Left Libertarian Blogs

Larry Gambone long time Canadian anarchist and an old pal has launched his own blog; Porcupine. You will find him commenting on my articles here and at Vive Canada!

Recently he has blogged about the Zapatistas, a libertarian peasant movement in Chiapas, Mexico that has been the most successful organizing attempt since the FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists) organized in Spain during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War 1936-39. The Zapatista's have put out a call to move towards greater broadbased community and political organizing. Larry points out, correctly, that the movement is more libertarian than lenninist. Which bodes well for models of revolutionary struggle in the newly capitalized world, also known as the Newly Industrialized Nations (oh, he says, is that what NIN stands for).

Kevin Carson runs mutualist.org , Free Market Anti-Capitalism, and has his own blog. Quoting from the libertarian right and the marxist left is a hard balancing act to do, yet he does it admirably. As I wrote here about the need for a real Movement of the Libertarian Left, Kevin fits that description admirably.

An example of Kevin's analysis from left/right libertarian perspective is in his blog comment that Toyota will be developing another new car factory here in Canada, because of our state subsidized infrastructure. And how some American commentators who have taken note of this news, were offended when Toyota explained it was because Ontario had a skilled workforce. It's not because workers in the Southern U.S. right to work states (read non-union) are dumber than unionized Canadians workers, perhaps less well trained was the actual statement from Toyota, as Kevin points out it was actually because;

In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson. "Most people don't think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage," he said.

While Americans give tax breaks that are greater than those offered by Ontario and the Federal Government, we have medicare, and a social welfare system that is a real economic advantage to monopoly capitalists, as Kevin points out.

For instance the only profit GM made last year was from its Financial Credit business and auto sales in Canada. GM sold more cars here than in the U.S., but not nearly as many as Toyota has. And Toyota will be scooping up a laid off workforce from shut down operations of the Big Three in Ontario. In otherwords thanks to the Big Three and their policies of downsizing, outsourcing and refusal to build smaller cars, Toyota has a capitve pre-trained workforce that is unemployed and ready to work. Big advantage that.

"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant....


And they can thank NAFTA for having opened up the market by ending the Auto Pact. While CAW like other Canadian Unions opposed NAFTA, and sort of still do, the result was the expansion of the non unionized Toyota operations in Canada and secondary parts companies. The auto belt in Canada is home to the successful non-unionized Magna parts company, which daddy gave to Belinda Stronach to run before she was seduced to run for the Conservatives, which is critical to just in time supplies to automakers who have outsourced those operations.

And while the CAW has lobbied for state funding for the Big Three which it has contracts with, the result of those efforts have also opened the playing field to Toyota. So the CAW will have to get busy doing what unions are supposed to do, organizing Toyota and Magna, and worry less about brokering deals between the NDP and the Liberals .

Ah the great thing about blogging you can add information to the page as you find it. And upon wandering in the blogosphere I came across another Libertarian blog that call itself CLASSical Liberalism, "a blog for all things CLASSical Liberal, with an emphasis on educating about aspects of classical liberalism (hence, the "CLASS" in CLASSical Liberal)--history, theory and, of course, practice." He has a series of biographies on line of Robert Anson Heinlein, Emma Goldman, Harriet Martineau, Liberal Economist and Sociologist, whom I hadn't heard of, and a great summer reading list. He's putting Class Struggle back into Libertarianism. Congrats on a thoughtful and good reading blog.

Anyways just a way of introducing a couple of great libertarian blogs to read in our little corner of the blogosphere.

A Libertarian Defense of the Left Wing in Latin America

Yes you read that right. Pardon the pun. Not all Libertarians are merely dyed in the wool right wingers like Colby Cosh, who uses the term to somehow indicate that he is just a Republican wannabe in Canada. See my article Cosh Slanders Chavez Again

A fruitful debate from the Libertarian Left on Latin America has been posted at Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog.

Vulgar Libertarianism Watch, Part XV: Lula and Chavez and Morales, Oh My!

There's been a lot of right-wing pissing and moaning out there recently about Venezuela and Bolivia, a lot of it under "free market" colors. First off, Doug Allen at Catallarchy:

Add another anti-US leftist [Evo Morales] to the Latin American leader list.

Well, for anyone who's just emerged from a time warp and has a century worth of news to catch up on, I'd say the Latin American left has some pretty fucking good reasons to be anti-US.

In the comments to the same post, Jonathan Wilde identifies Hugo Chavez as

the latest in a long tradition of South American populist thugs like Allende and Lula.

Well, golly, we can't have any of those thugs in South America now, can we? Given the vast number of individuals who might have deserved that epithet in recent Latin American history, Wilde's singling out of Allende and Lula speaks volumes. First, consider the wide range of political forces in Latin America over the past half century or so; the single biggest, probably, is the U.S. government--the Marines, CIA, and School of the Americas, inter alia. Next, consider the governments installed by the U.S. over the same period by means of those same interventionist forces, starting with the intervention in Guatemala in 1954, continuing through the Brazilian coup in the 1960s, the overthrow of Allende, Operation Condor, and the tens upon tens of thousands of people murdered by U.S.-supported death squads in the 1980s. Finally, consider that the two most prominent political figures in Chile alone in the past 35 years have been Allende and Pinochet. The choice of Allende and Lula as exemplary "thugs," in such a context, indicates (to put it mildly) a rather idiosyncratic view of reality.

And it just gets better and better. And so do the lengthy contributions in the comments section.


So next time Colby Cosh calls himself a Libertarian you now know he is no such thing he is just another vulgar right wing reactionary.

Meanwhile the right wing will have another excuse to avoid reality, that the IMF and the neo-liberal agenda in Latin America is a failure. Consequently the basket case economies created by the IMF like Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, etc. has led to the revival of a viable left wing mass movement on the contient. A movement that is about worker and community control, rather than just statist-nationalization.

Now Chile has elected its first Woman President who is a socialist. A Victim of Pinochet Is Chile's New Leader

Yep the American Imperative, the Monroe Doctrine, in Latin America is tumbling down like a house of cards. Vive le Revolucion.


Tags

Latin America
Chavez
Venezeula
Libertarian
Mutualist
Kevin Carson
Lula
Blogs
Chile
Brazil
Bolivia
Evo Morales
Colby Cosh

Kevin Carson Replies

Keven Carson of Mutualist Blog has responded to my article; State-less Socialism.He gives a spirited defense of Indiviudalist Anarchism, Libertarianism, based on Benjamin Tucker, and in opposition to the Labour Theory of Value. Read it here. Thanks for the thoughtful comments Kevin, I am working on a reply.


Also see:

Libertarian Labour

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid

Libertarian Dialectics

Tags
Anarchism
capitalism
individualism
libertarian communism
socialism
libertarian socialism
mutualism
libertarian

HERE IS ANOTHER BLOG THAT PUBLISHED A CRITIQUE OF THE MYTH THAT PRUSSIAN STATE SOCIALISM IS SOCIALISM 

REAL SOCIALISM COMES FROM BELOW 

IT IS CALLED  STATELESS SOCIALISM AS I DISCUSS HERE 

I THOUGHT I WOULD SHAMELESSLY STEAL 

AND REPRINT THIS SINCE THE BLOG IS NO 

LONGER PUBLISHING UNFORTUNATELY

Socialism- the s-word…

Just a thought…

I really wish I could be either enthused or appalled by the fact that Ed Miliband is now leader of the Labour Party. I know the ultra-Blairites, with their fellow travellers in the BBC and on the Murdoch Death Star, who rallied around his brother David as the next best thing to The World’s Favourite Money Grabbing War Monger, are shocked that their cunning plan failed (‘if it hadn’t been for you meddlin’ trade unions…’) Best make the best of a bad job chaps… and go and join the Conservative Party- Education Secretary Michael Gove for one seems pretty keen on embracing the Blair Legacy.

Anyway, ‘Red Ed’? Do me a favour! You may have heard the comment that his father Ralph Miliband claimed that socialism could not come through Parliamentary means and his two sons have gone around proving it in practice. Only in a country where most mainstream politicians are in such awe of a handful of  mindlessly Thatcherite newspapers with declining circulations could someone like Ed Miliband be called a ‘Red’.  It is a bit like Business Secretary Vince ‘privatise the Post Office’ Cable being called a ‘Marxist’ for criticising the City of  London. If there is any sort of ‘Marxist’ class war in this country it is the City of London and its patsies in the mainstream media and the main political parties  against the rest of us…

Now if Vince had walked  around the Square Mile with this placard…

Anyway, socialism is a real political swear word isn’t it? Sometimes I try and think if anything has not been tagged with the ‘s-word’ at some point. I realise that for a lot of people, ‘socialism’ is any form of state intervention in the economy. Sometimes this is expanded to include any state intervention in wider social life or state interventions abroad. I then wonder how it got to this. After all, most of the original socialists were often extremely anti-state…

Every couple of years or so I seem to repost this blogpost written in 2006 by Larry Gambone, a Canadian evolutionary anarchist who now lives in Nanaimo (that’s right isn’t it, Larry?), largely as a quick refresher for those who automatically think socialism = the state:

The Myth Of Socialism As Statism [May 6th 2006]

What did the original socialists envision to be the owner and controller of the economy? Did they think it ought to be the state? Did they favor nationalization? Or did they want something else entirely? Let’s have a look, going right back to the late 18th Century, through the 19th and into the 20th, and see what important socialists and socialist organizations thought.

*Thomas Spence – farm land and industry owned by join stock companies, all farmers and workers as voting shareholders.
* St. Simon – a system of voluntary corporations
* Ricardian Socialists – worker coops
* Owen – industrial coops and cooperative intentional communities
* Fourier – the Phlanistery – an intentional community
* Cabet – industry owned by the municipality (‘commune’ in French, hence commune-ism)
* Flora Tristan – worker coops
* Proudhon – worker coops financed by Peoples Bank – a kind of credit union that issued money.
* Greene – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Lasalle – worker coops financed by the state – for which he was excoriated by Marx as a ‘state socialist’
* Marx – a ‘national system of cooperative production’

Would that sound better on ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Dragon’s Den’, Karl?

* Tucker – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Dietzgen – cooperative production
* Knights of Labor – worker coops
* Parsons – workers ownership and control of production
* Vanderveldt – socialist society as a ‘giant cooperative’
* Socialist Labor Party – industry owned and run democratically through the Socialist Industrial Unions
* Socialist Party USA – until late 1920’s emphasized workers control of production.
* CGT France, 1919 Program – mixed economy with large industry owned by stakeholder coops.
* IWW – democratically run through the industrial unions.
* Socialist Party of Canada, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1904-05 program – common ownership, democratically run – both parties, to this very day, bitterly opposed to nationalization.
* SDP – Erfurt Program 1892 – Minimum program includes a mixed economy of state, cooperative and municipal industries. While often considered a state socialist document, in reality it does not give predominance to state ownership.

Well? Where’s the statism? All these socialisms have one thing in common, a desire to create an economy where everyone has a share and a say.

Why The Confusion

The state did play a role in the Marxist parties of the Second International. But its role was not to nationalize industry and create a vast bureaucratic state socialist economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government, and backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Three things would then happen:

1. The expropriated enterprises handed over to the workers organizations, coops and municipalities.

2.The army and police disbanded and replaced by worker and municipal militias.

3. Political power decentralized to the cantonal and municipal level and direct democracy and federalism introduced.

These three aspects are the famous ‘withering away of the state’ that Marx and Engels talked about.

The first problem with this scenario was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their program and adopt a lot of the statist reformism of the liberal reformers. Due to the Iron Law of Oligarchy the parties themselves became sclerotic and conservative. Then WW1 intervened, splitting the workers parties into hostile factions. Finally, under the baleful influence of the Fabians, the Bolsheviks and the ‘success’ of state capitalism in the belligerent nations, the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and worker ownership and control to nationalization and statism. The new post-war social democracy began to pretend that state ownership/control was economic democracy since the state was democratic. This, as we see from the list above, was not anything like the economic democracy envisaged by the previous generations of socialists and labor militants.

So there are ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forms of socialism. I definitely identify with the latter type, while the former attracts the power hungry ‘socialist’, whatever his or her professed stripe (notice how many erstwhile ‘Bennites’ in the Labour Party thirty years ago became evangelicals for ‘Blairism’?). ‘Top-down’ socialists who identify with the Big State are a bit like ‘free marketeers’ who excuse Big Business rather than support independent trades people and the self-employed because, to use Kevin Carson’s mocking phrase, ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.’ (Kevin A. Carson Studies in Mutualist Politcal Economyi, p.116)

Of course, to talk about a Non-Statist or Libertarian form of  Socialism throws a lot of people. Well, here another phrase to throw about: ‘market collectivism.’ That is:

‘a community of producer cooperatives. Each cooperative is owned and run by the workers themselves. Their products are sold on a market. They purchase the required raw materials themselves. There is little or no central planning….a market collectivist society is not capitalist because….workers are self-managed; they do not work under the direct or indirect control of a capitalist. In addition the workers (collectively) own the product of their labour, which they bring to the market for sale.’ Geoff Hodgson The Democratic Economy, p.177.

The nearest to a ‘market collectivist’ economy any of us have seen is Yugoslavia under Tito. Now that eventually collapsed in the wars of the 1990s but how much did market collectivism have to do with it? I suspect the lack of political freedom and the plunging of the whole country into deep debt during the 1970s and 1980s had a much more profound effect in bringing about the death of Yugoslavia.

The main theorist of market collectivism is Jaroslav Vanek. An interview with him from the early 1990s, in which he says why it has been hard for co-operatives to take off in the West, can be found here.

So what is a pore ole Market Collectivist to do? I cannot think of a British political party that is opposed to co-operatives per se. However, are any of them likely to say in the foreseeable future that co-operatives should be the dominant enterprise model for the economy? I doubt it. Even the Co-operative Party is hobbled by its links to the Labour Party. Perhaps one should just keep plugging away and things will change.  It is worth noting that the economic situation in recent years seems to have encouraged the growth of co-operatives in the US. This ‘bottom-up socialism’  is definitely better than the top-down ‘War Socialism’ which is encouraged by the Republican Party in the US:

The U.S. economy increasingly resembles the dual economy of the Soviet Union, with an overfunded military sector and a chronically weak, dysfunctional civilian sector. Like the Soviet Union in its decline, we are bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. The Soviet system was supported to the end, however, by Soviet military and intelligence personnel and defense factory workers and managers. Their equivalents exist in America. Conservatives are not being irrational, when they ignore the civilian economy while fostering the military economy that provides orders and jobs to many of their constituents. Theirs is the logic of Soviet-style conservatism.

‘Watch what we say, not what we do,’ Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell famously remarked. Out of power, the Republican Party preaches Ron Paul-style libertarianism. In power, the party practices Martin Feldstein-style military Keynesianism and military socialism — and Hank Paulson-style financial sector Keynesianism and socialism.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there. I do not expect to quickly change the minds of those who think socialism must always = the state, but I’ll give it a go!

Update: Suzanne Moore goes down memory lane with Da Brudders:

I have vague recollections of the Milibands thousands of years ago when I worked at Marxism Today. There were many young men around who made the tran­sition from Communist Party backgrounds to New Labour without much trouble. It ­simply required a degree of faith and opportunism.

There is still to be a good book written on how a load of erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’ (whether from a Communist or Trotskyite background) and/or ‘Hard Left’ activists (Freud would have a field day) ended up supporting the largely pro-City of London/Big Business agenda of New Labour. They took on different ideals and goals but used the similar methods to achieve them. Discuss.

PUBLISHED IN:

• UNCATEGORIZED

ON OCTOBER 2, 2010 AT 10:31 PM  COMMENTS (1)  
TAGS: BENJAMIN TUCKER, DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY, GEOFF HODGSON, JAROSLAV VANEK, JUMP YOU FUCKERS, KARL MARX, KEVIN CARSON, LARRY GAMBONE, MARKET COLLECTIVISM, MUTUALISM, PETER WILBY, PROUDHON, ROBERT OWEN, RON PAUL, SOCIALISM, STUDIES IN MUTUALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY, SUZANNE MOORE, TITO, US WAR SOCIALISM, VINCE CABLE, WORK LESS PARTY, WORKERS' CO-OPERATIVES, WORKERS' SELF-MANAGEMENT

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

I had come across Joseph Stromberg’s libertarian analysis of Anti-Imperialist American Historian William Appleman Williams, some time ago on the web and had the opportunity to cruise Stromberg’s column at antiwar.com again and thought it important enough to share.

I had not heard of Williams before, and appreciated Stromberg’s introduction to this overlooked American revisionist historian.

I came to appreciate why his socialist critique of American Empire and foreign policy would influence Americans of both the Libertarian Left and the Right. "Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian.” says Paul Buhle.

Williams fell out of favour in the eighties and nineties as the neo-liberal ideology steamrolled over its opponents on the left after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Williams however is has not been left as an obscure footnote in history. His work is now considered essential in understanding American Imperialism in the age of Globalization.

With Stromberg’s appreciation of Williams, written in 1999 at the height of Clintons Popular Front War against Serbia, we see libertarian dialectical analysis unafraid to confront a marxian dialectic and appreciate it. Williams insight into American Imperialism became even more relevant as America pursued its new preemptive strike policy post 9/11 against the neo-cons old straw dog Iraq.

An essential aspect of Libertarian Dialectics is the praxis of revisionist history. In this we need no conspiracy theories to understand that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and that theirs is a history of the winners and losers. Our revisionism arises from understanding this dialectic we look at history from below, not from the losers, but the actual historical actors who have created the social change in the first place, the people themselves, as individuals and as social beings.

Stromberg is not your papa's libertarianism. It is not Republicanism Right, nor is it "vulgar libertarianism" or "liberaltarianism". If Kevin Carson is a Free Market Anti-Capitalist then Stromberg is a Libertarian Anti-Imperialist.

Stromberg is a consistent and outspoken opponent of Imperialism and War from a Libertarian perspective. And he has been so when such opposition on the right was tantamount to treason, which it has been in every case of American intervention abroad regardless of the popular opposition to it. Even now as half the American population opposes the Iraq war the Right continues to wave the flag of patriotism (the last refuge of a scoundrel as Bernard Shaw said) for their boys, and girls, over there. Why they are there is less important than supporting them once they are there, says the patriot regardless of whether they belong to the Democrats or Republicans. Stromberg consistently has asked why they are there and his answer is a consistent Anti-Imperialism in the tradition of Mark Twain.

Carson and Stromberg are amongst the few and the brave, who use Libertarian Dialectics, to confront the right wing liberaltarians and those who would reduce revisionist history to being a caricature of itself; conspiracy theory. Revisionist history is not a creature of the right but of the left, its essence is historical materialism, unable to accept this basic fact, the right insists on reducing every act to those of conspiracies amongst the rulers over the ruled.

So I am pleased to offer this introduction to Williams by Stromberg and a link to the rest of the article on Williams here on my blog. As well as readers will know from my web writings I have included other references to Williams as well as examples of his writings available on the web.


William Appleman Williams:
Premier New Left Revisionist

A PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN

by
Joseph R.
Stromberg

Last week in a discussion of Charles Austin Beard, "isolationist" Progressive historian, I mentioned Beard's influence on a number of younger scholars, among them William Appleman Williams and Murray N. Rothbard. Williams emerged in the late 1950s as the spearhead of New Left diplomatic history and has had an enduring influence on the writing of American history. "Mainstream" scholars take his insights into account but acknowledge his impact only in the most backhanded way possible. It is probably among libertarians and anti-imperialist conservatives that Williams now finds his true following.

A LIFE IN HISTORY

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) was born in Iowa in and attended the U.S. Naval Academy. He served in the Pacific in World War II. As influences on his thought, I should mention Beard, John Adams, James Madison, Walter Prescott Webb (whose writings on the frontier – ending with The Great Frontier – treated a theme which Williams made his own), and – in a generic sort of way – Karl Marx. One doubts, however, that Williams was ever really a "Marxist," despite the Cold War liberals' joy in awarding him that title.

After the war, he took a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin, which was still something of a bastion of the old-style Progressive history. His first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 [1952] had a small impact and led Mr. Vital Center himself – Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a founder of Cold War liberalism – to attack Williams as a "pro-Communist scholar."¹ In 1957, Williams returned to teach at Wisconsin, where he and his graduate students became known as the "Wisconsin school" of diplomatic history. Late in life, he taught at Oregon State University and served as President of the Organization of American Historians. Even in the turbulent "sixties," he was critical of New Left excesses. He would have hated the present university climate of political correctness.

A BODY OF WORK

His Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959; 1972] was noticed by the scholarly community, although the Cold War liberals, of course, hated it. The House Un-American Activities Committee noticed his work and wasted his time with summonses which were suddenly revoked after he had spent money and time traveling to hearings. This petty harassment was continued for a while by another government agency I need not mention.

As the quagmire in Vietnam raised fundamental questions about the policies pursued – with mere differences of nuance – by Cold War liberals and conservatives, Williams began to find an audience for his ideas. Book followed book. Here I shall only mention the very important Contours of American History [1961, 1973], the two-volumes of readings in American diplomatic history (The Shaping of American Diplomacy [1966, 1967]), America Confronts a Revolutionary World [1976] and Empire as a Way of Life [1980].

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars. He is a part-time lecturer in History at the college level. You can read his recent essay, "The Cold War," on the Ludwig von Mises Institute Website. His column, "The Old Cause," appears each Tuesday onAntiwar.com

William Appleman Williams Learning From History
American Radicals , American Radicals series

Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin

``I prefer to die as a free man struggling to create a human community than as a pawn of empire,'' wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1976.

Annapolis graduate and World War II Naval officer, civil rights activist and President of the Organization of American Historians, Williams (1921-1990) is remembered as the pre-eminent historian and critic of Empire in the second half of this century. More than any other scholar, he anticipated, encouraged and explained the attack of conscience suffered by the nation during the Vietnam War. Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian. Fellow historians consider him a great figure in American thought at large, one who looked for large patterns and asked the right questions.

Counterpunch also has an excellent article on Williams’s relevancy today in light of the new age of American Imperialism:

The Relevance of William Appleman Williams

History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy

"William Appleman Williams suggested that in spite of its best intentions American foreign policy was based largely on a one-dimensional American belief that Americans and American democracy had all the answers. The sad truth is that that belief might not be far wrong, but the inflexibility of the administrators in charge of its application has contributed to a century of failure in foreign relations.

According to Williams, American diplomacy was based on three premises, which, for all intents and purposes, have not changed and maintain a contemporary validity and relevance. The first is the humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. The second principle encourages self-determination, which insists that every society have the right to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. Third-and here's the kicker-American diplomacy has typically insisted that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they follow the American formula. The contradiction evident in this third premise effectively nullifies the genuine best interests of the first two, but it also speaks volumes about the global perception of American arrogance."

American Marxism: Theory without Tradition
by John B. Judis , Washington editor of In These Times and has recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley.

The Choice Before Us by William Appleman Williams
The American Socialist, July 1957

Preface: History as a Way of Learning
Excerpted from The Contours of American History
by William Appleman Williams (1966) pp. 17-23.

Martin Luther King and the New American Frontier
By William Appleman Williams and Lewis Kreinberg
for Renewal Magazine. Originally Published April 5, 1968.

William Appleman Williams and the Myth of Economic Determinism
Steven Hurst
Manchester Metropolitan University
Paper prepared for the APG Conference, Reading, January 3-5 2003

Kindleberger on Bretton Woods
Redefining the Past: Essays in Honor of William Appleman Williams

Free Market Is Not Capitalism

Says Nobel Prize winner and father of Microcredit Muhammad Yunus sounding like my pal Kevin Carson.

And his critique of One Dimensional Human Beings resulting from Globalization harkens us back to Herbert Marcuses One Dimensional Man.

Pool photo by Bjoern Sigurdsoen, via Reuters

Muhammad Yunus, left, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Mosammat Taslima Begum, representing Mr. Yunus’s Grameen Bank, arriving for the award ceremony at Oslo Town Hall today.

Nobel Winner Warns of Dangers of Globalization New York Times

By WALTER GIBBS

Published: December 10, 2006

OSLO, Dec. 10 — The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all highway.”

“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies,” Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway.”

While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good.

Challenging economic theories that he learned as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville in the 1970s, he said glorification of the entrepreneurial spirit has led to “one-dimensional human beings” motivated only by profit.

Dr. Yunus, 66, then took a direct jibe at the United States for its war on terror, telling about 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo’s City Hall that recent American military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere had diverted global resources and attention from a more pressing project: halving worldwide poverty by 2015, as envisaged by the United Nations six years ago.

“Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size,” he said. “But then came Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream.”

He said terrorism cannot be defeated militarily and the concept of peace requires broadening. “Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way,” Dr. Yunus said.

He called for legal recognition of a new category of corporation that would be neither profit-maximizing nor nonprofit. It would be a “social business,” like Grameen Bank, the Dhaka-based microcredit institution he started 30 years ago. The bank has lent nearly $6 billion to help some of the poorest people on earth to start businesses, build shelters and go to school.

Grameen Bank — with which Dr. Yunus shared the prize today — is an interest-charging, profit-making business with more than 2,200 branches. But it is owned primarily by its poor clients and run for their benefit. Similarly structured institutions, he said, could bring health care, information technology, education and energy to the poor without requiring infusions of aid.

“By defining ‘entrepreneur’ in a broader way, we can change the character of capitalism radically and solve many of the unresolved social and economic problems within the scope of the free market,” he said.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Will Urge Banks to Lend to the Poor (December 10, 2006)

Out to Maximize Social Gains, Not Profit (December 9, 2006)

See:

Free Market

Microcredit

Africa

Capitalism

Globalization


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Did You Say Libertarian Communist

Yes indeed I did, and as usual I get comments from the great unwashed masses that this is a contradiction. Well once more into the fray we go, but this time from an indvidualist anarchist in Switzerland who says;

Thus, anarcho-communists could in fact be regarded as anti-property market anarchists. With this in mind, all anarchists have to realize that the differences between anarcho-communism, libertarian socialism, individualist anarchism and anarcho-capitalism are marginal and that we are all working towards the same goal—a stateless society. Economics: The Market as an Inevitable Result of Individualism

A tip o the blog to Kevin Carson for this.

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Land Reform=Privatization

A brilliant analysis of Land Reform as privatization is made by Kevin Carson where he points out;

As Jesse Walker points out at Reason Hit & Run, much of what Evo Morales calls "land reform" is what libertarians would call "privatization"--if it wasn't done by, you know, Evo Morales. And if the beneficiaries weren't poor people.

The point I was making in reply to Mr. Stupid Angry Canajun.


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Libertarian Left Blogs

The Libertarian Left blog exchange shows the diversity of the market in ideas, pages, design, comments, all that is the politicks of those of us who are Left-Libertarians.

So I went through the blog listings of the Liberatarian Left, BLL, that you can find in the side bar to the left.

And since many of my comrades here are free-marketers well I thought I would look at their output, that is how many links they are generating for the collective good. And lo and behold if in most cases they aren't generating more than they are getting. What altruists.

And here are the stats to show who is putting out and who is out putting. Here is our top ten list of those who have linked out, pushed more links over 1000 visitors makling them aware of BLL.

KN@PPSTER
Powered by: Nicotine, Kentucky Tavern, Kama Sutra
This site has received 2079 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 6127 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
A free market socialist blog in the tradition of the American individualist anarchists: Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, etc.
This site has received 979 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 5160 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left Home
Webring home for the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left.
This site has received 2107 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 5147 visitor(s) to this Site Ring

BradSpangler.com
Easily offended? Go away.
This site has received 1676 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 4535 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


Le Revue Gauche
Libertarian Communist Analysis And Comment
This site has received 717 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 4173 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


karmalised
elementary musings on matters of peace, freedom and justice.
This site has received 1265 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 3498 visitor(s) to this Site Ring

freeman, libertarian critter
This site has received 2430 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 2715 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


out of step
Unfinished essays and spontaneous eruptions about politics and culture from an agorist (i.e., radical Rothbardian) perspective
This site has received 1587 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 2199 visitor(s) to this Site Ring


Tor's Rants
A miscreant's musings on Mid-Coast Maine, Politics, Range Rovers, Buddhism, Idiot Drivers and kitty-kats.
This site has received 860 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 1750 visitor(s) to this Site Ring

Independent Country
For peace, privacy, and economic liberty.
This site has received 1901 hit(s) from this Site Ring
This site has sent 1510 visitor(s) to this Site Ring

And this humble blog site ranks number five.
I guess I 'm the centrist in the group :)

Nice to see that Kevin Carson of Mutualist Blog, and I pump out three times the links as we get. Labouring away for the good of the cause while generating surplus value in hits to BLL.

While we give a big hand out to Independent Country who managed to get more links than he sent out, but still did so in the high thousands.

Now there is competition. Lets see who can generate the most links out and in. That is the way of the Tao, balance.



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WTO Who Cares?

The WTO is meeting in its long anticipated Hong Kong round to talk about agribusiness subsidies. But despite the long anticipated meeting it is going nowhere. Nor can it. Despite the anti-WTO protests, despite last summers G8 meeting pledging Trade Not Aid, despite Bono and Geldoff, the very fabric of capitalism is the industrialization of agriculture, and this is the contradiction that belies this round of trade talks. Capitalism developed out of large scale farming production with the end of the commons in England.

Today the modern form of agribusiness destroys the family farm here in the industrialized world as much as it has declared war on subsistence farming in the developing world. The subsidies given out to Agribusiness are being equated with cooperatives and producer marketing boards. Hence the attack on the Canadian Wheat Board and the Quebec Dairy boards by Americans and by our own comprador farmers from the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party. And they are no more equivalent than the subsidies given to Agribusinesses that market bananas from Ecuador, like Dole, and the farm cooperatives that grow the bananas and are paid below market price by Dole.

Ever since the GATT Uruguay talks ended, more and more subsistence farming in the Third world and the newly Industrialized nations has been replaced by large scale export farming controlled by Agribusiness Giants like ADM,Cargill, Nestles, etc..

And where export products such as sugar, rice, soya, and dairy products, are in competition with the G8 they have no fair trade market. Even in their particular unique export markets such as bananas and cocoa and coffee, the internecine trade zones between the EU and the USA punitively punish these producing countries, and do not pay a fair price for their products.

Nor are the farmers encouraged to develop subsistence farming, some for export with varied crops for their own survival. When agribusiness gets involved, farmers in the developing world become wage slaves on large scale corporate plantations.

The village farming cooperatives are a real market alternative to rapacious capitalism and its agribusiness operations, but these folks are forgotten at the WTO. They have neither local representatives nor state representatives. Nor has the Libertarian movement taken up their cause with few exceptions such as those of us on the Libertarian Left; Kevin Carson, Larry Gambone, and the Knappster, voices in the wilderness on this issue.

Think of the power that these small villages would have if rich American Libertarians who have oodles of cash were to champion their cause. But it won't happen because they aren't really Libertarians, just Republican hanger ons, more interested in privatizing public services than supporting real free markets in the real world. Because these markets are run by cooperatives and collectives, which runs counter to their individualist consumerist ideology.

The WTO talks stalled again today, and will not get anywhere because the issue to agribusiness is not the issue of sustainable farming, but of transforming the world into its supermarket as ADM brags.

And until we have fair trade that promotes open markets to farmer cooperatives in the developing world, Africa in particular, we will continue to have to feed them, and fund them, as they suffer the famines of Imperialism.

Post War Socially Constructed Reality

Key to the social amnesia that occurred around the revolutionary potential of the proletariat after WWII is the social construction of the myth of the middle class. The dull boring fifties as popular history refers to it, was a utopian myth created by the beginnings of a post war boom in America.

It was anything but, with the Cold War, the homosexual and communist witch hunts, the rise of the UAW in the automobile industry and the unification of the CIO and AFL, the war in Korea, mass automation, etc. But by the end of the Fifties the neo-con ideologists who once had been leftists such as Daniel Bell could declare the End of Ideology, that is the end of class war and the end of the potential of Marxism to appeal to the American working class who now owned their own homes, had washing machines, cars, summer vacations.

It was a wonderful myth for in reality America still had poverty and lots of folks missing out on the post war boom as the black listed movie Salt of the Earth showed. Women had been forced out of the factories into the dull and monotonous career of being house wives. Segregation kept blacks and white workers separated through out America and not just in the south, but also in the factories of the north where they worked together.Mexican Americans like those depicted in Salt of the Earth, lived lives of brutal poverty not unlike folks during the Great Depression. But all this was white washed by the myth of the growing American Middle Class. A myth perpetrated by sociologists and other academics as well as the media.

Another myth that had to be created was that of the nuclear family, since the war had destroyed all social relations between the sexes and had opened up sexual opportunities with out the need for marriage. Sometimes war brides had several husbands, homosexual liaisons increased, sex for pleasure became an antidote to pending death, there could be no long term commitments given as those who left for the front might never come back. With the revelations about sexuality published by Kinsey and subsequent social turmoil created by sexual relations during the war, the post war planners saw the need to create the ideal family that returning G.I.'s would fit into, forgetting their real experiences of another kind of sexual relationship, one that was not forever and ever. One based on pleasure, however fleeting, not just for reproduction.

Increased production, automation, the creation of mass consumption, wide spread home ownership, increasing the access to higher education for G.I.'s, the creation of Ozzie and Harriet land, all this was planned in advance of the end of the war. As this amazing web site shows.

Those in charge of America were worried that the revolutionary and radical movements that emerged during the great depression and subsequently in resistance to fascism in Spain would re-emerge after WWII. Johnny had gotten his gun and was coming home, and the last thing the ruling class wanted was an armed proletariat with grievances unresolved from the depression. The creation of the house wife, that paradigm of virtue was the result of the need to move women out of the factories in order to avoid the crisis of post war unemployment that had led to the General Strike wave of 1919 following WWI.

During WWII the U.S. military created a special education program based on comics and propaganda pamphlets aimed at changing the consciousness of their draftees. To create the myth of American Democracy as we know it today, and to create the conditions for a post-war ideology of the Middle Class, the great mushy middle the happy worker consumer who was the 'American Citizen', no longer a 'proletarian' who could be appealed to by socialists, communists and labour activists.

They were pamphlets designed by Management to educate workers about their place in the world, not unlike the Team Work posters you see in your workplace today.

The whole modern management scheme of reification, which takes the socialist ideal of self management and transforms it into a management scheme to get us to work harder for less evolved from this ideological construct that occurred after this WWII experiment. It was the source of the Dimming school of ideology where Team Work Management was used to further enslave the working class through application of modern automation.

The new management strategies of getting us to participate in our own exploitation are well criticized by Kevin Carson.

And they originate in the ivory towers that created the North American post WWII world as this site reveals.



Constructing a Postwar World: Background and Context

These pamphlets arose from impulses that are generally overlooked in the celebratory historiography of World War II. In a very real sense, the impetus for the pamphlets was fear—fear among military and civilian leaders that enlistees formed a potentially restless, dangerous, and uncontrollable group (particularly among those stationed overseas) who were likely to have difficulty adjusting back to civilian lives.

Social unrest among enlistees after World War I provided some cause for caution, but their concerns were substantially heightened and reinforced by new and extensive efforts to poll and test the mood and morale of the service men and women. Sociologists working for the Army found that servicemen were deeply ambivalent about the war, uneasy about their relationship with the civilian population, and deeply concerned about their lives after the war. In this respect, the emergence of the field of social psychology was critical, as it created new tools to measure morale and discontent in large groups of men and suggested new means of social manipulation.

The records of the Army’s Information and Education Division (IED) demonstrate that as early as the summer of 1943, military and civil leaders became concerned that after the conclusion of hostilities, the absence of common enemies and goals might unleash widespread social unrest. The definition of the problem and the resulting efforts at a solution were shaped by two important factors—the particular personality and background of the division’s commander, Frederick Osborn, and the emergence of social psychology as a discrete discipline with its own institutional imperatives.

As early as the summer of 1943, Osborn and others in the War Department were tying these issues together, and pointing to the need to ameliorate wide-scale social disruption after the war. They were particularly concerned about the period between the end of fighting and the moment when the servicemen could be shipped home. In a memorandum to the chief of personnel, Osborn noted the experience of the services after World War I, which “amply demonstrated that without an adequate substitute for military training, administered with vigor and conviction, cases of absence without leave, desertion, insubordination, petty misdemeanors, and even serious crises mounted week by week.” The solution offered by Osborn’s staff was a comprehensive program of nonmilitary training, recreational and athletic activities, and an educational program in which the G.I. Roundtable series would be a featured component.

Democratic Education or Engineering?


In his first report on preparing for the postwar transition, to the Chief of the Personnel Branch, Osborn sets out four avenues for ameliorating potential negative behavior: a nonmilitary education program (a system of correspondence courses for high school and college credit), “information activities,” recreational activities, and an athletic program. Under information activities, Osborn sketches out a program of information, “derived from nonmilitary sources and prepared so far as possible by nonmilitary agencies,” on such issues as jobs; “local, state, and national problems which men will find confronting them as citizens with explanations of the historical, geographical, and economic backgrounds of these problems”; and “international problems facing the United States.” This sketch would form the basis for the G.I. Roundtable series.


However, as William Graebner has noted, similar programs were being developed in the civilian world in the same period. This notion had fairly deep roots, stretching back to notions of progressive education, which had gained credence at the end of the 19th-century and been further developed by progressive philosophers and social scientists like John Dewey.These ideas had a particularly strong advocate in Francis T. Spaulding, chief of the Education Branch, and another civilian pressed into temporary service for the war. Spaulding joined the division from a post as dean of education at Harvard to accept a temporary commission as colonel for the duration of the war.[21] In articles and a variety of consultant’s reports, he had been actively promoting these ideals of democratic education, noting in one article that

the conventional school teaches history out of books, and civics also out of books. As a result, its graduates know a good many of the facts of American history and something of about the machinery of national government, and perhaps recognize their rights as American citizens to freedom of speech and of assembly and of the press. But most of these pupils, as studies of representative schools have shown, have no clear realization of the social and political problems to be found in their own local communities; few of them know how to go about the task of being active citizens in their own right; only a minority are willing even to say that they would do certain things necessary to make democracy actually work, in situations where the task of making democracy work involved some personal effort or self-denial.

Spaulding would bring these ideals of an engaged form of education into the military, and was quite active in advocating the “democratic” form of the discussion group as a necessary leisure-time activity.An important component in their thinking was a very similar program being conducted by the British military under the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). Both Osborn and Spaulding had traveled to England and been noted that it was a deficiency that the U.S. military lacked a similar program.Osborn was particularly impressed with the way these were carefully structured to “guide” discussion into certain topic areas, and promote small group cohesion. While the discussion on how to establish a specific program comparable to ABCA is not recorded, in early September 1943 Spaulding approached the American Historical Association about producing the materials for these discussion groups.

At a disciplinary level, the contrast between the involvement of the history profession and that of social psychologists is quite instructive. While social psychologists were provided an abundance of resources to apply the tools of their discipline, the history profession was feeling largely excluded from the work of the war. The historical profession and particularly the leadership of the AHA were casting about for some way to support the war effort. Even before war was formally declared, the papers submitted for the AHA annual meeting in December 1940 were dominated by discussions of war, and the analogical evidence that could be brought to bear on the forthcoming conflict.The subsequent correspondence of the AHA’s executive director, Guy Stanton Ford, over the first two years of the war reflects a clear sense of frustration at the marginalization of the profession, which had enjoyed a prominent role in World War I

According to Spaulding, the criteria for selecting the AHA were largely based on the discipline’s pretensions to social scientific objectivity, which he praised as the profession’s “recognized disinterestedness and impartiality.” At the same time, the AHA had the added benefit of being free of the taint of being seen by Congress as a social science, noting that an earlier collaboration with the Social Science Research Council ran into heavy criticism because “Congress does not know the difference between socialist, social science, and social worker.

The War Department was quick to publicize the relationship, noting in a press release that, “With the birth of the voluntary group discussion forums and its rapid fire spread, the Army is undertaking to provide informational pamphlets presenting basic facts of special concern to the men as evidenced by their own choice of subjects.” In a rather fulsome review of the new program (which also fails to note the significance of the program to postwar planning), Fortune magazine expanded on this, stating,

The men who are behind the orientation program ...want above all, and with the greatest disinterestedness and democratic faith in the world, to make the American soldier conscious. They have no desire to give him political notions; they do want to give him a democratic-mindedness, a faith in what he is fighting for, equal to his pride of outfit and his physical courage. They do not ask him to take sides; they ask him to be aware of the fact that there are sides to be taken in the world, and that some principles can be as lethal as weapons.

The authors initially commissioned to write the pamphlets tended to come from the same spheres, typically senior-level faculty and management in many of the same organizations. Among the domestically related pamphlets, for instance, Clifford Kirkpatrick, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, would author essays on war marriages and working wives. Francis Brown, assistant director at the American Council on Education, would write on G.I.’s returning to school. Grayson Kirk, professor of government at Columbia University, would draft a pamphlet on universal military training that was subsequently censored. Emerson Schmidt, deputy director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, would author a pamphlet on small businesses, and Thorsten Selden, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, would author a pamphlet on the possibility of a postwar crime wave.

While both the Historical Services Board and military described their potential readers as “democratic citizens,” there was a fundamentally different way in which they each conceived of the term. The historians and social scientists serving as authors and on the board placed the accent on “democratic,” envisioning readers who would read and discuss these in a non-hierarchical setting, who would be improved simply in the process of learning, thinking, and discussing their subjects. For the military, the accent was always on the “citizen,” in the term. While democracy might serve as a cause and goal for the prosecution of the war, there was no intention of permitting free and full expression on these topics. From the first, the pamphlets were intended to provide the basis for guided discussions in which their role as citizens who had given up certain rights afforded by a democracy were to be clearly understood

As important as the ideological differences were, the convergence in the normative outlook of the board and the military, seems equally important. The pamphlets addressing postwar domestic issues all share the same underlying premise, holding up an ideal that was essentially white, heterosexual, and upper middle class. It is not surprising that the target audience is clearly enlisted men who were young, white, and male. To make the point explicit, the authors often use the device of injecting a Private (sometimes promoted to Sergeant) Pro and Private Con on different sides of an issue (in the pamphlet on war marriages, they are called Private Hasty and Private Wait). In every instance where this device is used, their differences are viewed by an omnipotent narrator as arising, at least in part, from ignorance of the “facts.”[44] But whatever the differences, the omnipotent narrator typically aligns with certain norms and ideals.

	Figure 1: This image from the War Marriages pamphlet is fairly typical in depicting women as problems that men will have to deal with on their return.

Apart from their general exclusion as participants in the discussion, women are typically depicted in domestic, maternal, or sexualized roles. Given the largely male military audience, it’s hardly surprising that pamphlets treating the subject of women directly—Do You Want Your Wife to Work after the War? and Can Wartime Marriages Work?—present them in highly objectified terms, as a problem to be solved. However, throughout the pamphlets women are often depicted as disturbing domestic harmony—in a pamphlet on consumer credit, for instance, women are depicted as potential spendthrifts who threaten to plunge the family into debt (Figure 1). And despite the pro-and-con debate on whether working women should return to the home after the war, the pamphlets typically depict only male figures as workers, producers, and managers.

While the texts express a measure of ambivalence about the future role of women, the images in the pamphlets, prepared by military artists, are less ambivalent. In a wide variety of pamphlets, women are depicted in sexualized contexts ranging from the young Eskimo woman casting an appraising glance over three single G.I.’s (in a pamphlet encouraging young men to move to Alaska), or the bare-breasted women in a pamphlet on the Pacific Islands, and the happy mother of triplets in the pamphlet on working women.[45]

Equally striking in the pamphlets is the near total absence of people of color except in exoticized settings like the Pacific Islands. The only mentions of African Americans appear in the pamphlet on crime and in a picture of black sharecroppers in the pamphlet on farming.[46] In this the pamphlets reflect the characteristics and the attitudes of their audience, most of whom felt that African Americans needed no further benefits in the postwar world.

Middle-class economic roles are generally privileged throughout the pamphlets, as (typically men) are directed toward business or other forms of white-collar work, such as business and civil service careers. There are a few exceptions to this norm, including an entire pamphlet devoted to farming and a few asides in the pamphlet encouraging men to move to Alaska, where they could “use their hands.” However, even in pamphlets that don’t address a specific career, this orientation toward a middle-class norm recurs throughout the pamphlets. In the pamphlets on postwar housing and borrowing, for instance, the ideal is a single-family suburban home—a class ideal that is reinforced by images of white men in suit and tie pondering their future dwelling. And throughout, the pamphlets emphasize individual striving and economic achievement as key measures of success in the postwar world.

The pamphlets privilege a white upper-middle-class lifestyle throughout, and place a particular accent on the veterans returning to a golden future as consumers of a plethora of new goods. This has a particularly technological accent in the series, as pamphlets prepare them for purchases of new radios, televisions, cars, and even private planes.This image of technological opportunities reflects the culture of the time, as a review of the periodical literature reveals a profusion of stories of technological progress in support of the war effort, supported by advertising from war-related industries who plowed some of their war profits back into ads that promoted their own technological creations on behalf of the war effort.

The significant level of technological hubris is suggested most clearly in the pamphlet Will There Be a Plane in Every Garage? which cautions against expecting that the title proposal will come to pass, while nevertheless leaving open the possibility. The authors note that “until private planes can do everything that automobiles can do, and fly as well, they will not displace the automobile.”[55] This is reinforced visually with pictures of a father returning home from work in the family helicopter. The postwar world envisioned by the pamphlets offered not only near limitless possibilities for personal economic progress, but intimately tied the notion of personal progress to vast new levels of consumer opportunities made possible by technological progress.

Figure 2: This image from Will There Be a Postwar Crime Wave? reflects the tone of the pamphlet, which suggests the urban environment is an unhealthy place to be.

The pamphlets also privilege a middle-America view of the world, which is probably not surprising given that the staff of the project were all from the Midwest (with most coming from Minnesota).[56] In discussions of the lived environment of the postwar world, for instance, urban settings are represented almost exclusively as sites of danger and crime, which are juxtaposed with rural and “hometown” settings, which are depicted as places of opportunity and community.[57] In Is a Crime Wave Coming? the authors lay out the social science data on urban crime rates, but generally ignore issues of crime and disorder outside of the city. To reinforce the implications of the data, the pamphlet’s images are typically urban, dark, and intentionally disturbing, in a way that viscerally connects crime to the urban environment (see Figure 2). This is in sharp contrast to the pamphlet on hometown life, which is filled with idyllic images of small towns that are lighter aesthetically, and in tone and spirit. This reinforces a narrative that emphasizes optimism and the nurturing environment of small-town life, noting that, “Going home will not mean going back but going forward from wherever you and your community find yourselves when victory comes.”

	Figure 3: This illustration from Can War Marriages Work? was the most frequently reproduced in the media coverage of the series.

The pamphlets finally began appearing in the fall of 1944. In early September, the War Department announced the publication of the G.I. Roundtable series, noting that they would begin to replace earlier discussion kits comprised of government- and privately produced materials.[61] The information in the release and related information in news reports makes it clear that these were intended as part of a larger effort to deal with domestic concerns about postwar readjustment of servicemen.The New York Times Magazine devoted five pages to the pamphlets, including a two-page spread showing the covers of all the completed pamphlets. The series received similar coverage from other media outlets nationwide.As Spaulding and Osborn had expected, the AHA’s role in the series provided exceptional cover for the Army, as the media coverage generally extolled the pamphlets’ objectivity in sum and detail.

However, some of the latent misogyny in the pamphlets did not pass by unnoticed. The Christian Science Monitor mocked the pamphlet Do You Want Your Wife to Work after the War? suggesting satirically that “its real purpose may be determined by revealing that one section of this subversive pamphlet actually deals with the need for assisting wives to wash and dry dishes. Can you imagine the effect on the boys overseas just as they are beginning to dream of returning home? Is the War Department trying to slow down demobilization?”The New York Herald and Boston Post offered similar critiques over the coming days. Nevertheless, the rest of the media coverage was exceptionally positive, and the shared insensitivity to the portrayal of women is reflected in the prevalent use of the demeaning up-skirt picture from the War Marriages pamphlet to illustrate stories about the series (Figure 3).

The Army continued to distribute the pamphlets in the quantities of 200,000 through 1946, and made additional copies available to civilians through the Government Printing Office. However, the intended uses of the series to guide and shape the thought of servicemen and women seemed to dissolve, even as the concerns about discontent among servicemen overseas quickly came to pass, as the Research Branch had predicted. Rather ironically, Osborn’s warnings about a sudden and dramatic exodus of personnel proved particularly true among the officers in his own division. The officers who had overseen the G.I. Roundtable project, from Osborn down to AHA liaison Major Goodrich, had departed for other positions within three months. This merely reflected the predicted agitation of servicemen overseas, who began to ask for a quick return.

Apparently in a last-ditch effort to revitalize the program, the lowly captain who had been left in charge of the program conducted another series of surveys of military bases on the West Coast to observe discussion groups of 20 to 100 people, and discuss the continuing use of the program. He found fairly extensive interest and readership for the pamphlets, but this often seemed to be as a relief of boredom, rather than a concerted programmatic effort to use them. The officers at the eight bases visited all said the pamphlets were being widely distributed aboard troopships returning from overseas and in the redistribution centers to which they were returning. The surveys demonstrated that they were popular as reading material, particularly those treating more controversial subjects. But the waning of the ideals that served to produce the pamphlets is evident in the workmanlike report that the captain produced. The language of guiding and shaping the men’s thoughts are completely absent from his lengthy report, noting that they will only “play a valuable role in keeping Army personnel well informed and personally interested in important current problems involving the nation’s best interests.”

In the end, the value of the pamphlet series is not in the actual effect it had, but in what it tells us about the times in which it was produced. The series was an abject failure in terms of the goals of those who initiated it—the evidence suggests that the pamphlets’ role in ameliorating social discontent was never accepted by those further down the chain of command, and they were never implemented on the local level with that goal in mind.

However, as a mirror on their times, the pamphlets illuminate a number of features in the war years that seem to have been lost in the historiography of the period. The notion that servicemen would pose a significant social problem in the postwar world seems largely unexplored in the current literature, which tends to treat postwar planning as either a foreign policy issue (in terms of constructing a postwar international order) or an economic issue (in terms of the supply of available jobs). At another level, the pamphlets highlight many of the cultural presuppositions that were taken for granted at the time. They provide useful evidence of efforts to envision a postwar world even as the military conflict was taking place, and offer some fresh evidence of the cultural representations of women and minorities at the time. They also highlight the early formation of a white-collar ideal and technological hubris that we tend to associate with the postwar world. As such, they open an interesting line of analysis about when the cultural forms of “the fifties” can be said to have started, and provide a suggestive opening to further inquiry into the culture of the period and the military’s role in shaping it.

SEE:

tick-tock-we-live-by-clock

The End Of The Leisure Society

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Take Time From the Boss

Work Sucks

Time For The Four Hour Day

Goof Off Day

The Right To Be Greedy

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