Wolfowitz & the World Bank

On a subject mentioned several times on this blog, see Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Was a Great World Bank President By John Cavanagh, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2007. I especially liked reasons 6 and 9.

New slogan

You may have noticed the change at the top of this page. Up to now I had been using the most-quoted lines from William Carlos William's 1962 poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."

Sweet, but hardly startling. My new slogan is meant to suggest a less familiar line of thought. It is of course an inversion of Karl Marx' 11th "Thesis on Feuerbach": "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In 1845 (Marx was only 27), when feudal structures of domination were still blocking the capitalist transformation of society, that thesis was forceful and persuasive. Today, with capitalism freed to do its worst, we know that it is only too easy for corporate executives, religious fanatics, and other revolutionaries under banners red or black to "change the world" uncomprehendingly, by (for examples) polluting our water, heating our globe, creating famine, blowing up marketplaces and even skyscrapers and so on -- whether in pursuit of profit, comfort, glory, spiritual salvation or power. Today, the most useful thing any of us can do is to try to understand these developments so as to predict consequences of alternative actions, so that we can steer our course. This has been the effort of sociologists such as Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, and Alvin Gouldner (to mention only those cited lately in this blog).

Anyway, it beats staring at a greeny flower.

Coming up: Church & party in Spain

It's been a complicated week, in my life as well as in Spain's. We just got back to Carboneras and my home Internet connection on Wednesday, after 2 very busy weeks in Madrid. And meanwhile, the hierarchs of the Spanish Catholic Church launched a surprise offensive on the Socialist government, which has gone to great lengths to appease them. Excessive lengths, in my opinion. The State still subsidizes the Church, and pays the salaries of military chaplains and religion teachers in public schools who are hired and fired by the bishops. And despite all this, at a huge rally in Madrid the day before New Year's Eve, supposedly to defend "the family," Cardinal Agustín García-Gasco thundered that "Radical laicism [i.e., the threatened separation of Church and State] is leading to the dissolution of democracy!"

Democracy? What does the all-male dominated, vertically commanded Church with its infallible pope know about democracy? This cluster of cardinals is taking a stand to the right of Pope Benedict, and openly siding with the conservative Popular Party. But rather than take pot-shots at purple-clad targets, I want to investigate these serious social questions:

What is causing this sudden ecclesiastic politicization? An upcoming election within the Church for control of the Bishops Conference is one vector, intersecting with the also proximate national elections (announced for March) for civil authorities, but mere coincidence (or contemporaneity) doesn't explain what is making certain cardinals so belligerent.

A second question is: How serious is all this going to be politically? Do the cardinals really control very many votes in contemporary Spain?

And we must also ask what it is about "laicism", homosexual unions and abortion that gets Spanish clergy so much more outraged than their counterparts in other European countries. Of even whether those are the real issues, or rather the public relations front to cover a more serious fear of the Spanish clergy: the threatened loss of their privileged institutional status and financing in a Church-State concordat still in effect since the Franco years.

I don't promise to answer all these questions, but simply to reframe them as hypotheses that can be proven or disproven. They are important for understanding Spain, and Spain is important for understanding the world.

Venezuela commentary in Spanish

Those of you who read Spanish may be interested in the commentary that my colleague, Baltasar Lotroyo, and I have been writing on another blog, Lecturas y lectores.

Protégete de los vacilantes (on the Dec. 2 referendum vote)

Otra visión de Caracas. Visit to the posh "Country Club" section and to the club itself, and to a very skillfully designed and popular shopping center, with the center's architect.

Política y espacio. A visit to Caracas' notorious "23 de Enero" housing project (mammoth superblocks, a violent political history) in August 2007. Photos.

"Socialismo del s. xxi": Hugo Chávez' big idea.

Hugo Chávez' military strength and problem

Last month's "No" vote in the referendum on changing the Venezuelan constitution, despite Hugo Chávez's energetic campaigning for "Sí", came as something of a surprise, given his continuing high approval ratings. It showed that not everybody who voted for him (over 60% in the last election) is willing to follow him anywhere he wants to lead, suggesting that the Venezuelan electorate is maturing and discriminating. The other surprise, to those who think of him as a dictator, was that Chávez accepted the result.

Jorge Castañeda, Mexican politólogo and former foreign minister (under President Vicente Fox), offered a cynical explanation of that second surprise: that army officers who knew that the vote was negative (hours before any public announcement) let him know that they would not tolerate fraud. (See Castañeda's article in El País, ¿Qué pasó en Venezuela?)

We can't know whether this is what really happened -- Castañeda's informed speculation is dubious, and his anti-Chávez bias is apparent. But Nikolas Kozloff's Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the United States (2006. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), originally published in 2006 and recently re-published as a paperback, includes two chapters suggesting that something like that is at least possible: "Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" and "The Test of Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" (pp. 71-104).

The "test" of his alliance with the military was the short-lived coup (Ap. 11-14, 2002), which Hugo survived by a hair, thanks to intervention of two generals (Carneiro & Baduel) and lower ranks, which changed the structure of the alliance in 2 ways: 1, allowing Chávez to identify and purge those most likely to betray his revolution, but 2, making very clear his dependence on those other officers who saved him but whose vision of the Bolivarian revolution does not depend entirely on his.

For more information and also some good laughs, see this video of Nikolas Kozloff on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Aug. 20, 2007.

Why Bourdieu?

Another book I picked up in Paris last month was by sociologist Nathalie Heinich, Pourquoi Bourdieu. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 188 p.) Among other things, the book has helped me understand better the anger of Alain Touraine, whom Heinich describes as a "collègue et ennemi" of Bourdieu, in the first half of his Penser autrement (discussed below, blog of 11-27), where he inveighs against a view of a society "without actors." It was the determinism of Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others that Touraine continues to combat.

Heinich first encountered Pierre Bourdieu (1930-1992) when she arrived in Paris as a beginning graduate student in 1977, and fell under his spell. His style of "domination" was "charismatic," she argues, in the strict sense defined by Max Weber (1919): based on "personal, extraordinary grace" ("la grâce personnelle extra-quotidienne" in the French translation she's using). The book is mainly about why she and scores of other young students and even non-sociologists were so overwhelmed by him, and why it was important for her and probably all of us to break the enchantment. I don't have time this morning, and you probably don't have patience for an extensive summary. Briefly, she (and others) found him extraordinarily attractive even physically (in 1977, he was "un homme jeune, beau..., souriant," ... etc.), and a lecturer who seemed to trap new ideas on the fly and appreciate enormously the little suggestions that his students dared to offer, treating students (his clear inferiors) as equals and researchers in other fields as friends -- whereas other sociologists of his own generation he viewed as competitors and treated them scornfully. If you were to be his student-collaborator-colleague, you had to be with him all the way, with no tolerance for other approaches -- e.g., Alain Touraine or even more distant intellectuals such as Barthes or Bachelard.

But it wasn't just his personal magnetism that made him such a towering figure. He really had interesting ideas, a great number of them, and Heinich describes some of the main ones critically but sympathetically. For my purposes here, as I seek to comprehend developments in Spain, these seem powerful tools. Stratification and hierarchy (of all social relations), the importance of non-material resources ("cultural capital") motivations and motives ("distinction"), etc.; the power of "habitus" and the arena of competition or "champ", etc.

But my time on this borrowed computer is nearly up. These are just notes to help me and maybe intrigue you. If I get a chance, I'll be back tomorrow, to talk not about Bourdieu but about other phenomena where Bourdieu, Touraine, Alvin Gouldner and others may help us understand. Hasta mañana.

Happy Winter Solstice to All!

My apologies for missing my latest self-imposed Friday deadline for an update on Spain. Things were just too chaotic last week, in our personal lives more than in Spain. For starters, Saturday Dec. 15 we rushed to Madrid in disorderly fashion (the refrigerator door fell off while we were cleaning our apartment, my external hard-drive went into infinite spin when I tried to back up my laptop, the train we were scheduled to take from Almería to Madrid had been canceled due to a track defect), so I got here without my laptop. Then, the apartment we had planned to move into wasn't really completed so we had to stay in a hotel with limited Internet access. The Madrid apartment is really tiny but very well located, right next to the Reina Sofía museum and very near the Atocha train station; it will be our urban pied-a-terre, while the main house (still not finished) will be in Carboneras. We're moved into the apartment now, and expect the final work to be completed today, and just this morning we discovered this wonderful Madrid institution, a cultural center with exhibitions and other activities and rooms where anyone can use computers or sit and study, absolutely free. It's called La Casa Encendida, an obra social of the savings bank Caja Madrid. "Obra social" -- there must be a common expression like that in English. Here it means an activity for community benefit. In Spain, savings banks (unlike the other banks such as BBVA) all have "obra social" as their chief mission -- their gains must go into such projects rather than as dividends to shareholders. Good system.

As I implied above, the week in Spain as a whole was much less chaotic than in our personal lives. The Socialist government even managed to get its budget approved in Congress at the last minute! This involved a lot of negotiation and patience with all the smaller parties and the one big opposition party, so it's further evidence of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's abilities as a political operative.

I hope to have something more substantive to say about events here this coming Friday. And now that I've discovered the resources of the Casa Encendida, I'll be able to post. Till then, Happy Winter Solstice!

(By the way, does anybody know why the early Christians, trying to peg their holiday to the pagan festival that everybody was already celebrating, missed by 3 days? The solstice is December 22, I believe. How could they get that wrong?

Hasta pronto.

Sociology of the Spanish "Right" - to come

Apologies. My intention is to examine the patterns of irrational discourse that characterize the Spanish "right," which will first require analyzing what holds its components together. (There is irrational discourse on the "left" as well, but in Spain that's not the big threat and therefore its analysis can wait.) This is a puzzle, because the big crowds that the Partido Popular musters for its noisy demonstrations include a range of people who ordinarily wouldn't even be able to talk to one another: barely literate fascist thugs, a few university faculty, rigidly schooled priests and bishops, accountants and other mid-level functionaries, rentiers, and -- a characteristically Spanish social group -- people we might call "career victims". I mean by that people who, after suffering some terrible loss to terrorist violence (such as personal injury or the death of a spouse, child or other relative), have organized their lives around that event. Some of those active in organizations of terrorist victims strike me as very admirable, politically responsible actors. Others -- well, despite what the Greek dramatists said, there's no scientific basis to believe that suffering necessarily leads to wisdom.

However my thoughts right now are too complex (which is perhaps no more than a self-flattering way to say "confused") to be of any use to anyone else. I've been reading Bourdieu, Touraine & others, looking for categories to examine and explain these things, and hope soon to be able clarify at least what the lines of inquiry should be. But not in time for my Friday blog. And it's already Saturday morning here in Spain! Hasta pronto.

The pain in Spain: fighting against progress

So far I've been focusing here on the Spanish left. But the real problem is the Spanish right. According to all opinion polls, the left draws the sympathies of a sizeable majority, and the Partido socialista obrero español (PSOE) has been the governing party for 20 of the past 25 years, achieving much in economic development, the growth of per capita income, and human rights legislation. But it has had to fight every step of the way, and its hold on power is precarious. The problem, of course, is the peculiar character of the Spanish right.

Spanish conservatives are not merely pro-business "liberals," as that word is used in Spain. "Liberal" here means defender of the free-market before other more social interests, and thus implies merciless capitalist exploitation -- which in the 19th century was equated with "Progress" (see last week's blog). The core of the Spanish right is far more conservative than that: not 19th century, which was far too dangerously enlightened (Darwin et al.), but reaching back to 1492. That was the year that Spanish intolerance reached unprecedented levels, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the newly united kingdom. It was also the year that Queen Isabel sent Columbus on his adventure to find the Indies, the year that Antonio de Nebrija presented the Catholic Monarchs with the first grammar of the Castilian (now called "Spanish") language (“Language has always been the companion of empire,” he explained in his introduction), and the year the price of gold reached its all-time historical high. A very good time for empire and a moment the Spanish right would like to freeze.

Spain did not invent intolerance (remember Samson's attempted genocide of the Philistines), but its monarch and clergy did invent institutions and even a special vocabulary for it. Our words "race" (in the sense of a subspecies of humans) and "caste" both have Spanish origins. The main institution was the Inquisition, an instrument for squashing innovation so effective that Spain -- once the greatest power in Europe -- stagnated as Holland, France and especially England advanced technically and comercially and soon had taken all Spain's possessions in the Old World (the Low Countries, Naples, etc.) and most of its wealth from the New. Popular resistence to such repression never ceased, causing the Inquisition to be abolished repeatedly, but repeatedly it returned along with the reactionaries who resumed power after every crisis. Abolished in 1808, it was reintroduced in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, then abolished again in 1820, restored again in 1823, and not abolished definitively until 1834. The progressive 19th century of the rest of Europe never had a chance in Spain. And though it did not carry that name, something very like the Inquisition was reinstituted by Francisco Franco (1939-75), as the Catholic Church became in effect (again) an arm of the state.

And for many Spaniards today, that is still their ideal of eternal Spain: all Catholic, all heterosexual, all speaking Castilian (and not Basque or Catalán or Gallego or Valenciano or anything else), all obedient to one temporal authority acting in the name of the supreme authority of God (the Roman Catholic God, that is -- not others are allowed). The party most rightists vote for, the misnamed Popular Party (PP), claims to be defending democracy, but its values do not derive from the people but from their constituents' vision of eternal Spain. As a recent example, the PP has blocked renewing the membership of the highest court and as many other measures as it could because it doesn't regard the party that won the elections as legitimate. In short, the PP does not regard the popular will as expressed by voting to be a source of legitimacy. The proof of its illegitimacy is that the PSOE-led government has approved same-sex marriages, recognizes the aspirations of non-Castilian-speaking regions, promotes integration of immigrants and, most damning of all, has sought to laicize education, at least partly.

The Spanish right is a minority but an extremely determined and potentially violent one. Its components include outright fascists waving Falangist banners and assaulting immigrants, an indignant clergy that denounces a course on citizenship as an attack on the Church's exclusive authority over moral values, the Church's outrageously reactionary radio network COPE (which, among other absurdities, has repeatedly called for the king's abdication on the grounds that he is too friendly to the Socialists), and an extremely vociferous organization of "victims of terrorism." The AVT represents only relatives of victims of ETA but not of 11 March 2004 (which happened on the PP government's watch) and has persuaded itself that the Socialists, just because they are Socialists, must be allies of the terrorists. And of course PP supporters also include the usual shady business interests anxious to avoid restrictions on their expoliation of the landscape, perforation of illegal wells in a thirsty country, and other abuses.

Together, they can stage very noisy, colorful demonstrations where they insult the government enthusiastically. More seriously, they have enough deputies in Congress to block any initiative requiring more than a simple majority (such as renewing the membership of the high court). And this is why the Socialist government proceeds cautiously, too cautiously for many of its potential supporters on the left. The state still subsidizes the Catholic Church out of taxes, and in addition still pays salaries for religious instruction in the public schools (students can opt out of that class, but it must be offered) while permitting Church authorities to select and fire the instructors on grounds of creed or anything else.

The Socialists are in a bind. If they try to move too fast, they will be blocked on everything. If they don't move fast enough, voters who oppose the right will stay home or will vote for one of the smaller leftist parties.

Well, I never got to it, but what I had intended to write about today was a symptom of this unending stalemate, the publication of the latest report (2006 data) of Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA. This is an international, triennial measure of 15-year old students' academic abilities in the 30 member nations of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) plus 5 non-member states. In a terrible embarrassment, Spain came out near the bottom of all the European nations in the three categories: number 32 in mathematics (of western European countries, only Portugal scored lower), 35 in reading (above Greece but below everybody else in W. Europe), and a little better in science where it was no. 31 (ahead of Lithuania, Norway and Italy). Worse, Spain's rankings in math and reading had dropped since the last report (2003 measurements). There are many reasons, of course -- there always are, and may excuses, for a failure. But a big part is due to the failure to institute any comprehensive reform of an antiquated and underfunded school system partly dominated by the clergy, and this is due to the right-left stalemate in Congress.

However, the PISA report wasn't all bad news. Some of Spain's regions, tested separately, did better than the European average, La Rioja best of all. The worst was my home region, Andalucía. Truly woeful results, explained by the Socialist regional president, Manuel Chaves, as a result of Andalucía's historical backwardness -- that is, it had been the least-developed region since Franco times. But we recall that some countries that were at least as backward back then have made far greater strides; Cuba comes to mind. And Chaves' argument doesn't explain why the results were worse in 2006 than in 2003!

But at least Spain can congratulate itself that its students score far better in math than those from countries with more wretched school systems, such as Kirgizstan (no. 57) and the United States of America (no. 35). Canada, in contrast, did very well: no. 7 in math, 4 in reading and 3 in science. Maybe those Canadian kids are brighter. Or maybe there's something wrong with public education in countries like Kirgizstan, the United States and Spain.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.*

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

* The English translation, Thinking Differently, came out two years after I wrote this review.