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rfmcdonaldThe two blog posts I'm about to link to, quote from, and summarize seem thematically linked to me.
Crooked Timber's Corey Robin suggests in "Age of Fracture or Age of Counterrevolution?", fragments of a review of Daniel Rodgers' book Age of Fracture that he had published in the paywalled London Review of Books, that there hasn't been revolutionary change in the world at large because of ongoing social fractures. If I understand his argument correctly, the growth of identity politics, while a necessary stage in addressing the concerns of individual demographics, made it impossible to form and sustain broad coalitions capable of challenging the establishment. This led to inertia, something that may now be lifting.
Elsewhere, at the Global Sociology Blog the post "The Convulsions of Multi-Institutional Legitimation Crisis" starts by suggesting that the decline in religious practice in the United States can be traced not so much to secularization as to declining trust in churches as institutions, part of an ongoing collapse in public trust with public institutions of all sorts. This collapse in the certainties of the establishment, the blogger suggests, might open up cracks that could let change in.
Thoughts?
Crooked Timber's Corey Robin suggests in "Age of Fracture or Age of Counterrevolution?", fragments of a review of Daniel Rodgers' book Age of Fracture that he had published in the paywalled London Review of Books, that there hasn't been revolutionary change in the world at large because of ongoing social fractures. If I understand his argument correctly, the growth of identity politics, while a necessary stage in addressing the concerns of individual demographics, made it impossible to form and sustain broad coalitions capable of challenging the establishment. This led to inertia, something that may now be lifting.
There are historical precedents for the association between fracture and counterrevolution. In response to the debtor insurgencies which took place in America in the 1780s, and which threatened the interests of creditors and property, James Madison observed that in small societies it is possible for democratic majorities with clear and distinct interests (usually inimical to property) to cohere and impose their will on the minority. But ‘extend the sphere’ of society, he wrote, ‘and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.’ After the French Revolution, doctrinaires like François Guizot and Pierre Royer-Collard, and their student Tocqueville, came to similar conclusions about the counter-revolutionary value of pluralism. And in the Old South, John Calhoun formulated his theory of concurrent majorities – an already fragmented society would be further fragmented by the near impossibility of the national government’s taking concerted action on behalf of the majority – as a counter to the abolitionist North.
Fracture need not always be a counterrevolutionary device. Neither must every counter-revolution follow the path of fracture. But the fact that the two are so often twinned does cause one to ask why fracture is so threatening to revolution and reform, and so friendly to counter-revolution and retrenchment. Why are unity and cohesion a necessary if not sufficient condition for any kind of democratic movement from below?
Movements of subordinate classes require the concerted action of men and women who, individually or locally, have little power, but collectively and nationally (or internationally) have potentially a great deal. If they hope to exercise it, such movements must press for and maintain their unity against many challenges: not only divisions among themselves (such movements hardly lack for heterogeneity of gender, race, status, religion, ethnicity and ideology) but also the power of their superiors. For these movements, unity is a precious and precarious achievement, always under threat from within and without.
Counter-revolutionary movements, by contrast, are multiply served by the forces of fragmentation. Political and economic elites, with their independent command of resources, do not need to rely so much on unity and co-ordination. What they require instead is the disunity of their opponents: the reverse of Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum that ‘the most important desideratum’ in any struggle is ‘the utmost possible unity of the leading social democratic part of the proletarian masses’. That disunity, it turns out, is fairly easy to achieve. Not only does fragmentation splinter the counter-revolution’s opponents into roving bands of ineffective malcontents; it also makes it more difficult to identify any ruling class or clique. No longer is there a simple target for mass action (the Bastille, the Winter Palace); there is just a pleasing spray of power, attached to no one group or individual in particular, potentially available to one and all. This, it seems to me, is one of the great obstacles the left has faced for the last half-century or so. With the Occupy movement, and its pitch for unity, one so grand (‘99 per cent’) it makes ‘workers of the world’ seem practically poststructural, we may at last be leaving it behind.
Elsewhere, at the Global Sociology Blog the post "The Convulsions of Multi-Institutional Legitimation Crisis" starts by suggesting that the decline in religious practice in the United States can be traced not so much to secularization as to declining trust in churches as institutions, part of an ongoing collapse in public trust with public institutions of all sorts. This collapse in the certainties of the establishment, the blogger suggests, might open up cracks that could let change in.
The legitimation crisis in the economic and financial sphere is rather obvious. It ties into a crisis of legitimation in the political system not only through the popular cynicism towards political systems throughout Europe and the rise of extremism such as the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn. But we can see this as well from political actors themselves, from the systematic lying, an phenomenon understated by the phrase “post-truth politics” (an absurdity if there ever were one as truth remains truth and we are not beyond it. To not tell the truth does not project one into a post- state but into good old-fashioned lying), to efforts to limit voting and democratic accountability over the polity.
The massive corporate funding of politics from financiers combined with extensive and increased surveillance as well as repression of anti-systemic movements tell a story of a system where the power elite thinks it can only maintain its hegemony more bluntly, through hard power (municipal police states at home, never-ending resource wars abroad). The much-denounced 1% probably understand what is happening but, as Atrios repeatedly has told us, either through evil or incompetence, can only imagine policies that maintain their power and wealth but, by making things worse, only precipitate the crisis further.
[. . . ]
[C]heating is relatively guilt-free for students because they have adopted, following the lead from the media, probably their parents, education “experts” and the overall narrative about education, an instrumental view of education: secondary education gets you into an elite college, which will get you on Wall Street or other elite places. The point of education is the solidification of capital (cultural, economic and social) in the hands of the “1%”, not education per se. This instrumental conception trickles down but in the form of education = job training, or, to use the phrase now in vogue “workforce development” and this is justified by the idea that if education is so costly, then, there must be a visible, tangible return on investment. In that context, one can feel justify to minimize one’s investment (either through minimal investment in individual classes or through cheating).
As for the wealthy, as anyone who has read Richistan knows, there is a cutthroat competition at the very top of the social ladder so that already academically successful students are pushed hard, hence the cheating, because of the fear of falling, even if still within the top 10%.
[. . . ]
What does this all amount to? A multi-institutional legitimation crisis where a lot of people find themselves brutally and violently assigned to the precariat, but also a situation where the privileged can see how easily, in this anomic context, their privilege could be questioned and react violently to it (whether it is lashing out on Twitter, or putting out political ads and funding elections or any other privilege consolidating strategy).
Thoughts?
