Category - Radicalism

Bruce E. Levine has an interesting article over at Alternet on the use of psychiatric medication to tame defiant youth. Some tantalizing excerpts:

For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs.

Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them “care less” about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable. And so-called atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa — powerful tranquilizing drugs — are increasingly prescribed to disruptive young Americans, even though in most cases they are not displaying any psychotic symptoms.

Many talk show hosts think I’m kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness — an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers — they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case.

Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as “a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior.” The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.” While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don’t respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs.

…

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of “drapetomania,” the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of “dysaesthesia aethiopis,” the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master’s needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush’s lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright’s lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

…

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine — or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X — were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?

Conflict of interest alert: I work for Chelsea Green Publishing, publishers of Levine’s recent book, Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic.

Two weeks ago, after complaining to my daughter about how much I would dislike it, I bought Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (New York, Henry Holt: 2007) from my local Amherst book store. Already familiar with his ideas from his various other writings (including The End of Nature; Staying Human in an Engineered Age; and various New Yorker articles), I suspected that his new book would be well written, an effective attack on much that ails us as a society, and would miss the point. It is this last that led me to threaten to throw the book against the wall in frustration. And that frustration led me to write this note. (Actually, it was my wife who wanted me to write this so that I would stop ranting to her.)

What could be wrong with a book that criticizes the Bush Administration, big oil, Cargill, Monsanto, and the Economics profession (among many many other villains)? Especially when the author has such good heroes: including farmers’ markets, urban gardens, organic farmers, Heifer International, and the Indian state of Kerala. Among economists, environmentalists like Herman Daly and Bob Costanza get most of the Kudos but a few, like Amartya Sen, make friendly cameo appearances. Individualism is bad; society is productive; and I agree that would all be better off, and the world a lot better off, if we listened to Bill McKibben.

The problem I have is that McKibben not only reads orthodox economists but believes them. For him, the economy is a social system that efficiently translates individual wishes into products; changing economic outcomes, therefore, requires two things: first we must change the technology we use; and, second, we must change individual wishes rather than reorganize the economy. For McKibben, both of these problems go back to the origins of modern economic growth in the British Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. Industrialization, and the economic growth that came after, is, first of all, the product of engineering and better technology: “[I]n 1712, something new finally happened. A British inventor named Thomas Newcomen developed the first practical steam engine” (p. 5). As a result of this technology, “Every action of a modern life burns fossil fuel” (p. 15) and “[t]he link between environmental destruction and wealth is deep and long-standing. Clearly, getting rich means getting dirty” (p. 21). In a nutshell, here is McKibben’s take on the world: we have the wrong technology, we use a technology that relies too heavily on fossil fuels, and this links economic growth with environmental degradation in a way that insures that economic growth will hurt the world.

Thus far, McKibben’s critique would be familiar to readers of Amory Lovins (cited in the book) and others. This argument may be simply stated as follows: “We’re in trouble because we, accidentally, chose the wrong technology and now we need to step back and change.” But McKibben makes a broader social critique than this by adding a second element to our social malady, also dating back to the beginning of the modern era, and also an accident. Until 500 years ago, McKibben argues, individuals were embedded in communities “as a small part of the Great Chain of Being” (p. 95). “The story of the last five hundred years,” he adds, “is the story of continual emancipation” (p. 95). He recognizes that many factors dissolved this ordered world, but, a good Weberian, he highlights one: Protestantism. Like fossil fuel-powered economic growth, individualism was at first a good thing; emancipatory, it gave space for individual expression and initiative. But it has gone too far and now “we’ve been overliberated” (p. 128).

There is so much here that is familiar, and so much that rings true and even comfortable, that I expect McKibben’s book will sell well. But, I fear that he is telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need. For starters, he is wrong about the British Industrial Revolution. Rather than steam engines, the signal change there was the creation of factories, almost always operating without steam power, where employers, “capitalists,” were able to regulate the work hours of their workers. Rather than an engineering problem, the Industrial Revolution was a solution to a social problem, the problem that people, workers, did not want to work as long or as hard as their bosses wanted. Factory production allowed capitalists to increase their profits by forcing their wage workers to labor harder or else be fired (and denied access to the means of production).

Instead of seeing the economy as a system that uses technology to transmute individual wishes into economic outputs, it is a system of profit creation, producing surplus value rather than use value. This explains many of the accidents and mysteries McKibben identifies, the odd mistakes and errors in judgement, that have led to our current malaise. We subsidize the burning of fossil fuels because of the political influence of fuel and automobile companies looking to profit. Our agricultural research emphasizes large-scale, oil-intensive technologies because these favor agribusiness profits. State policy promotes extensive housing development because these projects favor corporate profits in real-estate, construction, furniture, and transportation. State policy favors private consumption of marketable commodities rather than communal use of public goods not just to raise the Gross Domestic Product but because corporations profit from private consumption. By contrast, state policy neglects, even discourages, much that enhances welfare and makes life better for people because corporations have not figured out a way to squeeze a profit from them. Home production, community building, and the development of social capital are all shunned not only because they do not enrich any section of corporate America, but because the strengthening of communities risks promoting democratic forces who would restrict corporate profit-making in the name of popular welfare.

Yes, McKibben is absolutely right that we use the wrong technologies and we value individual action over communal interests. But the problem is not in the technology, nor in any excessive desire for liberty and personal autonomy. Nor is it in our desire for economic growth where we provide the opportunity for a better life for everyone. The problem is that we grow in the wrong way because that is more profitable for the corporations who dominate our social policy.

So what is to be done? Blaming technology and individualism, McKibben urges us to change our thoughts and revise our expectations of the world with the promise that this will save the planet and even may eventually make us better off. Like the Garrisonian abolitionists of the 19th century, he would rely on “moral suasion”; after we change our behavior and rebuild our communities “then our politics will start to change as well” (p. 175). If we see capitalism and capitalist control of state policy as the root of our environmental and social maladies then we should reverse this ordering. Instead of personal change opening the door to political action, we need political action that will end the subsidization of environmental and community destruction so that we can save our planet and rebuild our communities.

Gerald Friedman
Professor of Economics
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
gfriedma@econs.umass.edu

By Geert Dhondt, Staff Economist

Madness surrounds all of us. Luckily the world is full of contradictions. While capitalism, barbarism and madness might seem all around us, so is its opposite, its negation. Thus, if we look hard enough we can recognize the new society in the present and we will be able to see the emergence of revolutionary possibilities. In the U.S., C.L.R. James was one of the first to clearly articulate the importance of independent Black struggles in creating these openings.

C.L.R. James was born in 1901 in Trinidad. In 1932 he left Trinidad for England where he immersed himself in the Pan-African and Trotskyist movements and worked as a cricket reporter. In 1938, on Trotsky’s request, he came to the U.S. to reinvigorate the American Trotskyist movement. By the time James was deported in 1952, he had broken with Trotsky’s conception of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state and developed instead a critique of state capitalism; he had broken with Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party and emphasized a different role for Marxist organizations and intellectuals; he also developed an important analysis of the role of independent Black struggle.

By Alejandro Reuss

Mention the name of Leon Trotsky and you might be asked, “Didn’t he have an affair with Frida Kahlo?” (He did.) Or, “Wasn’t he murdered with an ice pick?” (He was.)

He was also, however, known to dabble in revolutionary politics.

The triumph of Stalin and his falsification of history have obscured Trotsky’s importance, writing him out of the Russian Revolution and airbrushing him from photos of the era (especially those showing him with Lenin). Trotsky was a principal leader of the workers’ council, or soviet, movement in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the main strategist of the October 1917 insurrection and the principal architect of the Red Army, Lenin’s most prominent lieutenant until the latter’s death in 1924, and a leading opponent of Stalin’s rise to dictatorial power. In short, he was one of the major figures of the 20th century.

Trotsky is mainly known for his thought on two key issues: the possibility of socialist revolution in “backward” Russia, and the rise of the bureaucratic dictatorship led by Stalin. Trotsky did not just apply Marxist theory by rote, but added new and “heretical” ideas needed to explain new phenomena. His balance sheet on the 1905 revolution, Results and Prospects (1906), argued that Russia’s leaps-and-bounds industrialization had set the stage for a revolution in which the proletariat - rather than the bourgeoisie - would be the protagonist. He would be vindicated by the October Revolution of 1917.

His masterpiece, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), presented a withering critique of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the long run, Trotsky argued, either the working class would overthrow the bureaucracy and clear the way for renewed progress toward socialism or the bureaucracy would formalize its privileges by reinstituting private property and restoring capitalism outright. Trotsky did not imagine that the system of bureaucratic rule would last another half century, but of course, he was eventually vindicated on this point as well.

Exiled from Russia in 1929, Trotsky lost the power and prestige of high position in a revolutionary government, and his efforts to build a new world party of socialist revolution (the “Fourth International”) could offer little to rival the rising tide of reaction worldwide. Nonetheless,
he considered this “the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the Civil War.”

In the founding program of the Fourth International, known as the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (1938), Trotsky emphasized that while mass struggles continued to rage, they were not imbued with the perspective of overturning capitalism and creating a new society. He argued, therefore, that the central task for revolutionaries was to build “bridges” from current consciousness to revolutionary politics. This did not mean, in Trotsky’s view, repeating radical-sounding slogans from the past, postponing revolutionary aims in favor of immediately “winnable” struggles, or pining for a reformed version of capitalism. Rather, it meant that revolutionaries must frame their positions on the burning issues of the day in a way that connected these issues to the aim of revolution.

Trotsky’s life and politics ought to be viewed critically, especially in light of his role (with Lenin and the Bolsheviks in general) in building a state machine that would grow into a totalitarian juggernaut. Ideas like those in the Transitional Program, however, should be put to work in the
present whatever we conclude about the author’s past. Trotsky was not the only, or even the first, theorist to insist on drawing the connections from every immediate issue to the fundamental problems of capitalist society. I learned this lesson from the writings of Trotsky and from his disciples. Today’s revolutionaries need not learn this from Trotsky as well - but those who do not learn it from him should make sure to learn it from someone else.

Further reading by and about Trotsky:

Two good short introductions to Trotsky’s life and thought are:
Phil Evans and Tariq Ali, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism, Icon Books, 2000.
Ernest Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative, New Left Books, 1995.

The following are Trotsky’s most important books (all published by Pathfinder Press):
The History of the Russian Revolution.
My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography.
The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects.
The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?
The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution.
For an excellent collection of these and other writings online, see The Leon Trotsky Internet Archive.

Isaac Deutcher’s monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky (Oxford University Press, 1970) is the definitive work on the subject:
The Prophet Armed - Trotsky: 1879-1921
The Prophet Unarmed - Trotsky: 1921-1929
The Prophet Outcast - Trotsky: 1929-1940

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Suresh Naidu, CPE Staff Economist

Piotr Kropotkin is famous within two groups that one never sees at the same party. The biologists and evolutionary anthropologists who derive inspiration from Kropotkin’s research into the evolution of human sociality rarely intersect with the anarchists and political theorists who respect Kropotkin’s views on revolutionary change and the abolition of the state and private property. However, there was no disparity for Kropotkin, who derived many of his political beliefs from his studies of human and animal evolution.

Kropotkin had a long and interesting life. Born in 1842 to Russian nobility, he began his career as an exemplar of his class, serving in the military during the Crimean War, but eventually wound up working with the revolutionary Jura Federation. His politicization followed lengthy and difficult travels, during which he developed a deep affinity for the Russian peasants and workers he encountered. Later cut off from any political influence by Lenin, Kropotkin’s last writings were notable predictions of the tyranny that would result from the Bolshevik retention of wage labor and reliance on state coercion.

A large portion of contemporary social and biological science follows in the footsteps of Kropotkin’s academic work. Responding to the social Darwinism of his day, he wrote his primary scientific work, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, arguing that a major factor in the evolutionary success of humans was a predisposition to cooperate and share, without the need for institutions such as the market or the state.

Modern day research has provided overwhelming evidence to corroborate Kropotkin’s thesis. Anthropologists and archaeologists have found widespread decentralized cooperation within many non-industrial societies. Experimental economists have definitively shown that people are not classically selfish, with people often giving away substantial amounts of money and actively cooperating in laboratory settings, even against their narrow self-interest. This is not merely “enlightened self-interest,” rather a deeply seated desire for fairness as an end in itself (this desire may or may not have roots in biology). Biologists have acknowledged that competition among early human groups could have contributed to the evolution of cooperative behavior on the part of individuals.

Much of this literature has paralleled Kropotkin in refuting a naive socio-biological theory of human behavior. Rather than concocting stories that rationalize the current order in terms of fitness, it points to potential ways of organizing human interactions that can replace the dominant institutions of our day with something more democratic and egalitarian. Kropotkin built his belief in anarchism on the knowledge that people can organize their lives without self-interest or governmental coercion as prerequisites for large-scale cooperation.

There are many current examples of such cooperation. Elinor Ostrom and colleagues are documenting community management of scarce resources and public goods provision without the aid of governments or market pricing systems. Steve Lansing examines how Balinese rice farmers coordinate their complex ecological interactions with a few simple rules. Yochai Benkler identifies Open-Source Software as an example of large-scale non-market, non-state coordination. Erik Olin Wright and others study how participatory directly democratic institutions function to solve practical problems from Kerala to Chicago. Human institutions that harness the natural propensity to cooperate (and sometimes punish those who do not) are quite pervasive.

The political implications Kropotkin drew from his work are not the ravings of a lunatic egghead. Anarchism is commonly caricatured as naive, or worse, a haven for would-be terrorists. Instead, the politics advocated by Kropotkin are best interpreted as general principles. First is an ethical imperative, that there is no policy substitute for social norms and ideals of behavior - a belief that one’s personal behavior can either reinforce or undermine the status quo. The second is a deep suspicion of facile state or market fixes to social problems. Together, these imply respecting and considering people’s abilities to develop community solutions and autonomously self-organize before suggesting “policy” or “market” solutions. Kropotkin’s mix of science and politics are not vestiges of a bygone age, but very relevant ideas deserving greater intellectual and political engagement.

References:

Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” Natural History, July 1997.

For experimental fairness, see Ernst Fehr et. al., “Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000.

For group selection giving rise to cooperation, see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others, Harvard University Press, 1998.

For egalitarian cooperation in hunter-gatherers, see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, Harvard University Press, 1999.

The remarkable case of Balinese rice farming is found in Steven Lansing and John Miller, “Cooperation in Balinese Rice Farming.”

For community solutions to public goods problems, see Elinor Ostrom’s classic Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990 and Trust and Reciprocity, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.

For Open-Source Software, see Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” 112 Yale Law Journal 369 (2002).

For the efficacy of direct democracy, see Erik Olin Wright and Archon Fung, Deepening Democracy, Verso, 2003.

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.