the German-speaking world might remember it as Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Poles recall the same city as Lwów. During the too-long life of the Soviet Union, Lviv grew Russified: many of its new citizens called it L’vov.</i></p><p><i>My grandparents moved there in the 50s and 70s, leaving behind their own family stories about the deadly 30s and 40s in central and eastern Ukraine, which had been the epicenter of the genocidal famine. By the time they settled in Lviv, almost none of the city’s prewar inhabitants remained. Only a handful of natives might have offered a first-person account of what the city had been like before the war. In 1939, Lviv was home to about 110,000 Jews, comprising fully a third of its population. By 1945, fewer than a thousand survivors remained.</i></p><p><i>The Soviet system never commemorated the Holocaust. One reason for this is that once you define and identify one genocide, you can recognize other genocidal crimes. The Soviet empire didn’t want us to learn our history. Decades of Soviet education and censorship ensured that even after the USSR collapsed, many in Lviv failed to realize the striking proximity of the Holocaust.</i></p><p>It is piercingly sad to read these lines by such a talented young woman about her hometown in Lviv, and to know that she died in Kramatorsk, some 1,200 kilometers to the east, under atrocious missile attack by the Russian state. The tragedies of Ukraine seem never to end. </p><p>The city of Lviv exemplifies the turmoil of life in Poland and Ukraine over the course of the past century. Lviv, Lemberg, Lwów, L’vov -- each iteration represented a cultural and political shift of identities, and often a movement of families and peoples as well. And with the Holocaust, the killing of the vast majority of the Jews of Lviv changed the city from an important center of Jewish life into an emptiness. (Here is a historical overview of Jewish Lviv; <a href="https://lia.lvivcenter.org/en/storymaps/jewish-lviv/">link</a>.)</p><p>Timothy Snyder's 2003 book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3LZJ6gW">The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999</a> is important reading today. Here is a vignette of the many transformations of a single town in Galicia, Kolomya (Ukraine) -- roughly 200 kilometers from Lviv:</p><p><i>When the statue of Lenin in the Galician town of Kolomya was dismantled, its pedestal was seen to be constructed from Jewish tombstones. Kolomya, today, is a town in southwestern Ukraine. In 1939-41 and 1945-91 it was a town in southwestern Soviet Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944 a town in the Nazi Generalgouvernement, before the Second World War a town in Poland's Stanislawow slawow province, before the First World War a town in Austrian Galicia, before 1772 a town in the Polish Kingdom's Ruthenian province. Until the Final Solution of 1941-42, Kolomya was, whatever its rulers, a Jewish town. The absence of Jews, in Kolomya as throughout Eastern Europe, coincided for forty years with the presence of communist rule. (Kindle Locations 115-119)</i></p><p>The passage is significant for several reasons. The historical fact of the use by the Soviet regime of Jewish tombstones to provide the foundation for a statue of Lenin is entirely revealing about the persistent anti-semitism of the Soviet regime throughout its history. The demographic and cultural transformation of Kolomya following from the physical destruction of Kolomya's Jewish population was a permanent change in its history -- like the same circumstances in countless towns and cities in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Kiev, Lviv, Berdichev, Miropol -- all fundamentally transformed by the murder of Ukraine's Jews. This is the fundamental tragedy captured in Vasily Grossman's 1943 essay "Ukraine without Jews" (<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0449010X.2011.10707095">link</a>): </p><p> <i>There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin... I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.</i></p><p><i>If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labour and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behaviour, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.</i></p><p><i>....</i></p><p><i>And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.</i></p><p><i></i></p><p><i>Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered. ("Ukraine without Jews")</i></p><p>Victoria Amelina sought to document the tragedy and atrocity that have once again engulfed Ukraine. The atrocious and lawless war of aggression initiated by the Russian Federation and its tyrant, Vladimir Putin rivals the crimes of Stalin and Hitler against the people of Ukraine. Once again innocent Ukrainian men, women, and children are being murdered, their cities and lives destroyed, and a new chapters of crimes against humanity are being written. </p><p>Victoria Amelina, your life ended too soon, and your courage is inspiring.</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-67998950884323477962023-06-30T10:47:00.000-04:002023-06-30T10:47:08.832-04:00Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXwHORE-5WkFkbdCSYlqYk_VOHjal30YYYg1slilPhLXh3jSed4taAB97YfO-ksU0NqHUun73aAmWIaooemroNt2SClF7SCnjMTKptf4v5fOxm4_KyscgrI72dZEnjXYzeA63yNaroAVsQ_YxBy4zRuj8znlFxiagf254lFNfJrMNZdFavJfYWTZauxvMa/s4032/PXL_20230624_031848814.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXwHORE-5WkFkbdCSYlqYk_VOHjal30YYYg1slilPhLXh3jSed4taAB97YfO-ksU0NqHUun73aAmWIaooemroNt2SClF7SCnjMTKptf4v5fOxm4_KyscgrI72dZEnjXYzeA63yNaroAVsQ_YxBy4zRuj8znlFxiagf254lFNfJrMNZdFavJfYWTZauxvMa/s320/PXL_20230624_031848814.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpJ_k08SAH0L2P78kqvcbYNwZh5Rz147mpbNaT1LUTnS8E0CLz0ZG9ND2TruzdHsSe2zoD1dkCvZKIK7cQ3_2lI4XO9kki9TOqUTQVoG1bL-SD0LIBvA4GNZemxfOvAcnxawFF9ObgJ-1hYwReHVSNqkAbCRpJ8ejfHUWY-zpSjH7ezy9IO4E1BYobOukL/s4032/IMG_9442.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpJ_k08SAH0L2P78kqvcbYNwZh5Rz147mpbNaT1LUTnS8E0CLz0ZG9ND2TruzdHsSe2zoD1dkCvZKIK7cQ3_2lI4XO9kki9TOqUTQVoG1bL-SD0LIBvA4GNZemxfOvAcnxawFF9ObgJ-1hYwReHVSNqkAbCRpJ8ejfHUWY-zpSjH7ezy9IO4E1BYobOukL/s320/IMG_9442.HEIC" width="320" /></a></div><br />The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (<a href="https://anposs2023bangkok.com/">link</a>). It was a highly stimulating success. Organizers Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kanit (Mitinunwong) Sirichan, Yukti Mukdawijitra, and others put enormous effort into carrying it off, and host institutions Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University provided excellent coordination and facilities. But best were the papers and discussions that took place among scholars from many countries during the several days of the conference and associated meals. There was also a full day of papers delivered in Thai — evidence of real interest in the questions raised by the social sciences. <p></p><p>For me the most stimulating and rewarding feature of the conference was its genuinely intercultural and international character. It was hugely interesting to discuss subjects of social change, methodology, or ontology with scholars from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, or China. And the very different historical, political, and cultural experiences of those different Asian zones of academic life inevitably stimulated new and different questions.</p><p>The experience of being in Thailand was itself a powerful one. The omnipresence of Buddhism as a cultural current is unmistakeable. But so is the level of inequality and poverty that Thailand still experiences. Talented young people are stymied by a lack of opportunity in education and employment. The legacy of social conflict during the time of the Red Shirt movement is still unresolved. And environmental degradation in Bangkok continues to outpace measures taken to improve water quality and pollution.</p><p>The profound problems the world faces today inevitably have to do with behavior, institutions, and the legacy of earlier disasters. So it is pressingly important for philosophers to make productive contributions to the efforts of political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, public health experts, and economists to figure out how our many civilizations can bend the curve away from the catastrophes that are looming on the horizon — climate collapse, environmental degradation, rising human poverty and misery, authoritarian political regimes, and war. Collaborations like ANPOSS can make a genuine difference. And if philosophy is of any enduring importance, it needs to be focused on making a practical difference in the world.</p><p>Thanks, then, to the philosophers and social science colleagues who are making such strong efforts to facilitate productive international discussions about the nature and impact of the social sciences!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-40927035361928528552023-06-11T15:18:00.002-04:002023-06-11T17:24:36.970-04:00Eric Hobsbawm's history of the Historians' Group<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KwKCGcIUaNPRd5dSu8L3bvcFthAxOqcdlv47DFCPmfGF7a3ontYAs33djGzC_ucSHguldPaQE1soH-9dTbQlQSYMRhKZ8ii-3H64vIblTJRmHk5l_h6y3-lXtUDh0Rzd8GEjLJ5A5VDo_5o1PemyfySb9rE4XIBeNS5MJzEEvG80DWPlLVIRcUt6yA/s2560/hobsbawm.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2560" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KwKCGcIUaNPRd5dSu8L3bvcFthAxOqcdlv47DFCPmfGF7a3ontYAs33djGzC_ucSHguldPaQE1soH-9dTbQlQSYMRhKZ8ii-3H64vIblTJRmHk5l_h6y3-lXtUDh0Rzd8GEjLJ5A5VDo_5o1PemyfySb9rE4XIBeNS5MJzEEvG80DWPlLVIRcUt6yA/w400-h240/hobsbawm.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>photo: Hobsbawm at work</i></div></i><p></p><p>The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of 1946-1956, and Verso Press has now republished the essay online (<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party">link</a>). The essay is worth reading attentively, since some of the most insightful British historians of the generation were represented in this group.</p><p>The primary interest of Hobsbawm's memoir, for me anyway, is the deep paradox it seems to reveal. The Communist Party was not well known for its toleration of independent thinking and criticism. Political officials in the USSR, in Comintern, and in the European national Communist parties were committed to maintaining the party line on ideology and history. The Historians' Group and its members were directly affiliated with the CPGB. And yet some of Britain's most important social historians were members of the Historians' Group. Especially notable were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Maurice Dobb, Raphael Samuel, Rodney Hilton, Max Morris, J. B. Jefferys, and Edmund Dell. (A number of these historians broke with the CPGB after 1956.) Almost all of these individuals are serious and respected historians in the first rank of twentieth-century social history, including especially Hobsbawm, Hill, E.P. Thompson, Dobb, and Hilton. So the question arises: to what extent did the dogmatism and party discipline associated with the Communist Party since its origins influence or constrain the historical research of these historians? How could the conduct of independent, truthful history survive in the context of a "party line" maintained with rigorous discipline by party hacks? How, if at all, did British Marxist historians escape the fate of Lysenko? </p><p>The paradox is clearly visible in Hobsbawm's memoir. Hobsbawm is insistent that the CP members of the Historians' Group were loyal and committed communists: "We were as loyal, active and committed a group of Communists as any, if only because we felt that Marxism implied membership of the Party." And yet he is equally insistent that he and his colleagues maintained their independence and commitment to truthful historical inquiry when it came to their professional work: </p><p><i>Second, there was no 'party line' on most of British history, and what there was in the USSR was largely unknown to us, except for the complex discussions on 'merchant capital' which accompanied the criticism of M. N. Pokrovsky there. Thus we were hardly aware that the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' had been actively discouraged in the USSR since the early 1930s, though we noted its absence from Stalin's Short History. Such accepted interpretations as existed came mainly from ourselves— Hill's 1940 essay, Dobb's <u>Studies</u>, etc.—and were therefore much more open to free debate than if they had carried the by-line of Stalin or Zhdanov....</i></p><p>This is not to imply that these historians pursued their research in a fundamentally disinterested or politically neutral way. Rather, they shared a broad commitment to a progressive and labor-oriented perspective on British history. And these were the commitments of a (lower-case) marxist interpretation of social history that was not subordinate to the ideological dictates of the CP:</p><p><i>Third, the major task we and the Party set ourselves was to criticise non-Marxist history and its reactionary implications, where possible contrasting it with older, politically more radical interpretations. This widened rather than narrowed our horizons. Both we and the Party saw ourselves not as a sect of true believers, holding up the light amid the surrounding darkness, but ideally as leaders of a broad progressive movement such as we had experienced in the 1930s.... Therefore, communist historians—in this instance deliberately not acting as a Party group—consistently attempted to build bridges between Marxists and non-Marxists with whom they shared some common interests and sympathies. </i></p><p>So Hobsbawm believed that it was indeed possible to be both Communist as well as independent-minded and original. He writes of Dobb's research: "Dobb's <i>Studies</i> which gave us our framework, were novel precisely because they did not just restate or reconstruct the views of 'the Marxist classics', but because they embodied the findings of post-Marx economic history in a Marxist analysis." And: "A third advantage of our Marxism—we owe it largely to Hill and to the very marked interest of several of our members, not least A. L. Morton himself, in literature—was never to reduce history to a simple economic or 'class interest' determinism, or to devalue politics and ideology." These points are offered to support the idea that the historical research of the historians of this group was not dogmatic or Party-dictated. And Hobsbawm suggests that this underlying independence of mind led to a willingness to sharply criticize the Party and its leaders after the debacle of 1956 in Hungary. </p><p>But pointed questions are called for. How did historians in this group react to credible reports of a deliberate Stalinist campaign of starvation during collectivization in Ukraine in 1932-33, the Holodomor? Malcolm Muggeridge, a left journalist with a wide reputation, had reported on this atrocity in the <i>Guardian</i> in 1933 (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2022/09/malcolm-muggeridge-on-holodomor.html">link</a>). And what about Stalin's Terror in 1936-1938, resulting in mass executions, torture, and the Gulag for "traitors and enemies of the state"? How did these British historians react to these reports? And what about the 1937 show trials and executions of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent persons? These facts too were available to interested readers outside the USSR; the Moscow trials are the subject of Arthur Koestler's <a href="https://amzn.to/3qGQIih">Darkness at Noon</a>, published in 1941. Did the historians of the Historians' Group simply close their eyes to these travesties? And where does historical integrity go when one closes his eyes? </p><p>Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and many ex-communist intellectuals have expressed the impossible contradictions contained in the idea of "a committed Communist pursuing an independent and truth-committed inquiry" (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2022/11/koestlers-observations-of-soviet.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/10/orwell-on-revolutionary-spain.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/03/koestlers-twentieth-century.html">link</a>). One commitment or the other must yield. And eventually E. P. Thompson came to recognize the same point; in 1956 he wrote a denunciation of the leadership of the British Communist Party (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/28/historian-ep-thompson-denounced-communist-party-chiefs-files-show">link</a>), and he left the Communist Party in the same year following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. </p><p>Hobsbawm's own career shows that Hobsbawm himself did <i>not</i> confront honestly the horrific realities of Stalinist Communism, or the dictatorships of the satellite countries. David Herman raises the question of Hobsbawm's reactions to events like those mentioned here in his review of Richard Evans, <a href="https://amzn.to/3qEuw8R">Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History</a> and Eric Hobsbawm, <a href="https://amzn.to/42xrH6I">Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life</a> (<a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/d3cb52b108044689ea5cf7ca1eb96615/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=29802">link</a>). The picture Herman paints is appalling. Here is a summary assessment directly relevant to my interest here:</p><p><i>However, the notable areas of silence -- about Jewishness and the crimes of Communism especially -- are, ultimately, devastating. Can you trust a history of modern Europe which is seriously misleading about the French and Russian Revolutions, which barely touches on the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, which has so little to say about women and peasants, religion and nationalism, America and Africa?</i></p><p><i>And what, finally, can we say about Hobsbawm's view of Soviet Communism? In a review called "The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm", the political philosopher, John Gray, wrote that Hobsbawm's writings on the 20th century are "highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism." Tony Judt wrote that, "Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age." Thanks to Richard Evans's labours it is hard to dispute these judgments. (199-200)</i></p><p>Surely these silences are the mark of an apologist for the crimes of Stalinism -- including, as Herman mentions, the crimes of deadly anti-semitism in the workers' paradise. Contrary to Hobsbawm, there was indeed a party line on the most fundamental issues: the Party's behavior was to be defended at all costs and at all times. The Terror, the Gulag, the Doctors' Plot -- all were to be ignored.</p><p>Koestler's protagonist Rubashov in <a href="https://amzn.to/43N2rKy">Darkness at Noon</a> reflects on the reasons why the old Bolsheviks would have made the absurd confessions they offered during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s:</p><p><i>The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats -- and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game. The public expected no swan-songs of them. They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night....</i></p><p>This is the subordination of self to party that was demanded by the Communist Party; and it is still hard to see how a committed member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s could escape the logic of his or her commitment. Personal integrity as an intellectual was not part of the bargain. So the puzzle remains: how could a Hobsbawm or Thompson profess <i>both</i> intellectual independence and commitment to the truth in the histories they write, <i>while also</i> accepting a commitment to do whatever is judged necessary by Party officials to further the cause of the Revolution?</p><p>Regrettably, there is a clear history in the twentieth century of intellectuals choosing political ideology over intellectual honesty. Recall Sartre's explanation of his silence about the Gulag and the Soviet Communist Party, quoted in Anne Applebaum's <a href="https://amzn.to/3J6PdR6">Gulag</a>: </p><p><i>“As we were not members of the Party,” he once wrote, “it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.” On another occasion, he told Albert Camus that “Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.” (18)</i></p><div>So much better is the independence of mind demonstrated by an Orwell, a Koestler, a Camus, or a Muggeridge in their willingness to recognize clearly the atrocious realities of Stalinism.</div><div><br /></div><div>(Here is an earlier post on the journal created by the Historians' Group, <i>Past & Present</i>; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/historians-of-past-present.html">link</a>. And here are several earlier posts about post-war Marxist historians; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2021/08/judt-on-twentieth-century-marxism.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-was-e-p-thompson-up-to.html">link</a>, <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-french-left-since-1945.html">link</a>.) </div><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-86542250890804632572023-06-10T14:30:00.000-04:002023-06-10T14:30:08.709-04:00Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights movement<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimobylQD0kA11VQ0F3Ifvee23gtM4EYMWwWXWMSVZwPUeL4jq2lyp-LtqnperetQh3v6uBiElsWafVJCQAM8ph8JHZlyNg46G4O3YvSZOno31LD_J1MUptCYuGr0MC6zNyywN2DJUU1mfjeAnsmCFQFedWEPRaI9zFefja7mqSY8ADYKzjg4185_hV8Q/s480/bus%20boycott%20mass%20meeting.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="480" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimobylQD0kA11VQ0F3Ifvee23gtM4EYMWwWXWMSVZwPUeL4jq2lyp-LtqnperetQh3v6uBiElsWafVJCQAM8ph8JHZlyNg46G4O3YvSZOno31LD_J1MUptCYuGr0MC6zNyywN2DJUU1mfjeAnsmCFQFedWEPRaI9zFefja7mqSY8ADYKzjg4185_hV8Q/w400-h264/bus%20boycott%20mass%20meeting.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Aldon Morris's <a href="https://amzn.to/3NwjziF">Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change</a> (1984) is a highly valuable treatment of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s through early 1960s. The book is a work of history and sociology, and it is deeply informed by the sociology of social movements. (It is significant that Morris and Doug McAdam were fellow graduate students in sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook. McAdam's dissertation and its 1982 published version, <a href="https://amzn.to/3P5SFzk">Political Process</a>, are cited in the book. It is also interesting that sociologist Charles Perrow was one of Morris's graduate advisors at Stony Brook. Perrow's emphasis on how organizations work seems to have been a useful influence for Morris.)<p></p><p>Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.</p><p><i>In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)</i></p><p>As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)</p><p>And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.</p><p>One relative blindspot in <i>Origins</i> is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in <i>cities</i> across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations: </p><p><i>The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):</i></p><p><i>"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."</i></p><p>However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in <a href="https://amzn.to/3XfiBKV">Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt</a>:</p><p><i>Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process. There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)</i></p><p><i>Origins</i> gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)</p><p>The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.</p><p>Is <i>Origins</i> chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's <i>Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.</i> Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.</p><p>And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.</p><p>-----</p><p>Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:</p><p>Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)</p><p>National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)</p><p>Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)</p><p>Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)</p><p>Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)</p><p>Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)</p><p>Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915) </p><p>Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)</p><p>Inter Civic Council (ICC, 1956)</p><p>Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-63090019902998858482023-06-08T20:26:00.000-04:002023-06-08T20:26:38.173-04:00How "micro" does the sociology of social movements need to go?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_MiIy85TwbZ-aoNkN3T2BI3tqDZangdlNXfFydyBRxIVI4MjnN-9UeY-V84lXwqsT39JzjqtjP__PQx5TX9Yyie7GFCRO0QJHdQIrsmgKBktlZLl08GlJqYSVVYd6NOYx6m5Pi1-wTGXBCz5_IkCGzcU5xDxl4EL4muamxZ68ZoGar1QpwVRtpdom6A/s1800/web_mlk_trial_mgm_bus_boycott_hero.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1012" data-original-width="1800" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_MiIy85TwbZ-aoNkN3T2BI3tqDZangdlNXfFydyBRxIVI4MjnN-9UeY-V84lXwqsT39JzjqtjP__PQx5TX9Yyie7GFCRO0QJHdQIrsmgKBktlZLl08GlJqYSVVYd6NOYx6m5Pi1-wTGXBCz5_IkCGzcU5xDxl4EL4muamxZ68ZoGar1QpwVRtpdom6A/w400-h225/web_mlk_trial_mgm_bus_boycott_hero.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Doug McAdam's <a href="https://amzn.to/43NDb73">Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970</a> is recognized as a leading sociological study of the US Civil Rights movement. With the addition of the new introduction to the 1999 edition, the book provides a cutting-edge treatment of the movement from the point of view of the field of contentious politics. McAdam offers three broad families of social mechanisms intended to account for the success of mobilization of groups with a grievance about the status quo:<p></p><p><i>Increasingly, one finds scholars from various countries and nominally different theoretical traditions emphasizing the importance of the same three broad sets of factors in analyzing the origins of collective action. These three factors are: 1) the political opportunities and constraints confronting a given challenger; 2) the forms of organization (informal as well as formal) available to insurgents as sites for initial mobilization; and 3) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. (viii)</i></p><p>And McAdam holds that these three factors help to account for the dramatic rise in Civil Rights activism, protest, and strategic choices of the movement across the South in the 1950s into the early 1960s. He asks the key question: “What led normally accepting African-Americans both in Montgomery and throughout the South to risk their livelihoods and their lives in support of civil rights?”. This is the theoretically central issue of mobilization: what factors facilitate mass mobilization around a set of interests or grievances?</p><p>Given the diversity of local situations in cities, towns, and farms across the South, we can speculate that the answer to this question will be different in different locales. But significantly, McAdam provides very little "micro-sociology" of the development of engagement on the part of ordinary African-American people making their lives in various places. He writes about the significance of churches, colleges, and the NAACP as "the organizational base of the movement" (125), but he goes into little detail about the activities and resources associated with these institutions and organizations. He writes: </p><p><i>Representing the most organized segments of the southern black population, the churches, colleges, and local NAACP chapters possessed the resources needed to generate and sustain an organized campaign of social insurgency. (128)</i></p><p>But how did these organizations actually <i>act</i> during the critical period; how were their actions different in different settings; and how did this influence rising activism on the part of ordinary people? What were the local processes that led to local mobilizations? His answer is a general one:</p><p><i>On one level, then, the importance of the churches, schools, and NAACP chapters in the generation of insurgency can be attributed to their role as established interactional networks facilitating the "bloc recruitment" of movement participants. That is, by building the movement out of established institutions, insurgent leaders were able to recruit en masse along existing lines of interaction, thereby sparing themselves the much more difficult task of developing a membership from scratch. (129) </i></p><p>This is a general formulation of a social mechanism. But it is not a specific and factual account of "recruitment" in a particular time and place -- for example, Montgomery prior to the bus boycott. Rather, McAdam emphasizes the idea that ordinary people saw it as their church-created duty to participate in protest. McAdam treats the church, colleges, and local chapters of the NAACP chiefly as "network" sites, where potential participants in the activist movement were located, where they further developed their claims and commitments, and where they encouraged each other in protest.</p><p>The general hypotheses provided within the current literature of contentious politics is valuable enough. But we would like to know more about variation: were the dynamics of the Black church different in Montgomery and Little Rock? Were local NAACP chapters different in their behavior or engagement, and did these differences result in differences in level and kind of activism in their surrounding communities? </p><p>Social historians of the Civil Rights movement go into much more granular detail about the movement. In greater or lesser detail, the social historians provide readers with insight into specific episodes of mobilization, conflict, and adjustment. They provide us with relatively detailed <i>case studies</i> of these episodes, with a reasonable amount of detail about background circumstances, existing organizations, the leadership available to the black community, instigating events, and the level of grievance and activism present in the population. For example, Aldon Morris's <a href="https://amzn.to/3NhlOVJ">Origins of the Civil Rights Movement</a> provides substantial detail about the individuals, leaders, and organizations that played important roles in the mobilization of support for movement goals in a variety of locations; Hasan Kwame Jeffries' excellent book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3J3Dsuw">Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt</a> describes the origins of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization among black rural "tenant farmers"; and Lance Hill's <a href="https://amzn.to/3WVPoUS">Deacons for Defense</a> does similar work in his analysis of the mobilization of rural African-American people in organized self-defense. A detailed history of particular episodes -- the Montgomery bus boycott, voter registration drives in rural Mississippi, 1960 (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/10/voter-registration-mississippi-1960.html">link</a>) -- would give the reader of McAdam's book a much more substantial understanding of the mechanisms and processes through which activism and insurgency worked out through ordinary people and local institutions. But there is very little of this kind of detail in McAdam's treatment of the Civil Rights movement. For all its emphasis on the need for accounts of the specific mechanisms through which mobilization, coordination, and protest occurred, not very much concrete detail is provided in the study. The level of aggregation at which McAdam's analysis proceeds is "the South"; whereas we might imagine that the real nuts and bolts of the movement took place in places as diverse as Selma, Little Rock, Montgomery, and the cotton fields and hamlets of Lowndes County.</p><p>This really is the point of the discussion here. McAdam's book functions largely to lay out "theories of the middle range" about the factors that facilitate or inhibit mobilization around shared grievances, and he illustrates these theories with examples from the history of civil rights activism in the South during the time period. The central interest of the book is theoretical and explanatory, and it is illuminating. But we can imagine a different kind of study that would incorporate much more attention to the specifics of the processes and events of mobilization in various places across the South. Such a study would result in a book consisting of a handful of moderately detailed case studies, along with sociological commentary on the events and processes that are uncovered in these various episodes. </p><p>It is suggestive that <a href="https://amzn.to/43PgDCN">Dynamics of Contention</a>, co-authored in 2001 by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, takes just such an approach -- sociological theorizing embedded within detailed exposition of important case studies of contention. And given the emphasis that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly give in the 2001 book on contingency and variation across cases, we might argue that McAdam's study of the Civil Rights movement is couched at too high a level of generalization after all. It would be more instructive if it provided a more granular account of a number of episodes of mobilization, including successes and failures. (This is the reason for returning to Alain Touraine's research on the Polish Solidarity movement (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/06/touraines-method-of-sociological.html">post</a>): Touraine's team did in fact engage in a granular and disaggregated study of the many strands of organization and activism that contributed ultimately to the national Solidarity movement.)</p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-44638707753015962802023-06-06T18:57:00.000-04:002023-06-06T18:57:28.938-04:00Touraine's method of "sociological intervention" applied to contentious politics<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjvXUVLPIqtWIAX1bZOl2AbdunW0Km_7tfAvAhpAX2QQrd2ioyXkIev_ovfBgr-2-uhG7ABak4XcDP43nJ9ijPOnKzC6u8ktyfQihQ-cp6JAalLKfgqV3UA4IYTJzg6tfmIxoeSvN795Rb8eXvMPLm6DKufhNWUk8vQtwxI4maG7sWiWaHheapQKCQ3w/s800/Solidarity-three.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjvXUVLPIqtWIAX1bZOl2AbdunW0Km_7tfAvAhpAX2QQrd2ioyXkIev_ovfBgr-2-uhG7ABak4XcDP43nJ9ijPOnKzC6u8ktyfQihQ-cp6JAalLKfgqV3UA4IYTJzg6tfmIxoeSvN795Rb8eXvMPLm6DKufhNWUk8vQtwxI4maG7sWiWaHheapQKCQ3w/w400-h225/Solidarity-three.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Alain Touraine has been one of the most prolific sociologists in France for at least six decades. Of particular interest to me is his study of the Solidarity Movement in Poland in 1980-1981. In research reported in <a href="https://amzn.to/3OYQEVf">Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980-81</a> Touraine (along with François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki) undertook to understand the occurrence, rise, and consolidation of the Solidarity Movement at that moment in Polish history. (An earlier post provides some discussion of this work; <a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/02/alaine-touraine-on-social-movements.html">link</a>.) This research is a contribution to the sociology of contentious politics, and it is especially noteworthy for the methodology that the research teams pursued.<p></p><p>The Solidarity Movement was a remarkable instance of broad popular mobilization within a Communist dictatorship. As students of contention are common to point out, grievances and discontent are to be found almost everywhere; but organized protest, struggle, and resistance are rare. Successful concerted collective resistance is the exception rather than the rule. So the key scientific problem is to try to discover how this successful mass mobilization came about, and that means conducting investigations to -- </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>identify the diverse motivations and grievances that individual workers experienced in the late 1970s;</li><li>identify the social mechanisms that allowed groups of workers to articulate their grievances and goals together; </li><li>identify the processes of aggregation through which diverse "insurgent" groups in many locations came together into national and sub-national groups; and </li><li>observe the processes through which various groups and leaders arrived at collective strategic and tactical plans through which to attempt to achieve their goals in the face of the armed power of the authoritarian state that Poland possessed at that time. </li></ul><p></p><p>Or in short, how, why, and through what mechanisms did mobilization and protest emerge?</p><p>The approach that Touraine's group took in attempting to discover answers to these questions was a deliberately <i>granular</i> approach. Rather than focusing on high-level statements of grievances, exhortations, and proposed plans of actions by nationally recognized leaders, the Touraine group recognized that this movement took shape through activist participants at the factory and local levels, and that the ideas, grievances, and mental frameworks about possible reforms that would ultimately become the "Solidarity Manifesto" took shape through conversations and debates at the local levels. Accordingly, the research teams gave significant weight to the processes of thought-change that were underway in six industrial centers: Gdansk, Katowice, Warsaw, Szezecin, Wroclaw, and Lodz. </p><p><i>Solidarity was not simply a social and political force which modified the course of Polish history. It was, and is, a movement, a collective will, and its significance goes far beyond the results it has obtained. When the dominated protest and seek liberation, their hopes are never entirely realised: the shadows cast by history remain. But great upsurges like Solidarity bring with them at least the certainty that the behaviour of the dominated is never totally determined by the dominant forces. (5)</i></p><p>The research also paid attention, of course, to the leadership conversations and debates that were occurring within the national movement. But the heart of their analysis derives from the "sociological interventions" at the level of the regional groups of activist workers. Touraine writes, </p><p><i>Because a social movement challenges a situation, it is always the bearer of normative values and orientations. Rather than enclosing the group in a reflexion upon itself, the technique involves opening it up so that it can experiences, in conditions which one might describe as experimental, the practices of the social group or movement to which it sees itself as belonging. (7)</i></p><p>This method resembles the use of focus groups to sort out attitudes, beliefs, and values within a target population; but it is more than that. It is critical and constructive, in the sense that it seeks to elicit from participants the more articulated versions of their beliefs, goals, and grievances. And Touraine suggests that this method is especially relevant for treatment of a social movement, because the ideas and values of participants in a social movement are themselves in a process of change and articulation. The method involves several "discussion leaders" who work to elicit ideas from the group; articulate those ideas in writing; and come back for further discussion and debate in a subsequent meeting. Here is how Marcin Frybes describes the method of "sociological intervention" (<a href="https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=799054">link</a>).</p><p><i>The sociological intervention consists in organizing meetings of groups (composed of eight to fifteen people) in order to discuss a specific issue (which had been proposed and formalized by the sociologists). The group of intervention is not a real group of militants. It brings together individuals who share either the same commitment or the same kind of experience, but who, if it is possible, do not know other members of the group. The Sociological Intervention involves having the same group meet in a neutral area on several (ten or more) occasions in order for them to be able to propose some analytical schemas representing the historical dynamics and the different components of the action (the logic of the action and the levels of the action). During every sociological intervention, the sessions (which take 2 or 3 hours) could be open or closed. (72)</i></p><p>There are two noteworthy aspects of this method. </p><p>First is the localism that it supports. It is entirely possible that the articulations of grievance, goal, and values that emerge from Gdansk will be different from those that emerge from Warsaw. And this is a sociologically important fact; a social movement is not homogeneous across regions and workplaces. </p><p>The second is the interactiveness that the method implies between researcher and "subject". Touraine's view appears to be that the results of these "interventions" come closer to a truthful reflection of the political perceptions and values of the participants than would a survey instrument or a traditional focus group. It is analogous to an in-depth conversation with a group of men and women on the subject of gender equality -- superficial views may be expressed to start, and then more considered and reflective views emerge. But the critic might argue that the investigators have injected their own frameworks into the conversation in ways that lead to a less authentic representation of the political consciousness of the workers of Gdansk or Warsaw. (Frybes refers to subsequent criticisms along these lines; 77.) But Touraine justifies the validity of this method in these terms:</p><p><i>This work of self-analysis does, however, have its limits. Every actor is an ideologist, in the sense that he produces a representation of the situation in which he finds himself, and that that representation corresponds to his own interests. No actor can become a disinterested analyst. The researcher must therefore intervene more directly. But at this point a double difficulty arises. On the one hand, if he adopts the attitude of a remote and objective observer, he cannot reach the very thing which he seeks to understanding: the coldness of objectivity will hold him back from the heat of the social movement. Conversely, if he identifies with the actors' struggle, he ceases to be an analyst and becomes nothing more than a doctrinaire ideologist; in this case, his role becomes entirely negative. The method's response to this difficulty is to say that the researcher must identify not with the actors' struggle in itself, but with the highest possible meaning of that struggle, which is nothing other than the social movement. (7)</i></p><p>The method is defended, that is, because it helps to elucidate the process of the formation of the collective will that eventually characterized the movement. And this implies that Touraine believes the active and critical nature of the research -- the open-ended discussions with the various groups, and the effort to formulate these ideas in writing -- illuminates the processes through which the agency of workers and other participants in a social movement find their ground in the processes of contention in which they are involved.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-74584126094735502222023-06-02T19:20:00.001-04:002023-06-02T21:06:33.738-04:00Photographs from the Holocaust<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCRmJiX7VvG76PhUuHPhyLd-H37eEziKUd9ytWg1wCUd9QJcnzlvOSzXFa9S08lIsg9l8YDEwlCieBEyF_83n2FFEelmpenXS84SqxpukP3xJ3ZJVBUIrOtwUdnQLAb2UfkzMoERTdtT2gcPlFo5Op2EcnZaMjGIeaHYpRwZ-TCiDIPKcLzAUCqQX1w/s800/rapoports_memorial6b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="577" data-original-width="800" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCRmJiX7VvG76PhUuHPhyLd-H37eEziKUd9ytWg1wCUd9QJcnzlvOSzXFa9S08lIsg9l8YDEwlCieBEyF_83n2FFEelmpenXS84SqxpukP3xJ3ZJVBUIrOtwUdnQLAb2UfkzMoERTdtT2gcPlFo5Op2EcnZaMjGIeaHYpRwZ-TCiDIPKcLzAUCqQX1w/w400-h289/rapoports_memorial6b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>image: Warsaw Ghetto Memorial 1948 (detail)</i></div><p></p><p>An earlier post analyzed Wendy Lower's stunningly original treatment of a single photograph of a 1941 mass killing in the town of Miropol, Ukraine (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2021/09/probing-atrocity-in-miropol.html">link</a>). The photograph captures the murder of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and her child by German soldiers and Ukrainian militiamen. After extensive investigation Lower was able to determine the identities of the victim, several of the killers, and the photographer. Like many photos documenting the atrocities of the Holocaust, this photograph was taken by a member of the German armed forces, a Slovak named Lubomir Škrovina. Initially Lower takes him to be an accomplice or collaborator, but eventually discovers that he was a dissident and a supporter of the Slovak resistance movement. She finds that Škrovina was concerned to record for the outside world the atrocities he witnessed under German occupation. In fact, Škrovina was a resister, not a collaborator.</p><p>Now consider some of the best-known photographs from the Holocaust and their provenance. Some of these images come from the merciless destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto following the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A largescale <i>aktion</i> was planned by the SS to put down the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in early 1943. The action was conducted by <i>SS-Brigadeführer</i> Jürgen Stroop, and it resulted in the deaths of 13,000 Jewish residents immediately. In the aftermath almost all of the 50,000 survivors were dispatched to the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka. </p><p>We must ask a crucial question: how do we happen to have these photographs? Because the Nazi state was interested in documenting the success of its plans to exterminate the Jews of Poland and all of Europe. These photos were taken by a German military photographer at the orders of Stroop, to record the "efficiency" and completeness of the operation. Triumphal volumes of these photos were subsequently conveyed to Himmler and to the supreme commander of the SS, and eventually the collection of photos made their way into the Nuremberg trials. Originally titled "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!", the collection is now referred to as the "Stroop Report". </p><p>Perhaps the most powerful and widely known photograph of the Holocaust comes from the Stroop collection, the "Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto" image (reproduced below). It is an emotionally wrenching image of a group of adults and children with their hands raised being forced out of a Warsaw bunker by German soldiers. In the center of the image is a boy, apparently 8-10 years old, with his hands raised, and a German soldier in the background with a submachine gun aimed in his direction. The tragic inevitability of this group of innocent human beings at the power of ruthless armed men is a powerful emblem of the cruelty and remorselessness of the Holocaust. And what about the Nazi soldier? His identity is now known. His name was <i>SS-Rottenführer</i> Josef Blösche, and he was a notorious genocider who had joined the Nazi Party in 1938. This was no "ordinary man" along the lines of the policemen treated in Christopher Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (<a href="https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-thinking-about-european-genocide.html">link</a>). (Blösche appears in several photos in the Stroop collection.) Blösche was convicted of war crimes, including murder of some 2,000 people, and was executed in Leipzig (GDR) in 1969. During his trial he was questioned about the moment captured in this photograph:</p><p><i>Judge: "You were with a submachine gun...against a small boy that you extracted from a building with his hands raised. How did those inhabitants react in those moments?"</i></p><p><i>Blösche: "They were in tremendous dread."</i></p><p><i>Judge: "This reflects well in that little boy. What did you think?"</i></p><p><i>Blösche: "We witnessed scenes like these daily. We could not even think." (</i><i>Dan </i><i>Porat, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (Hebrew). Dvir, 2013; quoted in Wikipedia (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bl%C3%B6sche">link</a>))</i></p><p>Here are three especially powerful images from the Stroop file, including the "Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto". Blösche appears in the first and third images, and may also figure in the second image.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0c0-OEFsdpYLVFe7144b5HkyHWF_8T2ZzZSVh3qcgjnTgWEIGjxhyaSOhp_GKOPPguF5bA2Ztt-uvUK7Ap4bUflSuqWW0-Kh1ytjFKXdl6Ux9V8PnfpmOoBRSgy3chxSVHElAk69sQIXzNw3rrv4OTXceLSTfAxVP-8Yzc8pI78qyciSxMFVkKLfX9Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1082" data-original-width="1600" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0c0-OEFsdpYLVFe7144b5HkyHWF_8T2ZzZSVh3qcgjnTgWEIGjxhyaSOhp_GKOPPguF5bA2Ztt-uvUK7Ap4bUflSuqWW0-Kh1ytjFKXdl6Ux9V8PnfpmOoBRSgy3chxSVHElAk69sQIXzNw3rrv4OTXceLSTfAxVP-8Yzc8pI78qyciSxMFVkKLfX9Q=w400-h270" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxLojvO4Ix2W0sBVEsUnuplZbFF0HOR2LGxP3OlLHvbaZyN_Q-MUv9u_bQE2HhRvAFmWcG3IHRzmLHCIfeR9SHRJ8jE5gQ4OVFq5UyWS8eUaLNf5oOn56EoqXG8l_dgIxpeOUSLIbfoJjkjvMDu5QN_KDMrmmksq8HpTcgCw5bDeiiLiugzd7zLtCJYA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxLojvO4Ix2W0sBVEsUnuplZbFF0HOR2LGxP3OlLHvbaZyN_Q-MUv9u_bQE2HhRvAFmWcG3IHRzmLHCIfeR9SHRJ8jE5gQ4OVFq5UyWS8eUaLNf5oOn56EoqXG8l_dgIxpeOUSLIbfoJjkjvMDu5QN_KDMrmmksq8HpTcgCw5bDeiiLiugzd7zLtCJYA=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhL5vDOeSwlsEkBx8nI9OxErxs8SsAqx037mComuaY-kEUjc8xQqy0OuU2AtnL1NugYBR_Si0Mg35hCqakVqRlqpIdxsK3DOmxEtSvcshUHC-GBCPa-9z88sblFOW2sriSc88jhN1Ay0t4ra23BUl5EIKLC8RqVZ6qTMvrlHrO4jg-0n0bPYzuj0K-fuQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1964" data-original-width="2766" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhL5vDOeSwlsEkBx8nI9OxErxs8SsAqx037mComuaY-kEUjc8xQqy0OuU2AtnL1NugYBR_Si0Mg35hCqakVqRlqpIdxsK3DOmxEtSvcshUHC-GBCPa-9z88sblFOW2sriSc88jhN1Ay0t4ra23BUl5EIKLC8RqVZ6qTMvrlHrO4jg-0n0bPYzuj0K-fuQ=w400-h284" width="400" /></a></div><br />These are historically important images of a tragic moment in history. But they raise a difficult question: how should photographs like these be used? They are doubly charged with moral valence: they depict tragic and evil events in which pain and death are imposed on innocent people; they were produced by the perpetrators of that evil history; and they were produced for the purpose of glorifying the "successes" of the Nazi plan of extermination. All of the civilians in these photos are almost certainly doomed -- either immediately in the streets of Warsaw or in the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka. So how can we treat these photos with the dignity that their human subjects deserve, while at the same time allowing the viewer to learn important aspects of the history of the Shoah that urgently need to be understood? (Recall the profound insights Wendy Lower reached in her analysis of an equally powerful and tragic image.)<div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the question answers itself: treat images like these with the respect and dignity that the subjects deserve; and do so solely for purposes that lead to greater understanding of these terrible events -- not for entertainment, not for extraneous "marketing" purposes. For example, the World Wrestling Entertainment corporation recently used footage from Auschwitz to advertise an upcoming match. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum released a compelling statement: “Exploiting the site that became a symbol of enormous human tragedy is shameless and insults the memory of all victims of Auschwitz”. WWE subsequently apologized (<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/business/wrestlemania-auschwitz/index.html">link</a>). </div><div><br /></div><div>We could say the same about careless and unthinking uses of these black-and-white photographs for purposes other than respectful understanding and remembrance. <p></p><p>(A full file of the Stroop Report photos is available <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AStroop_Report_photographs_-_NARA_copy.pdf&page=1">here</a>. Here are brief historical accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (<a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/warsaw-ghetto.html">link</a>, <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/photographs-warsaw-ghetto/stroop-collection.html">link</a>) and a video exhibition recording survivors' experiences from Yad Vashem (<a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ghetto_testimonies/index.asp?gclid=CjwKCAjwpuajBhBpEiwA_ZtfhatzpJm6er0DGF9c_uF2ShiWRk4DjNhb6kl54KDm6udBHnX4tJdn_RoCFD8QAvD_BwE">link</a>).)</p><p><br /></p></div>Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.com3