SCIENCE NEWS FROM THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL NEWS NETWORK

Life could have emerged from lakes with high phosphorus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment. But how did a lifeless environment on the early Earth supply this key ingredient? Eastern California's Mono Lake has no outflow, allowing salts to build up over time.... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How fish fins evolved just before the transition to land

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

Research on fossilized fish from the late Devonian period, roughly 375 million years ago, details the evolution of fins as they began to transition into limbs fit for walking on land. Tom Stewart holds a fossil cast of a fin from a juvenile Sauripterus taylori, a late Devonian fish with primitive features of tetrapods [Credit: Matt Wood]The new study by paleontologists from the University of Chicago, published this week in the... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The growing Tibetan Plateau shaped the modern biodiversity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

Holding particular biological resources, the Tibetan Plateau is a unique geologic-geographic-biotic interactively unite and hence plays an important role in the global biodiversity domain. The Tibetan Plateau has undergone vigorous environmental changes since the Cenozoic, and played roles as switching from "a paradise of tropical animals and plants" to "the cradle of Ice Age mammalian fauna". Local origination of endemism of fishes... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

North Atlantic Current may cease temporarily in the next century

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

The North Atlantic Current transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe, providing much of north-western Europe with a relatively mild climate. However, scientists suspect that meltwater from Greenland and excessive rainfall could interfere with this ocean current. Simulations by scientists from the University of Groningen and Utrecht University showed that it is unlikely that the current will come to a complete stop,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Forces from Earth's spin may spark earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at Mount Etna

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

New research suggests forces pulling on Earth's surface as the planet spins may trigger earthquakes and eruptions at volcanoes. An image of an eruption at Mount Etna on October 30, 2002 from the International Space Station. The eruption, triggered by a series of earthquakes, was one of the most vigorous in years. Ashfall was reported in Libya, more than 350 miles away [Credit: NASA]Seismic activity and bursts of magma near... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

A 'pivotal' moment for understanding whale evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

Scientists could soon better investigate the feeding behaviours of extinct dolphin and whale species. A third year student at Japan's Nagoya University has found that the range of motion offered by the joint between the head and neck in modern-day cetaceans, a group of marine mammals that also includes porpoises, accurately reflects how they feed. The authors of the study, published in the Journal of Anatomy, suggest this method could... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Researcher discovers earliest fossil evidence of parental behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

A team led by Carleton University's Hillary Maddin has discovered the earliest fossil evidence of parental care. The fossil predates the previous oldest record of this behaviour by 40 million years and is featured in an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The fossilized remains of a type of lizard-like early mammal were discovered by a team led by Carleton University’s Hillary Maddin inside a lithified tree stump on Cape Breton... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Locations of prehistoric sites in Cyprus reassessed after Troodos discovery

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

The Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Transport, Communications and Works, has announced the completion of the second part of the 2019 archaeological campaign of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUT) in the Troodos mountains. The team, under the direction of Prof. Nikos Efstratiou, in collaboration with educator/archaeologist Demetris Kyriakou, concentrated on further investigating the prehistoric site at Agios... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Remains of 4,000-year-old Egyptian Guide to the Underworld discovered

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

When it comes to difficult travel, no journey outside New York City’s subway system rivals the ones described in “The Book of Two Ways,” a mystical road map to the ancient Egyptian afterlife. A detail from the floor of a coffin of Gua, physician of Djehutyhotep, a nomarch of Deir el-Bersha, Egypt, during the Middle Kingdom, with markings showing the “two ways” of the ancient Egyptian afterlife. Researchers recently unearthed the... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

New terracotta warriors uncovered at emperor’s mausoleum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

More than 220 new terracotta warriors with five different official titles, including senior military ranks, have been unearthed during the third excavation at the Mausoleum of the Emperor Qinshihuang. Credit: Emperor Qin Shi Emperor's Mausoleum (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); A new military rank, dubbed "lower than the lowest," was found by archaeologists at the site, according to a report of Shaanxi TV... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Evolution: Revelatory relationship

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

A new study of the ecology of an enigmatic group of novel unicellular organisms by scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich supports the idea hydrogen played an important role in the evolution of Eukaryota, the first nucleated cells. A hydrothermal vent in Loki’s Forest, deep beneath the North Atlantic [Credit: R.B. Pedersen, Centre for Geobiology, University of Bergen]One of the most consequential developments... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Researchers make new discoveries set to reveal the geology of planets outside our solar system

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 1 day ago

Three OU astronomers today announced groundbreaking discoveries allowing scientists to understand planets outside the solar system. Professor Carole Haswell, Dr. Daniel Staab and Dr. John Barnes discovered three, new, nearby planetary systems. Dispersed Matter Planet Project target selection area [Credit: The Open University]Research led by Professor Haswell found the exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—as part of the... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Large Mayan palace found in Mexico

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

37 kilometers southeast of the city of Tizimin in Yucatan, Kulubá is located. It is quite an interesting Mayan archaeological site since everyday something new shows up. Credit: Mauricio Marat, INAHThe name Kulubá, according to the Maya language specialist William Brito Sansores (La escritura de los mayas, 1981), is allegedly formed by the words “K’ulu”, which refers to a kind of wild dog, and “ha”, water. (adsbygoogle =... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

57 ancient tombs found in south China

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

Nearly 500 archaeological items have been found in 57 ancient tombs in south China's Guangdong Province, a local cultural heritage and archaeology institute said Thursday. Credit: Xinhua (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); The tombs, dating back to periods between the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.- 220 A.D.) and the Qing Dynasty (1644 A.D.-1911 A.D.), were unearthed in construction sites in the provincial capital... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Phoenician family tomb discovered in Israel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an entire Phoenician family buried together in a tomb in Achziv, an ancient population center on the Mediterranean coast near the northern city Nahariya. Cypriot and Phoenician pottery, bronze bowl, necklace found in the Phoenician grave at Achziv [Credit: Valdimir Neikhin] (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); In 2017, a joint team from Jerusalem’s Hebrew Union College... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Stylish suburbs: how ancient Mexican metropolis dodged inequality trap

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

Fragments of pre-Aztec murals recently unearthed on the outskirts of what was once the largest city of the Americas are adding to mounting evidence that even commoners there enjoyed the finer things in life. Mural fragments depicting a bird, recently discovered in the Tlajinga neighbourhood of the ancient city of Teotihuacan [Credit: David Carballo/Proyecto Arqueologico Tlajnga (PATT) via Reuters]Each year, millions of tourists visit... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Newly found stakes prompt fresh look at Vietnam's defeat of the Mongols

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

Excavations on a 950-square-meter site uncovered several ironwood poles in the Cao Quy rice field, located in Vietnam's Lien Khe Commune, Thuy Nguyen District. Credit: VNExpressArchaeologists said this is a large-scale, important finding relating to the Tran Dynasty’s famous Bach Dang Battle against an invasion by Mongolia’s Yuan Dynasty. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Well-known historian Le Van Lan noted... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Eleven skeletons found in 1,000-year-old Moche grave in Peru

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

Eleven graves containing skeletons of the mysterious Moche civilisation have been found in darkest Peru from 1,000 years ago. Credit: CEN/Ministerio Cultura PeruTwo children buried at the site had symbols on their skull, from either tattoos or markings that got under the skin and blemished the bone underneath. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); One person was buried with a sceptre and another was placed in a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Dog walker discovers 65 million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton on beach in Somerset

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) at The Archaeology News Network - 2 days ago

A dog walker has claimed he discovered a 65 million-year-old skeleton on a Somerset beach after his sharp-nosed dogs sniffed it out. Fossilized skeleton, likely of an ichthyosaur, on the rocky beach of Stolford, Somerset [Credit: Jon Gopsill, Caters News]Jon Gopsill, 54, was on the coast near Stolford, Somerset, with his two pets when he stumbled across the five-and-a-half foot long fossil, which had been exposed by recent... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Labour and Progressive Coalitions

Labour and Progressive Coalitions

Two penneth worth concerning Jem Gilbert's piece on Labourism. Jem takes aim at what you might otherwise call Labour's sectarianism: the idea Labour is the sole means of achieving progressive social change in this country, with the trade unions and affiliated societies as adjuncts, and other movements kept at arm's length. He argues that Corbynism was a step away from traditional Labourism with its re-emphasis on community building, supporting campaigning and struggle and, yes, standing with workers on picket lines. But it was only a step. The supremacy of the Labour Party as the parliamentary vehicle for change went fundamentally unchallenged. However, this will no longer do. The opposition to the Tories is split and, as this election has demonstrated again, a Labour victory is the exception not the rule. What we need to see is the democratisation of Labour to continue apace and, for once, a bit more modesty about the party's capacity to win elections. As Jem argues, "the fantasy of another 1945 ... has paralysed our politics for too long." Labour has to think seriously about progressive coalitions and leverage the actual anti-Tory majority in the country to deliver an anti-Tory majority in the Commons.

In the abstract, who can disagree? The problem comes with the practicalities. The Greens took some votes from Labour in this election, but didn't cost the party many seats. It's a much smaller outfit that is a contender in a vanishingly tiny number of constituencies and, given its recent remainia turn, helped make the EU wedge issue for detaching Labour voters. Of the nationalist parties, Plaid Cymru has embraced neoliberalism with Welsh characteristics just as Labour moved left and, fresh from clawing back all the seats lost to Labour in 2017, there is little incentive for the SNP to sign up for a progressive alliance. Nicola Sturgeon's 2015 rhetoric notwithstanding.

And then we have a Liberal Democrat problem. The problem with forging a progressive alliance with the LibDems is, well, they're not that progressive. Given the opportunity of government with the Tories they dived under the covers with alacrity, and enabled the worst attacks seen on the post-war settlement since John Major. And they helped pave the way fro Brexit too. At the recent election, instead of attacking the Tories as the greater danger they thought piling into Labour alongside Boris Johnson and parroting Tory attacks was the better bet. In short, at every juncture since Charles Kennedy stood down as leader in 2005, the LibDems have made the wrong call. If the next Labour leader was minded to arrange something with the yellow party, it would be against resistance within and without the parliamentary party. And who can blame any sceptic? There's nothing stopping the LibDems doing the dirty after benefiting from an electoral pact with Labour.

READ ON AT 
All That Is Solid ...
Look what A Very Public Sociologist melted into

Win Nay, Ryan Dean, Joey Deluca, and Urban Infidels: Edmonton Against Fascism Reports on Alberta

Unknown at Anti-Racist Canada: The ARC Collective - 6 hours ago

As ARC enters our third decade, welcome to 2020 folks! I have to admit that I've been a little lazy with regard to keeping up with what is happening in Alberta these days. I've certainly been meaning to look back at some of the groups and individuals this blog has been monitoring for the past number of years but other projects were preoccupying me and I just wasn't able to devote the attention to some of the stories coming out of the province that I should have. So thank goodness for the many activists who have taken up the challenge of monitoring the far right in Alberta. While the... more »

What counts as work?

Katrina Forrester

Will the Gig Economy Prevail? 

by Colin Crouch.

Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 5095 3244 5

5 DECEMBER 2019 lrb

Employment​ contracts are by their nature asymmetrical. Although in principle contracts are made between two free and equal parties, when an employee signs one they enter into an unequal relationship. Work can be a source of identity, a prerequisite for social inclusion, and a marker of status and independence; historically, the employment contract has been contrasted with slavery, bondage and other forms of servitude. But workers’ movements have long argued that waged labour in general implies a kind of wage-slavery: it dominates as well as exploits. At the very least, it sets up a hierarchical relationship: having a job means being under the authority of an employer. Struggles for better working conditions – for proper remuneration, trade union representation, protection against discrimination, the right to time off for leisure, parenting or sickness – aim to mitigate the essential inequity of the employment contract and limit the power of the boss.

According to the sociologist Colin Crouch, the gig economy provides a new way of concealing employers’ authority. People who work for such online platforms as Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo are classed not as employees but as self-employed. They are supposedly flexible entrepreneurs, free to choose when they work, how they work and who they work for. In practice, this isn’t the case. Unlike performers in the entertainment industry (which gives the ‘gig’ economy its name), most gig workers don’t work for an array of organisations but depend for their pay on just one or two huge companies. The gig worker doesn’t really have much in common with the ideal of the entrepreneur – there is little room in their jobs for creativity, change or innovation – except that gig workers also take a lot of risks: they have no benefits, holiday or sick pay, and they are vulnerable to the whims of their customers. In many countries, gig workers (or ‘independent contractors’) have none of the rights that make the asymmetry of the employment contract bearable: no overtime, no breaks, no protection from sexual harassment or redundancy pay. They don’t have the right to belong to a union, or to organise one, and they aren’t entitled to the minimum wage. Most aren’t autonomous, independent free agents, or students, part-timers or retirees supplementing their income; rather, they are people who need to do gig work simply to get by.

What is new about the gig economy isn’t that it gives workers flexibility and independence, but that it gives employers something they have otherwise found difficult to attain: workers who are not, technically, their employees but who are nonetheless subject to their discipline and subordinate to their authority. The dystopian promise of the gig economy is that it will create an army of precarious workers for whose welfare employers take no responsibility. Its emergence has been welcomed by neoliberal thinkers, policymakers and firms who see it as progress in their efforts to transform the way work is organised.

‘Standard employment’ is the formal name given to a non-temporary, full-time job secured by a contract. Today, the share of ‘non-standard employment’ in the labour market is growing. There are many kinds of non-standard and informal work, from self-employment to the unstable, unregulated and illegal work of the shadow economy. It takes different forms in different countries. In the UK, on-call contracts (whereby workers are on standby and can be called in to work at any time, even for short stints) and zero-hours contracts (whereby employers aren’t obliged to guarantee even a minimum number of working hours) are popular: an estimated 900,000 people worked under such arrangements in 2017. Across Europe, too, there has been an increase in ‘marginal jobs’ and in the use of contracts that expire before workers acquire full rights, like Germany’s ‘minijobs’ and ‘midijobs’ (which provide short hours and low pay, but are enough to disqualify workers from claiming unemployment benefits). At the same time, in advanced economies, the rights of ‘standard employees’ have been steadily eroded. Insecurity is the general condition of modern work.

Historically​ speaking, standard employment has been the norm only briefly, and only in certain places. Until the ‘industrious revolution’ of the 18th century, work was piecemeal. People worked where they lived, on the farm or at home: in the ‘putting-out system’ – which still exists in cloth production in parts of the global South – manufacturers delivered work to workers, mostly women, who had machinery at home and organised their work alongside their family life. Then work moved out of the home. Over the next two centuries, the workforce was consolidated into factories, then into offices. Waged work was standardised, then became salaried. When large numbers of people were brought together so that labour could be divided and supervised, unions gained bargaining power. New aspects of the employment relationship were subject to government scrutiny: pay, living standards, the responsibility of employers to contribute directly to the support of their employees through a system that came to be known as social insurance. As workers gained more rights, standard employment was ‘enriched’ with benefits.

At its postwar peak, enriched employment was a model of social democracy, providing generous benefits, union recognition, worker representation and consultation, and in some countries (such as Belgium and France) job protection. After the Second World War, Attlee’s Labour government embarked on a campaign to decasualise work through a social insurance system that would include all employees. But the most generous benefits were always limited in scope: unlike government-funded social assistance – which can be universal or means-tested but goes to the population at large – social insurance schemes provide benefits only to those who have made contributions, usually through waged work. In Britain, social insurance excluded non-workers and those in casual employment (since the point was to eliminate it). The paradigmatic wage-earner was taken to be a man with a family. In the US, key labour settlements excluded agricultural and domestic workers (groups that included many African-Americans and immigrants), and later limited the power of unions, which accepted no-strike clauses in return for a minimal safeguarding of job security.

Since then, standard employment has been eroded. In the 1960s and 1970s, unions gathered strength before being significantly weakened by commodity price inflation crises and the move towards the free market, which threatened the aspiration to full employment. The world of the steady job, it turned out, contained the seeds of its own decline. Today, standard employment is no longer enriched to the same degree, even when it is available. Union membership has declined, particularly in Anglophone countries. Labour markets have been deregulated, the protections offered by collective bargaining agreements weakened, and employers have fewer obligations to workers. A quarter of all employment in the OECD countries for which data is available is precarious (the figure would be higher if the shadow economy could be measured accurately). Novel forms of precarity are multiplying. Agriculture accounts for a smaller proportion of precarious labour than it once did (though much agricultural work is performed by migrants, who are often the most precarious workers of all), but involuntary part-time and temporary work is rising, especially in countries affected by the Eurozone crisis. In Italy, 12 per cent of total employment is involuntarily part-time and temporary; the figure is more than 5 per cent in at least ten OECD states.

Even if standard employment turns out to be the historical exception, the erosion of workers’ security doesn’t mark a return to the capitalism of the Gilded Age. Modern precarity takes a distinctive form, which is a result of the major political and economic changes of the 1970s. As Crouch sees it, three of these changes are especially significant. First, the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, characterised as deindustrialisation or as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. As manufacturing declined, the enriched standard employment associated with it began to disappear. Second, the rise of digital and data technologies, which has made possible the intensification of workplace discipline and surveillance as well as new ways of working from home – a modern ‘putting-out’ system. The internet has enabled monopolies, but it has also decentralised work as well as deindustrialised it. Third, workers’ loss of power after the deregulation of finance. Under Thatcher and Reagan, corporations were reorganised to benefit shareholders, and finance was given the freedom to move to more advantageous regimes. Workers had no such freedom, and neither did conventional firms, whose buildings, equipment and working populations were settled in a particular place. All this changed the distribution of risk, to the detriment of workers.

So workers’ rights have declined over the last decades – but unevenly. Anti-discrimination law has been strengthened, making the workplace rights of women and minorities more robust. The amount of paid parental leave has increased in many countries, though it varies wildly: Slovakia offers the most generous paid maternity leave in the OECD, at 164 weeks, but doesn’t provide for fathers; Japan and Korea offer more than 50 weeks’ paid leave to both parents; the US offers nothing to either. In EU member states overall, there have been improvements in minimum wage regulation and in the representation of employees on workers’ councils (though changes of this sort are often made in exchange for a ceding of union power; in Austria and the Nordic countries, where collective bargaining is strong, there is no minimum wage). Crouch argues that the rights that have been strengthened tend to be ‘market-enhancing rights’: those that encourage participation in the labour market, increasing productivity; they are often supported by neoliberal policymakers and businesses. The rights that have consistently declined are those that reduce the asymmetry of the employment contract.

While women and minorities have more rights than they used to, those in precarious work don’t benefit from them, and women are more likely than men to be involuntarily in part-time and temporary work. Differences between categories of work are easily politicised. Neoliberal critics of labour rights see the enriched model of standard employment as the problem: on their view, the segregation between a largely white, male, secure workforce and a precarious workforce of women, minorities, immigrants and the young has come about because of the improvement in employment rights and trade union protections – and so the way to end the segregation is to get rid of those rights and protections. Others see it as having come about through the efforts of social democratic parties to protect the privileges of their core constituency (those white, male workers), so that ‘modernisers’ wanting to transform their party’s base and reputation have sought to repeal job protection laws.

The very existence of a precarious workforce makes it possible for steady jobs to be undercut, work contracted out and workers set against one another. Crouch believes that the gig economy has a wider significance too. He picks out two contradictory models of capitalism. Market fundamentalists believe that the aim of capitalism is to achieve perfect markets; they reject oligopoly and propagate the the myth of the equal contract. Corporate capitalists, by contrast, are in favour of oligopoly and don’t care so much about ideal markets; they see the relation between employer and employee as closer to a master-servant dynamic (much modern labour law legally enshrines obedience to managerial authority). What the gig does, in Crouch’s view, is to ease the tension between the two models. It promises to fulfil the fantasy that we are all free in the marketplace, even in the labour market. When workers are no longer defined as employees, their interests are pushed outside the corporation altogether. They are also removed from union jurisdiction. Unions have, as one would expect, campaigned against the encroachments of the gig economy and the erosion of workers’ rights it entails. But they have sometimes been reluctant to organise the precarious workforce, even though precarious workers are among those most in need of union representation. It’s no surprise that, as a consequence, many precarious workers see ordinary workers – however poorly paid – as privileged; in some countries, Italy for example, they even support further labour market deregulation. Unions are starting to address this – by looking for ways to organise workers outside workplaces, by supporting new organisations led by precarious workers, by bringing legal cases to win rights for those workers – but progress is slow.

Recently, there have been challenges to Uber, first on grounds of customer safety (the app was banned in India), and then, in cases brought by drivers, unions and regulators in Brussels, Paris, London, Montreal and elsewhere, on grounds of its denial of workers’ rights. Opponents of the gig economy have more generally made efforts to have ‘independent contractors’ awarded the status of employees, with all the associated benefits. The new online platforms have resisted these changes by exploiting legal nuances. In English law, ‘no employment relationship exists if a worker can substitute another person to perform the work.’ By this definition, gig workers are self-employed, and so forfeit the benefits of the Employment Rights Act of 1996, which stipulated the right of workers to the minimum wage, sick pay and parental leave, and to be protected against discrimination and unlawful deductions from their pay. Of the legal challenges to definitions of this sort, the most successful resulted in a ruling made by California’s Supreme Court in September, defining workers as employees of a company if that company exercised control over their work or if the workers were integral to its business. This would mean that Uber and Lyft’s ‘independent contractors’ would be reclassified as employees. Economists, lawyers and sociologists, meanwhile, are trying to establish the definition of employer as a controller of workplace behaviour or, more capaciously, as a work provider.

If online platforms, as work providers, can be classed as employers – after all, they control the work relationship, provide work and pay, and profit from workers’ labours – then the privileges they currently enjoy would disappear. Such technical discussions of employment law join up with the politics of work. To call an activity ‘work’ still confers legitimacy on the person performing it, no matter how far workers’ rights have been eroded. As manufacturing continues to decline, disputes over what counts as work (care work? sex work?) and who can be included as a member of the working class (health and education workers? tech workers? the precariat? the wageless?) will persist.

Will​ the gig economy last? Crouch thinks the current situation – in which unregulated firms exploit a rapidly increasing employment asymmetry – may well be unsustainable. Most workers are reluctant to give up job security for the ‘independence’ afforded by gig work unless they have to – in a slack labour market, for example, where there is a surplus of labour. When there is a labour shortage, the balance of power shifts to workers; firms start having to guarantee job security. This may be happening already. Uber and Lyft workers have recently shown a willingness to strike. Both companies are publicly listed, and Crouch believes that in order to address investors’ anxieties they may be forced to offer workers a better deal.

But things could just as easily move in the other direction: in the scramble to maintain stock value, platforms may try to exert downward pressure on wages. Even if the ‘independent contractor’ is legislated out of existence, firms will continue to try to find ways to use precarious labour, not least by continuing to dismantle standard employment. In a bleak moment, Crouch predicts that digitalisation will cause disturbances at least as severe as in the depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Old jobs will be destroyed by technology and new ones created, and there will be prolonged surpluses of labour, tilting the balance of power even further towards employers. The greater the proportion of work and business conducted digitally, the easier it will be for firms continually to move their operations wherever they will get tax breaks. Rent-seeking, cash-hoarding, tax-evading employers will contribute as little as possible to pensions and social insurance, and governments will have to pick up the slack, increasing the state’s vulnerability to fiscal crisis.

Crouch thinks a major overhaul of policy will be required if we are to cope with these transformations. He doesn’t share the enthusiasm for a Universal Basic Income or other form of ‘citizens’ wage’ that has gained ground both on the left (as a route to autonomy or a rejection of work) and on the right (as a way to shrink the state or to secure a modicum of stability for people in a world where work no longer pays). As Crouch sees it, UBI hollows out the social democratic notion of citizenship as a system of rights, responsibilities and duties. He doesn’t want to abandon the notion of enriched standard employment but to find ways of extending it to the precarious workforce. His main proposal is a reform of social insurance, to make it a tax on the ‘use of labour’. Currently, only firms that choose to accept their responsibility as employers pay towards social insurance. Instead, Crouch proposes, all organisations that use labour would have to pay. Firms would no longer be able to shrug off their obligations by changing their status as employers, relocating, or defining their precarious workers as ‘self-employed’. They would have to pay their fair share.

Individual workers would pay their fair share too. Their contribution to social insurance would be calculated according to their income rather than their employment or citizenship status, and they would receive benefits including pensions, disability and sick pay, leave for parenting and other care work, as well as job retraining. These benefits would be tied to contributions made to the insurance fund, rather than being delivered as a form of social assistance drawn from general taxation. In lieu of the patchwork of insurance and assistance that characterises the British welfare state today, this version of social insurance would encourage the belief that you get back from society what you put in. Everyone would have an incentive to work, since the benefits would be tied to payment of tax on work done (unpaid care work and parenting would qualify). If firms treated their workers well – with secure contracts, training, union representation – their tax bill would be reduced. To make all this stick, unions would have to work not just to secure higher wages for their members, but to handle grievances, create family-friendly working environments and lead campaigns against challenges like the rise of workplace surveillance.

Crouch’s book is a love letter to the postwar welfare state. It is not a critique of capitalism, just of its neoliberal variant. Indeed, he makes clear that he believes eliminating the gig economy is necessary if capitalism is to be saved. The gig economy is a threat to social stability, and if it were to prevail, he writes, ‘capitalism’s own need for social reproduction would be severely compromised’; capitalism will not sustain itself, he argues, unless it can sustain ‘normal, secure family life’. He wants to preserve the social democratic institutions of family, home and property, along with the separation between home and workplace, work and leisure (a traditional, even nostalgic, but also perhaps compelling offer at a time when many millennials find it inconceivable they might ever own a home). He also values the work ethic, the entrepreneurial imperative, the capitalist emphasis on flexibility. His ideal society is one in which everybody works and the refusal of work is off-limits (revealingly, the only exception he makes is sex work; there are surely other forms of work involving at least as much exploitation and drudgery). By insisting that work can pay for the family rather than imagining a reduction of work for all, Crouch misses the chance to imagine a way of living beyond the one we know. He rejects the idea that in the future we may need to break the connection between work and income – let alone the connection between profit and income. What he is striving for is a path to stability. Will this suffice? The real question, perhaps, isn’t whether stability is enough, but whether the stabilisation of capitalism is all we want.

Katrina Forrester teaches at Harvard.

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What counts as work? Gig Economics

5 DECEMBER 2019

The LRB at 40: The Crisis of Liberalism

16 OCTOBER 2019

How bad can it get?

15 AUGUST 2019

More by Katrina Forrester

Letters

Vol. 42 No. 1 · 2 January 2020

Katrina Forrester says that my book Will the Gig Economy Prevail? is ‘a love letter to the postwar welfare state’ (LRB, 5 December 2019). Not really. I argue that we need to move away from social insurance payments based solely on number of employees; argue for the social investment welfare state, with its emphasis on education, training and childcare; and endorse the idea that ways must be found to provide income for carers operating outside the labour market. All of this moves us on a considerable way from the postwar model.

What I think Forrester means is that I envisage – and ardently want – a world in which as many adults as possible are able to find good work, either in the labour market or as properly recognised carers. She, like several other current observers, sees a future in which that will be either impossible or undesirable, thereby supporting the idea of a citizen’s income paid to all whether they work or not.

This concept worries me, for two reasons. First, given how easy it is to stir up political opposition to any social benefit that can be presented as ‘undeserved’, I cannot see how a consensus around the idea could be strong enough to make it proof against political attack. The experiments so far attempted in advanced economies, such as Finland or Italy, bear this out. The sums involved in the incomes have been very low, and in the Italian case the scheme has been reduced to a particularly mean kind of workfare. There is a real danger that people dependent on a citizen’s income would become the victims of savage cuts in its level and conditions.

Second, it would be a disaster if we abandoned the effort to find work for as many adults as possible. A population that became ‘surplus to requirements’, as some students of artificial intelligence warn us could happen, would find it politically difficult to sustain any claim to rights, including the right to a citizen’s income.

Colin Crouch

Oxford

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 

by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.

Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 

In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, as well as countless other organisations that promote human rights. He has promised to give $100 million to Human Rights Watch over the next ten years. The decision of the European Court, however, brings Soros to book for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, Popper wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to unify the humanitarian left while celebrating the openness of the free market, with all its imbalances. Did he succeed?

Popper began his academic career as a philosopher of science in Vienna, where he mixed with the Logical Positivists. Being, as he put it, ‘of Jewish descent’, he fled Vienna for New Zealand in 1937. The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, made him famous. He took a job at the LSE, where he remained for the rest of his life – Soros was one of his students there. Before this, his reputation had rested mainly on his Logik der Forschung (1934), in which he gave an account of explanation and claimed to have found a way round the problem of induction – the question of how empirical observations about the world lead to general laws of explanation. Popper argued that the laws of science are not based on the principle of verification, but on the principle of ‘falsifiability’. The claim that ‘all swans are white’ cannot be verified by any number of observations of white swans; however, the claim can be falsified by the existence of only one black swan. Popper regarded the attempt to translate experience into verifiable knowledge as misguided. Instead of searching for illusory certainty and trying to confirm hypotheses about the world, we should aim at bold but robust hypotheses that are less false. Popper thought his ‘fallibilism’ applied to both natural and social sciences. But while many believers in the unity of the natural and social sciences were interested in applying scientific laws to society in order to predict social change, Popper argued that in natural science unconditional predictions, in any case very rare, are peculiar to some natural systems and not others: they should never serve as a model for predictions about human society. There was little room for certainty in science, and in politics there was even less.

The Open Society was one of a number of contemporary works of political theory (others included Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom) that saw both fascism and communism as forms of totalitarianism. Popper attacked what he saw as the logic underpinning totalitarianism: the collectivist, anti-rationalist and historicist ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx. He claimed that they put tradition before reason and the collective before the individual, and that they believed in laws of history which could explain the past and predict the future. Popper saw this as dangerous nonsense. Grand theories of history allowed political actors to get away with murder. Worse still, they could deny the realities of unintended consequences and justify wicked actions as necessary steps on the path to utopia.

Popper sought a theory of politics that took ‘fallibilism’ seriously, and it was clear to him that any politics that rested on historicism wouldn’t do. What was needed was a political system that allowed for trial and error, for mistakes to be made and acknowledged. Popper claimed that The Open Society was part of his ‘war effort’, an attempt to discredit totalitarianism, but he also intended it to be useful to political actors in building the peace to come.

Trial and error can mean different things in different political contexts. The soft left version would be a system based on benign reform and responsible social engineering. At the far right of the spectrum would be the capitalist Wild West of extreme risk and massive reward, but also social inequality and potential market failure. Soros started out in the Wild West but, with his bankrolling of left-liberal reform movements, turned social engineer. Popper moved in the opposite direction. In After ‘The Open Society’, Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner have collected a range of his published and unpublished essays, letters and lectures that tell the story of this transformation. To the picture Popper presented of himself in his autobiography Unended Quest (1976), this volume adds a map of his intellectual development during his later years. He was sympathetic to Marxism at the beginning of his political life, but ended up a reactionary neoliberal. He was not alone: as he slid to the right, so did the liberal consensus. The essays here tell both stories. Popper begins the volume as the kind of liberal who cares about equality and ‘the social question’. By the end, he is a free marketeer, angry with the spoilt, irresponsible younger generation, with their complaints about capitalism, their drugs and their alcohol – by all accounts, a grumpy old man. This is a far cry from Marxism, but a far cry too from the man who in The Open Society aimed at uniting the dispersed left – liberals and socialists – under the banner of ‘humanitarianism’.

In the long march from socialism to neoliberalism, it is hardly a surprise to find that Popper was at his most interesting when he tried to combine the two. In the 1940s, he attempted to develop a political theory that would provide a practical basis for agreement among the anti-communist left. ‘Nothing is so important at the present time,’ he wrote in 1944, ‘as an attempt to get over the fateful dissention within the camp of the friends of the “open society”.’ He rejected the traditional, essentialist question of political philosophy – ‘What is the state, what is its true nature, its real meaning?’ – and asked instead: ‘What do we demand of the state? How do we want the state to be ruled?’ His answer formed part of what has been called his ‘negative utilitarianism’. Politics, he argued, should work towards the minimisation of human suffering, not the maximisation of human happiness. For Popper, this was a point on which the left could agree.

He didn’t, however, hope for unity within the left as a whole. The great battle was against collectivism, and he was interested in uniting only the ‘individualist’ left. Unlike those who opposed state communism, or social planning more broadly, on the grounds that it was inefficient, Popper opposed it because he thought it dangerous to liberty, and potentially tyrannical. These arguments would become part of the standard liberal critique of communism. But although Popper opposed the communist state, he didn’t oppose the state as such. Few mid-century liberals – even market liberals such as Hayek, who acquired a bad reputation for putting profit over people – were against all state intervention. Indeed, Popper often sounds like a welfare statist, praising state institutions for their protective role and their promotion of freedom. He argued that liberals – even those who were concerned about excessive state action – could not oppose the ‘socialisation of suffering’ and the institutions required for its practical realisation. Thus he supported public hospitals and public education, and even believed that the state should be responsible for maintaining full employment. Like many 20th-century liberals, he felt it necessary to take seriously the ‘social problem’.

Writing in 1940, he argued that ‘liberalism and state interference are not opposed to each other. On the contrary, any kind of freedom is clearly impossible unless it is guaranteed by the state.’ The open society must protect its citizens. Popper wasn’t, at this stage, against all social planning, merely transformative social planning. He distinguished between utopian and piecemeal reform: the utopian invents a blueprint for a society, then tries to put it into practice; the piecemeal reformer seeks to avoid suffering and injustice by making small changes at an institutional level, proceeding by trial and error. Piecemeal reformers, who can more closely monitor the effects of the changes they make, have a better chance of avoiding unintended consequences.

Wary though he was of the dangers of the unintended consequences involved in large-scale planning, Popper didn’t want to alienate those who cleaved to an interventionist state. Socialism was still the dominant political ideology of the left and it isn’t surprising that he had some socialist sympathies. Hayek, who had none, was more unusual. In 1947 Hayek set out to build an international alliance of liberals to combat collectivism and promote the free market. The Mont Pélerin Society was intended to be – and indeed became – the centre of neoliberalism. Popper was a founding member, as was Milton Friedman. When Hayek first suggested the idea to Popper and proposed a list of participants, Popper recommended that he add others to the left of the liberals he had already invited – his suggestions included Orwell, G.D.H. Cole and Herbert Read. If Hayek wanted to unite individualist humanitarians against the collectivist threat, Popper advised, he must extend an olive branch to the defenders of interventionism: those who wanted to cure society’s ills by increasing social equality through redistribution were no less genuine in their wish to promote freedom than those who defended market solutions. ‘Anything that looks like a general attack on interventionism makes this union impossible, for it is rightly felt, by socialists, as an impossible and undesirable wish to return to laissez faire.’ But at the first meeting, Orwell, Cole and Read didn’t appear. The recent history of neoliberalism might look a little different if they had. In a number of the essays collected here Popper sounds a lot like John Rawls, who emphasised the importance of distributive justice and the need for social policies that improve the lot of the least well-off: a far cry from Friedman’s market liberalism, and from the neoliberalism of today. This was a road not taken: Popper’s – and Hayek’s – less fiercely anti-statist version of neoliberalism quickly became its moderate face. The gulf between economic liberals and social liberals grew wider. Once neoliberalism had been radicalised, there was no chance that the olive branch would be extended to interventionists or, indeed, accepted by them.

One of the most interesting exchanges from this period is a series of letters between Popper and the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. (It’s clear that Popper, too, thought they were interesting, since he sent Hayek a copy of his responses to Carnap’s questions.) In 1946, after reading an attack by Popper on Marx and historicism, Carnap wrote to ask ‘whether or to what extent you still regard yourself as a socialist’. Popper replied that he rejected the term ‘socialism’, but claimed that he shared much with the socialists: a belief in the ‘greater equalisation of incomes’, in ‘experimentation in the political and economical sphere’, and even in the partial ‘socialisation of means of production’. The public ownership of industries and services could work well, he suggested, and it was certainly important that the state have the power to break up monopolies. But he attached two provisos, which, he thought, brought out the differences between the socialist position and his own. He argued that socialisation would be possible only if ‘the considerable and serious dangers raised by such experiments are frankly faced, and means are adopted to meet these dangers’, and if ‘the mystical and naive belief is given up that socialisation is a kind of cure-all’. Freedom could not be ‘saved’ without ‘improving distributive justice, i.e. without increasing economic equality’. More important, it could be achieved only if its defenders were willing to use trial and error, to accept that socialisation sometimes would promote freedom, and sometimes would not. Popper believed that income disparities might be even greater in a socialised, centralised economy. It was also more likely, he believed, that in such an economy powerful people would have too much control over individuals’ thoughts and actions. As Carnap pointed out in response, Popper differed from socialists in other ways, too – notably in his lack of concern for issues of economic power and exploitation, and in his emphasis on distribution rather than production.

When did Popper leave all this behind? In a 1956 letter to the American journalist Henry Hazlitt, a neoliberal and one of the founding members of the Mont Pélerin Society, Popper retracted the ideas he’d outlined in The Open Society that now seemed to him too statist and too Keynesian, in particular the concern with full employment. He still thought it important to reduce poverty and support public education, but no longer had the goal of increasing equality. From this point on, he starts to look more like a Cold Warrior. His attacks on totalitarianism in general became attacks on communism in particular, and what he perceived as the choice between the open and the closed society became ever starker. Where once he had tried to unify the individualist left, he now became a critic of it. By the early 1970s he had declared himself in ‘diametrical opposition’ not only to Marxists, but also to the New Left. Radical students saw him as a representative of the conservative establishment; he saw them as representing the decline of Western civilisation. He objected to what he called the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ – namely, the idea that the capitalist system is evil or morally base. Yes, the open society was in ‘urgent need of reform’, but it was still the case that people had never had it so good. During the postwar decades, he withdrew from public life, spent less time at the LSE and became more and more intellectually isolated. Though he never described it in quite these terms, he came to see the biggest problem in the capitalist West as that of moral decline. Indeed, it sometimes seems that, for Popper, all that was morally objectionable in society could be blamed on individual failures of moral and intellectual responsibility. When he listed what was wrong with the world, alcohol, drugs and crime were high on the list. These were not just symptoms, he believed, but were themselves the problems. In democracies, it was not the structures of society that were at fault, but the citizens: when things go wrong, they have only themselves to blame. By 1981, Popper was so angry at outright opponents of capitalism that he claimed he didn’t care about social inequality any more. What did it matter if the rich got richer?

Despite Popper’s continual assertions that he remained a critic of modern politics, the West appeared to get off scot-free. All he cared about was whether or not a government could be removed without bloodshed. If it could, it was a democracy. Many political theorists of Popper’s generation had been sceptical about idealistic visions according to which democracy expresses the ‘general will’. They argued that such visions obscured the reality that democracies are competitive systems in which voters elect leaders – so-called ‘elite democracies’. Popper certainly shared this view. But whereas his fellow Austrian Joseph Schumpeter had argued that real-life competitive democracies tended to be less competitive – and less open – than free markets, Popper didn’t spill much ink on the flaws in his model of the open society. He may have wanted it to be open to critical discussion, but he was surprisingly uninterested in the question of how to ensure that such discussion would be open to everyone and conducted on equal terms. Though he advocated a continual ‘fight against bureaucracy’, he didn’t see the need for an equivalent fight against private corporate interests.

While it isn’t so surprising that Popper gave up on equality (it was always an instrumental good for him, a necessary step on the path to liberty), it is striking that he gave up on – or at least toyed with giving up on – aspects of individual freedom. In his later writings, population growth is a constant concern. In 1972, after the publication of The Limits to Growth thesis, with its Malthusian predictions of economic and social collapse, he wrote that in order to preserve life on earth, we must find ways to address the problem, and to do so without coercion. How? Education, he argued, was the only way out, the only way to slow population growth without constraining freedom. How to avoid giving up on freedom in the face of this danger is a recurrent theme in After ‘The Open Society’. He is less obviously troubled by threats to freedom of speech. In 1989, he declined an invitation to sign the Society of Authors’ letter declaring support for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was declared. By this time he seems to have become open to arguments for censorship. The last essay in this volume argued that the power of television must be controlled and violent images restricted. Only then could a democratic society remain ‘civilised’. Popper’s suggestion here was that the primary function of ‘civilisation’ was to reduce violence – censorship was the cost of keeping a society open.

This picture of Popper in old age is not a flattering one, but a picture of the younger Popper might not be very flattering either. Though he listed modesty and a readiness for critical debate as the highest intellectual virtues, he was famously dogmatic – and the dogmatism shines through in these writings. For a man who declared (in a technical context, it’s true) that there is ‘no such thing as justification’, he seems to have spent a lot of time justifying himself. Many of the early essays are directed at the (many) critics of The Open Society who saw it as polemical, emotional, even hysterical. His defence – that although it aimed at peace, it was also his ‘war effort’ – was reasonable, but his tone was sometimes less so. He wrote letters to friends that included third-person defences of his work so they could pass them off as their own. And he could appear remarkably self-important: in a lecture on Tocqueville, he noted how impressive it was that in some of his views on the paradoxes of freedom and equality, ‘Tocqueville anticipated me.’

These quirky and revealing writings show that Popper was not as consistent as he would have liked to think. But the editors sometimes seem too close to him to notice. Jeremy Shearmur was Popper’s assistant for many years, and gives the impression that he wants the reader to feel as he did on first reading some of these essays – when one unpublished fragment tails off, he tells us that ‘alas no more material follows.’ Popper’s own inconsistencies – particularly his celebration of individual freedom and unwillingness to face up to its consequences – are reflected in the editors’ decisions. And terminology that reminds us of Popper’s historical context has been removed, thanks to a somewhat squeamish political correctness: as the editors make clear in the introduction, they have ‘changed the use of Mohammedans for the followers of Islam, as it is now recognised as offensive’. But the updating – or whitewashing, take your pick – of Popper’s terminology doesn’t extend to eliminating the term ‘Negro’, which he apparently continued to use as late as 1988. By then, he was out of touch. The idea of The Open Society may have had a long and illustrious afterlife, but as the title of this volume inadvertently suggests, the political writings that followed are perhaps best understood as a long and not so illustrious footnote to the ‘war effort’ of Popper’s middle years.

Katrina Forrester teaches at Harvard.

MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

What counts as work? Gig Economics

5 DECEMBER 2019

The LRB at 40: The Crisis of Liberalism

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 11 · 7 June 2012

Katrina Forrester reads Popper as if he was a proponent of market liberalism, or ‘neoliberalism’ (LRB, 26 April). But this isn’t the case. Popper certainly valued liberty and markets; but within the broad commitments of the ‘open society’ he was willing to accept considerably more government involvement than neoliberals – or any conservative, for that matter – would. Any account of Popper’s views is complicated by the fact that he found admirers on the left as well as on the right. But today there is no reason to think that support for liberty and (well-regulated) markets alone entails any particular position on the liberal spectrum. Part of the interest of After ‘The Open Society’, the collection of Popper’s writings that Forrester reviews, which I co-edited, is that it shows the extent to which Popper never fully joined with Hayek and other neoliberals. For example, late in his career he proposed that the state take a 51 per cent share in all public companies (but not an active role in management). His attention to the problem of overpopulation and his (curmudgeonly) worry about the effects of mass market television, also tell against a neoliberal interpretation of his views, especially when a more consistent social democratic interpretation is available. Popper was explicitly critical of ‘free market ideology’. But the main contribution of his political philosophy was towards the defence of the widely shared liberal commitments of the ‘open society’, within which more specific policy prescriptions may be worked out through trial and error.

Jeremy Shearmur

Australian National University 

English Marxists in dispute

Roy Porter, 17 July 1980

Arguments within English Marxism 

by Perry Anderson.

New Left Books, 218 pp., £3.95, May 1980, 0 86091 727 4

Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory 

edited by Philip Corrigan.

Quartet, 232 pp., £4.95, May 1980, 0 7043 2241 2

Writing by Candlelight 

by E.P. Thompson.

Merlin, 286 pp., £2.70, May 1980, 0 85036 257 1

The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe that blooms come best in mixed bunches. They may allow themselves some guarded asides on the psychology of chiliasm, but would reject Norman Cohn’s full-frontal psychopathology of anti-semitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as dominated by clique and pique rather than by constitutional principle, but would hesitate about his overarching behavioural conservatism. Call this open-mindedness, pussy-footing or Vicar of Bravery, it has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick.

Yet in this matter as in others the English are not as tolerant as they would like to be thought. Marxist blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to reveal the same crusading zeal on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, in a cunning jest of History, some Marxist philosophers have latterly enlisted in the armies of the Right in denying Lebensraum to Marxist history. In France, Louis Althusser and his disciples, and in England followers such as Paul Q. Hirst and Barry Hindess, have argued that the business of Marxist intellectuals is to construct not history but theory (e.g. a rationally water tight account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, not one purportedly told from the ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’). History is irremediably empirical, and empiricism is a mode of bourgeois false-consciousness. In his ‘The Poverty of Theory’, Edward Thompson pilloried this stance as being neither materialist nor Marxist, but an epitome of the most arrogant and authoritarian (‘Stalinist’) degenerations of the New Left. Perry Anderson’s book defends the New Left from such charges.

Certain Marxist blooms adorn most scholars’ studies. True, a few academic-historians have tried to keep out all blossoms with even a whiff of Marxist scent. T.S. Ashton notoriously wrote his great history of the 18th-century English economy without mentioning the word ‘capitalism’. But few fear contagion so badly. Most economic historians, explaining entrepreneurs’ pursuit of profit, are de facto as much economic determinists as any Marxist. Marxist contributions, such as those concerned with the structural contradictions of slave economies, or the de-skilling of proletarian labour as ‘hands’ within machinofacture, are, though not uncontroversial, widely accepted by non-Marxists. This infiltration is possible because much of the Marxist meta-history so closely resembles (superficially at least) the gospel according to many Whig, Liberal, Positivist and progressive historians over the last century: a story of man’s increasing dominion over nature and necessity through science and technology, the victory of the middle classes over absolutism and aristocracy, capitalism’s triumph over feudalism, religion yielding to secularism, and so forth. A historian such as Asa Briggs can write The Age of Improvement, chronicling the First Industrial Revolution and the maturing of the bourgeoisie that accompanied it, without any accusations of Marxisant tendencies.

It has been particularly easy for English non-Marxist scholars to give their blessing to historical-materialist insights because Marxist history has always accorded pride of place to England itself. It was England’s peasants who conspicuously revolted in 1381 against feudalism. England staged the first successful ‘bourgeois’ revolution in 1642, England the first Industrial Revolution, spawning the first proletariat. In the middle of the last century, the history and prospects of England looked to Marx and Engels to be a likely blueprint for global political developments.

In many areas of English history, Marxism has yielded rich harvests. Christopher Hill’s Marxism has allowed him to grasp the union of Puritan faith and political activism amongst the ‘industrious sort of people’ in the 17th century. It was his Marxist materialism that enabled Francis Klingender to write what still remains a classic of art history: Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947). But until recently Marxist historians have hardly illuminated the workings of the state. This is partly because they have rightly been indignant about its victims – peasants, hand-loom weavers, slaves – and more interested in the resistance to it – from bandits, millennarians etc. Perhaps there is also a fear of being drowned in the quicksands of conventional political and constitutional history (‘How many boroughs did the Duke of Newcastle monger?’). Nevertheless, the absence is disturbing.

Since the early 1960s, however, and not least in the books under review, Edward Thompson and Perry Anderson have begun to remedy this state of affairs. Other Marxist historians are taking up the challenge, as the work edited by Philip Corrigan suggests. In the present review I shall concentrate on this aspect of the three books.

The books have a lot in common. In their own ways, all bear witness to the immense, inertial substantiality of states. Andcr son has stressed – above all, in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (1975)– how during and despite the emergence of new socio-economic forms (the rise of capitalism, the emergence of a career nobility, the venality of offices), central state power in many European nations was remarkably resilient. The rise of bureaucracy, standing armies, Erastianism and centralised taxation – all strengthened the hand of government. Though habitually written off as sick men, as anachronisms, many European absolutist regimes had not been unhorsed even as late as the First World War (and have persisted in modified totalitarian forms since). In his ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1963), Anderson offered a similar X-ray for England. The old heart-warming view of England as the happy womb of the bourgeois revolution, and hence of the Labour movement, was erased. England’s 17th-century bourgeois revolution had after all been premature, and had rebounded (in any case its ideology had been religious and pre-rational, and therefore ‘primitive’). The manufacturing middle class, instead of becoming Jacobins and expropriating the aristocracy, had joined hands with them against Painite radicalism. Since then, they had been bought off with token powers. Writing almost at the apogee of the 14th Earl of Home, Anderson saw aristocratic power (inflected through the House of Lords, the Church, the City, Oxbridge, and Metro politan culture) swanning on.

Thompson has likewise stressed the subteranean sinews of the state. Eighteenth-century ‘Old Corruption’ (Cobbett’s THE THING) was cemented by patronage, privilege, spoils and bully-boy force, veneered with the ideologies of religion, law, morality and patrician culture. In the present day, ‘New Corruption’s is the hidden world of MI5 and MI6, ‘official secrets’ and ‘national security’, the technology of surveillance, the subversion of constitutional liberties (as, recently, by jury vetting), and the rise of non-responsible powers amongst the Police and Civil Service. As Philip Corrigan puts it in Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory, when we examine the state we see ‘the enormous enduring materiality of symbols, rituals, and a general moral ethos’, only the tip of which is commonly conspicuous.

In emphasising the snowballing internal strengths of the state, all these authors therefore reject the view that the state is merely the temporary superstructural expression of whichever class happens at that time to be economic top-dog (though the language of base and superstructure is still present in early Anderson). In the book he has edited, Philip Corrigan (writing together with Harvie Ramsay and Derek Sayer) repudiates the view that ‘the State reflects, in the realms of political and ideological relations, the “facts” of production.’ Thompson as well: in the justly famous ‘Postscript’ to The Making of the English Working Class, and in ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965), where he said of the 18th-century state that it was ‘nothing but itself. A unique formation’ – not ‘a direct organ of any class or interest’ but ‘a secondary political formation’. With a slightly different aim in mind he has stressed the same point in his Whigs and Hunters (1975), and in Writing by Candlelight, denying (pace many Marxists) that the common law and the British constitution are nothing other than the force of the ruling class in mystified form. They have a relative autonomy, some life and pulse of their own. They can be used by all classes. Similarly, Anderson analysed absolutism without reducing it to an expression of changing modes of production (for which fellow Marxists labelled him a Weberian).

At this point, of course, it is quite in order for non-Marxist historians to say that, glad as they are that Marxists have abandoned such fatuities as base-superstructure models, it is no news to them that the political and legal powers of the state have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan belatedly finding much to approve in G.R. Elton on Thomas Cromwell, or J.H. Plumb on Walpole. Whether Elton or Plumb would be pleased about the use he makes of them is another matter: Anderson, by the way, has a highly penetrating assessment of Walpole as Thompson’s bug-in-chief.

So what special insights have Marxist historians offered us on the nature of the English state? We are partly in their debt because they are almost the only historians to have posed the wider questions. Which non Marxist historians over the last generation have attempted brief synoptic essays probing the rise and fall of classes over the last five centuries in their relations to the control of state power? Thompson and Anderson continue to throw down the challenge. Their most recent works are quite exceptional tor their range and energy, for the quality of their literary expression, and their breadth of information. Both should be read for far more than then analyses of the state, which is all there is room to discuss here.

Thompson offers a Dunning’s Motion for the late 20th century: ‘The power of the executive has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ His warnings are timely and urgent. Their stature is enhanced because Thompson’s engaged eloquence is anchored in a deeply historical (even Burkean) sense of the enduring fabric of English society (perhaps enduring little longer in the sweep of an administratively tidy, authoritarian new broom). Similarly, Anderson’s sustained interrogation of Thompson’s ocuvre, generous but judicious, and remarkably disinterested, wins admiration for the writer’s encyclopedic knowledge and acuteness of mind, as he ranges from Existentialist epistemology to the literary imagination of Jonathan Swift. Anderson’s examination of facets of Thompson’s historical technique – his notion of ‘No Class without Class Consciousness’, or his consistent defence of agency in history – is of importance to all schools of historian.

The special focus of both Anderson’s and Thompson’s accounts of the English state is upon its cultural strength (its capacity to function hegemonically). The two are in large agreement about the pre-industrial forms: patriotism, ‘deference’, religion, the law. Anderson sees an unbroken continuity down to the present. Thompson sees such continuities as the House of Lords, the Church, the Establishment, more as a façade. Up front in his account are the hegemonic achievements and ideologies of the bourgeoisie – natural sciences, empiricism, political economy. Both accounts, however, have glaring omissions. Neither Thompson nor Anderson has scrutinised in detail the actual apparatus of the state, the ways it has changed, and the reasons for this. The monarchy, a key institution replete with constitutional and personal prerogatives, hardly receives a mention. Even if, reductively, one saw the king merely as a cipher of the ruling class (surely an unacceptable view), the changing constitutional and political powers of the crown demand Marxist analysis. The limitations of Thompson’s rather swashbuckling vision of the Hanoverian state as a parasitical racket are exposed by Anderson in Arguments within English Marxism. Anderson also points out how little of the actual mechanisms of state repression The Making of the English Working Class contains.

The second serious omission is any sustained analysis of the class composition of the power élite, and how it changed. The third is the question of its relation to the class structure at large. In what sense do those in power ‘represent’ other classes and interests? Or do they ‘represent’ only themselves? Upon such questions Marxist accounts of the significance of political party must rest. Thompson and Anderson have not answered such questions. But it is clear that they would regard them as key issues.

The series of ‘texts’ which Philip Corrigan has edited offers itself as the ‘first steps’ towards the kind of Marxist theory and history required by the 1980s. Its Introduction quite explicitly sets itself (pace some Althusserians) the empirical task of making ‘historical investigations’. Hence one looks to see whether this ‘survey of the development of the State within England from the 16th to the early 20th centuries’ has answered these questions. The answer is no. This book seems rather to have abolished them. The agenda for a Marxist history of the English state has been changed. The theoretical opening essay by Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer rejects views of the state as superstructure, but equally the image of the state as an instrument, a tool, to be used by particular groups. In denying both these Marxist approaches, the authors of this essay (and of the book at large) renounce investigation of the daily ways and means of the state (police, army, law courts), and also abandon causal analysis of who controls the state. The book’s concern, rather, is to expose how state formations (i.e. the forms of the state) envelop people, provide total frameworks of legitimacy, exclude alternative ways of life and thought, give moral standing to the status quo, and ‘naturalise’ capitalism. Thus in their essay ‘The State and Social Policy’ Chris Jones and Tony Novak show how the state is ratified by apparently providing ‘welfare’. One of Stephen Yeo’s main themes in his ‘State and Anti-State’ is how the state seeks to stifle the conceivability of any political alternatives to itself (Yeo’s celebration of co-operative movements offers one such alternative).

Though the jargon is modern, the approach is familiar. Current French Structuralism is present (particularly in the rejection of causal analysis), and behind that, Durkheim. Beyond all is a kind of Left Hegelianism (throughout ‘the State’ is capitalised). As with other modes of Hegelianism, the issue of who precisely holds power, who the ruling class is, seems to disappear. Thus, in his overview of the development of the English state from the 1530s to the 1830s, Corrigan discusses how the Civil War paved the way for a new economic order, but is not interested (unlike Christopher Hill) in how far the war involved class conflict, or in who came out on top in 1660. Whereas Thompson and Anderson have fought tooth and nail over how far the industrial bourgeoisie seized power in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for Corrigan this has become an unmentioned issue. Nor does this new Marxism worry about the consequences of state power. Rachel Harrison and Frank Mort, in their ‘Patriarchal Aspects of 19th-century State Formation’, treat the law as a univcrsalising, naturalising ideology, but they explicitly renounce investigating its reception or effectiveness: ‘We concentrate here on the way in which the legislative processes of the State construct and articulate particular sets of patriarchal relations, rather than on the effectivity of that legislation as it is implemented and “lived” within specific practices and institutions.’

Yet the old issues do bob up. And because they are not dealt with systematically, they lead to confusion. Paul Richards, in his interesting ‘State Formation and Class Struggle, 1832-48’, attempts to relate reform groups back to class interests, but also makes the rather empty disclaimer: ‘The 19th-century British State was not a crude apparatus at the service of capitalism against labour.’ Seeing (with others) most reforms as being functional to capitalism, his account of the Factory Acts is rather lame, and he has resort to the deus ex machina of ‘genuine humanitarianism’ to account for some welfare legislation. The terminology of class also creates problems throughout the book. Corrigan tells us that the English nation was ‘bourgeois’ in the 18th century. Yet Richards tells us that even after 1832 Parliament was still not dominated by the ‘bourgeoisie’. Only sustained analysis of the composition of the ruling élite can save us from these confusions.

It may in part be a problem with words. Thompson writes with the verbal imagination of a Burke, a Cobbett, a Paine. Anderson has a limpid, precise prose. But many of the authors in Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory write in jargon. Sometimes this is merely wearisome. ‘One is at worst reading through total absences’ means: ‘Nothing has been written about it.’ Sometimes it is highly confusing. Does the phrase ‘bourgeois and middle-class women’ contain a tautology, or a technical distinction? And take this:

The strategic ways in which the State acted for (‘to assist’ and to speak for) the agrarian and urban bourgeoisie is one reason for both popular resistance, which took traditional forms (one of the major topics of the work of Thompson and the essays collected in Albion’s fatal tree), and changes within the ‘political nation’ including the early forms of electoral politics, such as the growth of Panics. In this way was J.H. Plumb’s Growth of political stability apparently established.

There are minor points that could be mentioned: I see no rhyme or reason, for instance, in the use of capitals, inverted commas and italics. There are problems of interpretation: Plumb’s book is not about how the growth of parties led to political stability, but the reverse. But above all there is the problem of deciphering exactly what has been proposed. The difficulty is partly one of clumsy expression. But much more it’s that this new Marxism is an Idealist hall of mirrors, full of relational analysis, reflections and representations. Causation is out; conditions of existence are in. People and agency disappear. ‘The State’ acts for people. Its ways are ‘reasons’. The Whig oligarchy doesn’t get its hands in the gravy, but ‘the growth of political stability’ is ‘apparently [sic] established’. And what is this state? It is ‘an orchestration of the relations of production’.

In his Considerations on Western Marxism (1977) Perry Anderson noted the tendency of Western Marxists, divorced from any tangible prospect of political power, to retreat into philosophical hermeticism. This is present in Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory, even down to its expression. If Marxist history is to engage with academic history, and be politically forceful, it is the work of Thompson and Anderson that must be its spark.?