Prof. Elizabeth S. Anderson – University of Michigan

Long before the growing interest in economic inequality facing contemporary capitalist societies, radical thinkers and union organizers were concerned about the authoritarian governance in workplaces. Unfortunately, this concern seems to have taken a back seat in political philosophy during the present era. Elizabeth S. Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, is seeking to remedy this with her trenchant analyses of the coercive and hierarchical nature of capitalist firms and corporations. Her book Private Government offers an important reminder that bosses tend to be dictators and that workers’ lives are essentially at the mercy of private government.

C.J. Polychroniou: In your book Private Government, you analyze the different facets of modern workplaces and argue that firms and corporations operating under so-called “free market” norms and arrangements are actually coercive and hierarchical in nature, and rule over workers’ lives as authoritarian governments tend to do. Can you elaborate a bit on these highly challenging ideas, as most people don’t seem to view workplaces as dictatorships?

Elizabeth S. Anderson: Look at the organizational chart of any firm: You will see a hierarchy of offices, with subordinates reporting to their bosses, and bosses issuing orders to subordinates that must be obeyed on pain of sanctions such as getting fired, demoted, harassed or denied decent hours. That’s all it takes to make a little government — the power to issue orders to others, backed by threats of punishment. If the workplace is a government, we can ask, what is the constitution of that government? The answer, in nearly all cases where workers lack union representation, is that the constitution of workplace government is a dictatorship. Workers don’t get to elect their bosses. They don’t have a right to participate in the firm’s decision-making about the terms and conditions of their work. For the most part, they have little effective recourse if their bosses abuse them, other than to quit.

Workers even lack the power to hold their bosses to account for a wide range of abuses at work — even when those abuses are illegal, such as sexual harassment and wage theft. The scale of wage theft — effected by forcing workers to work off the clock, work overtime without extra pay and numerous other scams — is vast. It exceeds the sum total of all other thefts in the U.S. The vast majority of workers who are sexually harassed face illegal retaliation at work for complaining. So most keep silent. More and more, employees are forced to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, which strip them of their right to have their case be heard by a neutral judge following legal procedures. Instead, they must go to an arbitrator chosen by their employer, who is bound by no procedures, and knows that the arbitration contract will not be renewed if they render too many judgments in favor of the worker. No wonder workers under mandatory arbitration are far less likely to win their cases, and when they win, receive far less compensation than workers who sue their employer in court. It’s a recipe for mass abuse. While many workers — particularly those in management or with rare skills — get decent treatment, millions of ordinary workers suffer under awful working conditions, low pay, unstable hours, and subjection to discrimination, wage theft and other illegal treatment.

Dictatorial employer control over workers doesn’t even end when workers are off-duty. The default rule in the U.S. is “employment at will.” This means that, with a few exceptions (mostly having to do with discrimination), employers are legally entitled to fire, demote and harass workers for any reason or no reason at all. This rule opens the door to punishing workers for things they do while off-duty. Many workers have been fired because their boss disapproves of their choice of sexual partner, support for candidates and political causes the boss doesn’t like, unconventional gender presentation, recreational use of marijuana on days off and other personal decisions. When a Coke worker can be fired for drinking Pepsi at lunch, it’s easy to see that the scope of employer control over workers’ lives is nearly unlimited.

You maintain that most people can’t see what private workplaces are all about. Do you mean to say that employees can’t see where authority lies and that they don’t realize the power that employers have over their lives? How could this be possible? Is it related to the pathology of “free market” ideology? Is this what grants legitimacy to capitalist firms and corporations in the eyes of employees and the general public?

A Zogby poll of U.S. workers about 10 years ago found that 25 percent regard their workplace as a dictatorship. Why don’t they all recognize the reality? I think this is because political discourse about work frames vital issues of worker freedom in terms of “freedom of contract.” Because workers are always legally free to refuse a job offer or to quit, people talk as if workers are free. But this free-market freedom only guarantees workers the freedom to starve. The critical questions should focus on what employed workers are free to do at work and off-duty. Talk about “free markets” distracts us from recognizing that the standard employment contract puts workers under the thumb of their bosses and strips them of their rightful freedoms. Thousands of slaughterhouse workers lack the freedom to use the bathroom during their eight-hour shift. They are told to wear diapers to work! When employers restrict even the most basic bodily functions of their workers, it’s ridiculous to pretend that these workers are free. While the acceptance of the employment contract is, from a legal point of view, voluntary (even when workers are desperate for a job), the content of the contract puts workers under the subjection of their employers.

Free-market ideology refuses to accept this framing, because it insists on the illusion that the content of the employment contract represents a meeting of minds over terms that have been freely negotiated between the parties. In reality, the vast majority of employment contracts are oral, not written, with workers knowing none of the terms other than what the employer chooses to tell them. This is possible, because the state has written the default terms of the employment contract in its laws regulating work. In that sense, the default employment contract is much like the default marriage contract, the terms of which have also been written by the state. Quick question to married readers: Do you know whether your marriage follows common law or community property? This follows from the state where you reside, not (unless you have a prenuptial agreement) from terms you negotiated with your spouse. The vast majority of workers never get an opportunity to negotiate, either. This is because the state has already decided, in the default employment contract, to deal virtually all of the authority cards to employers. Since employers are already holding the authority cards, they have little incentive to deal any of them back to the employee in negotiations. So, most don’t bother to hold negotiations.

What about all the latest trends in many workplaces where the tendency is to get employees to feel, through various creative schemes, that they are all part of the big picture? I have in mind such corporate tactics as group meetings on leadership (“everyone can be a leader”), encouraging communication in common areas, rewarding individuals as “employee of the month,” and so on and so forth. These schemes are obviously designed to increase employee satisfaction and productivity, but are they not also designed to promote a further sense of “false consciousness” about power relations between employers and employees?

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” – The Russian Revolution

The Library: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/index.htm

Begin van de zomer! Het zou een stralende zomerdag moeten zijn maar het regent. Gisteren was het warm, een onweer zorgde voor regen. De langste dag. Voor ons blijven het lange dagen.
De schrik van vorige week zit nog in mijn benen en omdat ik Hans eigenlijk zaterdag verwacht (soms komt hij onaangekondigd), zit ik alweer in angst. Stilletjes, want ik mag de anderen niet aansteken, maar mijn angst om Hans en Inge groeit elke dag, neemt enorme proporties aan. Ik weet dat mijn zenuwen me die streek leveren maar de angst om je kinderen is ook zoiets verschrikkelijks.
Morgen komt misschien Inges vriend (vorige week kwam hij niet) en ik blijf onrustig over hoe het met het kind gaat, of zij zich kan aanpassen, of ze kan blijven.

HCA 32 / 1845.1: A box with ship’s documents, court papers, ship’s journals, cash books and a wallet with a small French prayer book, seized in the 17th century during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. Source: Sailing Letters Journal IV, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2011, 12; picture: Erik van der Doe

The Prize Papers are documents seized by British navy and privateers from enemy ships in the period 1652-1815. These papers are kept in the archive of the High Court of Admiralty in The National Archives in Kew (London). Approximately a quarter of the Prize Papers originates from Dutch ships. Apart from ship’s journals, lists of cargo, accounts, plantation lists and interrogations of crew members, this collection also contains approximately 38,000 business and private letters. The letters originate from all social strata of society and most of them never reached their intended destination.

Research

The huge variety of the Prize Papers makes it suitable for different types of research. It means that the Prize Papers can be used for a wide range of research topics, for example, for developments in language and dialect, trade, material culture, social relationships and knowledge transfer from the 17th to the 19th centuries. A large international research project by the universities of Oxford and Birmingham led by Jelle van Lottum focused on the migration of sailors and the distribution of human capital, based on records of interrogations of crew members. This research was financed by the Economic and Social Research Council (2011-2016).

The Sailing Letters’ project carried out by the National Library of the Netherlands in 2004, introduced the Prize Papers to a broad group of Dutch researchers. Five Sailing Letters Journals were published between 2008 and 2013 to make this rich and versatile resource even more widely known.

Preservation and digitisation

The award at the end of 2015 of a substantial subsidy to Huygens ING by Metamorfoze, the national programme for the preservation of paper heritage, made it possible to preserve and digitise 144.000 pages of selected documents.

Go to: https://www.huygens.knaw.nl/dutch-prize-papers/

or: https://prizepapers.huygens.knaw.nl/

First edition 1935

It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

THE handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have been on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit in which Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (custom tailoring—pressing & cleaning) announced that they were those historic Vermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about imaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies present. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college… or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.

The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing funny, at least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses of Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrily with the topic “Peace through Defense—Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute,” and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch— she who was no more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919 than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country—except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions.

The Annual Ladies’ Dinner was a most respectable gathering—the flower of Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more than half of the gentlemen wore evening clothes, and it was rumored that before the feast the inner circle had had cocktails, privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square, were bright with candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner lettered “Service Before Self,” and the menu—the celery, cream of tomato soup, broiled haddock, chicken croquettes, peas, and tutti-frutti ice-cream—was up to the highest standards of the Hotel Wessex.

They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was completing his manly yet mystical rhapsody on nationalism:
“… for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned well let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduous task of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of American culture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves ‘governments,’ and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.

“For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest—not for jealousy— not for war—but for peace! Pray God it may never be necessary, but if foreign nations don’t sharply heed our warning, there will, as when the proverbial dragon’s teeth were sowed, spring up an armed and fearless warrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduously cultivated and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded images we must be… or we shall perish!”

The applause was cyclonic. “Professor” Emil Staubmeyer, the superintendent of schools, popped up to scream, “Three cheers for the General—hip, hip, hooray!”

Full text: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html

Note:

Title: It Can’t Happen Here
Author: Sinclair Lewis

* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0301001h.html Language: English Date first posted: Jul 2003 Most recent update: Jul 2017
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GoodBooksRadio StrongandCook:

Vijay Prashad

IS socialism making a comeback? If so, what exactly is socialism, why did it lose steam toward the latter part of the 20th century, and how do we distinguish democratic socialism, currently in an upward trend in the U.S., from social democracy, which has all but collapsed? Vijay Prashad, executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a leading scholar in socialist studies and the politics of the global South, offers answers to these questions.

C.J. Polychroniou: Socialism represented a powerful and viable alternative to capitalism from the mid-1800s all the way up to the third quarter of the 20th century, but entered a period of crisis soon thereafter for reasons that continue to be debated today. In your view, what are some of the main political, economic and ideological factors that help explain socialism’s setback in the contemporary era?

Vijay Prashad: The first thing to acknowledge is that “socialism” is not merely a set of ideas or a policy framework or anything like that. Socialism is a political movement, a general way of referring to a situation where the workers gain the upper hand in the class struggle and put in place institutions, policies and social networks that advantage the workers. When the political movement is weak and the workers are on the weaker side of the class struggle, it is impossible to speak confidently of “socialism.” So, we need to study carefully how and why workers — the immense majority of humanity — began to see the reservoirs of their strength get depleted. To my mind, the core issue here is globalization — a set of structural and subjective developments that weakened worker power. Let’s take the developments in turn.

There were three structural developments that are essential. First, major technological changes in the world of communications, database management and transportation that allowed firms to have a global reach. The global commodity chain of this period enabled firms to disarticulate production — break up factories into their constituent units and place them around the world. Second, the third world debt crisis debilitated the power of national liberation states and states that — even weakly — had tried to create development pathways for their populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The debt crisis led to [International Monetary Fund] IMF-driven structural adjustment programs that released hundreds of millions of workers to international capital and for the workforce of the new global commodity chain. Third, the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern bloc, as well as the changes in China provided international capital with hundreds of millions of more workers. What we saw is in this period of globalization was the break-up of the factory form, which weakened trade unions; the impossibility of nationalization of firms, which weakened national liberation states; and the use of the concept of arbitrage to force a race to the bottom for workers. These structural developments, from which workers have not recovered, deeply weakened the workers’ movement.

Trade union density declined, national liberation states surrendered, the reservoirs of working-class power depleted. If you don’t have worker power behind you, the ideas you uphold — socialist ideas — are not seen as credible and are dismissed by the academy and the media. The field opened up for right-wing ideas to be seen as reasonable. The idea of a socialist future was destroyed. [Friedrich] Hayek’s theory that any attempt to improve the world will lead to serfdom became a general theorem not only of the right, but also of postmodernism. Without the notion of a socialist future, without something beyond the horizon of capitalism, you are left with a politics of tinkering, of reform. This has been catastrophic. Why join a political force and sacrifice your time if the best that you are going to get is a small percentage increase in benefits? The turn to the right comes in this space, since the right suggests a future based on identity and fellowship grounded in racism and patriarchy. But at least it offers a kind of future. Without the idea of a socialist future, the possibility of building socialist movements is negligible.

In the West, the dominant strand of socialism has been that of social democracy, which today, however, has all but collapsed, while democratic socialism appears to be making a comeback, especially in the United States. What are some of the main differences that distinguish democratic socialism from social democracy?

The distinction between “democratic socialism” (which comes from the Michael Harrington/Barbara Ehrenreich tradition) and “social democracy” (which comes from European Marxist movements) is one of context (U.S. versus Europe) and one of politics. The European tradition emerged out of the trade union movement to create political parties with Marxism as the governing ideology. Those parties became key to the Second International, their heyday being in the late 19th century, with the German Social Democratic Party as the most emblematic. The break between social democracy and the left came when the parties of social democracy adopted an evolutionary theory for socialism (associated with Bernstein) and when they later voted in favor of World War I. But, until then, these were the main Marxist parties, defining the left wing of politics in Europe and in Russia. Their antipathy to communism would only arise in the Cold War, when the democratic socialists built their own anti-communist political tradition. Both would share this anti-communist framework during the Cold War. Nowadays, the gap between these traditions and the communist traditions is much more limited. The left is so weak that to rehearse arguments about social democracy, democratic socialism, communism and anarchism seems like the narcissism of petty differences. It is important that the left produce an attitude of openness toward left-wing groupings and left-wing ideas. There is no need for a fundamental unity of all groups, but there has to be an attitude of common work and common struggle. Differences are important and should be held. But they are comradely differences. I fear that the Western left is so divided not only by ideas but by sectarian arrogance and by even sectarian hatred that it will not be able to create a genuine flank against the hard right.

How do we explain the appeal of democratic socialism today among a growing percentage of young people, especially in the United States, a country where in fact even the use of the term “socialism” was something of a taboo?

Frankly, we should not exaggerate the turn to socialism. There is definitely a turn away from neoliberal policies that have created a desert of society. But this has created all kinds of political possibilities — cynicism is one, evidenced by low voter turnouts and a general malaise of overwork, and another is political polarization to the far right and toward socialism. There is certainly a turn away from neoliberalism, but this should not be seen as any kind of automatic turn towards socialism. Socialism has to be built. It requires immense amounts of work. A precarious workforce combined with a toxic cultural world does not make it easy to build political parties that require overworked people to come to meetings. Political education is essential to a socialist movement, but this again requires commitment and time. Furthermore, the socialist movement is anachronistic in the sense that socialists try to live with values that are not entirely rooted in our time, where the values are the values of the ruling class. We are under an obligation by our own values to live with a horizontal attitude to each other, obligations that appear bohemian to the mainstream and that take time for us to honor. I say all this merely to remind us that for the past hundred years, socialist organizers have had to do two simultaneous things — be amongst the class of workers and peasants and be outside the prejudices of our times. This requires an attitude of fellowship with everyone and yet sternness about the hierarchies to which we are heirs. Let’s not minimize this challenge, which has been with the movement for over a hundred years.

In the past, socialism drew its strength primarily from the working-class people, but this is no longer the case today and, in fact, multiculturalism and identity politics have become focal points for social mobilization for many progressively oriented movements throughout the Western world. Can the universal values traditionally espoused by socialism be reconciled with the pursuit of a political agenda built around multiculturalism?

There can be no socialist movement that ignores the question of class. Taking the issue of the precarious workforce or landless workers and so on is central to the class struggle. But workers are not merely workers — we have cultural identities and we have to struggle with social hierarchies. So, there is no point starting this conversation by making a binary between class politics and identity politics. All politics is about class and identity. The point is the character of the political platform. I think that there is too much in multiculturalism and identity politics today that reflects a bourgeois orientation. For instance, a multiculturalist politics that is about individual advancement is certainly bourgeois. On the other hand, a politics of socialism that ignores racism and patriarchy, that ignores caste and transphobia does not reflect the actual stresses and desires of the precarious workforce and the landless workers. Identity politics of a class character are necessary. There can be no socialist movement in India, for instance, that is not at the same time against the hierarchy of caste. In the West, the question of race is central. Marx, in Capital, which was published in 1867, wrote that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.” This has been an axiom in the socialist movement, although not always raised to theory and into praxis. But it must. There is no question, to underline the point, of juxtaposing class and identity or suggesting that class politics are universal. They are simply not. All working-class movements must adopt a politics that is against social hierarchy and then must act on that politics!

Assuming that political leaders who identified themselves with democratic socialism came to power, what aims and goals should they be pursuing that would be conducive to the needs of economies and societies in the 21st century? In other words, what should socialism be all about in our own age and time?

The most immediate matter to take charge of is a kind of salvage. We need to assert the importance of turning the social surplus toward ending hunger and illiteracy and toward addressing fundamental problems of social and economic life — such as the catastrophe of the climate and of endemic joblessness. There are funds to do all of this, but we have to sharpen the class struggle to get them. The wealthy have been on a tax and investment strike for the past 50 years. They have refused to pay tax — with tens of trillions of dollars hidden in tax havens. They do not invest for social development, since they rely upon subcontractors on the global commodity chain to do the investment. The world of finance has increasingly become inert, unwilling to build value for investment in the productive sector. That money is used in an endless casino. We need to fight to recover the money from tax shelters and from the casino and put it to immediate use to end the social atrocity of hunger and illiteracy and to put it toward a pivot away from carbon-based joblessness. There is a lot we can do if we had power, real power, power not only from a surprise election, but power of the precarious workers and the landless workers behind the political forces that win elections. No point running a government if you don’t have an organized mass force to drive the social policy from the hall of government to the home of the poorest worker.