Greece's financial woes and the future of the euro

Economists Paul Krugman (A Money Too Far New York Times 05/06/10) and Barry Eichengreen (The Greek crisis: It is not too late for Europe Berkeley Blog 05/07/10) discuss the latest on the Greek crisis.

Krugman thinks the euro could take a big hit as a currency over the Greek crisis:

So how does this end? Logically, I see three ways Greece could stay on the euro.

First, Greek workers could redeem themselves through suffering, accepting large wage cuts that make Greece competitive enough to add jobs again. Second, the European Central Bank could engage in much more expansionary policy, among other things buying lots of government debt, and accepting — indeed welcoming — the resulting inflation; this would make adjustment in Greece and other troubled euro-zone nations much easier. Or third, Berlin could become to Athens what Washington is to Sacramento — that is, fiscally stronger European governments could offer their weaker neighbors enough aid to make the crisis bearable.

The trouble, of course, is that none of these alternatives seem politically plausible.

What remains seems unthinkable: Greece leaving the euro. But when you’ve ruled out everything else, that’s what’s left.

This result wouldn't put an end to the euro or the European Union. But it would be a body blow to both.

The euro is currently structured to lock in neoliberal policy directions. Without the ability to devalue its currency, Greece is forced into severe austerity measures which will hurt the general population there in a serious way. That also means they are locked into the Herbert Hoover economics of slashing public spending severely in the middle of a recession, when a sensible anti-recession policy would be doing just the opposite.

While I'm not as much of an EU-skeptic as Krugman seems to be, he does have a good basic point. If Europe wants to avoid this kind of neoliberal death-trap for national economies like Greece right now, it will have to have much more of a common tax and economic policy and the political authority to enforce it.

Under both the Clinton and Cheney-Bush administrations, the United States encouraged expansion of the EU, with the Clinton administration seeing it as kind of a development program for eastern Europe after the collapse of the Eastern Communist governments and economies, and the Bush administration seeing it as a way to weaken Europe as a world political force. Neither policy was necessarily in the long-term best interests of the United States.

At the moment, the EU looks more in the latter situation. Their expansion before establishing more effective central governing structures sure looks like a mistake right now.

But neither Europeans nor Americans have reason to be indifferent to the weakening of Europe and the EU. The "European project" has been one of the most important advances for democracy and world peace that we've ever seen. Having it dissolve into national rivalries would be a tragedy not only for them but for the world.

Tags: european union, greece

Two weeks of the Howler and Arizona's SB1070

Arizona's Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the anti-immigrant SB1070 on April 23, and HB2062 that provided minor amendments to it, on April 30, both to take effect July 29. Latinos, civil rights groups and the public generally recognized that this law would produce increased racial profiling, despite Brewer's assurances to the contrary. This is a law in the Jim Crow mode like those of the segregated South that gave police various pretexts to hassle African-Americans citizens at a whim, or for more directed reasons to intimidate real or potential dissidents and activists.

I thought I would take a look at the daily posts by Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, who for a long time now has been scolding those bad, bad liberals for even suggesting that white racism might play a part in the Tea Party movement. Here's how he dealt with the issues of white racism and Arizona's Juan Crow law in the two weeks after Gov. Brewer signed SB1070.

April 26, IT’S THE STUPIDITY, STUPID! A lengthy profile of Mike Allen reveals the world’s greatest problem: criticizes Keith Olbermann for eulogizing coal miners killed in West Virginia as "band of 29 roughneck angels." Claims Olbermann had previously somehow derided those same people as "teabaggers. Attacks naughty liberals for being partisan on their own behalf: "We tend to enjoy The Dumb when it’s aimed at Them, abhor it when it’s aimed at Us. Beyond that, we liberals like to pretend that The Dumb is a mark of The Other Tribe." Whether "we liberals" is an appropriate phrase for Somerby to be using these days is not clear.

April 27, BROOKS & DUMB! In a clueless column, David Brooks rolls over and dies for The Dumb: It takes work to make a garbled criticism of one of Bobo's columns; that should be an easy target. But Somerby accomplishes it here. And managed to bring his point around to scolding liberals for talking about white racism: "Whether we’re talking about the Internet or cable “news” channels, when we scan the work of The Other Tribe, we often do so because it hurts so good—because we love to hate their (racist/elitist) work." Liberals "love to hate", he tells his readers over and over, including in this column.

April 28, THE USES OF PAPA CASS! On Glenn Beck’s show, Cass Sunstein loves Mao. Why won’t David Brooks say so?: Avoids race, but trashes Maureen Dowd for criticizing a cynical Goldman Sachs executive. Dowd does write some real howlers and sometimes seems downright disturbed, but Somerby's particular criticism of her on this point fall flat.

April 29, IT’S THE STUPIDIFICATION, STUPID! When S. E. Cupp sat down with the Lamb, The Dumb was all around: Bashes Paul Krugman for criticizing those nice white folks who support the Jim Crow-style SB1070 law. "Only a virally tribal person could compose such a ludicrous post," he says of Krugman. Bad, bigoted, libruls, bad libruls. Here he employs the standard Republican pitch that one should never make generalization about people on the basis of political party. The problem with that silly argument, of course, is that we have political parties because people do make distinctions between themselves and others on the basis of politics and policy.

April 30, THE REFUSAL TO SPEAK! David Brooks refuses to speak. E. J. Dionne gives him cover: complains that "the loonies and fools are on TV" and that liberal and conservative pundits aren't explaining it enough. Observes at the end that while we search in vain for examples of David Brooks or E.J. Dionne writing about that adequately, "Glenn Beck will tell his viewers ten times about [Cass] Sunstein’s vast love for Mao." But then in earlier columns, Somerby scolded Digby for complaining about his Tea Party crush Pam Stout, who declared that Beck provokes her to think. Somerby himself says that Beck, who raves John Birch Society conspiracy theories, is often "erudite." If it's wicked for us libruls to ever criticize Beck or the people who he suckers, does Somerby actually think it's a bad thing that Beck tells his audience "about Sunstein’s vast love for Mao"?

May 3, THE CULTURE OF FURY AND INSULT! When Tapper’s panel discussed that new law, an unhelpful pattern emerged: Somerby agrees with conservative New York Times' columnist Ross Douthat that liberals were mean in assuming that the motives of supporters of Arizona's Juan Crow law weren't pure as the driven snow. Bad liberal, bad, bad liberals! He also bitches about the This Week panel talking about an amendment to Arizona's SB1070 without describing what the amendment did; but the Howler doesn't both to explain it either. (See my post of 05/05/10 on that topic.)

May 4, RICH, LAZY AND DISHONEST! Does Rich ever know what he’s talking about? Liberals should be concerned: scolds naughty liberals for talking about racial considerations in the Arizona SB1070 controversy; says "white liberals love to accuse other people - specifically, white conservatives and centrists - of bigotry and racism", says this is an "especially noxious" trait of those bad white liberals. Suggests that liberals are "condescending dandies who can’t be trusted, elitists who sneer at valid concerns".

May 5, JUST ASK ROBERT BENNETT! The Tea Party movement hates white people too! Just ask Robert Bennett: how can we say Tea Partiers are racist when they hate some white people too? Plus, hey, look at all the black Republicans running for office! All that anti-immigrant and anti-Latino bile, the Tea Partiers in Washington chanting "nigger, nigger, nigger" at two African-American Congressman (an event on Somerby shares FOX News' skepticism that it even happened), why that's no sign that white racism is involved. It could just be the way these nice white folks are saying they don't like Big Business. Oh, and liberal leaders "simply aren’t very smart" and "tend a bit toward the morally bankrupt."

May 6, ENDLESS AMAZEMENT! We’re still amazed at the childish things our celebrity “journalists” do: Attacks some of his favorite liberal targets among the celebrity punditry - Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O’Donnell, Gail Collins, Frank Rich - over Sen. Lindsey Graham's complaints about the terrorism watch list interfering with the alleged right of people on it to buy guns and explosives. Somerby doesn't touch on race in this one. But he doesn't add much clarity to Graham's particular complaint, which on the surface strikes me as possibly one of those stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day moments where Graham may be making a valid point for a frivolous reason. Somerby makes it an example of liberal frivolity. He bridges Frank Rich into the complaint with this: "The 'watch list' story has special appeal [to liberal pundits] because it fits treasured New York Times themes about southerners, guns and religion." (New York City's Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's a real law-enforcement problem. Dibgy describes why she thinks Graham is being inconsistent in Tyranny For Dummies Hullabaloo 05/05/10.)

May 7, WHAT DIGBY SAID! In a remarkable pair of posts, Digby helps us recall the truth about someone’s favorite: after having blasted Digby in recent weeks for talking about white racism, he recommends a couple of her recent posts highlighted the dysfunctional nature of our national press corps and of Chris Matthews in particular. (Matthews is a mess, even when he's taking the Democrats' side; Somerby is right about that.) And Somerby blasts Salon's Joan Walsh for, apparently, giving some stock general praise to Chris Matthews when she appears on his show. He's also been blasting Walsh lately for the same sin as Digby, talking about white racism. He says here, "be prepared to get sick to your stomach the next time you see Walsh parade out onto Matthews’ show and tell him how great he is - how much his deeply seminal thinking resembles that of Joan herself."

Just how is Bob Somerby different from the standard white Republican rightwinger on the issues raised by SB1070?

One thing is very clear: he really, really, really doesn't like it when liberals or social scientists or anyone talks in public about white racism in a negative way.

To get an idea of the company in which that puts him, see Christine Schwen, Racial profiling? No problem, say conservative media Media Matters 04/30/10.

Standing alone, some of his columns, like the May 6 one, could read like a liberal contrarian take on our celebrity press corps, who really are generally painfully shallow. But taken in the context of his other columns cited here, even that one could also be read, perhaps more plausibly, as an echo of stock conservative complaints about the Liberal Media Conspiracy. He characterizes leading liberal pundits Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O’Donnell, Gail Collins as follows:

This are truly hideous people, the scum of modern, big-bucks corporate culture. But mainly, they’re amazingly childish. Collins’ column is stunningly clownish—and therefore, it’s pleasing for readers, and it was easy to type. In truth, these people will do and say anything to maintain the tribal game of the moment. And they seem to be sure that your low IQs won’t let you spot their game. [my emphasis in bold]

What rightwinger would disagree that Keith Olbermann and most other liberal pundits are "truly hideous people" and "scum"?

Tags: bob somerby, comprehensive immigration reform, white racism

How strong is the government's case against the Hutaree Militia?

I have no trouble seeing the Christian terrorist-wannabes of the Hutaree Militia as no-good-niks based on their own self-descriptions and group propaganda.

But we have trials and due process for good reasons. For the government to send someone to jail, they have to demonstrate their guilt in a courtroom in which the defendants get to actually defend themselves and in which both sides have to follow a definite set of rules.

The government didn't do such an impressive job in their initial round in court, from what the news reports are saying. The judge even ordered the defendants released pending trial with stringent restrictions, including electronic monitoring. Mark Reiter describes those conditions in some detail in, U.S. attorney successful in blocking release of Hutaree members from jail Toledo Blade 05/06/10.

In her decision to release them, which has been stayed by the Appeals Court, Judge Victoria Roberts wrote:

While the Government contends that the crimes charged against Defendants go well beyond speech, there is no doubt that controversial, offensive and hate-filled speech is implicated. In their defense, the Defendants disagree that this case implicates anything other than speech, and, that whatever they said, did not amount to a conspiracy to commit illegal acts. ...

The United States is correct that it need not wait until people are killed before it
arrests conspirators. But, the Defendants are also correct: their right to engage in hatefilled, venomous speech, is a right that deserves First Amendment protection. ...

When a person crosses the threshold between protected speech and illegal advocacy and related activity, is not always clear. That lack of clarity, and the fact that so much of the Government’s proffer was based on words spoken by Defendants, caused the Court to look closely not only at the protection afforded by the First Amendment, but also at the clear principle that crime masquerading as speech deserves no First Amendment protection.

Her decision discusses the charges and particular aspects of the government's case, including some transcripts of that "hatefilled, venomous speech".

All Defendants are charged with: (1) Seditious Conspiracy...; (2) Attempt to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction ...; and (3) Carrying, Using, and Possessing a Firearm During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence...

Some defendants face additional charges.

Based on reading her opinion, from what the government has presented so far, their case against the Hutaree Militia may not be terribly strong. A lot can change between now and the verdict, of course. But it's a strong reminder that the government's initial announcement of arrest and charges may turn out to be overblown.

See also:

FBI agent short on details on militia inquiry AP/Toledo Blade 04/28/10

Feds pressed to show Hutaree group is threat AP/Toledo Blade 04/28/10

Ed White, Hutaree Militia Staying In Jail: Court Issues Emergency Order AP/Huffington Post 05/06/10

Tags: christian terrorism

Arizona's SB1070

Arizona's anti-immigrant SB1070 became law on Friday, April 23, with Republican Gov. Jan Brewer's signature; the provisions are scheduled to take effect July 29.

Arizona's anti-Constitutional SB1070 and police practices in some areas are a challenge that requires the federal government to step in and insure that that the rights of everyone, citizens and non-citizens, are protected from rogue police and even a rogue state legislature. This is not to say that Arizona is some kind of political monolith, even among whites. On the contrary, the protest against the law and against racial profiling has been more intense in Arizona than anywhere else. Including city mayors and city councils pursuing legal challenges to SB1070. Federalism in action, in a good way: local governments opposing the state government's bad, impractical and un-Constitutional law.

Michael Lacey in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Reign of Terror Becomes State Policy, Thanks to State Senator Russell Pearce and Governor Phoenix New Times Jan Brewer 04/29/10 reports on the model for racial profiling and abuse of police power set by the infamous Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County:

Senate Bill 1070 instructs police officers to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" may be in the country illegally.

Critics point out that the new legislation allows individuals to be stopped absent criminal behavior. The demand to know whether a person's papers are in order smacks of an authoritarianism not seen in this country in recent memory. ...

Arpaio has explained clearly how he and his deputies determine which individuals are brown Mexicans and which are brown Americans.

"If you look like you came from Mexico," Arpaio told listeners of KPHO radio, that will get you searched.

On national television, Glenn Beck was informed by Arpaio of his standard: "If local law enforcement comes across some people that have erratic, or scared, or whatever, you know, they're worried . . . And if they have, their speech, whatever they look like, if they just look like they came from another country, we can take care of that situation."

Last year, Arpaio informed the GQ magazine that Mexicans are contagious.

"All these people that come over, they come with disease. There's no control. No health checks or anything. They check fruits and vegetables. How come they don't check people? No one talks about that!

"They're all dirty."

And Lacey reasonably points out how Barack Obama is again handling a serious problem by saying some nice-sounding things in public and then letting the official misconduct continue:

Initially, 1070 even caught the eye of President Barack Obama, who labeled it a misguided effort to address border issues that the federal government had ducked. But his promise to move immigration to the top of his agenda faded three days later. The president was soon telling journalists that with all of the political capital expended on healthcare, now was not the time to tackle such an incendiary issue.

Resorting to Orwellian syntax, the president abused decency in declaring that immigration could not be addressed before mid-term elections "just for the sake of politics."

America's first black president's dodging racial profiling goes well beyond irony.

On April 30, Brewer signed SB2162 into law, making some minor amendments that look to me to be aimed at helping the law to survive court challenges on racial profiling, rather than substantially modifying any of its features.

Louis Jacobson writes for the St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact.com in Barking dogs, racial profiling and the Ariz. law 05/04/10

On April 30, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed a bill that made several important changes. Because of these changes, we've produced two new fact-checking items based on the revised bill. (Our old items are now outdated, but they can still be found here and here.)

One of our new items addresses the role played by "racial profiling" -- that is, the use of racial or ethnic characteristics as a justification for police questioning. The changes included additional language that said, "A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution."

But experts we spoke to were skeptical of Brewer's claim that this language would "lay to rest questions over the possibility of racial profiling." We rated this statement Barely True.

Alia Beard Rau and Ginger Rough in The Arizona immigration law hit with its first 3 lawsuits Arizona Republic 04/30/10 characterized the changes in a similar way, in an article written before the amendments were signed.

For a law that so much discussed and is not that long, it's surprisingly challenging to get to an authoritative copy of the final version signed by Brewer. The Arizona legislature's page on SB1070 at this writing shows an introduced version, a senate version and a house version. The house version in Sec. 2(C) specifies which documents will be legally considered sufficient to establish legal residency, a feature missing from the senate version. It is listed as the chaptered (adopted) version. It seems to have been this amendment that added the document specification. (I had previously assumed that the senate version was the adopted one, excluding any specification of acceptable documents.) According to the law, a valid driver's license from any US state is acceptable. But what if one of Shurff Arpaio's cops thinks it "looks fake"?

The legislative page on SB2162 shows the conference version as the adopted one. Here More on the amendments: Alan Silverleib, Arizona governor signs changes into immigration law CNN 05/01/10; Amendment to Arizona’s SB1070 Immigration Law, Meaningful Change or Lip Service? Brave New Wave 04/30/10;

Other posts on how Jim Crow type laws and a racially discriminatory atmosphere work:

Gabriel Winant, E-mail reveals Arizona law was designed to maximize harassment Salon 05/03/10

Friday, April 30, 2010
Mike Sunnucks, Immigration law cutting into Hispanic hires Phoenix Business Journal 04/30/10:

Local labor and employment attorneys say they are increasingly seeing the trend of businesses opting to not to hire Latinos or laying Hispanic workers off, even if they are U.S. citizens or have legal status.

“We have heard of employers who have questioned whether Hispanic workers should be resubmitted through the current e-verify system in response to this legislation. This is exactly the type of response that is ill-advised and could land employers in hot water,” said Shayna Balch, a labor attorney with the Phoenix office of Fisher & Phillips LLP. Dave Seiden and Julie Pace, immigration and employment attorneys with the Cavanagh Law Firm, said they already see the trend with employers worried about raids from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Seiden and Pace said they have clients calling them about the new immigration law expecting that measure to result in more raids and scrutiny.

“They don’t want to run the risk of being targeted by the sheriff or anyone else. They don’t want the hassle,” said Pace.

“Anyone who looks and sounds foreign is a concern to some employers. They want to avoid some of the things they see in the paper,” she said. [my emphasis]

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, white racism

Julian Gumperz on the American political party system (1932)

Julian Gumperz (1898-1972) in 1923

Julian Gumperz did a piece for the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung Vol 1 (1932). For the most part, his analysis does not hold up well. And it has faults that should have been obvious in 1932.

In theory, a social-democratic or Marxist view in 1932 of the American Revolution and the American Constitution wouldn't be different from a capitalist ("bourgeois") democratic viewpoint. The general democratic understanding, and the social-democratic/socialist understanding in particular, was that capitalism and the democratic-republican form of government with which it became associated in its classical forms - the Glorious Revolution in England, the American Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789 - was a progressive development in history, a process in which the emerging capitalist order and the new social classes and political consciousness that accompanied them established a form of government more suited to the demands of the historical period and its dominant economic system. Classical liberal historical accounts might use a different theoretical framework to describe it than socialists, but they would be in agreement with the basics as I've described them here.

His analysis of American parties has some valuable points, particularly his description of how lobbies were the primary form in which specific economic interests including labor most directly asserted themselves in American politics. He also gives a good description of how a reform like the direct primary could in fact function in a less democratic way than the smoke-filled-room approach they replaced in the early years of the 20th century.

Gumperz argues that the Progressive reform of the direct primary, which was meant to give the party rank-and-file a more democratic role in selecting the party's candidates, in fact made the process less democratic. Only small percentage of the party's voters actually show up for primaries, giving the urban party "machines" particular clout, because they could turn out the voters for their preferred candidates. (Today, lobbies make their preferences felt through campaign donations which are necessary for the primary campaigns.)

Gumperz takes special note of the "huge influence" that women's organizations have as lobbies in the United States, without further exploring the democratic implications of that fact. That influence was built from the early 19th century by primarily female activists building grass-roots organizations using methods that emerged from the Jacksonian democratic movement.

He also takes account of the role of African-American voters and the slavery issue and their effect on the US party system. But he doesn't mention the segregation system and what a radical limitation on small-d democratic politics that represented in the US. It's not a trivial fault, since it had such a central role in what the Democratic Party was in 1932. And on how the seemingly non-ideological nature of the American parties, on which he places a great deal of emphasis, actually played out in practice.

But the main lines of his analysis of the American party system are badly flawed. In the most immediate sense, he didn't see the ideological and party-political shift that would become apparent in the 1932 elections, and was already evident in the Presidential election of 1928. The Democratic Party would become the Party of the working class and attract increasing African-American votes in the North, which would reshape the Party landscape.

But even without the benefit of hindsight from the subsequent developments, his analysis is problematic.

It's cringe-inducing today to see him citing Lawrence Dennis' book Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932). In fairness, in that book Dennis wasn't yet advocating an American brand of fascism to solve the problems he saw in American society, and hadn't yet become the leading intellectual of the Hitler-loving far right in the US. (Lawrence was a thoroughly weird character, an African-American who passed for white and became a leading American fascist, as Gary Younge describes in The fascist who 'passed' for white Guardian 04/04/2007.) And what he quotes from Dennis is a fairly straightforward observation that the displacement of rural farm populations to the cities where they became part of the industrial work force didn't tend to reinforce their devotion to prevailing doctrines concerning private property. (In the 3/1933 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Gumperz gives Is Capitalism Doomed? a glowing review.)

Gumperz provides the following basic account of the US party system: The Constitution of 1789 was a conservative effort to block the democratic currents making themselves manifest in American society, the currents which had fired the American Revolution itself. Parties have never been particularly ideological in the United States, but rather vehicles through which various capitalist factions have competed for power. Since the division of powers in the Constitution effectively restricts popular democratic aspirations by largely paralyzing the federal government, the political parties also became a necessary vehicle to make the federal government function. Only through means of the parties could the inherently paralyzing tendencies of the three-way division of power and the bicameral national Congress be sufficiently surmounted for the national government to function effectively at all.

From the time of Andrew Jackson until the turn of the 20th century, he argues, the basic conflict in American politics was between industrial capitalism, represented by the Republican Party, and capitalist agriculture, represented by the Democratic Party as the party of agrarian "resistance". His description of the party differences as industrial vs. agrarian is so superficial as to have barely surface plausibility. The notion that the Democratic Party was ever a "purely agrarian" one, much less that it was so into the days of Bryan's leadership, is silly.

His account of the Constitution is based heavily on the arguments of historian Charles Beard, whom he cites, and they don't hold up to scrutiny. Gumperz, like Beard, is just off-base in arguing that the Constitution represented a reactionary restraint of democracy. In fact, using the left-right schema that emerged during the French Revolution, the Constitution was defended by the democratic "left" and generally opposed by the reactionary "right", who supported rule by the wealthy and included most of those who favored an American version of monarchy.

He doesn't understand the significance of Jacksonian democracy, and seems unaware that the Jacksonian movement represented the emerging urban labor movement among its core constituencies. He doesn't even mention the Abolitionist movement, nor does he discuss the emergence of the Whig and Republican Parties. I was tempted to stop reading on the third page of his article, where he drops the historical whopper that James Madison, one of the most important leaders of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, had been a leader of the Federalist Party along with Alexander Hamilton. That's a very basic error of fact, and one that also undermines any confidence in his Beard-derived analysis of the early Republic.

Gumperz is very critical of the "spoils system", which he understands superficially. He rightly credits Andrew Jackson with initiating it, but mostly misses the democratic significance it had in 1829, when Jackson took office as President. though he does mention in passing the "hard-fought democratic achievement" that Jackson's Spoils System represented. He describes the city party machines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a conventional Progressive manner as sordid, corrupt institutions promoting personal servility to Party bosses. The urban party machines, he charges, "usurped the power which Constitutionally belonged to the voters".

Oddly, he does quote one source approvingly who explains some of the practical nuances of the party machines and contradicts the stereotypical image of machines as simply a corrupt bunch of party hacks. But he doesn't seem to grasp that the machines had particular benefits for working-class voters. Contrary to the Progressive narrative that long dominated American history writing on the urban party machines, more recent analyses have stressed their practical value as vehicles of working-class participation in democratic politics and as mechanisms that directly responded to many practical needs of working people.

In fact, the great strength and organizational basis for the longterm success of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in Vienna, a success that was evident in 1932 and which continues to this day, was based on what was and is a urban party machine. Given that "red Vienna" was then and is now one of the great success stories of Social Democracy, it's surprising that he didn't make that connection in this 1932 article.

Gumperz' argument is confused on the ideological nature of American parties. He argues that the direct primary in connection with the party machines sharpens the distinctions between the parties. But he doesn't explain how that meshes with his picture of American parties as non-ideological, and of direct primaries as having their potentially democratic function mitigated by city machines.

In fact, after making the argument about party primaries promoting distinctions, he goes on to argue that personalities rather than programs are particularly important in American elections, because the political programs are so little different. He does put it in the context that "the parties in the United States are not class organizations in the programmatic sense of the word," perhaps his point is that because American parties didn't have the kind of more specific class allegiances that European parties did, that the programmatic distinctions were less significant. But if that is his point, he doesn't spell it out very clearly. In his presentation, it is lobbies that give more clear expression to class interests in American politics than the parties themselves.

He seems not to appreciate the specific institutional effect of the winner-take-all electoral districts on making the American system tend heavily toward a two-party structure. This neglect undercuts his attempts to explain why, in comparison to Europe, a distinctive Labor Party or other distinction interest-group based parties have not emerged.

Tags: frankfurt school, julian gumperz

First year of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

The Frankfurt School's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung began publication in 1932 under the editorship of Max Horkheimer, who was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung under whose auspices it was published.

The edition I have available is a combined edition of all of Volume 1, which covers that first year, 1932. This edition was apparently published as a single volume.

In addition to around 300 book reviews, it includes as essays:

• Max Horkheimer on the ways in which positivist theories deprive scientific thought of its social-critical function ("Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise") and the use of psychology in historical analysis ("Geschichte und Psychologie")

• Erich Fromm with two essays on the application of psychoanalysis to sociology: "Über Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie" and "Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie"

• Theodor Adorno, his name appearing here as Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, in a long essay on the sociology of music ("Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik")

• Franz Borkenau on the development of the mechanistic worldview related to the early version of manufacturing ("Zur Soziologie des meehanistischen Weltbildes"), an excerpt from his then-forthcoming book on the transition from the feudal to the capitalist (bourgeois) worldview, Der Übergang vom fedualen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (1934).

• Henryk Grossman on economic cycles and the concept of the value-price-transformation in Marxist economics ("Die Wert-Preis-Transformation bei Marx und das Krisenproblem")

• Julian Gumperz on the American system of political parties ("Zur Soziologie des amerikanisehen Parteiensystems"), which I will discuss in a separate post

• Leo Löwenthal on using the historical setting of a literary work in literary scholarship ("Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik"). Löwenthal ende his career as a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley.

• Friedrich Pollock on the situation at that time in the Depression and the potential benefits of a planned economy ("Die gegenwärtige Lage des Kapitalismus und die Aussichten einer planwirtschaftlichen Neuordnung")

• Andries Sternheim on the analysis of how workers use their leisure time ("Zum Problem der Freizeitgestaltung")

Grossman's essay focuses on analyzing an issue in both Marxist and capitalist (classical and neo-classical) economics. He argues that Marx understood that the labor theory of value, or the price-value scheme of analysis, which he elaborated in the first volume of Capital has to integrated with the market framework, or production-price scheme, that he discussed in Capital's third volume. Classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus) had focused on the organization of labor, and Marx's version of the labor theory of value was heavily based on that approach. Neoclassical economics (Alfred Marshall) focused more on market mechanisms. Grossman argues that neither the liberal nor the Marxist economic traditions had adequately founded the production-price schema on the price-value schema.

Grossman's essay focused on economic theory and issues, as does Pollock's. The others focus more on sociological, psychological and cultural questions. For liberals and conservatives, it was not a surprising problem that capitalism had stabilized after the Great War. But for the assumptions of the social-democrats and Marxists in the late 19th century through the First World War, the situation of a stabilized capitalism, particularly in Germany, with a parliamentary system in which the Social Democrats could lead a government but not have the power (or really even the intention!) to fundamentally alter the economic system and nationalize the means of production, in their manner of speaking, was a surprise and problem that needed to be understood in both practical-political and theoretical terms.

Andries Sternheim's look at the use of leisure time is a great example of one way the Frankfurt School was approaching the problem. Prior to the Great War, workers in Germany and western Europe normally had 10-hour days and not many leisure pasttimes available to them. This both increased the feeling of desperation for a dramatic social change. But it was the Social Democratic movement who provided urban workers with much of their alternatives in their time off work, all of which encouraged some kind of political involvement. And of course some of which was direct political involvement. (Leisure time or free time in his context means time other than that spent at work or directly connected to preparting for work and getting to the workplace, not specifically play time.)

After the war, the eight-hour day became more firmly established. And Sternheim examines some of the available information on the new ways in which workers and their families were using their leisure time: sport events, both as participants and spectators; movies; the radio; cultural programs, including theater. And he stresses that it is important to understand both the actual political effects and implications for political and/or class consciousness of such activities as they are. And also to understand how the workers' movement can make use of them for political purposes.

He didn't have the kind of data to undertake a lot of that analysis in this essay. But he does make some informed observations and speculations. And his essay makes the point that leisure activities, including film and radio, do provide important channels through which people's understanding of their society and their role in it is shaped. And which can to some extent be manipulated in ways not available at the turn of the 20th century.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school

Kent State retrospectives

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has plenty of them at its Kent State Shootings 40th Anniversary page.

The Kent State killings were a big event in the symbolic "culture war." Novelist James Michener did a non-fiction account of the killings, Kent State: What Happened and Why (1971). He gave this grim account of one woman in the area, a parent of Kent State students, who his researchers interviewed. To fully appreciate this, you have to keep in mind that the National Guard fired randomly at students on the campus; most of those shot were walking to class or otherwise going about their daily lives:

But no case of parental rejection equals that of a family living in a small town near the Kentucky border with three good-looking, well-behaved, moderate sons at the university. Without any record of participation in protest, the boys found themselves inadvertently involved at the vortex: the middle son ended up standing beside one of the students who was shot (at a great distance from the firing); the youngest was arrested for trespass and his picture appeared in the hometown paper, to the embarrassment of his family. When the family spoke to one of our researchers, the conversation was so startling that more than usual care was taken to get it exactly as delivered.

Mother: Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes or barefooted deserves to be shot.

Researcher: Have I your permission to quote that?

Mother: You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.

Researcher: But you had three sons there.

Mother: If they didn't do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.

Professor of Psychology (listening in): Is long hair a justification for shooting someone?

Mother: Yes. We have got to clean up this nation. And we'll start with the long-hairs.

Professor: Would you permit one of your sons to be shot simply because he went barefooted? Mother: Yes.

Professor: Where do you get such ideas? Mother: I teach at the local high school.

Professor: You mean you are teaching your students such things?

Mother: Yes. I teach them the truth. That the lazy, the dirty, the ones you see walking the streets and doing nothing ought all to be shot.

I've often wondered what Thanksgiving dinners were like at their house. That's really pretty twisted.

Kent State May 4, 1970This report by Bob Jones for WEWS Newsnet5 (Akron) reports on how the University is officially commemorating this sad anniversary: Kent State dedicates May 4th walking tour 05/03/10:

A ribbon cutting ceremony was held on Monday to mark two major milestones related to the May 4, 1970 campus shootings that killed four Kent State University students and wounded nine others.

The university dedicated a walking tour. Visitors can read seven markers and use their cell phones to listen to a narration describing the the tragic events of that day.

The university also unveiled a plaque recognizing the site on the National Register of Historic Places.

That site also has a 40th Anniversary of May 4 page.

Kent State University itself has webpages on the shooting: Kent State’s WKSU-FM Launches May 4, 1970, Audio Archive 04/29/10; KentState1970.org; Reflections on May 4th: Carole Barbato and Laura Davis; Kent State Presents Events Marking 40th Commemoration of May 4, 1970, Shootings.

Tags: establishment+press

What is the Frankfurt School? (2)

Karl Korsch (1886-1961), a major early participant in the Frankfurt School

Since the Frankfurt School is commonly associated when it's mentioned in popular articles with only a few thinkers such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, it's useful to see the figures Schmid and Van Riejen highlight as the most prominent members. Some of them were associated with critical theory their entire careers. Others such as Erich Fromm later took a different direction in their work. Schmid and Van Riejen arrange them by alphabetical order of the last names:

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) is best known for his sociological work on the authoritarian personality.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a major influence in the field of literary criticism.

Franz Borkenau (1900-1957) from Vienna was a Communist activist after the First World War until his expulsion from the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1929, the same year he received support from the Institut for developing his study Die Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild [The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois Worldview] (1934).

Hans Cornelius (1863-1947) was a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt who taught the Frankfurt School figures Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Leo Löwenthal.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is a famous psychologist who was associated with the Institut from 1930 to 1938 and was the founder of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt in 1929 and an analysand of Hans Sachs, another famous figure in the history of psycholanalysis.

Kurt Albert Gerlach (1886-1922) was the first head of the Institut für Sozialforschung.

Henryk Grossmann (1881-1950) became an Assistant to Carl Grünberg, the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, in 1925 and authored the first book to appear in the Institut's series of publications, Das Akkumulations- un Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalischtischen Systems (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie) (1930-31).

Carl Grünberg (1861-1940) could be said to have represented the Frankfurt School before there was a Frankfurt School as publisher of the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung. (The editions for 1911-1916 are available online.), known more succinctly as the Grünberg Archives. In 1924, Grünberg took over the directorship of the Institut after Gerlach's 1922 death. He played a key role in the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels, called in German the „Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe“ (MEGA). Ludwig von Friedeburg perhaps overreaches and bit in calling him "the father of Austro-Marxismus."

Aracdius Rudolf Lang Gurland (1904-1979), born Arkadij Gurland, fled Germand in 1933, worked with illegal socialist organizations against the Nazi dictatorship, and emigrated to the US in 1940. He collaborated with Franz Neumann on his book on Nazi Germany, Behemoth 1942, expanded edition 1944), which is still considered an important and useful source.

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was the editor of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and is credited with inventing the term "critical theory" to describe the general perspective of the journal and of the Frankfurt School. He became the director of the Institut in 1931.

Otto Kirschheimer (1905-1965) studied under the still-controversial political scientists Carl Schmitt; during the Second World War, he worked with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), one of the predecessor organizations to the CIA.

Karl Korsch (1886-1961) was elected to the parliament of the German state (province) of Thuringia in 1924 on the KPD ticket but was expelled from the Party around 1927. He did a biography, Karl Marx (1938) while working for the Institut.

Siegfriend Kracauer (1889-1966) began sociology-based film criticism in Germany; wrote From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960).

Karl Landauer (1887-1945) was a psychoanalyst, an analysand of Sigmund Freud, a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society beginning in 1913, and Max Horkheimer's psychoanalyst. He died of hunger in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993) was a philosophy Ph.D. who did his dissertation on the conservative 19th century Prussian Catholic reformer Franz von Baader (who incidentally introduced the world "proletariat" into German); eventually worked for the Voice of America (1949-53), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and as a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley..

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) had quite a colorful career: People's Commisar of Education in the short-lived Soviet Republic of Hungary (1919), active collaborator with the Institut, refuge in the USSR during the Second World War, deported from Hungary to Rumania for supporting the reform Communism associated with the Hungarian uprising of 1956, reutrned to Hungary in 1957 and lived there until his death. Lukács is known for his brand of Marxism heavily influenced by Hegel and was an important theorists for East German (DDR) dissidents.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was famous (or infamous!) as one of the main intellectual influences on the New Left in the US, West Germany and France in the 1960s. He took part in one of "soldiers' counsels" during the democratic revolution of 1918 in Germany, later studied under Martin Heidegger, did extensive philosophical work on Hegel, Marxism, and Freud, and was notably influenced by existentialism and phenemenology. Franz Neumann brought him to the OSS in 1943, and he worked for the federal government for several years, succeeding Neumann as headof the Research and Intelligence Division of the US State Department in 1947.

Franz Leopold Neumann (1900-1954) is best known as the author of the important study Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942; expanded edition 1944). Also from 1942 to 1947, he worked with Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and then for the State Department; he contributed research to the preparation of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970)began work with the Institut in 1923, where over the next years he worked on the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels and a major study of the planned economy in the Soviet Union.

Richard Sorge (1895-1944) is not remembered for the little scholarly work he did but for being one of the most talented spies known to history, successfully spying for the Soviet Union in Japan for most of the Second World War. A good account of his spycraft is found in Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (1984) by Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and Donald Goldstein. He was eventually exposed as a spy and executed by the Japanese in 1944.

Andreas Sternheim (1890-1944) contributed to one of the Institut's most important publications, the Studien zu "Authorität und Familie" [Studies on Authority and the Family]. He died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a noted Christian Protestant theologian who after the Second World War served as a professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Lucio Felix José Weil (1898-1975)was the Argentinian-born son of the wealthy agricultural trader Hermann Weil; Felix Weil studied national economics and played a key financial and organizational role in founding the Institut. His most important published work is The Argentine Riddle (1944).

Hermann Weil (1868-1927) wealthy agricultural trader and philanthropist who supported the founding of the Institut and whose son Felix Weil was the formal founder of the Institut in 1922 along with Kurt Albert Gerlach.

Karl August Wittfogel (1896-1988) was for a time (1926-27) the China expert for the KPD, left the KPD after the German-Soviet Non-Agression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact), became an American citizen in 1941, and eventually became decidedly anti-Communist. in his in his book Oriental Despotism, he described Russia (1947) as "Asiatic Russia".

There were also women associated with the Frankfurt School including Margaret Mead, and others less well known, and which didn't rate their own separate photo and biography pages in Grand Hotel Abgrund. But the main text of book is an essay my Michael Buckmiller, "Die 'Marxistische Arbeitswoche' 1923 und die Gründung des 'Institute für Sozialforschug'", describing a retreat in 1923 at which a number of intellectuals, including several women, discussed the initial perspective and direction of research of the Institut.

Buckmiller notes that it was Richard Sorge who formally convened the group. Sorge was the Assistant Director and was the lead official of the Institut after the death of Gerlach in 1922. Buckmiller notes that Julius Mader observed that most of the participants of the Marxist Working Week were at the time members of the KPD. But Buckmiller argues that it was not a formal KPD meeting. Felix Weil and other participants credited Karl Korsch as having developed the idea for the meeting.

Of those listed above, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Pollock and Karl Wittfogel were participants, in addition to Sorge, Korsch and Felix Weil. Buckmiller gives short sketches of the following particpants, whose presence is documented by a photo taken during the event: Gertrud Alexander (1882-1967) and her husband Eduard Ludwig Alexander (1884-1945); Hedda Korsch (1890-1982); Kuzuo Fukumoto (1894-1984); Margarete Lissauer and her future husband Béla Forgarasi (1891-1959); Hede Massing (1900-1981) and her future husband Juliam Gumperz (1898-1972); Christiane Sorge (1887-?), Richard's wife; Käthe Weil (1902-?), Felix' wife; Rose Wittfogel, Karl's wife; and, Konstantin Zetkin.

Buckmiller identifies by first initial and last names a few other possible particpants based on later memories of known participants: B. Roniger, H. Süßkind, W. Biehahn, H. Büchel, K. Frank, and, K. Schmückle.

The 1923 edition of Carl Grünberg's Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung reflects the early perspectives of the Frankfurt School, including pieces by Korsch, Lukács, and Felix Weil.

Many of the formal associates of the Institut in the early 1930s were Jewish. That along with their activity in left politics and their association with the Institut that was known for its Marxist approach created heavy incentives for many of them to emigrate out of Germany, as a number of them did.

Sources:

Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen.

Göran Therborn, "The Frankfurt School", New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970

Rolf Hecker, Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland)

Ludwig von Friedeburg Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung, with an English summary.

Tags: frankfurt school

False equivalence

Digby points in Alien Rule 05/02/10 to a recent example of Obama making some decent points in articulating a larger Democratic vision of positive government. But then stepping on it by trying to talk about the extremes of the right and the left.

Obama is facing a hardline Republican opposition that is encouraging crackpot extremist ideology in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement. On the fringes of their ideological argument is a terrorist militia movement that responds to many of the same issues that the Republicans emphasize but assume that if people like Glenn Beck and FOX News and members of Congress are talking about the feds coming to take their huntin' rifles and establish a Communist tyranny, that things must be way worse than even their paranoid fantasies supposed.

So on the fringe, we have an increasingly energized and openly violent terrorist element. We have a large segment of the public, inspired by Republican and Christian Right claims and responding to their leadership, who are increasingly hostile to science and are willing to swallow fact-free claims like Sarah Palin's "death panels" and can't distinguish Glenn Beck's absurd picture of the political world from the real thing. Nativism and white racism just manifested themselves in the Arizona SB1070 stop-and-search-the-brown-people law that is in practice a racially-targeted law like the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South.

And on the left we have: Keith Olbermann occasionally being stridently self-righteous. Health care advocates who think a public insurance option would be a good idea. Anonymous commenters on liberal blogs who compare Bush to Hitler.

There is just not a big problem with leftwing terrorism right now. If past history is a guide, someday we'll probably have a new version of the Black Liberation Army or Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF). There are some hardcore ecological and animal-rights groups now who may be inclined to commit violent acts or engage in cyber-sabotage of targeted corporations. But I haven't heard about anything lately along those lines actually occurring, except for Limbaugh's evidence-free speculation about the BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the current oil spill disaster being sabotaged by eco-terrorists.

In other words, in the United States right now there is a real, practical problem with anti-democratic, rightwing extremism with violent elements. There is no comparable level of problem on the left. Not even close.

So in this situation, to pretend that there are somehow equivalent problems with rightwing and leftwing extremism inevitably minimizes the real existing problem of rightwing extremism. Whether the false equivalence is coming from Obama or anyone else.

Paul Starr in Better Than Tea The American Prospect 05/03/10 recognizes that the Tea Party movement doesn't have a left-leaning equivalent. But, unfortunately, he seems completely clueless about what that means. He writes, astonishingly, "With millions unemployed and home foreclosures at record levels, the country is still suffering acutely from the recession's effects, yet the Tea Party is the only movement that can put thousands of people into the streets."

Except for, you know, people who do. Teresa Watanabe and Patrick McDonnell, L.A.'s May Day immigration rally is nation's largest Los Angeles Times 05/01/10:

Galvanized by Arizona's tough new law against illegal immigrants, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday as the city led the nation in May Day turnout to press for federal immigration reform.

As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters joined a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, waving American flags, tooting horns and holding signs that blasted the Arizona law. The legislation, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a crime to be in Arizona without legal status and requires police to check for immigration papers.

Though the crowd was roughly half as large as police had projected, it was the largest May Day turnout since 2006, when anger over federal legislation that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and those who aid them brought out more than 1 million protesters nationwide. Since then, most activists have deemphasized street actions in favor of change at the ballot box through promoting citizenship and voter registration.

But this year is different. Outrage over the Arizona law, continued deportations and frustration over congressional delay in passing federal immigration reform prompted activists nationwide to urge massive street protests on this traditional day of celebrating workers' rights.

Demonstrations are one manifestation of political movements, though not the only ones. It's a little anachronistic to measure the strength of a movement by how successful they are putting "thousands of people into the streets." Still, if you're comparing movements by that measure, as Starr is, you should at least pay attention to the movements that actually are doing that.

Starr here reflects the Establishment media blinkers that led our celebrity pundits and reporters to pay rapt attention to anti-health care Tea Party demonstrators in Washington but ignore the far more numerous demonstration there in favor of comprehensive immigration reform in March: Clement Tan and Don Lee, Big immigration march in Washington Los Angeles Times 03/22/10.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, radical right, white racism

This should be interesting...

Culture war: the shootin' kind

If this process produces new evidence, that will be an interesting situation: Analysis of 40-year-old tape may reveal whether Ohio Guardsmen were ordered to fire on Kent State protesters by John Mangels The Plain Dealer 04/29/10.

Tuesday, May 4, will be 40 years after the Kent State murders. There is no statute of limitations on murder. No was was prosecuted so far. But then, it took 40 years or more for some murders during the height of civil rights activism to be prosecuted, too.

I posted about the Kent States murders in the context of the "culture war" in The "culture war" in its infancy 05/07/08.

Tags: kent state killings, sixties

What is the Frankfurt School? (1)

"Frankfurt School" refers primarily to a school of thought. It is also called "critical theory" and it appears that the latter term is used more often when referring to the trend of thinking and social criticism, while Frankfurt School tends to refer more to the leading individuals associated with it. The work of Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse are famously associated with critical theory. Jürgen Habermas also is generally considered to be working in the Frankfurt School/critical theory tradition of thought.

There are actual institutions associated with the Frankfurt School, the leading on being the Institut für Sozialforschung, which was formally associated with the University of Frankfurt as an independent academic institute. The Institut was formally founded by Kurt Albert Gerlach and Felix Weil, who developed the agreement with the University to establish the Institut in 1922. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Instutut shut down in Frankfurt and continued its work through offices in New York, London, Paris, Geneva and Los Angeles. In postwar Germany, the Institut was refounded and continues to exist today.

The dating of the founding can seem a bit murky. Rolf Hecker points out Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland) that the formal opening of the Institut took place on June 22, 1924, with Carl Grünberg as Director. But the agreement with the University by Gerlach and Weil took place in 1922. So here I'm calling Gerlach the first Director even though the Institut didn't formally open until after his death and under Grünberg's leadership.

A useful source for the origins of the Frankfurt School is Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen. Göran Therborn also provides a helpful history of the evolution of critical theory in New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970. Schmid and Van Riejen describe the original purpose of the Institut für Sozialforschung as being "research work on Marxism, the workers movement and the root causes of anti-Semitism". Ludwig von Friedeburg provides a Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung at the Institut's present Web site, with an English summary also available.

Therborn describes the general approach of the Frankfurt School and the issues with which they wrestled. He writes, "Critical theory’s epistemological basis is a metaphysical humanism." He sees critical theory as a continuation of German Idealism that also took as it historical point of reference the Marxist concept of the development of capitalism leading to the taking of power and transformation of capitalism into socialism by the working class:

What was this philosophy which could thus be substituted for both science and politics in a revolutionary stance? In fact, the theory outlined in Horkheimer’s programme and developed by the Frankfurt School from the 1930’s to the present was by no means a completely original intellectual formation. It was rather an extreme development of the most philosophically self-conscious form of Marxism available to the Frankfurt theorists—the philosophy of the young [Georg] Lukács and [Karl] Korsch, which was itself a development of a whole trend of 19th- and 20th-century German sociological thought represented most completely by Max Weber’s work. The central concern of this tradition was that of ‘capitalist rationalization’.

Therborn speaks there as though Lukács and Korsch were outside the trend of critical theory, when actually they were key figures. This is part of the limitation of Therborn's approach in that article, in which he explicitly limits his focus: "The core members of the School are Horkheimer, Adorno
and Marcuse. ... [T]his article is devoted almost exclusively to the work of these three core members."

Social Democratic politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had proceeded on an assumption, which was largely confirmed in the politics of those centuries, that the urban industrial working class constituted a relatively coherent interest group fundamentally opposed to that of the capitalist class. To a degree hard to imagine now, the events of the end of the Great War (First World War) had an apocalyptic cast. Four great empires collapsed: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. The Social Democrats, despised by the royalists and the democratic capitalists alike, took power in Germany and Russia and established parliamentary democracies. A more radical faction of Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, took power in St. Petersburg, with a bloody civil war ensuing. The Social Democratic parties of Europe and the rest of the world generally split into Social Democratic and Communist factions, the latter following the model of the Russian Revolution.

But despite these huge changes, the capitalist systems of Western Europe, inlcuding Germany's, the largest and most robust of them. And in the Weimar Republic other postwar regimes, the social-democratic parties provided workers a new level of participation in government and delivering real reforms that mitigated some of the worst abuses of the capitalists systems. All parties and political trends of thought had to adapt to a dramatically new situation and understand its implications for their perspectives and parties. The Frankfurt School was one of those attempts, a serious academic one, focusing heavily on cutting-edge work in sociology and philosophy.

Therborn also notes that the Frankfurt School was heavily influenced by Hegel's work, though critical theorist interpreted it still more in the sense of Marx's historical materialism, which itself was heavily indebted to Hegel's thought. And he talks about the central role that the analysis of fascism played in the work of the Frankfurt School.

However, a lot of Therborn's analysis strikes me as pretty seriously off-base. For instance:

Critical theory sees itself as humanity’s self-knowledge. Therefore it
cannot and must not have a structure which is (formally) logical and
systematic.

Therborn complains that the critical theorist didn't provide political strategies for addressing the issues they raised, which winds up sounding a lot like complaining that they were not a political party or faction instead of a research institute. And he argues that the critical theorists in their analysis of fascism "focused not on economic and political problems, but on ideological and cultural factors." But the Frankfurt School scarcely ignored economic factors.

And politics is politics. Those "ideological and cultural factors" are very much part of it, as they are of social development. Work like Erich Fromm's efforts to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to sociological and political issues wouldn't deserve to be dismissed as third-rate "ideological and cultural factors". And one of the most famous and influential products of the Frankfurt School, Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1942, expanded edition 1944) very much focused on economic and political-science issues.

On Behemoth, see „Behemoth“ war die erste Strukturanalyse des Dritten Reiches von Manfred Funke PM 421/2004 and The Nazi Behemoth by C Wright Mills Partisan Review Sept-October 1942. Mills' evaluation of Neumann's book gives an idea of the reputation of critical theory in the West, and not just on the left (of which Mills was certainly a part):

Franz Neumann's book represents the best tradition of the social sciences in Germany, which came to full stature during the twenties. He looks down a neo-Marxist slant further subtilized by Max Weber's distinctions and deepened by a sociologically oriented psychiatry. His thinking is thus sensitively geared to great structureal shifts and to happenings in the human mind.

Such reporting as his book accomplishes is of central facts tied down by the best documentation available. And there is no repeating of formulae in it: Marx may bear a nineteenth-century trademark in some matters, but, as Neumann again makes clear by a fresh intellectual act, the technique the elements, and the drive of his thinking is more than ever relevant, and right now. There are so many who have "forgotten" what they once half understood and who take the easy ways out that it is downright refreshing to experience a book which displays a really analytic heritage with perception and with craftsmanship.

Therborn is also bothered by the criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism in science that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse elaborated. He makes a point of being more complementary to Marcuse as a person than to Adorno and Horkheimer, noting that Marcuse embraced the radical student movement of the Sixties in a way that Adorno and Horkheimer did not. The particular issues Adorno and Horkheimer had with the German student movement are interesting in the history of the Sixties, but not especially important in understand their careers or their work on critical theory.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school

The Frankfurt School and critical theory

I've been making an effort to familiarized myself with the history of the left in Germany and Austria, and of the Frankfurt School in particular. I'm going to be doing periodic posts on this theme.

This is not entirley new for this blog. I've placed links at the bottom of this post to some of the previous posts in which I engaged with topics touching on the Frankfurt School and its history.

I want to acknowledge here that there are a lot of loony-tunes ideas that pass for political thought in the Republican Party, which is currently blessed with political theorists of the caliber of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The have many disciples among Republicans elected to office and among the rank-and-file. Language that would have seemed like a hick version of McCarthyism in the 1950s have become common as dirt among "respectable" Republicans like Beck and chief Party ideologue Limbaugh.

In their alternative narrative of reality, Marxism and fascism and socialism and Communism and Nazism and liberalism and the Democratic Party in the US are all pretty much synonymous. Since I'm going to be dealing in this post with people who were involved in various ways in the German social-democratic and communist movements of the first four decades of the 20th century, I thought about whether I should try in these posts to put in explanations to address the Beck-Limbaugh-Republican Party McCarthyist worldview of the moment.

I decided that for the most part I will not. I can't put a whole history textbook's worth of information into a blog post. And attempting de-programming via blogs seems like a pretty unproductive undertaking. So I won't waste my time.

I'm going to assume that readers of these posts will have some minimal ability to form a realistic picture of the history of the 20th century. I don't see how that is possible in the Birchized view of today Republican media stars like Beck and Limbaugh.



Past posts relating to the Frankfurt School

Are there problems with tolerance?

Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"

Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance

Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy

Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance

The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

"Critical theory" and war

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (1 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (2 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (3 of 3)

Tags: frankfurt school