John wrote:

“A commendably hopeful essay. So far the Egyptian initiative has lofted a Mubarak stooge in his place and the elevated overt military control. These are not hopeful yet, and based on past examples of exactly these non-revolutionary, reactionary shifts, not much can be expected… There is little chance of ensconced and comfortable intellectuals to forego their perks… Al Jazeera is a lucrative business not a public service, and in that it is merely another self-promoting journalistic conceit like CNN, NYT and the others… It is disheartening to see Obama and others citing the giants of dissent, metronomically, stupidly… But then Obama is a millionaire, as the giants became as their hard-fought individual efforts became national and global enterprises. So what else is new.”

Thanks for taking the time to comment, John. It is interesting that several nettimers have written to me privately to say that they like and agree with what I wrote, but yours is the only response to be posted so far. Your comment seems to hinge on the optimism/pessimism pair. I have often been called hopeful or optimistic, even once Dr. Pangloss. But I believe that hope is only worthwhile if it comes with a large dose of realism. We are or could be engaged in constructing paths from the actual to the possible, from the real to the imagined. I consider it a waste of time to try to predict the outcome of events like those the world is experiencing now and we are right to fear the worst.

But revolutions have one undeniable effect, whatever subsequently happens: they clarify the social forces opposed to each other in the present moment. Most of the time these are mixed up in a confused way, making it difficult to take sides meaningfully. It is hardly surprising that politicians and intellectuals should be slow to catch on during a popular uprising. A running joke (for me) is the preoccupation with leadership in contemporary discourse. The best leaders follow the people and give them back what they have done in inspiring words. Lenin arrived at the Finland station after the soviets had taken to the streets. He wrote later that until then he was just another bourgeois parliamentary politician (all that vanguard party stuff), even if an exiled one. But the soviets taught him what was possible and he followed them.

I was attacked for posting Obama’s Friday speech on Facebook, shown photos of him shaking hands with Mubarak and reminded of his complicity in the US’s brutal policy for the Middle East. Many American liberals have turned from being diappointed in him to hating him. But he is the same Obama as before, maybe just another Chicago pol who talks the talk and is as divided as most of us. It is one thing to run for office and make stump speeches, another to be the figurehead of the awesome American state. He was the latter at the beginning of the week and roused himself to be the former by the end of it. Both are him, but the actions of the Egyptian people provoked him to remember his human side. It is always possible to speak to the humanity in everyone and he did then, quite effectively in my view.

Of course the forces of darkness have their own tried methods for subverting popular dissent. I recall reading a letter sent by Smuts advising Lloyd-George on how to put down the Irish rebellion, drawing on South African experience. A British civil servant had scrawled on this “Who does this man think he is? We have been putting down revolutions in India for fifty years!” But the Irish won and so too did the Indians eventually. The rhetoric of established power always speaks of eternity and yes the bulk of intellectuals follow the power. Taking a historical view of this or any other revolution is not about predicting who will win. It is about finding a realistic foundation for joining others who are on the same side and doing whatever you can to promote its ends. That’s why I posted a mesage on nettime, not truly in hope, but you never know.

Apart from making the sides in a struggle clearer, revolutions also show up history in a new light. 1989 made 1917 current history and brought the whole twentieth century into play anew. The Egyptian revolution and its aftermath shows us the history of the last half-century or more in a new light. I had bits of it already, but I never before saw so vividly the parallels between British world dominance in the late 19th century and the US equivalent in the late 20th. The Anglo-Indian superstate was a transnational colossus linked by the Suez Canal from 1870, the same time that Queen Victoria was installed as Empress of India. All the other powers had to react to that: the Russians by invading Afghanaistan, the Germans by building a railway through Persia, the French by competing in Afica. The US-Middle Eastern superstate is not formal, but it is real enough. People write about the Israeli lobby in Washington, but it goes much further than that. And now Iraq is a garrison on the spot. No wonder Obama and Clinton hesitated. At least they didn’t say it was all over before it had properly begun.

My point is that Egypt is not a foreign land as far as Americans are concerned. They may not know it, but their country has included Egypt for over forty years. That makes the revolution internal to the United States. In 1870 17 out of 20 British civil servants lived in India. The Mills designed a blueprint for Oxbridge education with that staffing problem in mind. American involvement in the Middle East today is more remote, but no less integral to home institutions.

“I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. Yet, as you rightly point out, the America that we understand extends beyond the borders of the geographic America. What does this mean for the potential of a second American revolution? Where would it be triggered? Much as the Egyptian revolution was triggered by the events in Tunisia it is possible that America’s revolution would be triggered from a far-off land.”

Saul, Now that the Egyptian revolution is definite, we can pose your question in a new light. Everyone likens events there now to 1989, not least Obama, who also links Egypt to Gandhi, King and the Ghana revolution. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the second Russian revolution, could Tahrir Square be the beginning of the second American revolution? After all, it wasn’t Russians who started the former, but Germans and Czechs, the Eastern European victims of the Soviet empire.

We know that the American empire was launched by World War 2 and has gone through two phases since. The French called the first les trente glorieuses from 1945 to roughly 1975, which was the heyday of the Cold War, but also a period marked by a developmental state on both sides of the Cold War committed to expanding public services and the purchasing power of working people. It was also the time when European empire was abolished by the anti-colonial revolution. After the watershed of the 1970s, we went through three decades of what came to be known as neoliberal globalization in which the power of big money to organize the world for its own benefit was unfettered. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China, India and Brazil as economic powers and the digital revolution in communications speeded up the formation of world society under American hegemony, even as these developments undermined it. This ended with the financial crisis of 2008 and we are now in the uncharted waters of the third period which might take in a full-scale depression, world war, a global democratic revolution, the end of life on earth, who knows? Whatever happens, it will be different.

The second phase of the American empire was put in place during the energy crisis of the 1970s. The US economy depends on Middle East oil. Just as the British empire yoked England to India, the US and the Middle East are a single political entity. When the British and French made their botched attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, the Americans let them fail. First they built up Israel as their proxy in the region, a strategy that culminated in the six-day war of 1967. But the Egyptians and Syrians launched a surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 to which the US, fearful of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, brokered a negotiated settlement. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 in return for the Sinai peninsular and Israel kept Gaza on hold for a future Palestinian state. 1973 also saw the reinforcement of OPEC and a big oil price hike which brought the Saudis into the Middle Eastern settlement as the leaders of a new oil cartel. In the last decade we have seen the installation of US armed forces in Iraq, the second largest oil producer, and a protracted campaign in Afghanistan (Afpak) which has the advantage of diverting attention from the Middle East and of starting a shooting war at the intersection of China, India, Russia and the Muslim world.

It is clear that Obama/Clinton were under strong pressure at the start of the Egyptian protests (themselves a response to the Tunisian revolution, as you say) to support the status quo, that is Mubarak or a stooge from his circle. The house of cards built up in the Middle East was only apparently stable. The Israelis have been increasingly intransigent with impunity, since they could count on the US, Egypt and the Saudis to keep a lid on things, a certainty increased by the formation of Iraq as an American armed camp within the region and the demonization of Iran as the Shiite bogeyman with “nuclear” capacity. And political security led to the accumulation of massive personal fortunes by the ruling elites, mirroring the financial excesses of the credit boom everywhere. This cascading inequality became more acute after the crash of September 2008. Demand in the world economy took a big hit, despite the use of taxpayers’ money in the major capitalist countries to bail out the banks and flood asset markets (but not consumer demand) with hot money. This has cushioned the blow for the time being in America, Europe and Japan at the risk of a sovereign debt crisis, but in many parts of the world unemployment, food prices and energy costs have all risen, making the social legacy of neoliberalism intolerable to the better educated, wired youth whose families are suffering and who see no future for themsleves under the status quo.

There are many scenarios out of 11th February 2011, several of them extremely unpleasant. It is not likely that Americans themselves would take the lead in a world revolution which potentially removes the free credit that the dollar’s hegemony has guaranteed for decades. But if the situation escalates, as seems likely, Americans will find themselves involved in a shooting war on more fronts than they can imagine now, not just the Middle East. Obama at last found the words to say something he probably believes after the Egyptians threw out Mubarak all by themselves. The first American revolution provides the rhetoric and even the substance of the second. American society is Janus-faced, pulled between its heritage as the only genuinely democratic polity on the planet and the imperial plutocracy it has become since. It is already deeply divided, as has been noted by the media of late. But the causes of this division cannot be understood within the parochial limits of American society itself. Who knows what will happen inside America once the impact of the Egyptian revolution spreads?

The Russians dismantled their own coercive bureaucracy instantly and with almost no loss of life. I have always believed in the American people’s practical good sense and love of freedom. The last few decades have seen a massive deterioration in the quality of American public culture, but the United States is still the home of modern democracy and the class that controls politics and the media today will not easily survive the turmoil unleashed in the world from now on. We are witnessing the end of a social form that I call “national capitalsim”. It was lanched in the 1860s by a series of political revolutions of which the American civil war was the most decisive. I would not be surprised if a world revolution triggers serious conflict within the US too.

I have been blogging here for years about the possibility of us launching a third World War soon (see “Conversations with Abdul Aziz“). This is not inevitable, but it is more likely if we don’t even talk about it and have no means of heading it off. I am greatly heartened by the non-violent strategy of the Egyptian protesters and the ease with which seemingly solid power structures have melted away in North Africa, as in eastern Europe in 1989. It is interesting that both regions form the immediate periphery of Western Europe which is not in great shape itself right now. If we embrace the possibility of a global democratic revolution now, rather than after a world war, the direst scenarios may not come to pass.

In American Civilization, CLR James argued that there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. This conflict was most advanced in America. The struggle was for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals, he thought, were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness and critic standing unequivocally for truth had been seriously compromised. The absorption of the bulk of intellectuals as wage slaves and pensioners of academic bureaucracy not only removed their independence but separated their specialized activities from social life.

If the Egyptian revolution has done nothing else, it has issued a wake up call to intellectuals everywhere. It is not outlandish to suggest that this may be the beginning of the second American revolution that James predicted, just possibly the world’s last.

AND NOW: the video!! Click on Read more for a 12-part lecture and discussion lasting about an hour and a half.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

1. Humanity is caught between national and world society. This is both dangerous and an opportunity for us. Yet much of what has been presented here has assumed that we can safely talk about the United States in isolation from the rest of the world.

2. Everything we have heard today has been impersonal and this will not do. People want to relate impersonal knowledge to their personal lives. And this relationship between the personal and impersonal aspects of social life is being radically changed by the digital revolution in communications, as manifested in the internet.

3. I want to offer a vision of money’s role in our lives that emphasizes its redemptive qualities as perhaps the principal means of mediating our relations with impersonal society in ways that can be personally meaningful.

4. The dominant social form over the last 150 years has been ‘national capitalism’. Any future we contemplate beyond the current crisis must take into account its history which I will present as a story of rise and fall in five stages.

5. Towards the end national capitalism resembled nothing so much an ‘Old Regime’, that arbitrary version of unequal society which was overthrown by the American and French revolutions. More accurately, I would say that the world society constituted by national capitalism as the dominant form manifested an obscene inequality and lawlessness characteristic of the Old Regime.

We are asked to re-imagine the economy. But what is THE economy? Where is it? The economy, when unqualified, is normally assumed to be national, but what we have to imagine is a genuinely world economy and all the levels underneath. I believe that we are at the end of something and the beginning of something new. In order to re-imagine the future, we have to re-imagine the past. What is it that is ending and what is its history?

The dominant social form of the last 150 years has been the nation-state formed through an alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class whose defeat was the principal aim of classical political economy. It was an alliance between big money and specialists in crowd control. They came together in a linked series of national revolutions in the 1860s, spilling over into the next decade, in order to secure industrial capitalism and the nation-state from the threat of the urban masses. These were the American civil war, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, Italy’s Risorgimento, Japan’s Meiji restoration, Britain’s second Reform Act and the formation of the Anglo-Indian superstate, German unification, the Franco-Prussian war and the French Third Republic. All of these moves by the main players in twentieth century history established a political framework capable of subduing and mobilizing people by a combination of capital, violence and the appeal to cultural unity. I call it national capitalism, the attempt to manage money and markets through central bureaucracy; but this has always been in dialectical tension with financial imperialism, a force for globalization that flourished for three decades before WW1 and for the last three decades, with disastrous consequences in the first instance and potentially for us too.

I should first indicate briefly my own approach to money. The economists understand money and markets exclusively through impersonal models, so anthropologists and sociologists have focused on how people make money personal and concretely social. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. As a token of society, money must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. To turn our backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests reproduces by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. It is not enough to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the macro-economy that we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin they could bring down on us all. This was what Simmel had in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

National capitalism has been the principal cause of our alienation from money and society as unreachable social objects, since it concentrates agency in remote centres of power that leave most people without a meaningful link to the forces changing society. It has evolved through five historical phases:

1. 1860s and 70s: its formation in a series of political and technological revolutions. The latter included steamships, continental railways and the telegraph.

2. 1880s to 1914: financial imperialism; globalization 1; bureaucratic revolution; the installation of the uneasy alliance between states and corporations that we call public and private sectors.

3. 1914-45: the second 30 years war (Churchill); an unmitigated catastrophe; wars and economic disaster.

4. 1945-70s: the social democratic consensus; the ‘golden age’ of national capitalism (Hobsbawm); the nuclear terror of the Cold War; the anti-colonial revolution and civil rights.

5. 1980s-now: neoliberalism beginning with Reagan and Thatcher, dismantling of the postwar class compromise; globalization 2. I claim that this was the period when world society was formed as a single interactive social network for the first time. It was fragile and highly unequal, but it hinged on three developments: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, opening up the whole world to transnational capitalism; the rise of China and India’s two billion people as economic powers in their own right; the shortening of time and distance through the internet.

The alliance of states and corporation came to resemble the Old Regime, especially when George Bush II and Halliburton acted as if they were George III and the East India Company. If national capitalism became near the end an increasingly arbitrary engine of inequality at the global level, what are the prospects for a world revolution now?

The forces of impersonal society have been weakened. This is true of large-scale private capital, especially the banks, and of the dominant free market ideology (economics, at least in the world outside Chicago!). This had led temporarily to reliance on the powers of government held by the leading states, in self-conscious evocation of a Keynesian past. But the national solutions of the 30s will not work this time; and states are compromised by their ties to the corporations. Their methods are ineffective and will fail, thereby discrediting the second leg of national capitalism. Our main problem is to locate the combination of political forms and levels of association that are adequate to address this crisis.

We need to identify the social forces that have been building up in this last phase and that may take advantage of the Old Regime’s collapse.

1. The shift in economic power West to East (North to South?) has undermined North Atlantic hegemony; but this may merely serve as an opportunity for China, India, Russia and Brazil to revive national capitalism on their own terms.

2. The recent rise of trading blocs (EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercosul) introduces a new regional and federal principle to world political economy. It will be a major contribution to global democracy if Africa, drawing on a tradition of Panafricanism, can form its own regional association.

3. I have focused in my own research on the potential for enhancing personal society through the internet, social networking, open source methods and so on. The dominant fact of our epoch is the radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information, making it possible to add lots of personal information to transactions at distance. There is much more to be said about this.

4. This is related to the possibilities for open money to flourish at the expense of the conventional banking system. Again I have explored community currencies at some length, drawing on the experience and ideas of Michael Linton and his associates.

5. The global institutions of late 1940s need to be replaced by new ones, even perhaps by a world government. Some may argue that the advent of Obama opens up a more progressive phase of international politics, but substantial reform, as Kant suggested when he said that conflict is the precondition for a more lawful world, is likely only after a prolonged breakdown of the peace. Must we go through another thirty years war in order to revive the impetus of the 1940s? My fear is that the closest historical analogy for our dilemmas is not 1933, but 1913, when globalization 1 broke down after three decades of financial imperialism.

There is an enduring tension between the closure of territorial rule and the universality of money. This has been magnified by the dominance of impersonal society in national capitalism. The forces for a democratic alternative, based on more directly personal relations to society, have been building up for decades and now face much weaker opposition from the Old Regime. I do not say a new liberal revolution will succeed; but I know which side I am on.

Talk given at the Financial Crisis Conference, University of Chicago, 10th April 2009, panel After the crisis: re-imagining the economy with Eugene Fama and James Galbraith, chair/discussant Moishe Postone.

Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award.

I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s not be critical of the end-product. The point is to scale down the world and scale up the self so that the two can enter into a meaningful relationship.

The Trap Part 1 Fuck you buddy

Part 2 The lonely robot

Part 3 We will force you to be free

See also:

The information revolution

The machine is us/ing us

A vision of students today

Introducing our YouTube ethnography project

Interview: how we learn

We are connected at last, humanity that is. World society is a reality. It has come home to roost in America. The reduction of the World Trade Centre to rubble marked this in the most vivid way possible. The world is one. Boom. That unity is violent. Boom. The sudden shock of recognition that America is in the world, not apart from it. The curious thing about the first decade after the Cold War is that, even as America took over the world, Americans, who come from all over the world, became more insular, more separated from it than before. John Locke once wrote, ‘In the beginning all the world was America’, meaning in a state of nature. Well, now all of our world is America again, but this time it reflects the age of money and unequal property that succeeded the state of nature in Locke’s scheme. The task of establishing civil government, successor to the age of money, awaits us.

After the catastrophe, a time for rationality. But reason works better backwards than forwards. Rationalization of the past is more effective than attempts to project a rational future. Today’s terrorism has a specific origin in the covert operations of the US government under Reagan during the 80s. Following the defeat in Vietnam, the Americans fought the Cold War through Third World proxies trained to use terror as a means of subduing civilian populations: in ex-Portuguese Africa, Unita and Renamo (supported by the outlaw South African regime); in Central America, the Contras; in Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin and, as we all now know, Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF opened up the rest to the predations of corporate capital and to the drain of debt interest. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush the Elder orchestrated the Gulf War for domestic consumption by television and then everything went quiet for a decade. The interventions in former Yugoslavia were minor policing operations in comparison. The Clinton years, in retrospect, now seem like a belle époque. Wall Street contrived the biggest boom in economic history, the internet connected us in a single network and the last checks on American military power evaporated. The bobos of Manhattan turned inwards to enjoy life at the centre of the world, while the rest of America was absorbed in itself. The cracks in all this were already beginning to show principally as a collapse of internet stocks and then of the telecoms boom when Hollywood’s perennial images of spectacular destruction were enacted for real on September 11th.

So now we have an unlimited war on terrorism, waged against the same Islamic fundamentalism that the CIA once encouraged in the Mujaheddin. This Republican regime relishes the opportunity to range worldwide without consultation and without even paying lip service to international law. After 1945, the USA decided to build up Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners in a new project of collective empire. The rules of this collective were set by the American reaction to Suez: the appearance of joint decision-making and participation, but only one active policeman allowed. This was supposed to be different from the European imperialism whose replacement by nation-states was supervised by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. It is celebrated as such by Hardt and Negri in their bestseller, Empire. It was established practice as recently as Kosovo. Yet now American columnists boast of their country’s freedom to act as it likes, a freedom prepared for by countless international treaties left unsigned. At home, Bush the Younger’s appeals to ‘the nation’ have produced a stampede to conform; anti-terrorist legislation and judicial practice promise to overthrow hard-won civil liberties; and Americans try to come to terms with estrangement from a world that resents their careless wealth and unfettered power. In the name of anti-terrorism, the satellite governments introduce their own versions of internal repression; border controls and surveillance in general are stepped up; and, while only the British have volunteered to be the Yankee imperial bag-carrier, no-one else has mustered serious criticism of the Americans’ conduct of the Afghan war.

The immediate aftermath of September 11th thus looks like a regression. For some time now, it has seemed that the old corporate bureaucracies were in retreat, when faced with the rise of a global network society. Even the capitalist corporations have gone through a frenzy of downsizing and outsourcing during the last decade in a drive to take on a more flexible network form. State capitalism, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through national bureaucracies, has been eroded by a tide of electronic money flowing across borders with virtual impunity, while the ability of corporations to dictate terms to national governments is growing every year. Criminal markets for drugs, arms and bootleg copies of everything dominate trade in much of the world. Now we have seen a band of terrorists, employing the techniques of informal economy and network society, produce the most dramatic public theatre in memory. And how does the Bush regime respond? With B 52s bombing a country into a stone-age to which it had already returned. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a universal symbol of the people’s triumph over bureaucratic power, this is the counter-revolution, contrived by a ruling elite threatened for a decade by increased freedom of social connection and reduced popular fear of central power. What is new is the unilateral assumption of this function by the American government. We might call it ‘state capitalism in one country’. But the rest of the world’s unpopular regimes know that it shores up their own powers of rule, even if they are not being given a token role in the action.

It is convenient for the rulers of our unipolar world to focus attention on cultural politics abstracted from history on the struggle between good and evil, liberal enlightenment and religious bigotry, ‘the American way’ and a recalcitrant Islam. Our task should be to expose the social contradictions that this ideology conceals. For this is a capitalist world and capitalism is not standing still while the media hang breathlessly on every minor development in Afghanistan. What democratic forces are emerging to confront a corporate capitalism whose hegemony has never been more universal than now? This question entails another. How might we break up the idea of a monolithic America, that rhetoric of national unity on which Bush depends for popular support, in order to identify the forces within American society ready to oppose their own government and corporations? This means refusing to equate the US ruling elite with the American people and their instinct for democracy. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism leaves out of the global struggle against neo-liberal capitalism many of the elements that are best placed to play an effective part. We must distinguish between the American state and the American people, even if today in an atmosphere of perceived national crisis many Americans are reluctant to do so. Against Bush’s version of America as lawless world bully and institutional expression of corporate capitalism, there is another living tradition representing America as a self-sufficient federalist democracy, with weak central government, offering a home for the world’s oppressed peoples.

The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth’s natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might reasonably have been considered shared culture to which all have free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The napsterization of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of visual images, of film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same American government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world.

In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments. The open source software movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft’s monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacture of food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of ‘organic’ farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is ‘intellectual property rights’, slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated ‘command and control’ methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property. The events of September 11th have temporarily diminished this movement, especially in North America, just as they have added to the powers of coercion at the disposal of governments everywhere. In this sense, the global movement for greater democracy and less inequality has suffered a reverse.

A large proportion of the activists resisting the corporate takeover of world society belong to the western middle classes. This is so whether we are talking about the internet, software, cultural products, food, drugs, pollution, arms control or the exploitation of cheap labour. Europeans make their own distinctive contribution, but many of these movements have their source in America. The Free Software Foundation is American. The American courts tried Microsoft. Napster was an American invention. American farmers are fighting rents imposed on food varieties by corporate monopolists. American consumers resist being made the guinea pigs of drugs companies. Of course, these activities can be and are represented by corporations, their lawyers and political stooges as ‘unAmerican’. But they are an expression of what is best in America, its democracy.

It is a widely shared and justified belief that the age of money, whose culmination we are witnessing today, is not in the interest of most human beings, that the American government and giant corporations (half of them American, a third European) are indifferent to that common interest of humanity. The rest of the world needs Americans to join them in the struggle for decent human standards in social life. They bring tremendous resources of technology, education and economic power to that struggle, but above all they bring their country’s liberal political traditions. It would be a pity if the effect of September 11th was to obscure that possibility of global democratic solidarity, leaving the world stage to Texas oilmen and Muslim fanatics, with their mutual conspiracy to divide and rule.

An article circulated among my academic colleagues, “The Needless Destruction of Iraq’s (and our own) Cultural Heritage”. It was written by a Director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and it protests the looting of the Baghdad museum, while US soldiers looked on with indifference. It was meant for the New York Times op-ed page and was rejected. I can see why it was rejected. Perhaps there were more ambivalent versions available certainly two others were published . A little irony would not have gone amiss and the author doesn’t seem to recognize that his professional interest might undermine his advocacy. And Mesopotamia was the cradle of all Eurasian civilizations, not just “ours”.

I had been mulling over the irony of bombing Baghdad in the name of democracy long before the war broke out. I don’t believe that the battle to displace agrarian civilization (a.k.a. the old regime) has yet been won. The Phoenicians, the Athenians and the Carthaginians did their best to establish a commercial civilization in the ancient Mediterranean for the best part of a thousand years and it was the Romans who won in the end, making the place safe for military landowners for another millennium and a half. So if America is exasperated with the Old World of its own origins, what better symbolic way of speeding up the transition to democracy than smashing up Mesopotamia? Except that, in doing so, Bush and Co reveal their own addiction to warfare as a technique of control, just like the old regime.

State capitalism is essentially backward looking. The belle époque of Clinton’s dotcom bubble now seems like the dream that it was and America has since turned to “state capitalism in one country” (only one world policeman allowed). It will be the ruin of us all if not checked. Arundhati Roy said recently that the only institution on earth more powerful than the American government is American civil society and I think she is right. We have to explode the ideology of freedom that links them free markets, free democracy, free to get run over by a tank, free to bury the past.

So when I heard of the cultural catastrophe last week, I immediately wondered if the looters and the lumpen crusaders had a common goal. I haven’t read many interviews with looters. It is assumed that they are just a greedy, undisciplined rabble let loose by Saddam’s fall. Lately there have been whispers of organised crime hiding behind the general turmoil, in which case Saddam’s totalitarian regime was not wholly effective, unless this is state-sponsored crime as in post-Soviet Russia. Saddam’s hangers-on didn’t run away or get to be buried in the rubble as so many remnants of DNA they stayed to get rich by stealing their country’s heritage under cover of a mob they conjured up themselves. No doubt President Assad is already lining himself up to fence the stuff to American billionaires for their private collections. The sack of Baghdad sees the loot going back to America, in a privatised way similar to but not quite the same as how the British Museum was filled.

But I digress. Could there have been another motive for the looting, one that has resonance with America’s historic mission to erase the old regime from the world, by bombing and occupying its source? Maybe the looters, like generations of American immigrants, born again and otherwise, just wanted to wipe out their past. Not just Saddam, but the whole sorry history, including colonialism, back to Sumer for crissake. What good did it ever do them, this revered past? Better to make a new start. This fits with Rumsfeld and his merry men, doesn’t it? A new beginning, at least for Bechtel. A born again Christian ideology of remaking the world from scratch. The ironic contrast with the priority given to safeguarding oil is made by everyone. But oil is the future, not the past and it’s running out. You say that these relics are priceless? Nonsense, cultural heritage is a creative capitalist industry these days. If it depended on a fixed stock of artefacts, where would the expansion be then? Schumpeter called it creative destruction…Just think of how Europe and Japan bounced back after all that real estate got wiped out. The archaeologists haven’t got the point. And in any case, Baghdad had already been razed to the ground by the Mongols, so it was really no more of an antique than Los Angeles.

Another angle. Most capitalist fortunes originated in theft. How can we disparage the spirit of enterprise in this instance? It’s like when the Serbs asked the western powers, How can you blame us for establishing our nation with the techniques you used at your own neighbours’ expense? This is what I find compromising about the American cultural heritage experts who wanted to work with the Pentagon, gave them long lists of sites “not to destroy” while they went about killing and maiming the Iraqi people, for whom no such lists were drawn up. And now they are outraged that their livelihood has been disrupted. What were they doing in bed with the Pentagon in the first place? Didn’t they think that an American army on the rampage would be as callous and brutal as any other, when it came down to it? Did they imagine that these ill-educated blacks, Latinos and poor white trash would have anything on their minds beyond self-preservation and the need to rest? Did they buy the rhetoric of surgical strikes, of invasion without collateral damage? Just what is it about clay figurines from 5,000 years ago that makes them exempt from the holocaust? It exposes the hypocrisy of our educational systems that this aberration against humanity could be seen as being susceptible to careful cultural management. All it would have taken was a tank or two, a few shots in the air… And quite a few dead people, more like.

The article in question starts by asking American readers to imagine a crowd looting the Smithsonian while the police stand idly by. This provoked a thought experiment, which follows. It is 1941. The Churchill government has escaped to Canada. The victorious German army enters London. Derelict buildings are everywhere, some of them still burning. Small arms fire can be heard in all directions. Snipers have a clear line on the advancing soldiers. Public services, including the police, have evaporated. They encounter a mob in the process of pillaging the British museum. Frenzied looters can be seen pushing wheelbarrows stacked with medieval tapestries and Greek statuettes. What are you supposed to do?  Tell them to take the stuff back, so that it can await shipping to Berlin? Shoot them for getting to the loot before the Nazis? But isn’t it the case that if the perfidious British want to destroy their own monarchical cultural heritage, it aids the reconstruction of their polity by the Germans? In any case, the Germans are too tired to react and have their hands full with the snipers. Perhaps an intrepid BBC reporter, at least one who can imagine collaborating with the new regime, interviews a few looters. Why are they stealing stuff from the BM? The answer is that they want to steal anything they can. They have lost everything. Why shouldn’t they grab what they can? People are looting anything that comes to hand the hospitals, the hotels, the ministries, Selfridges, anything. It’s just that these icons of cultural heritage are more shocking to the educated class than mattresses thrown out of the windows of the Savoy.

Maybe all of this is simply unbelievable. The British are much too well-behaved to become this kind of undisciplined mob, aren’t they? Or are they? What does it say about the nature of Iraqi society that this should be the outcome of its demise? What is the comparative evidence of how people have behaved elsewhere under conditions of abrupt regime change, invasion or war? Isn’t the outrage of the orientalists an expression of a belief that somehow the American empire ought to be different, perhaps as nuanced in its techniques of control as its British predecessor? Most damning of all, a marine is reported (by Robert Fisk, who else?) as phoning in, ‘Yeah, some guy says some biblical library’s going up…’. The shame of it, that our soldiers should have a weak command of the language. The Europeans will be crowing over this example of ugly Americanism for years. Maybe US marine jokes will temporarily displace Bush jokes from the internet charts.

Irony isn’t enough. But how do you talk to these self-important academic representatives of American or ‘western’ civilization? I tried yesterday with an archaeology graduate student. He beat a hasty retreat up the stairs. In any case he had an important matter to expose to public view, another urgent plank of the campaign to oppose the infidels who run the White House.

I was contacted by a guy in Hyde Park, a software artist unattached to the university, who had read my Mesopotamia piece on a list. He invited me to a public meeting of a Committee against War and Racism. Always glad to seize any chance to make virtual society real, I squeezed all my jobs into the first half of the day and headed South around 4pm. On the way over, I read a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Eliot Weinberger called 9/12. He is a writer from New York and the pamphlet is five essays starting with Bush’s election coup, then the day after September 11th and three other ruminations on that and the Bush regime at later intervals. It made a big impact, not least because the journey from Evanston to Hyde Park was a perfect length to read it. It was a day when my dislocation in the world appeared to be redeemed, if only partially. It is so well written, humane and muscular, and incredibly informative.

For most of my time here, I have affected to be dismissive of the American progressives I have encountered. They seem to be in despair, talking of exile, preoccupied with getting Bush out, insular. When I come with my line about the American opposition that is built into the country’s history, they talk instead of a popular monolith that is brainwashed by the media and look to Europe for resistance French intransigence, the English press. Weinberger, with his relentless accumulation of detail, the Curse of the Bushes (cowardice) and all that, tipped me over. I realised more concretely than before what these people were talking about; and the tenacious grip I have on my own vision of America as a force for enlightenment and democracy in the world slipped a little.

The meeting in the university church was a bust. I guess the only public culture Americans have is that of a revivalist meeting. Each of six speakers gave their personal testimony a Palestinian woman missed the plane for her father’s funeral because she was arrested at the airport; an old man told how his prescription drugs for Parkinson’s were unaffordable because money is being diverted from Medicare to war; a Vietnam vet offered some insight into conditions in the army today; a public health professor went on about the damage to people in Iraq and here; there was just one standard leftist rant alright, but predictable. That wasn’t too bad. It was the discussion that was depressing. Because everyone had their own private agenda and no way of making a conversation out of it. So one girl wanted to know about smallpox vaccination because someone in her family (a soldier?) had been made ill by it; some old guy went into a rambling thing about the UN; two Spartacists stood up and made incredibly insensitive speeches, calling for a Bolshevik revolution (1917 was the only successful anti-war movement in history) and reminding us that Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism they were shouted down. I couldn’t stand it any more, the impotence of the occasion, found my contact, made my apologies and left.

But the journey wasn’t yet over. I still had to take the Red Line to Howard and on to Evanston. This time I was reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for a class. This is an excerpt from the American edition:

“The title is taken from W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The second coming’ and that for his second novel, No Longer At Ease from TS Eliot’s ‘The journey of the magi’. The choice of titles reflects the author’s awareness of a debilitation that Okonkwo foresees in Things Fall Apart. This comes from the world of Yeats’s cataclysmic vision and how the Irish poet would have appreciated the wild old Nigerian…No Longer at Ease ends not with a matchet swing but a gavel’s tap.” (Evoking Eliot: the world ends not with a bang but a whimper).

I once read a book by Stephen Toulmin called Cosmopolis. At one stage he merges two poems by Donne and Yeats, the latter’s being this one Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… He claims that they are in effect the same poem, as revealed by the fairly seamless merger. He goes on to say that both Donne and Yeats were radical conservatives, defined as someone who, disgusted by contemporary society, would renew it in the name of a value taken from the past. I suddenly thought, Hang on! Donne and Yeats are my two favourite poets, so what does that make me? And ever since, I have known that I too am a radical conservative. Witness the fact that I prefer to read old books. And I know what past value I want to revive the tradition of classical anglophone liberalism from Milton and Locke to Smith and Jefferson. This project has solidified of late and underlies my book proposal for The Human Economy.

All of this was passing through my mind while the Chicago Transit Authority train made halting progress toward Howard (a place chiefly known as the nearest source of booze and sex for the inmates of that dry Methodist town where I now earn my living). And it came to me then, not an original thought, but original to me. That we are living in fascism now. I recall a book of essays about America between the wars, called The Aspirin Age. A major theme was fascism then Huey Long, Father McLoughlin etc. And I realised what Weinberger’s pamphlet had demonstrated, that the Bush clique were a continuation of that thread, only this time with the corporate state within a state, the Pentagon in tow (fuelled by two-thirds of American taxes), with the most irresponsible American corporations in charge and with fundamentalist Christianity as a vision for fixing the world. I understood more fully why my American friends were depressed. I could still hang on to my own vision of the liberal democratic tradition, but I can also now embrace more fully the vision of the American and European left. America has come under the control of fascists.

Not long after, I went to a meeting of the International Socialist Organization in Rogers Park. It was billed as “Karl Marx’s revolutionary ideas”. But I went as part of my fieldwork study of American dissent while I am here. I was invited by a young friend,. John whom I had known in Cambridge and Paris. The speaker was a cross between a Hell’s Angel and a teddy bear, called Adam. He rattled off a prepared speech, mostly based on the Communist Manifesto, gave a potted early bio of Karl Marx and was careful not to strain his audience (“As a young man he was attracted to leftwing circles arguing about the ideas of a German philosopher called Hegel, but I won’t go into that…”). He had one good joke: “He wrote against censorship for the Rheinische Zeitung, but most of what he wrote was censored.”. The speech was OK, nothing special.

We were in a high school doubling as a community centre, with women’s keep fit classes and black caucuses. The room was small and full (good planning). I was impressed by the range of the audience. In Britain a meeting of Trots would be geriatric, male and all white. Here there was a good mix of age, gender, race and class. Then we had a discussion. I had in mind my previous experience in the university church, where all the speakers had only their private agendas and no way of making a conversation, like a revivalist meeting without the holy ghost to keep things communal. This was entirely different. People spoke in an order determined by the chair, a large lady who couldn’t remember Adam’s name, but knew most people in the room. The main speaker waited until the end to get back in. The speeches were relevant and abstract, sometimes relating to each other. Most of all I was impressed by the respect and kindness people showed each other, as well as by that American trick of trying to address the largest number in an uncomplicated way without condescending. It was impressive, like a church meeting of the better sort, sticking to the agenda, but turned outwards to the world not inwards.

I tossed in an anomalous comment early on. There had been talk about bourgeois wealth being diverted to the alleviation of poverty come the revolution, about capitalism being on its last legs, old, past its sell-by-date. So I reminded them that a third of humanity still worked in the fields with their hands and a similar number had never made a telephone call in their life. Who or what was going to bring them into the circuit of shared wealth, if not capitalism? Who would send up the satellites and lay the cables to bring them all in? Well, this got them going in not unexpected ways. Later I made my pitch for nationalism (and behind that racism) as the main obstacle to a socialist revolution capable of addressing the scope of the world capitalist economy. I talked of states, corporations and transnational institutions as the social relations of production that now act as so many fetters on the development of the forces of production. People responded positively to that. The show ended up with what I took as the stalwarts of the group making an upbeat pitch two young Asian women, a Hispanic man, a Jewish intellectual, a Stalinoid white woman at the back who controlled the purse strings and offered a good but irrelevant piece on musical chairs as a way of indoctrinating children with a dog-eat-dog ethos early. Only one person broke the pattern, a gay black man who did the revivalist thing (“I come from Grand Rapids and it was only when I was a teenager that…”), much to the discomfort of the others.

I came away impressed and uplifted. The art of political conversation is not dead in America. They were a small groupuscule I learned that they had been thrown out of the SWP in Britain, plus ça change. They are having a potluck on Saturday to raise funds for their big conference here in late June (100 panels… groan!). I might go. They were nice. They said things I hadn’t heard before. Like someone asked what the socialist revolution would look like and how do you persuade people it doesn’t have to be like Stalin’s Russia and one guy said you just get on with your life and join in the fights that mean something to you. They had a highly idealised view of the Third World (peons working for absentee landowners), but they wanted to connect with them and some of them knew in detail what was going on in Bolivia, Argentina etc. It gave me a warm feeling. I enjoyed myself and not even mainly because I had spoken and afterwards bought a book of Trotsky’s speeches, chatted with someone whose mother was French and so on.

Afterwards, John and I went to his apartment and talked for a couple of hours. It was a very stimulating conversation in the course of which I reached what seemed then and now to be my clearest ever conception of our moment in world history, of the relationship between capitalism and revolution. A lot of it had to do with trying to explain the relationship between two things: the shift in the social organization of economy from house to city to nation-state to world society; and the idea that the shift to virtual commodities, especially money instruments, was not necessarily a house of cards about to collapse, but possibly a new stage in the rationalisation of the market. I argued that the main contradiction is between national and global organisation of the economy, that there are two great camps, combining right and left, who adhere to each pole respectively. I rehearsed my line that this opens up the terrain for a classic liberal revolution in which some elements of capitalism combine with popular democratic interests, this time to break up state capitalism. This will lead to new global Keynesian institutions, but not to socialism in the first instance or soon. Capitalism still has a way to go to complete its mission to bring cheap commodities to the masses and to break the grip of the old regime by making the market universal.

In the course of this conversation, I found myself trying to capture in soundbites the glimpses I have had of the high financial capitalist world, mainly through Satya, an Indian mathematician who designs derivatives for Union Banque Swiss. I couldn’t help thinking of the huge UBS trading floor, the multitude of traders locked into their Panopticon on the world, all those screens with moving numbers in lights and televisions showing the weather everywhere, hidden away in an inaccessible place in a huge implacable building on North Wacker with black windows, seeing everything, but seen by no-one. How could this score of Trotskyites in a crummy high school room in a rundown Chicago neighbourhood compete with that? We have to find the points of possible alliance with those sectors of capital for whom the Bush strategy doesn’t work. I recalled a factoid about China’s 40% share of world economic growth last year. It reverberates in my skull. I wonder if I could get into Swiss banking as a fieldworker somehow. I have such a slender grip on this stuff. I have read most of the books on Drexel Burnham Lambert, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers etc in the boom years. But I want to see that floor again, if only from the outside. It has become the symbol of what I am reaching for.

I saw Polanski’s The Pianist only recently on video, while I am spending three months in the USA.. I have been coming here for thirty years and I am a great fan of this mysterious society and its warm people. Lately, I have been disturbed by a discernible shift to autocracy, even brutality in public life at home and abroad. Much of this is justified as the need for security in response to “terrorism”. We all depend on impersonal society, call it law, bureaucracy, the market or whatever. And the quality of face-to-face interaction with other human beings is still our measure of the standards we set for personal society. The balance between the two is a thin line we tread daily. Personal society can mean feudalism or criminal mafias and no-one wants that, whatever we may think about the tendency of bureaucrats to trample on basic human interests.

The other day I left my wife crying at the airport where her personal goods had been systematically ripped apart by officials claiming to be just following orders. She said she had never been treated that way in the Soviet Union. There is no question that people who travel through US airports these days expose themselves to harassment and humiliating treatment that would have been unthinkable two years ago. All in the name of security, of course. Black young men have suffered much worse from the police for much longer. But it does seem as if American society could be sliding imperceptibly towards instituted inhumanity of a sort we once called fascism. The present government’s indifference to law, whether in Iraq, at Guantanamo or in the domestic detention of suspects, and its apparent ability to lie with impunity merely reinforce the impression that we are witnessing something new here or perhaps rather something old that we thought we put behind us after 1945.

These thoughts were brought to life and made relative by watching The Pianist. The first half of the movie is harrowing. It shows a decent middle class family shuffling down the slippery slope to destruction by a fascist society that had trained some of its members to behave with the most callous brutality imaginable. At every step, normal people could doubt the plausibility of what was happening to them. By the time they tried to resist, it was too late. The second half is a chase whose outcome is already known (it wouldn’t be a movie if the hero died before the end). This reduces the suspense and contributes to a feeling that the film lasts too long. The main character and his relationships don’t develop at all in a protracted sequence marked by historical dates the Warsaw uprising, the arrival of the Russians and so on. But the movie did provide a useful way of placing disparate phenomena along a continuum we might label ‘fascist’.

Could I claim that roughing up the belongings of a French woman with a baby at the airport is analogous to picking eight men out of a line at random and shooting them in the head? My answer was and is Yes. Because Nazism started out with the acquiescence of ordinary people in brutality that escalated imperceptibly over time. And because all nationalisms are implicitly a racist assertion of superiority over foreigners who lack any claim to human rights. The critique has to start with the inhumanity of normal society harassed women slapping kids in supermarkets, men in their 50s being thrown on the scrap heap because the terms of trade dictate it, a teenager being strip-searched because she fits a drug runner’s profile. I think this makes me a liberal, as does the belief that we can’t return to the Warsaw ghetto or the Gulag, not that far. Why so? We are witnessing an attempt to put the lid on a popular uprising that was continuous since 1945 and peaked in the 90s. The resistance is not obvious today because people are fearful about losing more than they think they can afford to. And they are right to be afraid. But I don’t think the repressive classes can get away with as much as they did in mid-century. And here I rely on the classic liberal idea, that people know too much these days.

So I wonder what this fine movie provokes in the minds of the audience: that this couldn’t happen to us again or that it could, if we forget the history it brings alive for us?

A review posted on Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).

The interest of America for Tocqueville and James originally stemmed from political questions posed within the context of Europe. The relationship of America to Europe, the continuities and the contrasts, forms a pervasive theme of their work. Although separated by more than a hundred years, both writers departed for the New World at a time of ferment in European history, after the political landscape had been transformed by a major event. In Tocqueville’s case this was the French Revolution; for James it was the Russian Revolution. Each man was convinced that democracy is the moving force in modern history and that America is playing the leading role in that movement.

Apart from the obvious parallels in the substantive concerns of Tocqueville and James, there are interesting similarities in their methods. Both writers, upon arrival in America, traveled widely through the country. Its geographical expanse captured their imagination; and a sense of freedom from the confining weight of European civilization is palpable in their writing. But these journeys also directly acquainted Tocqueville and James with the working of a democracy; and, in different ways, each made their personal observations and encounters with sections of the population the basis for understanding American society. They reached similar conclusions, placing their faith not in laws and formal institutions, but in the common people, in their pragmatic political sense. They saw the customs and attitudes to life of ordinary Americans as the safeguard of democracy’s future.

The structure of both Democracy in America and American Civilization reflects these conclusions. Each book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the ideas underpinning the outward appearance of America’s public institutions, the second with the inner life and social practices of the American people themselves. Each book contains within its own development a movement from form to content that mirrors the historical contrast between the civilization of Europe and its American successor.

Tocqueville set out to examine how Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity had been incorporated into the foundation and functioning of a new society. He believed that democracy, government by the people in their own interests, was the distinctive impulse of his age. Its triumph as a historical process was inevitable and irreversible. The democracy of America was his case study. He found the principle of equality to be a more fundamental and durable feature of democracy than liberty; but he recognized their relationship to be close and complex: “Men cannot be equal without being free and equality, in its extreme form, must merge with freedom.” For Tocqueville the essential feature of American society was its people’s pursuit of worldly prosperity (happiness) under conditions of general equality.

Nevertheless, these observations led him to pose as the central paradox facing American civilization the unequal treatment of blacks, which he described as “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” He was conscious too of other dangers facing the new democracy. For example, the pursuit of happiness channeled the restless energies of the population into commercial and industrial activity. Yet Tocqueville saw here the possibility of inequalities being established through the growth of a manufacturing aristocracy. Furthermore, he observed that the drive for greater efficiency in America was achieved through specialization, through increasing division of labour. This resulted in a devastating dehumanization of the work process: “What is one to expect from a man who has spent twenty years of his life making the heads for pins?”

More fundamentally, for Tocqueville the greatest threat to a democratic society was posed by despotism. This was because it was part and parcel of the growth of democracy itself. Equality was linked to individualism; but, in isolating individuals, democracy weakened the connections between them and undermined their resistance to encroaching centralization. The power of society in a democracy was likely to be oppressive; the only counterweight in his view was the ability of citizens to form free associations.

At the close of the first volume of Democracy in America, there is a striking passage that in many ways anticipated the world in which James lived and which shaped his work:

“There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a prominent place among the nations; and the world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time. . . .Each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

James’s own study, begun a century later, shows how deeply Tocqueville understood the social, economic and political forces at work in democratic society. In American Civilization he takes up Tocqueville’s themes of liberty, equality and the forms of association; and he examines their meaning in a mid-twentieth century America where the pursuit of material wealth had reached its fullest expression in the system of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford. For James in 1950 the society’s original ideals of freedom and equality had by then been sacrificed to an oppressive work regime that paradoxically made it feasible for the people in general to aspire to the material means of achieving these goals. If Tocqueville placed equality at the centre of his interpretation of the new democracy, James was preoccupied with freedom, or rather with the awareness of its loss that permeated the consciousness of Americans in his day. Moreover, James saw that the worldwide struggle of popular forces against totalitarian bureaucracy had brought Tocqueville’s prediction of rivalry between America and Russia to the nightmare conclusion of the Cold War.

There is little of this grand vision in the more recent writings of European intellectuals. Nor is there the same sense of the American people as the vanguard of world civilization. Baudrillard’s America offers a typical example of the distaste felt by European elites for the American version of democratic society. While appearing to be seduced by the surface gloss of America, Baudrillard in reality gives vent to the deep hostility he feels towards the common people. They simply do not exist in his book. Their passive lot is to be imprinted by the myriad signs of advertising and propaganda whose meaning is vouchsafed only to the traveling intellectual, the author himself.

Baudrillard, a Cartesian subject if ever there was one, thinks alone in a universe unmediated by the presence of others. Hence his preference for the desert as an image of American society, reflecting the emptiness of the world he inhabits, as he watches it flashing by his car window. Traditionally, the European writer has conceived of his audience as a narrowly-based cultural elite, successor to the courts of the absolutist monarchs. He resents bitterly the democratization of the means of communication, especially television, since it threatens to bypass the monopoly of knowledge and information which was once stored in books. Even worse, democracy might transfer power from the intellectuals and their masters into the hands of the people themselves.

It follows from this that the intellectual denies the ability of the masses to make appropriate use of the information coming their way. One means of doing so is to represent America, the place where people power and mass communications are most developed, as a bewildering maze of signs detached from any sensible forms of social life and made meaningful only by the arcane manipulations of a master semiotician. In this way, Baudrillard and others like him transform the idea of America as the future into a grotesque cacotopia that it would be perverse to emulate. It is safe to celebrate the old Hollywood movies, as long as television, advertising and fast food are held at bay. America may even offer tourists the chance to relive cinematic images in the Western desert today, before they return to the safety of the old way of life.

The contrast between Baudrillard and James could not be greater. James too made a mind-expanding journey shortly after arriving in America from Europe. But he stayed for more than a decade. He made it his business to penetrate “the actual and intimate lives” of the American people; and he used the opportunity to overthrow the burdens of his own European intellectual legacy. He saw that the development of mass communications in the twentieth century had opened up a huge audience for information and entertainment. James recognized that the volatile tastes of this mass audience gave expression to social forces that had their roots in personal experience, in an individuality multiplied by millions. The purveyors of popular art forms, in his view, had to pay close attention to the revealed wants of their customers. Moreover, these forms reflected the essence of modern social life, its movement. The new audiences for the mass media have elevated the scale of perceived community far beyond the old limits imposed by work and residence, moving beyond the nation-state to embrace the emergent idea of one world society. James never underestimated the sophistication of ordinary people, certainly not their ability to make independent judgments about what they were fed by the media.

James, accepting the intrinsic movement of American society, felt compelled to address its history. Americans may not have a strong historical sense, but they make world history—whether in the eighteenth century with their revolution, in the nineteenth with the Civil War or in the twentieth with their military interventions abroad. James saw his task as the need to situate the growing power of the American people in a social history which was at once local and global. Baudrillard knows nothing of American history. History for him is what intellectuals pass on to the educated classes in books. Americans have no place in that version of history; they do not exist. Let them be reduced to the images of Hollywood movies or to fleeting encounters in desert motels.

Baudrillard is not indifferent to his great French predecessor. Like James he refers back to Tocqueville, only to conclude that the famous unity of private interest and public spirit has gone. He insists that there is no collective principle left in America to modify the fragmentation of individual existence. If James reached the opposite conclusion, then so too was his method an extension of Tocqueville’s. For him the meaning of popular culture was to be found in its resonance with the lives of ordinary Americans whom he studied over a period of many years. Not for him the jottings of a few weeks’ holiday spent trying to match what can be seen through a car window with youthful memories of the cinema.

As a representative example of much postmodernist writing in recent years, Baudrillard’s America is an indictment of that whole intellectual class whose postwar prosperity has insulated them from the movement of modern history, so that they can only see in America a mirror reflecting their own alienation. The intelligentsia have truly become a class without a social purpose. It is hardly surprising that, faced with the rise of popular forces on a world scale, they retreat into the old forms of intellectual life associated with Europe’s bourgeois civilization—and thereby constitute a ready-made market for Baudrillard’s excesses. James’s 1950 manuscript, Notes on American Civilization, is an even more pressing antidote to such thinking today than when it was originally written.

[Written with Anna Grimshaw. Note by Jim Murray, C.L.R. James Insititute, July 2001: This text was written in 1990 as an Appendix to the Institute pamphlet C.L.R. James and ‘The Struggle for Happiness’. The authors decided at the last minute not to include it because they thought it might “unbalance” the structure of the pamphlet. The material here was also not included in the slightly modified version of the pamphlet that became the Introduction to the 1993 Blackwell edition of American Civilization by C.L.R. James. James's own title for the book, at the end of his life, was The Struggle for Happiness. The title was changed, after he died, against the editors' wishes.]