Dear Readers, this article, sent by the author, is quite interesting. I was living in New York when Bill DeBlasio, the mayor who preceded Eric Adams, ran on a platform that is similar to Mr. Mamdani’s, the current Democratic Party candidate.
Thirty seconds into his first term as Mayor, DeBlasio revealed that he was the same old same old when he jettisoned his platform in favor of ‘being pragmatic,’ which was code for doing what his rich donors wanted him to do.
Kshama Sawant has been giving interviews making the point that Mamdani, while describing his politics as Socialist, is saying that he wants to work with city oligarchs. In contrast, a Marxist frame featuring class struggle suggests that the oligarchs feed on the rest of us. The current distributions of income and wealth in the US give empirical backing to the class struggle thesis.
Personalizing the election—- Mamdani seems like a decent fellow with politics that I largely agree with, misses the point. As this piece suggests, some significant portion of his campaign is astroturfed. This suggests hidden hands behind the campaign.
Voters in New York should decide for themselves. Eric Adams, the current mayor, is a very nasty piece of work. And Mamdani pulled off a miracle by refusing to support the US - Israeli genocide in Gaza and still winning the Democratic nomination.
But until the veil is pulled back on US elections as to who is funding them and why, ready yourselves for permanent electoral disappointment.
Although Mandani claims to be a break from the political electoral framework perpetuated by oligarchies, he is funded by them. A question must be asked: why would someone finance a candidate that goes against their interests?
I agree with your last claim……the problem is that this ‘consumerist paradise wisdom’ is now accepted by many…..the question is how to ‘discredit’ it….. “the crap on the shelf at [supermarkets] isn’t the path to happiness for most humans”….
A first step is to end the use of psychological coercion to sell products. Doing so is antithetical to the premises of both capitalism and democracy because it replaces rational choice with irrational choice.
Prior to the advent of commercial propaganda (advertising), consumer culture didn’t exist. Today it does. This isn’t to suggest that the process can be easily reversed. But a return to ‘tombstone’ product announcements rather than the use of psychological coercion would be a good first step.
I agree. But my point was different — why people subscribe to this consumer logic? To change the ‘mechanics’ of advertising is important, but the logic that we should be able to buy on the market many different things, regardless of a destruction of the earth, is taken as our ‘right’.
Separating the goods in the store from the circumstances of their production is fundamental to capitalism. With no intention to offend, I have been vegan for years. The plastic packages of animal corpses sold in grocery stores in the US give no indication of the misery from which they were produced.
Reuniting so-called consumers with the circumstances of capitalist production is crucial. In practice, this means re-localizing most economic production. This isn't 'efficient' in the capitalist sense. But without doing so, destroying the world is as easy as buying groceries at the local supermarket.
Brilliant. Expected to be met with various degrees of lacking of understanding. Especially from those so steeped through and through in the religion called capitalism, believing in some shiny most awesome transcendental capitalism as a solution of every and any problem...
Well written! But from my perspective :), this essay is analytically flawed in its structural framing. This is because it conflates “capitalism” entirely with neoliberalism and imagines that “socialism” is the *only* path to liberty, yet ignores the fact that the United States from the 1830s until some point after World War 2 developed under a structurally distinct lower case “d” democratic, decentralized system that, over time, achieved immense gains in liberty, pluralism, and material improvement, without becoming either oligarchic capitalism or state run socialism.
That participatory democracy, federated capital diffusion, and civic integration created a system more pluralistically free than the current centralized technocratic model or any historic socialist experiment *that actually existed at scale*. So, in my personal opinion, this essay's framing runs the risk of trapping us between two overly abstract poles, market or state, while ignoring the lived history of resilient, redundant, community anchored structures that do not fit into its binary. And, effectively, n a sort of way, this essay inadvertently replicates the very erasure it claims to resist
What happened in the US beginning around the 1830 was the Second Industrial Revolution. So, what happened to the pluralistic democracy that you refer to is that capital accumulation created a new group of oligarchs.
By the 1890s the Populist movement that Thomas Frank has written about arose to counter the power of these new oligarchs.
Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement.
Question: weren’t the Indian Wars underway then? Answer: yes, they were.
The point is that it wasn’t / isn’t socialists creating these divisions. The social catastrophes that led to the rise of a militant union movement in the US were the product of the actions of capital alone.
If you are suggesting that pluralistic democracy will emerge from the existing American ruling class, I don’t agree. The far more likely outcome is nuclear annihilation.
What is missing from your analysis IMHO is Marx’s theory of exploitation. That the US is the most capitalist— and the most militaristic, country in world history should ring a bell or two.
That the US MIC is incentivizing potentially world-ending wars should as well.
With apologies, I have limited time to spend on this today. Other readers with the inclination are invited to work through this with Mike. Thanks again!
""Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement.""
Reading the exchanges between the both of you, I can't help but wonder how much this noted "utopia" of (at least) 40 of those 60 years was greatly benefitted by a slave economy (free labor cost for many), and, although I do not possess the knowledge of history that you two do, I also can't help wondering how different things may have turned out without that "labor".
Not only did slave labor produce much of the material base in the period under discussion, but it also represented the model for ‘managing’ industrial labor. Harvard had a series of stories a few years back relating how the techniques used to manage slaves form the basis of modern corporate human resources practices.
What happened in the US beginning around the 1830 was the Second Industrial Revolution. So, what happened to the pluralistic democracy that you refer to is that capital accumulation created a new group of oligarchs" [THIS IS WRONG, THEY CREATED A DECENTRALIZED AND FEDERATED SYSTEM WHOSE POLITICS WERE DOMINATED BY PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE MASS MEMBER PARTIES]
By the 1890s the Populist movement that Thomas Frank has written about arose to counter the power of these new oligarchs. [FRANK'S ACCOUNT ONLY MENTIONS THE POPULUST PARTY AND THE OTHER ONE, THEM COMBINED WERE A MINORITY OF TEH SO CALLED POPULIST ERA, I SAY SO CALLED BECAUSE BOTH THE PROGRESSIVE ERA AND THE POPULIST ERA BEFORE IT WERE GIVEN THOSE NAMES BY ACADEMIC HISTORIANS WELL AFTER THEIR FACT, THEY HAD VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH WHAT OUR SYSTEM TODAY DECEPTIVLY LABELS AS POPULIST AND SOME OF THE PROGRESSIVE GROUPS IN THE CURRENT DAY AMERICAN ACADEME WHO CLAIM A STAKE IN THAT PERIODS HISTORY, SUCH AS LEGAL REALISTS AND INSTITIONAL ECONOMISTS, WERE ACTUALLY NOT VERY INFLUENTIAL THEN AN IN SOME WAYS WERE EVEN FRINGE GROUPS DURING THAT ERA]
Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement. [IT WASNT JUST AN AGRARIAN THING, IT WAS VERY, VERY URBAN AS WELL, IN FACT, A WHOLE LOT, POSSIBLY EVEN MOST, OF ITS BIG ACTIONS WERE DONE WITHIN CITIES]
Question: weren’t the Indian Wars underway then? Answer: yes, they were. [THATS A POLICY OUTPUT, NOT A SYSTEM DESIGN MATTER. IT WAS IMMORAL, AND IT HAPPENED, BUT THATS AN OUTPUT, NOT THE S2YSTEM ITSELF, A SYSTEM THAT IS PRIMARILY A LOWER CASE d democracy CAN COMMIT SINS JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER SYSTEM CAN]
The point is that it wasn’t / isn’t socialists creating these divisions. The social catastrophes that led to the rise of a militant union movement in the US were the product of the actions of capital alone. [FUN FACT: THERE WAS A SOCIALIST PARTY IN THE USA THAT AT ONE POINT CONTROLLED I THINK OVER A HUNDRED CITIES AND TOWNS, MOSTLY TOWNS, BUT THEY HAD A COUPLE OF SIZEABLE CITIES, THY HAD MILWAUKEE FOR A LONG TIME! AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WERE FAR MORE IMPORTANT BACK THE BECAUSE A WHOLE LOT MORE POLICY HAPPENED AT THAT LEVEL, UNLIKE TODAY WHERE WEVE SHIPPED OFF MOST POLICY TO FAR, FAR AWAY PLACES. THE SOCIALIST PARTY RAN AND OPERATED WITHIN THE DEMOCRATIC FRAMEWORK]
If you are suggesting that pluralistic democracy will emerge from the existing American ruling class, I don’t agree. The far more likely outcome is nuclear annihilation. [ :) NO, I AM NOT SUGGESTING THEY WOULD DO THAT :). BUT THE POINT IS THAT IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, AND I SEE AND HEAR MORE AND MORE THESE DAYS PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNG, ASKING THE SAME SORTS OF QUESTIONS PEOPLE IN THE 1820s WERE ASKING. CAPITAL FLOWS AND DISTRIBUTIONS! THAT IS WHERE OUR STORY BEGAN.... ]
What is missing from your analysis IMHO is Marx’s theory of exploitation. That the US is the most capitalist— and the most militaristic, country in world history should ring a bell or two. [RE: MARX HAD SIGNIFICANT BLIND SPOTS WHEN IT CAME TO THE INTERNAL VARIABILITY OF THE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE RADICAL, ANTI BUG CAPITAL HUGE VICTORIES SUCH AS IN CALIFORNIA WHICH WAS SUPPOSED TO REVECINVE THE SAME DEVELOPMENT EOCNOMICS THAT HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THE CONGO FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS BUT THE DEMOCRATS STOPPED IT AND PUT IT ON A DIFFERENT PATH! ALSO, MARX FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THAT DEEP ANTI-FINANCE, ANTI-CHARTERED BANK STRUCTURES WERE BEING BUILT WITHIN THE OLD REPUBLIC’S FEDERALIST FRAMEWORKK, STRUCTURES THAT EMBODIED A TYPE OF ECONOMIC RESISTANCE HE NEVER FULLY CONSIDERED POSSIBLE OUTSIDE OF PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION..HMMMM, BUT YOUR REFFERING TO THE CURRENT DAY USA, WHICH IS A VERY DIFFERENT SYSTEM THAN THE OLD REPUBLICS, MAYBE YOU SAY THE OUTPUTS RELATED TO THAT WERE THE SAME SORTS OF OUTPUTS AS THE OLD SYSTEM? I DONT THINK SO, I THINK THAT IT IN GENERAL HAS BECOME MUCH LESS MORAL, ITS JUST THAT ITS CONTSRAINED BY MODERN EXPECTATIONS..
That the US MIC is incentivizing potentially world-ending wars should as well. [THATS A CURRENT SYSTEM THING, DO YOU THINK THE OLD ONE WAS LIKE THAT? THERE WERE PREDECESORS TO THE MIC, MOSTLY NYC DEFENSE PRODUCTION AND INTEL CHINACERY, BUT IT IT DIDNT HAVE AN MIC LIKE WE DO, WELL, I SUPPOSE ITS FINAL DECADE OR SO, THE 1950s, DURING ITS PHASE OUT, IT DID ZOMBIE OVERLAP WITH IT BUT THAT DOESNT QUITE COUNT]
With apologies, I have limited time to spend on this today. Other readers with the inclination are invited to work through this with Mike
ALWAYS A PLEASURE ROB! THANKS FOR THE INTERESTING WRITING!
Mike, the all caps makes it look like you are shouting.
1831 was Nat Turner’s Rebellion, where slaves rose up and killed sixty or so not-slaves. Much of the US wasn’t a pluralistic democracy at all, because slaves, by then a significant part of the population, had no rights and were excluded from politic participation.
Between the indigenous population that was being exterminated and chattel slavery, you are reporting only what you want to see.
And of course my comment back to you was that is was the historical process of capitalism that turned what you call pluralistic democracy of 1830 into the Populist rebellion by 1890. To remove the process makes it appear like you missed the point.
In the essay, I asked readers to imagine history from the perspective of others. I did this because of my own experience thinking that I understood something, but then learning that there were other perspectives that were equally true that bore no obvious relationship to my truth.
If you leave half or more of the humans that are part of history out, who are you writing for and about?
As you're of course very well aware (perhaps even your impetus for writing that last sentence), Howard Zinn wrote an entire book detailing exactly that point.
Hi, sorry, wasnt meant to convey shouting. The system they put in place lasted until some point after ww2. And imagineing it from the perspective of others is actually my point, it became more and more inclusive and in it last period the descendants of those you mentioned were, and in some cases, already had for a long time, gaining access to it. When the system was replaced with centralized technocracy many of the communities were badly harmed. Lower case "d" democracy refers to the distribution of power and the formal and informal architectures of decision making processes; thats what I'm talking about here. California was meant to have the development economics that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years (even with an IMF type enitity), they had power to reject it and do something different, communities in the Congo have not had that ability. All systems can have a lot of lower case "d" democracy, so my point is that whatever system someone is proposing, they should imagine things from the perspective of others and describe what frame work for lower case "d" democracy will be in that system...
the Jacksonian system that emerged in the 1830s was explicitly designed as a structural counterweight to the accumulation of capital and power in centralized oligarchic hands. It was not utopian; it was a real, functioning system built on institutionalized plurality, regional economic control, decentralized public finance, and participatory mass-member parties.... and it worked remarkably well! Not only at resisting oligarchic concentration but distributing power geographically and institutionally! The political economy didnt fundamentally change in the late 19th c., the transformation did not take effect to the extent of creating a new and different System state until the 1960s or 70s, it was gradual, uneven, sometimes reversed, and fiercely contested
Thomas Frank’s narrative, like much of their retrospective literature, squeezes a super complex landscape into a simplistic thing, misrepresenting the scale, diversity, and continuity of the decentralized system. The Populists and the later Progressives, but both names are essentially fake as they were applied retroactively for the Eras after their fact and the fact is that almost all politically activly groups during the so called Populist and Processive Eras were not as Frank describes!. I was taught what Frank was taught, I'll literally bet by left hand in fair forum that I can prove that were indeed responding to concentration, but they were not the first, and they certainly weren't anti-capitalist or proto socialist. Many were Jacksonian style democrats, scientists, workers, civic believers, and many other things, doing activism in a System that allowed for actual reasoned debate in forums where the output mattered, and they trying to do the right thing!!!!
https://open.substack.com/pub/candeloro/p/the-mamdani-playbook-how-grassroots?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=zvhi
Dear Readers, this article, sent by the author, is quite interesting. I was living in New York when Bill DeBlasio, the mayor who preceded Eric Adams, ran on a platform that is similar to Mr. Mamdani’s, the current Democratic Party candidate.
Thirty seconds into his first term as Mayor, DeBlasio revealed that he was the same old same old when he jettisoned his platform in favor of ‘being pragmatic,’ which was code for doing what his rich donors wanted him to do.
Kshama Sawant has been giving interviews making the point that Mamdani, while describing his politics as Socialist, is saying that he wants to work with city oligarchs. In contrast, a Marxist frame featuring class struggle suggests that the oligarchs feed on the rest of us. The current distributions of income and wealth in the US give empirical backing to the class struggle thesis.
Personalizing the election—- Mamdani seems like a decent fellow with politics that I largely agree with, misses the point. As this piece suggests, some significant portion of his campaign is astroturfed. This suggests hidden hands behind the campaign.
Voters in New York should decide for themselves. Eric Adams, the current mayor, is a very nasty piece of work. And Mamdani pulled off a miracle by refusing to support the US - Israeli genocide in Gaza and still winning the Democratic nomination.
But until the veil is pulled back on US elections as to who is funding them and why, ready yourselves for permanent electoral disappointment.
Thanks, Rob.
Although Mandani claims to be a break from the political electoral framework perpetuated by oligarchies, he is funded by them. A question must be asked: why would someone finance a candidate that goes against their interests?
I agree with your last claim……the problem is that this ‘consumerist paradise wisdom’ is now accepted by many…..the question is how to ‘discredit’ it….. “the crap on the shelf at [supermarkets] isn’t the path to happiness for most humans”….
A first step is to end the use of psychological coercion to sell products. Doing so is antithetical to the premises of both capitalism and democracy because it replaces rational choice with irrational choice.
Prior to the advent of commercial propaganda (advertising), consumer culture didn’t exist. Today it does. This isn’t to suggest that the process can be easily reversed. But a return to ‘tombstone’ product announcements rather than the use of psychological coercion would be a good first step.
I agree. But my point was different — why people subscribe to this consumer logic? To change the ‘mechanics’ of advertising is important, but the logic that we should be able to buy on the market many different things, regardless of a destruction of the earth, is taken as our ‘right’.
Separating the goods in the store from the circumstances of their production is fundamental to capitalism. With no intention to offend, I have been vegan for years. The plastic packages of animal corpses sold in grocery stores in the US give no indication of the misery from which they were produced.
Reuniting so-called consumers with the circumstances of capitalist production is crucial. In practice, this means re-localizing most economic production. This isn't 'efficient' in the capitalist sense. But without doing so, destroying the world is as easy as buying groceries at the local supermarket.
Brilliant. Expected to be met with various degrees of lacking of understanding. Especially from those so steeped through and through in the religion called capitalism, believing in some shiny most awesome transcendental capitalism as a solution of every and any problem...
Thank you Youlian.
Well written! But from my perspective :), this essay is analytically flawed in its structural framing. This is because it conflates “capitalism” entirely with neoliberalism and imagines that “socialism” is the *only* path to liberty, yet ignores the fact that the United States from the 1830s until some point after World War 2 developed under a structurally distinct lower case “d” democratic, decentralized system that, over time, achieved immense gains in liberty, pluralism, and material improvement, without becoming either oligarchic capitalism or state run socialism.
That participatory democracy, federated capital diffusion, and civic integration created a system more pluralistically free than the current centralized technocratic model or any historic socialist experiment *that actually existed at scale*. So, in my personal opinion, this essay's framing runs the risk of trapping us between two overly abstract poles, market or state, while ignoring the lived history of resilient, redundant, community anchored structures that do not fit into its binary. And, effectively, n a sort of way, this essay inadvertently replicates the very erasure it claims to resist
Thanks Mike. Well considered comment as usual.
What happened in the US beginning around the 1830 was the Second Industrial Revolution. So, what happened to the pluralistic democracy that you refer to is that capital accumulation created a new group of oligarchs.
By the 1890s the Populist movement that Thomas Frank has written about arose to counter the power of these new oligarchs.
Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement.
Question: weren’t the Indian Wars underway then? Answer: yes, they were.
The point is that it wasn’t / isn’t socialists creating these divisions. The social catastrophes that led to the rise of a militant union movement in the US were the product of the actions of capital alone.
If you are suggesting that pluralistic democracy will emerge from the existing American ruling class, I don’t agree. The far more likely outcome is nuclear annihilation.
What is missing from your analysis IMHO is Marx’s theory of exploitation. That the US is the most capitalist— and the most militaristic, country in world history should ring a bell or two.
That the US MIC is incentivizing potentially world-ending wars should as well.
With apologies, I have limited time to spend on this today. Other readers with the inclination are invited to work through this with Mike. Thanks again!
""Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement.""
Reading the exchanges between the both of you, I can't help but wonder how much this noted "utopia" of (at least) 40 of those 60 years was greatly benefitted by a slave economy (free labor cost for many), and, although I do not possess the knowledge of history that you two do, I also can't help wondering how different things may have turned out without that "labor".
Not only did slave labor produce much of the material base in the period under discussion, but it also represented the model for ‘managing’ industrial labor. Harvard had a series of stories a few years back relating how the techniques used to manage slaves form the basis of modern corporate human resources practices.
Here is a related article that ties slave management to wage labor. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/caitlin-c-rosenthal-accounting-slavery-excerpt/
The point is that excluding slavery from American history misses a large part of the story.
What happened in the US beginning around the 1830 was the Second Industrial Revolution. So, what happened to the pluralistic democracy that you refer to is that capital accumulation created a new group of oligarchs" [THIS IS WRONG, THEY CREATED A DECENTRALIZED AND FEDERATED SYSTEM WHOSE POLITICS WERE DOMINATED BY PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE MASS MEMBER PARTIES]
By the 1890s the Populist movement that Thomas Frank has written about arose to counter the power of these new oligarchs. [FRANK'S ACCOUNT ONLY MENTIONS THE POPULUST PARTY AND THE OTHER ONE, THEM COMBINED WERE A MINORITY OF TEH SO CALLED POPULIST ERA, I SAY SO CALLED BECAUSE BOTH THE PROGRESSIVE ERA AND THE POPULIST ERA BEFORE IT WERE GIVEN THOSE NAMES BY ACADEMIC HISTORIANS WELL AFTER THEIR FACT, THEY HAD VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH WHAT OUR SYSTEM TODAY DECEPTIVLY LABELS AS POPULIST AND SOME OF THE PROGRESSIVE GROUPS IN THE CURRENT DAY AMERICAN ACADEME WHO CLAIM A STAKE IN THAT PERIODS HISTORY, SUCH AS LEGAL REALISTS AND INSTITIONAL ECONOMISTS, WERE ACTUALLY NOT VERY INFLUENTIAL THEN AN IN SOME WAYS WERE EVEN FRINGE GROUPS DURING THAT ERA]
Stated differently, in sixty years capitalism transformed your agrarian utopia into a malevolent toilet so egregious that ending it appealed to enough people to fill a large political movement. [IT WASNT JUST AN AGRARIAN THING, IT WAS VERY, VERY URBAN AS WELL, IN FACT, A WHOLE LOT, POSSIBLY EVEN MOST, OF ITS BIG ACTIONS WERE DONE WITHIN CITIES]
Question: weren’t the Indian Wars underway then? Answer: yes, they were. [THATS A POLICY OUTPUT, NOT A SYSTEM DESIGN MATTER. IT WAS IMMORAL, AND IT HAPPENED, BUT THATS AN OUTPUT, NOT THE S2YSTEM ITSELF, A SYSTEM THAT IS PRIMARILY A LOWER CASE d democracy CAN COMMIT SINS JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER SYSTEM CAN]
The point is that it wasn’t / isn’t socialists creating these divisions. The social catastrophes that led to the rise of a militant union movement in the US were the product of the actions of capital alone. [FUN FACT: THERE WAS A SOCIALIST PARTY IN THE USA THAT AT ONE POINT CONTROLLED I THINK OVER A HUNDRED CITIES AND TOWNS, MOSTLY TOWNS, BUT THEY HAD A COUPLE OF SIZEABLE CITIES, THY HAD MILWAUKEE FOR A LONG TIME! AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WERE FAR MORE IMPORTANT BACK THE BECAUSE A WHOLE LOT MORE POLICY HAPPENED AT THAT LEVEL, UNLIKE TODAY WHERE WEVE SHIPPED OFF MOST POLICY TO FAR, FAR AWAY PLACES. THE SOCIALIST PARTY RAN AND OPERATED WITHIN THE DEMOCRATIC FRAMEWORK]
If you are suggesting that pluralistic democracy will emerge from the existing American ruling class, I don’t agree. The far more likely outcome is nuclear annihilation. [ :) NO, I AM NOT SUGGESTING THEY WOULD DO THAT :). BUT THE POINT IS THAT IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, AND I SEE AND HEAR MORE AND MORE THESE DAYS PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNG, ASKING THE SAME SORTS OF QUESTIONS PEOPLE IN THE 1820s WERE ASKING. CAPITAL FLOWS AND DISTRIBUTIONS! THAT IS WHERE OUR STORY BEGAN.... ]
What is missing from your analysis IMHO is Marx’s theory of exploitation. That the US is the most capitalist— and the most militaristic, country in world history should ring a bell or two. [RE: MARX HAD SIGNIFICANT BLIND SPOTS WHEN IT CAME TO THE INTERNAL VARIABILITY OF THE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE RADICAL, ANTI BUG CAPITAL HUGE VICTORIES SUCH AS IN CALIFORNIA WHICH WAS SUPPOSED TO REVECINVE THE SAME DEVELOPMENT EOCNOMICS THAT HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THE CONGO FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS BUT THE DEMOCRATS STOPPED IT AND PUT IT ON A DIFFERENT PATH! ALSO, MARX FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THAT DEEP ANTI-FINANCE, ANTI-CHARTERED BANK STRUCTURES WERE BEING BUILT WITHIN THE OLD REPUBLIC’S FEDERALIST FRAMEWORKK, STRUCTURES THAT EMBODIED A TYPE OF ECONOMIC RESISTANCE HE NEVER FULLY CONSIDERED POSSIBLE OUTSIDE OF PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION..HMMMM, BUT YOUR REFFERING TO THE CURRENT DAY USA, WHICH IS A VERY DIFFERENT SYSTEM THAN THE OLD REPUBLICS, MAYBE YOU SAY THE OUTPUTS RELATED TO THAT WERE THE SAME SORTS OF OUTPUTS AS THE OLD SYSTEM? I DONT THINK SO, I THINK THAT IT IN GENERAL HAS BECOME MUCH LESS MORAL, ITS JUST THAT ITS CONTSRAINED BY MODERN EXPECTATIONS..
That the US MIC is incentivizing potentially world-ending wars should as well. [THATS A CURRENT SYSTEM THING, DO YOU THINK THE OLD ONE WAS LIKE THAT? THERE WERE PREDECESORS TO THE MIC, MOSTLY NYC DEFENSE PRODUCTION AND INTEL CHINACERY, BUT IT IT DIDNT HAVE AN MIC LIKE WE DO, WELL, I SUPPOSE ITS FINAL DECADE OR SO, THE 1950s, DURING ITS PHASE OUT, IT DID ZOMBIE OVERLAP WITH IT BUT THAT DOESNT QUITE COUNT]
With apologies, I have limited time to spend on this today. Other readers with the inclination are invited to work through this with Mike
ALWAYS A PLEASURE ROB! THANKS FOR THE INTERESTING WRITING!
Mike, the all caps makes it look like you are shouting.
1831 was Nat Turner’s Rebellion, where slaves rose up and killed sixty or so not-slaves. Much of the US wasn’t a pluralistic democracy at all, because slaves, by then a significant part of the population, had no rights and were excluded from politic participation.
Between the indigenous population that was being exterminated and chattel slavery, you are reporting only what you want to see.
And of course my comment back to you was that is was the historical process of capitalism that turned what you call pluralistic democracy of 1830 into the Populist rebellion by 1890. To remove the process makes it appear like you missed the point.
In the essay, I asked readers to imagine history from the perspective of others. I did this because of my own experience thinking that I understood something, but then learning that there were other perspectives that were equally true that bore no obvious relationship to my truth.
If you leave half or more of the humans that are part of history out, who are you writing for and about?
As you're of course very well aware (perhaps even your impetus for writing that last sentence), Howard Zinn wrote an entire book detailing exactly that point.
Hi, sorry, wasnt meant to convey shouting. The system they put in place lasted until some point after ww2. And imagineing it from the perspective of others is actually my point, it became more and more inclusive and in it last period the descendants of those you mentioned were, and in some cases, already had for a long time, gaining access to it. When the system was replaced with centralized technocracy many of the communities were badly harmed. Lower case "d" democracy refers to the distribution of power and the formal and informal architectures of decision making processes; thats what I'm talking about here. California was meant to have the development economics that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years (even with an IMF type enitity), they had power to reject it and do something different, communities in the Congo have not had that ability. All systems can have a lot of lower case "d" democracy, so my point is that whatever system someone is proposing, they should imagine things from the perspective of others and describe what frame work for lower case "d" democracy will be in that system...
the Jacksonian system that emerged in the 1830s was explicitly designed as a structural counterweight to the accumulation of capital and power in centralized oligarchic hands. It was not utopian; it was a real, functioning system built on institutionalized plurality, regional economic control, decentralized public finance, and participatory mass-member parties.... and it worked remarkably well! Not only at resisting oligarchic concentration but distributing power geographically and institutionally! The political economy didnt fundamentally change in the late 19th c., the transformation did not take effect to the extent of creating a new and different System state until the 1960s or 70s, it was gradual, uneven, sometimes reversed, and fiercely contested
Thomas Frank’s narrative, like much of their retrospective literature, squeezes a super complex landscape into a simplistic thing, misrepresenting the scale, diversity, and continuity of the decentralized system. The Populists and the later Progressives, but both names are essentially fake as they were applied retroactively for the Eras after their fact and the fact is that almost all politically activly groups during the so called Populist and Processive Eras were not as Frank describes!. I was taught what Frank was taught, I'll literally bet by left hand in fair forum that I can prove that were indeed responding to concentration, but they were not the first, and they certainly weren't anti-capitalist or proto socialist. Many were Jacksonian style democrats, scientists, workers, civic believers, and many other things, doing activism in a System that allowed for actual reasoned debate in forums where the output mattered, and they trying to do the right thing!!!!