Who was Angelo Herndon?

In a previous post I quoted Langston Hughes' 1938 poem "The Kids Who Die", which is very powerful in the context of our current crisis of police use of deadly force against black men. "Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi / Organizing sharecroppers / Kids will die in the streets of Chicago / Organizing workers / Kids will die in the orange groves of California / Telling others to get together / Whites and Filipinos, / Negroes and Mexicans, / All kinds of kids will die / Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment / And a lousy peace." In the third stanza Hughes writes "To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together". Who was Angelo Herndon?

Herndon was a self-educated advocate and organizer for workers' rights and racial equality in the 1930s. He describes his early life of labor and social activism in Let Me Live, published in 1937 when he was only twenty-four years old. His life and arrest and conviction in Georgia for insurrection are described in Charles Martin's The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. As a teenager Herndon worked as a laborer and miner under highly exploitative conditions, and eventually became an organizer for workers' rights and racial equality. Introduced to the Communist Party in the early 1930s, he found the party to be the first organization he had encountered that was not racist, and he joined the party and became an organizer for the Unemployment Council in Atlanta. In 1932 he was arrested by Atlanta police and accused of insurrection, and was convicted on the basis of his possession of Communist literature. He was defended by the International Legal Defense, affiliated with the Communist Party. His case went to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case twice in 1935. Finally in 1937 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and found that Georgia's anti-insurrection law was unconstitutional. Law professor Kendall Thomas refers to the Supreme Court decision of Herndon v. Lowry as "generally acknowledged as one of the great civil liberties decisions of the 1930s" (link).

Herndon was a radical and articulate advocate for workers' rights for both white and black workers, and he was very willing to challenge Jim Crow racism when he saw it. Kendall Thomas refers to Let Me Live as an example of "the popular tradition of Afro-American resistance literature", and an instance of "insurgent political consciousness among African-Americans at one key moment in our national past" (2610). As a young man writing Let Me Live, Herndon was scathing in his descriptions of African-American leaders for racial justice including W.E.B. Du Bois, on the ground that they were not radical enough in their attacks on white racism. Quoting Thomas again, "The Angelo Herndon case powerfully underscores the extent to which the history of the struggle of Afro-American people against an oppressive cultural (social, political, and economic) order has also always been the history of a struggle against an oppressive discursive or symbolic order."

The most powerful political organization that influenced Herndon in his teens and twenties was the Communist Party USA. It appears that the Communist Party's program, leaders, and strategies were quite different in the American South, and were adapted to addressing the injustices of Jim Crow racism. Robin Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression is a detailed history of black Communism in Alabama. It is a truly fascinating book to read. Here is how Kelley describes the Alabama Communist Party in the preface:

Built from scratch by working people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, the Alabama Communist Party was enveloped by the cultures and ideas of its constituency. Composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, the Alabama cadre also drew a small circle of white folks—whose ranks swelled or diminished over time—ranging from ex-Klansmen to former Wobblies, unemployed male industrial workers to iconoclastic youth, restless housewives to renegade liberals.

What emerged was a malleable movement rooted in a variety of different pasts, reflecting a variety of different voices, and incorporating countless contradictory tendencies. The movement's very existence validates literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's observation that a culture is not static but open, “capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is exceeding its own boundaries.”

The experiences of Alabama Communists, however, suggest that racial divisions were far more fluid and Southern working-class consciousness far more complex than most historians have realized. The African-Americans who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race and class oppression as a totality. The Party and its various auxiliaries served as vehicles for black working-class opposition on a variety of different levels ranging from antiracist activities to intraracial class conflict. Furthermore, the CP attracted some openly bigoted whites despite its militant antiracist slogans. The Party also drew women whose efforts to overcome gender-defined limitations proved more decisive to their radicalization than did either race or class issues.

It is genuinely fascinating to see how the ideas of Marx and Engels were considered, debated, and reshaped in the context of racist capitalism in the American south. Herndon's memoir provides numerous examples of his excitement at finding in Marx the language and ideas that he had been seeking to articulate his own construction of the relationship between white owners and black workers. Here is how Herndon paraphrases the Communist Manifesto in his own words (as a man of about twenty): 

The worker has no power. All he possesses is the power of his hands and his brains. It is his ability to produce things. It is only natural, therefore, that he should try and get as much as he can for his labor. To make his demands more effective he is obliged to band together with other workers into powerful labor organizations, for there is strength in numbers. The capitalists, on the other hand, own all the factories, the mines and the government. Their only interest is to make as much profit as they can. They are not concerned with the well-being of those who work for them. We see, therefore, that the interests of the capitalists and the workers are not the same. In fact, they are opposed to each other. What happens? A desperate fight takes place between the two. This is known as the class struggle. (Let Me Live, 82)

Following his release in 1937 Herndon continued to combine activism with literature where he gained some prominence, and he co-edited a short-lived journal, Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture, with Ralph Ellison for a short time. Herndon left the Communist Party in the late 1940s and died in 1997. (This entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia provides a few biographical details; link.)

Looking into the life of Angelo Herndon -- stimulated by reading the poetry of Langston Hughes -- I am struck once again by the fundamental multiplicity and plurality of history. It is sometimes tempting to tell a unified narrative of a large historical process -- the rise of liberalism, the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equality, or the development of radical populism -- as if there were a single main current that characterizes the process. But in reality, almost any historical epoch is a swirling process of tension, conflict, and competing groups, and many stories must be told. This is certainly true in the case of African-American history, where radically different visions of the future and conceptions of needed strategies were at work at any given time. The distance between an Angelo Herndon and a W.E.B. Du Bois is as great as that between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Eldridge Cleaver or Stokely Carmichael. And yet all of their stories are part of the long history of struggle for emancipation, equality, and dignity that America has lived. That is perhaps part of the meaning of Langston Hughes' refrain: "(America never was America to me.)"

The second primitive accumulation

One of the more memorable parts of Capital is Marx's description of the “so-called primitive accumulation of capital” — the historical process where rural people were dispossessed of access to land and forced into industrial employment in cities like Birmingham and Manchester (link). It seems as though we’ve seen another kind of primitive accumulation in the past thirty years — the ruin of well-paid manufacturing jobs based on unionized labor, the disappearance of local retail stores, the extinction of bookstores and locally owned hardware stores, all of which offered a large number of satisfying jobs. We’ve seen a new set of bad choices for displaced workers — McDonald’s servers, Walmart greeters, and Amazon fulfillment workers. And this structural economic change threatens to create a permanent under-class of workers earning just enough to get by.

So what is the future of work and class in advanced economies? Scott Shane's major investigative story in the New York Times describing Amazon's operations in Baltimore (link) makes for sobering reading on this question. The story describes work conditions in an Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore that documents the intensity, pressure, and stress created for Amazon workers by Amazon's system of work control. This system depends on real-time monitoring of worker performance, with automatic firings coming to workers who fall short on speed and accuracy after two warnings. Other outlets have highlighted the health and safety problems created by the Amazon system, including this piece on worker safety in the Atlantic by Will Evans; link. It is a nightmarish description of a work environment, and hundreds of thousands of workers are employed under these conditions.

Imagine the difference you would experience as a worker in the hardware store mentioned in the New York Times story (driven out of business by online competition) and as a worker in an Amazon fulfillment center. In the hardware store you provide value to the business and the customers; you have social interaction with your fellow workers, your boss, and the customers; you work in a human-scale enterprise that actually cares whether you live or die, whether you are sick or well; and to a reasonable degree you have a degree of self-direction in your work. Your expertise in home improvement, tools, and materials is valuable to the customers, which brings them back for the next project, and it is valuable to you as well. You have the satisfaction of having knowledge and skills that make a difference in other people’s lives. In the fulfillment center your every move is digitally monitored over the course of your 10-hour shift, and if you fall short in productivity or quality after two warnings, you are fired. You have no meaningful relationships with fellow workers — how can you, with the digital quotas you must fulfill every minute, every hour, every day? And you have no — literally no — satisfaction and fulfillment as a human being in your work. The only value of the work is the $15 per hour that you are paid; and yet it is not enough to support you or your family (about $30,000 per year). As technology writer Amy Webb of the Future Today Institute is quoted in the Times article, [It’s not that we may be replaced by robots,] “it’s that we’ve been relegated to robot status.”

What kind of company is that? It is hard to avoid the idea that it is the purest expression that we have ever seen of the ideal type of a capitalist enterprise: devoted to growth, cost avoidance, process efficiency, use of technology, labor control, rational management, and strategic and tactical reasoning based solely on business growth and profit-maximizing calculations. It is a Leviathan that neither Hobbes nor Marx could really have visualized. And social wellbeing — of workers, of communities, of country, of the global future — appears to have no role whatsoever in these calculations. The only affirmative values expressed by the company are “serving the consumer” and being a super-efficient business entity.

What is most worrisome about the Amazon employment philosophy is its single-minded focus on “worker efficiency” at every level, using strict monitoring techniques and quotas to enforce efficient work. And the ability to monitor is increased asymptotically by the use of technology — sensors, cameras, and software that monitor the worker’s every movement. It is the apotheosis of F.W. Taylor’s theories from the 1900s of “scientific management” and time-motion studies. Fundamentally Taylor regarded the worker as a machine-like component of the manufacturing process, whose motions needed to be specified and monitored so as to bring about the most efficient possible process. And, as commentators of many ideological stripes have observed, this is a fundamentally dehumanizing view of labor and the worker. This seems to be precisely the ideal model adopted by Amazon, not only in its fulfillment centers but its delivery drivers, its professional staff, and every other segment of the workforce Amazon can capture.

Business and technology historian David Hounshell presciently noticed the resurgence of Taylorism in a 1988 Harvard Business Review article on “modern manufacturing”; link. (This was well before the advent of online business and technology-based mega-companies.) Here are a few relevant paragraphs from his piece:

Rather than seeing workers as assets to be nurtured and developed, manufacturing companies have often viewed them as objects to be manipulated or as burdens to be borne. And the science of manufacturing has taken its toll. Where workers were not deskilled through extreme divisions of labor, they were often displaced by machinery. For many companies, the ideal factory has been — and continues to be — a totally automated, workerless facility. 

Now in the wake of the eroding competitive position of U.S. manufacturing companies, is it time for an end to Taylor’s management tradition? The books answer in the affirmative, calling for the institution of a less mechanistic, less authoritarian, less functionally divided approach to manufacturing. Dynamic Manufacturing focuses explicitly on repudiating Taylorism, which it takes to be a system of “command and control.” American Business: A Two-Minute Warning is written in a more popular vein, but characterizes U.S. manufacturing methods and the underlying mind-set of manufacturing managers in unmistakably similar ways. Taylorism is the villain and the anachronism. 

Predictably, both books arrive at their diagnoses and prescriptions through their respective evaluations of the “Japanese miracle.” Whereas U.S. manufacturing is rigid and hierarchical, Japanese manufacturing is flexible, agile, organic, and holistic. In the new competitive environment — which favors the company that can continually generate new, high-quality products — the Japanese are more responsive. They will continue to dominate until U.S. manufacturers develop manufacturing units that are, in Hayes, Wheelwright, and Clark’s words, “dynamic learning organizations.” Their book is intended as a primer. (link)

Plainly the more positive ideas associated with positive human resources theory about worker motivation, knowledge, and creativity play no role in Amazon’s thinking about the workplace. And this implies a grim future for work — not only in this company, but in many others who emulate the workplace model pioneered by Amazon.

The abuses of the first fifty years of industrial capitalism eventually came to an end through a powerful union movement. Workers in railroads, textiles, steel, and the automobile industry eventually succeeded in creating union organizations that were able to effectively represent their interests in the workplace. So where is the Amazon worker’s ability to resist? The New York Times story (link) makes it clear that individual workers have almost no ability to influence Amazon’s practices. They can choose not to work for Amazon, but they can’t join a union, because Amazon has effectively resisted unionization. And in places like Baltimore and other cities where Amazon is hiring, the other job choices are even worse (even lower paid, if they exist at all). Amazon makes a great deal of money on their work, and it manages its great initiatives based on their Chaplin-esque speed of completion (one-day delivery). But there is very little ability to change the workplace towards a more human-scale one, and a workplace where the worker’s positive human capacities find fulfillment. An Amazon fulfillment center is anything but that when it comes to the lives of the workers who make it run.

Is there a better philosophy that Amazon might adopt for its work environments? Yes. It is a framework that places worker wellbeing at the same level as efficiency, “1-day delivery” and profitability. It is an approach that gives greater flexibility to shop-floor-level workers, and relaxes to some degree the ever-rising quotas for piece work per minute. It is an approach that sets workplace expectations in a way that fully considers the safety, stress, and health of the workers. It is an approach that embodies genuine respect and concern for its workers — not as public relations initiative, but as a guiding philosophy of the workplace.

There is a hard question and a harder question posed by this idea, however. Is there any reason to think that Amazon will ever evolve in this more humane direction? And harder, is there any reason to think that any large modern corporation can embody these values? Based on the current behavior of Amazon as a company, from top to bottom, the answer to the first question is “no, not unless workers gain real power in the workplace through unionization or some other form of representation in production decisions.” And to the second question, a qualified yes: “yes, a more humane workplace is possible, if there is broad involvement in business decisions by workers as well as shareholders and top executives.” But this too requires a resurgence of some form of organized labor — which our politics of the past 20 years have discouraged at every turn.

Or to quote Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (1770):

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

So where did the dispossessed wind up in nineteenth century Britain? Here is how Engels described the social consequences of this "primitive accumulation" for the working people of Britain in his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England:

It is only when [the observer] has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of civilisation with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them. (30)

This passage, written in 1845, could with minor changes of detail describe the situation of Amazon workers today. "The vast majority ... have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them."

And what about income and standard of living? The graph of median US income by quintile above in constant 2018 dollars tells a very stark story. Since 1967 only the top quintile of household income has demonstrated significant growth (in a timeframe of more than fifty years); and the top 5% of households shows the greatest increase of any group. 80% of US households are barely better off today than they were in 1967; whereas the top 5% of households have increased their incomes by almost 250% in real terms. This has a very clear, unmistakeable implication: that working people, including service workers, industrial workers, and most professionals have received a declining share of the economic product of the nation. Amazon warehouse workers fall in the 2nd-lowest quintile (poorest 21-40%). (It would be very interesting to have a time series of Amazon's wage bill for blue-collar and white-collar wages excluding top management as a fraction of company revenues and net revenues since 2005.)

Here is a relevant post on the possibilities created for a more fair industrial society by the institution of worker-owned enterprises (link), and here is a post on the European system of workers councils (link), a system that gives workers greater input into decisions about operations and work conditions on the shop floor.

Collapse of Eastern European communisms

An earlier post commented on Tony Judt's magnificent book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There I focused on the story he tells of the brutality of the creation of Communist Party dictatorships across Eastern Europe (link). Equally fascinating is his narrative of the abrupt collapse of those states in 1989. In short order the world witnessed the collapse of communism in Poland (June 1989), East Germany (November 1989), Czechoslovakia (November 1989), Bulgaria (November 1989), Romania (December 1989), Hungary (March 1990), and the USSR (December 1991). Most of this narrative occurs in chapter 19.

The sudden collapse of multiple Communist states in a period of roughly a year requires explanation. These were not sham states; they had formidable forces of repression and control; and there were few avenues of public protest available to opponents of the regimes. So their collapse is worth of careful assessment.

There seem to be several crucial ingredients in the sudden collapse of these dictatorships. One is the persistence of an intellectual and practical opposition to Communism and single-party rule in almost all these countries. The brutality of violent repression in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries did not succeed in permanently suppressing opposition based on demands for greater freedom and greater self-determination through political participation. And this was true in the fields of the arts and literature as much as it was in the disciplines of law and politics. Individuals and organizations reemerged at various important junctures to advocate again for political and legal reforms, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even the USSR.

Second was the chronic inability of these states to achieve economic success and rising standards of living for their populations. Price riots in Poland in the 1970s and elsewhere signaled a fundamental discontent by consumers and workers who were aware of the living conditions of people living in other parts of non-Communist Europe. Material discontent was a powerful factor in the repeated periods of organized protest that occurred in several of these states prior to 1989. (Remember the joke from Poland in the 1970s -- "If they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.")

And third was the position taken by Mikhail Gorbachev on the use of force to maintain Communist regimes in satellite countries. The use of violence and armed force had sufficed to quell popular movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in years past. But when Gorbachev made it credible and irreversible that the USSR would no longer use tanks to reinforce the satellite regimes -- for example, in his speech to the United Nations in December 1988 -- local parties were suddenly exposed to new realities. Domestic repression was still possible, but it was no longer obvious that it would succeed.

And the results were dramatic. In a period of months the world witnessed the sudden collapse of Communist rule in country after country; and in most instances the transitions were relatively free of large-scale violence. (The public executions of Romania's Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu on Christmas Day, 1889 were a highly visible exception.)

There seem to be many historical lessons to learn from this short period of history. Particularly sharp are the implications for other single-party dictatorships. So let's reflect on the behavior of the single-party state in China since the mid-1980s. The Chinese party-state has had several consistent action plans since the 1980s. First, it has focused great effort on economic reform, rising incomes, and improving standards of living for the bulk of its population. In these efforts it has been largely successful -- in strong contrast to the USSR and its satellite states. Second, the Chinese government has intensified its ability to control ideology and debate, culminating in the current consolidation of power under President Xi. And third, it used brutal force against the one movement that emerged in 1989 with substantial and broad public involvement, the Democracy Movement. The use of force against demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and other cities in China demonstrated the party's determination to prevent largescale public mobilization with force if needed.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that China's leaders have reflected very carefully on the collapse of single-party states in 1989, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. They appear to have settled on a longterm coordinated strategy aimed at preventing the emergence of the particular factors that led to those political catastrophes. They are committed to fulfilling the expectations of the public that the economy will continue to grow and support rising standards of living for the mass of the population. So economic growth has remained a very high priority. Second, they are vigilant in monitoring ideological correctness, suppressing individuals and groups who continue to advocate for universal human rights, democracy, and individual freedoms. And they are unstinting in providing the resources needed by the state organizations through which censorship, political repression, and ideological correctness are maintained. And finally, they appear to be willing to use overwhelming force if necessary to prevent largescale public protests. The regime seems very confident that a pathway of future development that continues to support material improvement for the population while tightly controlling ideas and public discussions of political issues will be successful. And it is hard to see that this calculation is fundamentally incorrect.

Jobs, basic income, and the future of the techno-market economy

In the dystopian vision of the future described in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, there are few people with normal jobs, regular sources of income, retirement plans, and health insurance. Instead, there are hackers, freelance security guards, software traffickers, criminals at many levels, and a few distant corporations with scientists and managers. It is a grim picture.

But how distant is that future from our current trajectory? Is that pretty much where we are heading? With the effort to shed 24 million Americans from health insurance; with the disappearance of "good" industrial jobs; with the rise of the gig economy; with the super-extreme development of inequalities of income and wealth, based on privileged positions in the financial and tech economies -- do these trends not seem like early-stage Gibson?

Philippe van Parijs has long been an advocate for a very fundamental change to the legal and economic structure of a capitalist democracy, the establishment of a universal basic income for all citizens and legal residents of a country. A recent statement of his position (with Yannick Vanderborght) is Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. The central value that drives van Parijs' social philosophy is "real freedom". And he believes that the creation of a legal commitment to universal basic income within advanced democracies is both politically feasible and desirable for the impact it would have on the levels of freedom enjoyed by the most disadvantaged members of society. Here is how van Parijs and Vanderborght put the fundamental point:

A basic income is not just a clever measure that may help alleviate urgent problems. It is a central pillar of a free society, in which the real freedom to flourish, through work and outside work, will be fairly distributed. It is an essential element of a radical alternative to both old socialism and neoliberalism, of a realistic utopia that offers far more than the defense of past achievements or resistance to the dictates of the global market. It is a crucial part of the sort of vision needed to turn threats into opportunities, resignation into resolution, anguish into hope. (kl 81)

What should be the level of a universal basic income? Parijs and Vanderborght choose as a benchmark the 25th percentile of a country's GDP per capita. In the US this would amount to $1,163 and in Brazil $180 (kl 235). For a US family of five including two adults, this amounts to $2,326 per month -- roughly the current level of the US poverty threshold for a family of five. (Van Parijs and Vanderborght address the relation between the UBI and the poverty threshold; kl 252.)

The current issue of Boston Review includes a forum on "Work, Inequality, Basic Income", with essays and discussions by Brishen Rogers, Philippe van Parijs, Dorian Warren, Tommie Shelby, Diane Coyle, and others. It is "must" reading for anyone concerned about the question of how we can craft an equitable and livable world in the context of a market economy in the coming decades.

Here is how Brishen Rogers describes the idea of universal basic income in his anchor essay:

The idea is simple: the state would provide regular cash grants, ideally sufficient to meet basic needs, as a right of citizenship or lawful residency. Understood as a fundamental right, basic income would be unconditional, not means-tested and not contingent on previous or current employment. It would help sever the link between work and welfare, provide income security for all who are eligible, and perhaps mitigate growing inequality. It could also enable people to provide unpaid work or community service, start new businesses, or get an education. (Forum 14)

Rogers places a great deal of emphasis on the changes in the power relations between capital and labor that are implicit in the technology revolution currently underway. Workers (think Uber drivers or Amazon inventory fulfillers) are more and more disempowered with respect to their conditions of work, including wage levels but also including job satisfaction, job security, workplace safety and health standards, and other features of meaningful work experience. Rogers thinks that basic income is a good idea, but one that needs to be part of a more comprehensive package of reforms.

An alternative case for basic income draws from classic commitments to social democracy, or an economic system in which the state limits corporate power, ensures a decent standard of living for all, and encourages decent work. In the social democratic view, however, a basic income would be only art of the solution to economic and social inequalities -- we also need a revamped public sector and a new and different collective bargaining system. Indeed, without such broader reforms, a basic income could do more harm than good. (15)

Elizabeth Anderson's critique of van Parijs in an earlier Boston Review forum on universal basic income strikes a similar note (link). Anderson believes that the "real libertarian" foundations of van Parijs's arguments for UBI are unconvincing, and they are inconsistent with the broader goal of establishing a just society within the circumstances of a capitalist democracy. Van Parijs over-estimates income relative to other social entitlements. Her summary is straightforward: "I will argue that Van Parijs’s real libertarianism cannot justify a UBI, but that a UBI may have some promise as a supplementary part of a larger social welfare package that is justified on other grounds."

So let's consider whether the establishment of a universal basic income would in fact lead to a substantially better level of quality of life and real freedom for the disadvantaged in a given capitalist democracy. To start, the level of basic income postulated by van Parijs and Vanderborght is by no means comparable to the level of living standards associated with a current unionized American worker. At $18/hour, a single earner family in the automotive manufacturing sector generates about $36,000 per year; with two earners this may rise to $48,000-$72,000 per year, depending on the nature of the second earner's job and number of hours of work. So the universal basic income does not substitute for "good jobs".

But this is perfectly clear to the advocates for a universal basic income. Their vision is not that the UBI is the sole source of income for most people most of the time. Both private employment and social provisioning would also be part of the individual's overall bundle of entitlements.

Contrary to the way in which it is sometimes characterized and to the chagrin of those among its advocates who want to sell it as a radical simplification, a basic income should not be understood as being, by definition, a full substitute for all existing transfers, much less a substitute for the public funding of quality education, quality health care, and other services. (kl 252)

Rather than constituting an all-round solution to the problem of living well in a capitalist democracy, the UBI is a safety net in the context of which individuals can seek out employment of various kinds.

It does not amount to giving up the objective of full employment sensibly interpreted. For full employment can mean two things: full-time paid work for the entire able-bodied part of the population of working age, or the real possibility of getting meaningful paid work for all those who want it. As an objective, the basic income strategy rejects the former but embraces the latter. (kl 617)

Individuals can use their skills and their interests to generate additional income permitting higher levels of prosperity and job satisfaction. And in a country in which access to affordable healthcare and free public education are rights, we can begin to see how van Parijs can assert that UBI would be a foundation for real freedom of choice and life plan.

This, then, is van Parijs's response to Rogers and Anderson: his view too depends upon a host of social-democratic reforms, including access to healthcare, education, and other critical components of quality of life. But this seems to concede the point: the reforms we need are broader than simply establishing UBI. And that seems to be correct. We need social democracy, and UBI may be a valuable component of a full social-democratic regime.

(The moral basis for an extensive state along the lines of the Nordic examples was discussed in a prior post; link. The topic of rapid change in employment opportunities in advanced capitalism came up earlier in a post about "A Jobless Future"; link. Also of interest is a post on the social construction of work; link. And here is a post on alternatives to capitalism; link.)

How is "work" socially constituted?

How does "work" take shape in an advanced manufacturing and service economy? Is the division of labor a natural outcome of technology, or is it the result of a concrete set of social processes involving the strategies and interests of several groups? What kinds of social processes determine the bundle of skills, knowledge, and training that go together to represent a job classification? How is the suite of tasks and activities assigned to a given job arrived at?

Here is a brief description from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of one specific skilled job function within a factory environment, the millwright (link):

Millwrights install, dismantle, repair, reassemble, and move machinery in factories, power plants, and construction sites. Millwrights typically go through a formal apprenticeship program that lasts about 4 years. Programs are usually a combination of technical instruction and on-the-job training. Others learn their trade through a 2-year associate’s degree program in industrial maintenance. Employment of millwrights is expected to decline 5 percent from 2010 to 2020. Despite declining employment, job opportunities should be good for those with a broad set of skills in machine maintenance.

Here is a description of a low-skill job function, the hand laborer and material mover (link):

Hand laborers and material movers transport objects without using machines. Some workers move freight, stock, or other materials around storage facilities; others clean vehicles; some pick up unwanted household goods; and still others pack materials for moving. Generally, hand laborers and material movers need no work experience or minimum level of education. Employers require only that applicants be physically able to do the work. Employment of hand laborers and material movers is projected to grow 14 percent from 2010 to 2020, as fast as the average for all occupations. Job prospects should be good because the need to replace workers who leave the occupations should create a large number of job openings.

And here is a highly skilled industrial job, the mechanical engineer (link):

Mechanical engineering is one of the broadest engineering disciplines. Mechanical engineers design, develop, build, and test mechanical devices, including tools, engines, and machines. Mechanical engineers need a bachelor’s degree. A graduate degree is typically needed for promotion into managerial positions. Mechanical engineers who sell services publicly must be licensed in all states and the District of Columbia. Employment of mechanical engineers is expected to grow 9 percent from 2010 to 2020, slower than the average for all occupations. Job prospects may be best for those who stay abreast of the most recent advances in technology.

So how is it determined which tasks are assigned to which classifications? And what social processes determine which individuals receive the right kind of training to qualify for any of these jobs?

One researcher who has contributed a lot to this issue is Charles Sabel in Work and Politics: The Division of Labour in Industry and The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities For Prosperity (with Michael Piore).  Sabel's work is particularly insightful in the light it sheds on the sociological processes and structures through which the bundles of skills needed in individual workers are determined and then transmitted through a training regime. Here is how Sabel frames the problem I'm interested in here:

This is an essay about the reasons industrialists create different kinds of factory jobs, about why workers put up with these jobs when they do, and about what they want when they do not. It shows how workers' ideas of self-interest, born of the principles of honor and dignity they bring to the factory, can be transformed by workplace struggles. And it shows how these struggles, colliding or combining with conflicts in the larger society and between nations, can reshape technologies, markets, and factory hierarchies. (Work and Politics, 1)

Notice the most fundamental idea being advanced here: that the natures of work, jobs, and implementation of technology are all the result of active back-and-forth negotiations over time between workers and owners.  The structure of work doesn't follow from a certain level or kind of technology; instead it is the result of an extended "game" in which the players seek out definitions of work and technology that suit them. Workplace struggles "reshape" technologies and jobs, and the division of labor is a socially mediated and historically conditioned reality.

This chapter argues that the capitalist organization of production creates clusters of jobs offering workers systematically different opportunities for the use and acquisition of skills, and for regular employment. The capitalists create jobs of various types, and the worker tries to find one suited to his ambition. (31)

Essentially the labor process is defined by several constraints, imperatives, and interests.  Products can be made for use and for sale in a market through a variety of combinations of tools, skills, and labor.  By subdividing tasks, economists and managers since Adam Smith have recognized that it is possible to increase efficiency or quality or both. And profit-oriented owners and managers have recognized that skilled workers can demand more for their services than unskilled workers.  So pursuing a combination of specialized tools and machines with repetitive, unskilled labor has been a profit-maximizing strategy since Henry Ford began experimenting with the assembly line.  "Fordism" is a specific economic and technological system, involving factory production for a mass market, specialized tools and machines, and mass unskilled labor.

There are many alternatives that exist for defining skill regimes that would get the job done for a given level of technology and organization. The Fordist regime separates workers into a low-skill group where only a minimal amount of training is required and the worker's activities are limited to a repetitive and simple set of actions, a smaller group of high-skill technicians, and a group of supervisors who oversee the activities of both groups. In this Fordist regime the low-skill workers are not expected to exercise independent judgment or to function as creative problem-solvers. The high-skill technicians are assigned a greater degree of independence and scope for problem-solving.

But, as Sabel observed in an important 1985 article with Jonathan Zeitlin ("Historical Alternatives to Mass Production"; link), the Fordist regime is not the only solution possible for advanced science-based production. There were alternatives. One such alternative is a high-skill, high-independence paradigm where ordinary production workers employ much more sophisticated skills and knowledge to carry out the production process. Here is how they describe their central argument:

Mass production -- the combination of single-purpose machines and unskilled labour to produce standard goods -- has been throughout this century the undisputed emblem of industrial efficiency. No more. Powerful currents of technological change are stirring up this sedimented lesson of the past. The development of numerically controlled machine tools which can be programmed to perform many different tasks automatically; the spreading use of such machines in highly competitive small firms in industries as diverse as engineering and textiles and regions as distinct as Baden-Wurtemberg and Emilia-Romagna; the increasing capacity of some large firms in Japan, West Germany, and the United states to switch production rapidly from product to product; the creation of new jobs which blur the distinction between skilled and unskilled work -- all these churn up established understandings of modern production methods. Engineers and managers take increasingly seriously the possibility that economic success in the future may depend on the flexible use of multi-purpose or universal machines and skilled labour to make an ever changing assortment of semi-customized products: a system that reverses the principles of mass production. (133)

The Volvo production system illustrates this regime. This approach bundles the market advantages associated with flexible production with a skills regime that focuses on teams of producers with advanced and flexible skills and an extensive degree of production independence.

These questions are pressing today for two important reasons. First, many of the "good" jobs that existed in the United States in manufacturing have either disappeared or have suffered major reductions in compensation. Moreover, the manufacturing jobs that are returning to the US are coming back at much lower rates of pay.  And jobs have disappeared for reasons that are very consistent with Sabel's argument: companies have made deliberate, strategic decisions to de-skill labor within their operations and to offshore some parts of the production process. Or in other words, companies have restructured work to increase profits. That is the logic of a capitalist economy.

Second, most observers accept the idea that worker productivity in the future -- and therefore worker compensation -- will be determined by the level of knowledge and skill the worker possesses. High skill and high knowledge production adds a lot of value to the product, and is compensated accordingly. But companies have a choice to make, whether they adopt production processes that depend on a smaller number of high-skill and high-pay workers, or processes that depend on a larger number of low-skill, low-pay workers.  And the company is of course aware of the terms of bargaining that exist with regard to these two groups; the high-skill group is more able to exercise influence in the bargaining process and thereby increase its compensation more rapidly.  Deskilling of the production process is therefore a tactical choice on the part of the employer.

This line of thought seems to have disjunctive consequences, neither of which is promising for the future of the American middle class: either companies will restructure their activities to incorporate a higher mix of high-skill workers in substantially smaller numbers; or they will continue to expand activities around a low-skill model while exercising substantial downward pressure on wages.  And this implies that employment growth will be slow, or else there will be more robust jobs growth in low-pay jobs leading to a falling standard of living for the majority of workers.

(Here is a post on Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio's version of this kind of analysis in The Jobless Future: Second Edition.)

Transnational labor activism

One of the characteristics that observers notice when they consider the anti-globalization protests of the past decade or so is the extent of transnational relationships that exist among activists and activist organizations. Sidney Tarrow provides a scholarly examination of these kinds of movements in The New Transnational Activism, where he tries to understand the organizational and situational circumstances that either facilitate or impede calls to popular action concerning large issues that affect many countries.  (Here is a post on transnational activism and an earlier post on anti-NATO protests in Strasbourg a couple of years ago.)  This is important work, and transnational activism is certainly an important feature of the world scene today.  Our attention, though, is often restricted to the recent past when we think about transnational activism.  So it is useful to consider earlier periods in the twentieth century in which movements succeeded at some level at bringing together multi-national coalitions in support of an important social or political cause.

One important instance is the international alliances that emerged in the radical end of the non-Communist labor movement in the 1950s.  Nicola Pizzolato's recent "Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950-1970)" in a recent issue of international review of social history (link) is a great case study in this light. Pizzolata provides a very useful and detailed account of the political and theoretical developments that transpired in Detroit and Turin among activist workers and thinkers during this period. It is well worth reading for that reason alone. But it also provides a concrete instance of a situation in which workers and activists, located within the industrial system in different parts of the world, were able to form their own understandings and strategies concerning those industrial realities, and the degree to which there was meaningful interaction among these groups.

The piece is particularly interesting to me for the light it sheds on the development of an important strand of radical African-American thought during the 1950s and 1960s. (Also because I had the remarkable pleasure of meeting one of the principal players in the story a few years ago, Grace Lee Boggs.) African-American militancy took a different shape within the industrial labor force than it did in much of the rest of America, and it is a story worth understanding. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin's Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution is a valuable monograph on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.  Manning Marable provides a thoughtful foreword.  Marable provides a quick sketch of the development of the movement:

By 1968, more than 2.5 million African Americans belonged to the AFL-CIO. Yet the vast majority of black workers were marginalized and alienated from labor's predominantly white conservative leadership.  In 1967, black militant workers at Ford Motor Company's automobile plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, initiated the United Black Brothers. In 1968, African-American steelworkers in Maryland established the Shipyard Workers for Job Equality to oppose the discriminatory policies and practices of both their union and management.  Similar black workers' groups, both inside and outside trade unions, began to develop throughout the country.  The more moderate liberal to progressive tendency of this upsurgence of black workers was expressed organizationally in 1972 with the establishment of the Coalition of Black Trade Unions.

A much more radical current of black working-class activism developed in Detroit. Only weeks following King's assassination, black workers a tthe Detroit Dodge Main plant of Chrysler Corporation staged a wildcat strike, protesting oppressive working conditions.... The most militant workers established DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement.  DRUM soon inspired the initiation of other independent black workers' groups in metro Detroit, such as FRUM, at Ford's massive River Rouge plant, and ELRUM, at Chrysler's Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant. (ix-x)

Here is how Pizzolato describes the situation:

In Detroit and Turin, these radicals saw the car factories as the key loci for change -- laboratories for a possible "autonomist" working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system -- and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization, beyond existing labour organization. (5)

The "Correspondence" was a post-Trotskyist version of anti-capitalist theory and activism, rooted in the Detroit auto industry and involving names that are still familiar in Detroit: James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, General Baker, Martin Glaberman, Charles Denby, William Gorman and George Rawick (6). (Parenthetically, Wayne State University enters the story at several junctures as a locus for theory and debate.) This segment of politically engaged workers was as critical of organized labor as they were of the companies. A key part of the political activism of the Correspondence consisted in its willingness to confront the racial divisions that existed in society and within the factory.  "[Charles Denby's Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal] took a particularly strong stand in support of both the possibility of interracial co-operation among workers and the necessity of an autonomous black struggle" (10).

The spontaneous discontent breeding in the factories and in the working-class neighbourhoods of Detroit and Turin in the late 1960s was captured by some radical groups that had incorporated into their programmes many of the insights gleaned in the previous fifteen years by the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Correspondence, Quaderni Rossi, and Classe Operaia -- groups that could engage in a dialogue because, notwithstanding local differences, they located themselves in a similar position within a global opposition to capitalism. (21)

Essentially the developments that Pizzolato describes in Detroit and Turin represent a sustained, theoretically powerful attempt by radical thinkers and activists to rethink the role of working people within a progressive vision. There were a number of strands, but core was the "Johnson-Forest Tendency", deriving from C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. The perspective is "autonomist" -- it rejects the idea that Communist parties, workers' states, or bureaucratic union organizations do a good job of furthering workers' interests. Rather, workers need to self-organize, both in terms of production and in terms of strategies and actions. Pizzolato makes the point that it is anti-Fordist, anti-Soviet, and anti-bureaucratic union. And, like the Occupy Wall Street movement today, its theorists attempted to go beyond existing radical dogma for a new radical diagnosis.

The narrative of theory, publication, and activism that Pizzolato offers for both Detroit and Turin is fascinating in its own terms. But equally interesting, and crucial to his argument, is his documentation of the transnational connections that existed within this period of radical thinking and action. C. L. R. James was an internationally recognized voice. But the influence of the Detroit radical groups on European and Italian working class activism required more direct linkages. What were they? Here are a few of the specific linkages that Pizzolato cites.

For six months in 1948 Grace Lee Boggs resided in Paris and established a "daily collaboration" with the members of the group[Socialism ou Barbarie]. (12)

In his native Cremona, Montaldi founded in 1957 a group called Unita Proletaria, that distanced itself from the Communist Party and established direct contact with Socialisme ou Barbarie, Correspondence, News and Letters, And European groups that espoused the same line: the British Solidarity for Workers' Power, the Belgian Pouvoir Ouvrier, the Dutch Spartakus and others. (13)

In addition to theoretical debates and developments that extended across these specific transnational networks, the examples of large labor actions in 1967 and 1968 -- Renault in France, FIAT in Turin, and the Big Three in Detroit -- served to communicate strategies, tactics, and a spirit of boldness from one group to another.

It was in this context that the intellectual and personal contacts between Detroit and Turin radicals dating back to the 1950s were rekindled by the almost simultaneous workers' struggles in the car factories. (24)

The Italians were also keen to know about Detroit, as very little leaked out in the Italian press about labour unrest in the American cities. "Everyone is asking [for] information about the auto strikes in [the] States," wrote Gambino to Glaberman in 1970. (26)

African-American activist John Watson soon traveled to several cities in Italy in 1970 (his second trip), to share the news about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

What is fascinating about this whole story is the light it sheds on the formation of efforts at understanding and challenging a complex social order. There is an emphasis throughout much of this movement on taking workers' experiences within the factory as the starting point. This implicitly challenges the preoccupation of the Old Left on the canonical ideas of Marxism and Leninism -- the structure of capitalism, the vanguard party. But parallel to this independence of thinking is an independence in acting. The activists within this loose transnational community put the emphasis on workers' actions, not the actions of bureaucratized organizations (parties, unions, states). And both aspects of this seem to have some resonance with the anti-globalization movement of the past 20 years.

Is justice a security issue?

Most people would probably say they would prefer to live in a more just world to a less just one. There is a strong moral basis for preferring justice. But is this a consideration that states and large international organizations need to take into account as they design their strategies and plans for serving their present and future interests? Do national governments have good practical reasons to think about the consequences their policies and actions may have on the circumstances of justice in the world? What about policies and actions through which states attempt to secure their future economic wellbeing -- do policy makers need to pay attention to the social justice consequences of these actions?

There is a strong empirical and historical case for thinking that the answer to this question is "yes." Injustice is a source of resentment, indignation, and conflict. In the long run, the victims of injustice will not be ignored. Justice is a security issue for states and supra-national organizations, and simple prudence demands that policy makers take it into account. To put a simple label on this idea, justice is a security issue.

Here is a European Union statement about its longterm interests that makes this point fairly explicitly (link):

In the context of ever-increasing globalisation, the internal and external aspects of security are inextricably linked. Flows of trade and investment, the development of technology and the spread of democracy have brought prosperity and freedom to many people, while others have perceived globalisation as a cause of frustration and injustice. In much of the developing world, poverty and diseases such as AIDS give rise to security concerns, and in many cases economic failure is linked to political problems and violent conflict. Security is a precondition for development. Competition for natural resources is likely to create further turbulence. Energy dependence is a special concern for Europe.

What are the theoretical and historical arguments for this conclusion? Here are several.

On the side of theory, several points are well established. Chronic and unrelieved poverty leaves people with low attachment to their own societies and less for the global community. The frustration of very basic human needs is bound to fuel indignation and resistance. So poverty and deprivation are causes of resistance. But there is also evidence that inequality itself has negative consequences for a society's health; this is the central finding of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (link). Finally, the social psychology created by a system that is perceived to be unfair and exploitative is likely to breed resistance and lawless action. Barrington Moore, Jr. was right when in Injustice he wrote:

Without strong moral feelings and indignation human beings will not act against the social order. In this sense moral convictions become an equally necessary element for changing the social order, along with alterations in the economic structure. 469

Gareth Stedman-Jones summarizes Barrington Moore's conclusion in these terms: "His argument is that human beings in stratified societies accept hierarchies of authority, so long as these hierarchies are not merely imposed by force, but based upon an 'unwritten' social contract, which binds together dominant and subordinate groups in a set of mutual obligations" (link).

So there are good empirical reasons, based in social psychology and the study of contentious politics, for expecting that injustice breeds conflict.

Are there historical demonstrations of the consequences of injustice for disorder? There are. We have the examples of slave revolts throughout the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries; anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia following World War II; the sustained resistance of the Burmese and East Timor peoples to dictatorship; and the sustained struggle for equal rights in the United States by African Americans, sometimes punctuated by major urban riots. In each case a set of social institutions had been created that were profoundly unjust for a sizable population, and this population gathered resolve and courage in opposing those arrangements.

So the conclusion seems clear. If we want to have a world in which there is a sustainable level of the rule of law and a low level of social conflict, we need to invest in justice. We need to work to create a system in which all peoples can satisfy their most basic human needs; where everyone can feel that he/she is respected in her humanity; and where no one judges that the basic structure of social life is exploitative.

In other words, states are well advised to actively include the basic requirements of justice in their plans for the future. Otherwise they are simply creating the tinder for future conflict.

Civil society in a globalizing world

An important component of western political theory since Locke and Rousseau is the notion of civil society—the idea of a society in which members have a variety of cross-cutting activities and associations, and where the state is not the sole source of social power. On this conception, a civil society is one that is characterized by multiple associations, free activities and choices by individuals, and a framework of law that assures rights and liberties for all citizens. It is a society with multiple forms of power and influence, minimizing the potential for exploitation and domination by powerful elites or the state. And it is a society in which citizens have developed a sense of mutual respect and consideration for each other. The fact of civil association serves to enhance the strength of collective identities among citizens, by building new loyalties and affiliations. Citizenship and unity are built through association with other citizens and the knowledge that they can pursue their interests and values through their associations (Robert Putnam, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community). But we can emphasize as well the importance of civil associations as a counterweight to the power of the state. Citizens have greater security when they can be confident that the state cannot act against their interests with impunity.

What is involved in sustaining a civil society? What are the conditions that enhance civility within a community? There are several factors that are particularly important. There is solidarity—some degree of shared identity among the individuals who make up the society as groups with interests in common. There is a sense of justice—confidence that the basic institutions are fair to all. There is confidence in the future, that one’s children will have reasonable (and improved) life prospects. There is a sense of dignity—of being treated with human dignity, of being assigned equal human worth. And there is a need for stable, fair, and predictable institutions that give citizens the confidence that they can pursue activities, form associations, and engage in civil discourse without fear. When these conditions are satisfied we can have the greatest confidence in the stability and flourishing of a civil society.

Several of these features fall within the concept of what John Rawls calls a well-ordered society. Rawls introduced the concept of a well-ordered society in A Theory of Justice. It is the conception of society “as a fair system of cooperation over time from one generation to the next, where those engaged in cooperation are viewed as free and equal citizens and normal cooperating members of society over a complete life” (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement : 4). Citizens within a well-ordered society respect one another; they have confidence that their most basic interests are fairly treated; and they have confidence that the basic institutions of society permit them fair access and permit them to pursue their conceptions of the good. A well-ordered society is thus a powerful and pervasive foundation for a stable society, and justice is an important causal factor in sustaining and reproducing a society. The underlying hypothesis is that shared moral values, including particularly the values, that determine the terms of social interaction, create the grounds of stability in a society. And profound disagreement about these values creates the possibility of serious conflict. (Here are a few earlier postings on Rawls's views in this area; link, link).

These ideas find their most common application in the context of local or national communities. How does this concept pertain to the idea of a world society? Is there any meaning we can assign to the notion of a global civil society? Or does this concept apply only to connected populations engaged in face-to-face interactions with each other? Is a global civil society feasible? This would be a world in which all persons recognize and respect the human reality and worth of all others—near and far. It is a world in which people are tied together through cross-cutting civil associations—local, national, and international.  These may include labor organizations, women’s organizations, environmental organizations, or religious groups. It is a world in which persons share a sense of justice—they share a basic agreement on the essential fairness of the institutions that govern their lives. And it is a world in which all people have grounds for hope for the future—that there are opportunities for them to improve their lives, that they will have fair access to these opportunities, and that their children will have better lives than they themselves have had. Such a world has every prospect of sustaining stable, peaceful, and civil social life—both local and international.

How does a theory of global justice relate to this vision (The Paradox Of Wealth And Poverty: Mapping The Ethical Dilemmas Of Global Development)? The connections are profound. Justice requires an urgent commitment to ending poverty throughout the world. It requires a commitment to democracy and human rights—and the effective legal institutions that can secure both. It entails adherence to the values of fairness and human equality, and the importance of reshaping international institutions with these values in mind. And these are precisely the values that are needed to establish the basis of peaceful civil society. If these values are genuinely and deeply embedded in our planning for the future—and if the people of the developing world become convinced that these are real, guiding priorities for the people and governments of the wealthy world—then the potential bonds of international civility will be established. And at the country level the positive institutions of law, democracy, and economic opportunity will reinforce the values of civility and mutual respect.

So the important values that pertain to just global development are arguably critical to a decent future for humanity. A world order that is not grounded in a permanent commitment to human dignity and justice is not only disqualified from the perspective of morality. It is likely to be an increasingly unstable and violent arena for deep and desperate conflict. So for our own sakes and for the sake of future generations we need to commit ourselves in practical and enduring ways to the establishment of global justice, an end to poverty, and the extension of effective democratic and human rights to all persons in all countries.

Three specific points are particularly central. First, poverty is not simply a problem for the poor or for poor countries. Rather, it is a problem for the world, and one that we must confront with determination and resources. This means that we need to develop plans that have a likelihood of success for poverty alleviation; we need to work toward the political consensus that will be needed in order to carry these plans out; and we need to exercise our democratic rights and voices so as to bring about the large commitment of resources that will be needed.  The Millenium Development Goals place this as the first priority (link).

Second, the equality of worth of all persons is an essential moral fact. All persons are equally deserving of attention. And much follows from this fact. The extreme inequalities of life prospects between citizens of the north and the south are inconsistent with this principle. The persistence of anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes throughout the developing world is inconsistent with the equal rights and worth of the citizens who suffer under those regimes. And the inequalities of voice that are present in current international institutions represent an affront to the moral equality of all persons who are affected by those institutions.

Finally, democracy and human rights are critical. It is only through effective democratic institutions for government and decision-making that the interests and concerns of citizens will be aggregated into just policies and progressive social institutions. Democratic institutions permit all citizens to influence the policies that affect the terms of their lives, and they represent a meaningful obstacle to the emergence of exploitation and domination of the powerless by elites.

Are there examples of international settings that embody some of the features of a global civil society? The European Union, and the pan-European institutions and identities that the EU is in the process of forging, offer a promising example of a system that can bring about a just international order. Here we find fledgling experiments in the creation of solidarities that transcend language, religion, nation, or place. And we find an emerging discourse of solidarity that may provide the political basis that will be needed to bring about global justice (and the international transfer of resources and knowledge that this will require). There is a measure of “global thinking” among European citizens that offers a basis for optimism about the feasibility of an engaged world citizenry. OECD institutions have already gone a long way in the direction of giving meaningful priority to the needs of developing countries. The OECD and the Development Assistance Committee represent effective and broadly supported institutional agents of change within the processes of economic development. And surveys of European public opinion suggest an emerging and strengthening public support for global justice (link, link).

Finally, what does the concept of a global civil society imply for the durability of national or cultural identities? Can the Brazilian, Sikh, or Muslim at the same time be a member of a global civil society? This question can be posed at virtually every level of scale—village, region, nation, or global system. And the answer is everywhere the same. One can be both cosmopolitan and Muslim, both Brazilian Catholic and citizen of the world (Martha Nussbaum and Josh Cohen, For Love of Country?), (Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity). In other words, this conception of a just global civil society does not presuppose a process of homogenization of world cultures. Instead, it presumes the development of a cross-cultural consensus about the importance of civility as a necessary context for the many cultural, religious, or national differences that will persist and that constitute one of the positive engines of creativity that are available to the world’s people.

Contentious politics in China

By official count, the incidence of popular protest in China has increased ten-fold in the past fifteen years.  Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern report that the Chinese state reported 8,700 "collective incidents" in 1993, and this number had grown to 87,000 by 2005 (12).  And the issues that have evoked protest have expanded as well: land seizures, egregious local corruption, lay-offs and labor mistreatment, ecological and environmental concerns, and the Sichuan earthquake and building collapses, for example.  (The photo above is drawn from a 2008 story on factory protests in Dongguan in the Telegraph (link).)  A recent volume by O'Brien and Stern, Popular Protest in China, is a collection of some of the best current work by China scholars on popular protest in contemporary China.  Contributors include some of the researchers who are doing the most detailed work on this topic today, including William Hurst (The Chinese Worker after Socialism), Kevin O'Brien (Rightful Resistance in Rural China), Guobin Yang (The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online), and Yongshun Cai (Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail).  So the volume offers an excellent perspective on the state of the field.

(It is mildly ironic to note that the conference on which the volume is based was held in 2006 -- several years before the global financial collapse that threw millions of Chinese workers out of work.  The incidence and severity of factory protests has certainly increased in the intervening years.)

Sidney Tarrow frames the volume by observing that there has been a welcome recent convergence between China studies and the field of contentious politics.  The contributors to the volume have made productive use of some of the core concepts of the theories of contentious politics that have been developed in the past two decades -- resource mobilization, political opportunity, issue framing, social networks, issue escalation, etc., that have proven so productive in the analysis of a range of instances of contention and collective action.  And Tarrow poses a comparativist's challenge: to what extent is it possible to discern similar processes of mobilization and escalation in the China case?  Further, Tarrow points out that much of the theorizing about contentious politics has taken place in the context of more democratic regimes; so how much of a difference does the fact of China's authoritarian political system make for the occurrence and character of social contention?

One of the important insights offered by several of the contributors is the importance of disaggregating structures like "political opportunity," "actor," and "issue."  O'Brien and Stern put it this way in their introduction:

The essays in this volume show that political opportunity in China depends (at a minimum) on the identity of the participants, the region, the grievance at hand, and the level of government engaged. (14)

The Chinese state is not a "monolith" but a "hodge-podge of disparate actors," an "attractive, multidimensional target." (14, quoting O'Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China)

And, of course, we have to recognize the widely different circumstances facing potential contentious actors in different regions and segments of the country.  The point is an important one: we should not look to the intellectual framework of contentious politics research as a set of conceptual recipes for deductively explaining contention.  Rather, we are better off looking at the literature on contentious action as a toolbox of "mechanisms and processes" that recur across contexts and that aggregate differently in different circumstances.  (This is, of course, the methodology that Tarrow, McAdam, and Tilly advocate in Dynamics of Contention.)

Each chapter focuses, by and large, on a different thread within the current literature on contentious politics: framing (William Hurst), trust (Teresa Wright), transnational actors (Patricia Thornton), leadership (Feng Chen), networks (Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao), repression (Yongshun Cai), communication (Guobin Yang), and opportunity (Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao). As such, the volume also serves as something like a tutorial on current theories of contentious politics.

Liz Perry's concluding essay frames the argument around "rebellion" (protest against particular officials) versus "revolution" (protest against principles and structures of government). And she is inclined to think that the rise in protest in China today falls in the former category -- mostly harmless from the point of view of the power and structure of the regime. 

Despite its remarkable frequency, then, contention in contemporary China remains limited in size, scale, and scope.  With few exceptions, the social composition, territorial reach, and endurance of individual protests have all been highly circumscribed. (206)

But I'm inclined to think that this misses one of the most important implications of the contentious politics literature, and the import of its most important case. Small-scale mobilization and protest can escalate to fundamental and widespread demands for justice. And a broad movement can emerge that is not revolutionary -- devoted to the overthrow of the state -- and yet is persistently transformative: dedicated to the long, slow transformation of society and state in the direction of equality and dignity for all members of society. The great historical example of this -- the example that motivated some of the best work in the literature of contentious politics -- is the American civil rights movement. This movement demanded a fundamental change of law and of culture, and it succeeded. And we might say that this is what ordinary people in China today demand and deserve.  The demand for voice and legal protections of lawful activities that swims throughout the more specific claims currently being made has the potential of becoming a very widespread movement.

(There are a number of earlier posts on these issues, collected under the tag CAT_collective action.)