Review- Hristov, “Blood and Capital”

March 16, 2020 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Jasmin Hristov, “Blood and Capital: the Paramilitarization of Colombia” (2009) – Canadian sociologist Jasmin Hristov casts a critical eye on the war and peace process in Colombia. The decades-long war supposedly ended with the victory of the Colombian government (aided significantly by the United States) over both the far left guerrillas of FARC and the ELN and the right-wing paramilitaries of the UAC. Both groups formally surrendered and disarmed, AUC in 2006 and FARC in 2017.

Hristov argues that the paramilitaries won the war, effectively, by “paramilitarizing” the Colombian state. Despite their formal antagonism — the AUC was always illegal and part of the US State Department terrorist list along with FARC — the Colombian government frequently worked hand in glove with the paramilitaries, before, during, and after the time the AUC formally existed. Much of the book is made up of lists of deeds undertaken jointly by the Colombian military and one or another right-wing paramilitary group, of arms and intelligence funneled to paras, blind eyes turned towards their atrocities, and joint operations. Hristov wisely does not place as much emphasis on the AUC as an organization as the peace process did- it was always a coalition and never a central command for all paramilitaries in the country. Its inheritor groups continue to this day, exporting drugs, intimidating labor and social movements, killing to protect their rackets.

In most insurgency wars, there’s something like a ten-to-one ratio between kills made by counterinsurgents and those made by insurgents. This is why you still get whiners claiming that the US “won” the Vietnam War- we surely killed many more people, by a chasmic margin, much good it did us or anybody else. But in the FARC war, the titular FARC inflicted twelve percent of the casualties, and the armed forces of the Colombian government inflicted eight. The rest, eighty percent, were killed by right-wing paramilitaries. These wars generally make mock of the distinction between civilian and military, but the paramilitaries in particular ignored the distinction. They terrorized communities seen as in league with the guerrillas, which often meant nothing more than that the village organized peasant groups or labor unions. The paras are also notorious for “limpieza social,” bloody social cleansing of the poor, sex workers, LGBT people, and so on.

Hristov is a Marxist and she makes clear the class lines of the war. The paramilitaries are the armed forces of the (primarily rural) Colombian elite. Isn’t a certain other body also the armed forces of the elite… oh yeah, the government! So ultimately, six of one, half a dozen of another. Why, then, did the paras form? In part, it’s counterinsurgency strategy gone feral- the establishment of local anti-guerrilla patrols was a part of counterinsurgency from its beginnings in the late fifties/early sixties. As Hristov points out, at first it was the government creating paras and the elites supporting- later on, as the war heated up, the roles were reversed, with elites creating paramilitary bodies with tacit or overt government support. The paras, she holds, could get their hands dirty in a way the government was reluctant to do. The rest is history.

My one main quibble with Hristov is that she takes a rather either/or attitude regarding criminality and ideology- if you’re a criminal, you’re not an ideologue (and presumably vice-versa), and the paras are definitely criminals looking to protect ongoing criminal enterprises like drug exportation and land clearances, so, their ideology is bunk. I’m not so sure I agree, in general and certainly in the case of the more ideologically-inclined paras like the AUC- maybe she’s right about the inheritor groups. Colombia has a long history of patriarchal rural conservatism that goes berserk when challenged, and it’s far from the only place that fits that description. The particular kinds of violence and the rhetoric around them strike a chord familiar from the history of paramilitarism and vigilantism from Northern Ireland to Michigan in the Black Legion days. The righting of the world, the restoration of the natural hierarchical order, through spectacular violence is an ideology in and of itself, at least as common on the right as the notion of the existential necessity of armed revolution is on the left. Crime fits in- when the right people do it for the right reasons, it stops being crime, in this view of the world, and becomes a sacrifice made by superior men. In general, though, this is a fine and useful book about a conflict whose lineaments should be of broad interest to those interested in social conflict. ****’

Review- Lippmann, “Public Opinion”

March 12, 2020 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Walter Lippmann, “Public Opinion” (1922) – Walter Lippmann created the op-ed writer as we know him. He was a sort of proto-Tom Friedman: newspaper columnist, author of bestselling nonfiction books, influencer of politicians. Though usually, a “proto” is supposed to be less than the later version, and Lippmann wasn’t as embarassingly silly, stupid, and bad at writing as Tom Friedman. Friedman describes forces beyond his (extremely limited) comprehension; Lippmann made a play, a not entirely unsuccessful one, at both portraying world-changing forces and shaping them himself.

In “Public Opinion,” Lippmann is coming from his experience working for the State Department during World War One, having taken part in what could be called the information side of the war (and just as importantly, the postwar peacemaking). The world, he announces, has become complicated, vastly complicated, so complicated no one can really understand it. At best, they understand a “pseudo-environment” composed of stereotypes (he was the first to use the word as it’s currently used). This is a problem, because human action still affects the real environment, not just people’s pseudo-environments.

Lippmann was writing for a general, if educated, readership and so takes his time laying all of this out, with examples (many of them drawn from the war or the peace process) and considering the case in it’s different facets, etc. Then he eases in to his attack on democracy, or, anyway, democratic theory. Democratic theory, he states, is based on the idea that everyone has access to the knowledge they need to make decisions. If this was ever true, Lippmann averrs, it’s definitely untrue now in our increasingly complex world. Lippmann depicts democratic theorists as hand-waving issues of complexity away by relying on “the human heart” to make the right decisions. I think Lippmann is about a quarter right here, both in terms of his depiction of democratic theory (resting largely on the American Founding Fathers, not the most notably democratic bunch) and his assessment of the knowledge problem. Democrats/republicans weren’t as unaware of the issue as Lippmann depicts; they went a long way towards trying to solve the problem through universal public education. For another thing, the republican notion of relying on virtue — or “the human heart” as Lippmann derisively puts it — didn’t come out of pre-modern somnolence, it came out of turbulence and chaos in places and times like Renaissance Italy, Civil War-era England, Revolution-era America. The idea, greatly simplified, was that fate and chance throw up all kinds of shit at you, and you’re better off having the inner resources to cope rather than try to have unique tools to meet every unpredictable situation. And these thinkers, from Machiavelli on down, knew that virtue could be a slender reed against the storms of chance and complexity.

But consider the other options! For Lippmann, the answer to the problems of governance in the midst of complexity lay in the creation of official fact-finding bureaux manned by the best experts and the “manufacture of consent” (a phrase he coined). You need the right people with the right amount of power, and they need to use modern media techniques to put them over to the people (Lippmann was a critic of democracy but knew it was here to stay). Where to find these people, Lippmann doesn’t say- he seems to assume the reader knows, and that the answer would be “people like Lippmann and his Harvard friends.” So, essentially, rule by universities, like a certain portion of the right’s nightmares. You don’t need to buy in to alt-right talk of a sinister university-based “Cathedral” to see the problems here. For one thing, nowhere in his system does Lippmann actually say that education is the way out of the pseudo-environment trap. If it was, the answer would be (and has been taken to be by generations of liberals) enhanced universal education. But if that’s not it — if even the educated operate according to stereotype and pseudo-environment — then who educates the educators? Where do the experts come from? How can we assess their expertise?

Like his spawn on contemporary op-ed pages, Lippmann was more of a condenser and expresser of elite opinion than he was a creative thinker (though again, he was much more creatively capable and competent at expression than his descendants). He leaves these massive lacunae in his work, but one gets the idea that’s almost intentional. Making too specific of a sketch of the expert-ocracy wouldn’t give his friends in government space to work. In many respects, Lippmann’s expert boards exist in the federal government today, just with less power than Lippmann would have given them. They are, like every other expression of power, public and private, ultimately dependent on political will and guided by political considerations. As it turns out, power isn’t reducible to expertise, though there’s always a buyer for people who promise ways to bypass the human element of power relations. Lippmann is an important part of a long liberal tradition promising to steer elites between the Scylla of popular uprising and the Charybdis of authoritarianism through the application of superior technique/knowledge. Sometimes, this even works, though it’s hard to see how today. ***

Review- Le Bon, “The Crowd”

March 4, 2020 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Gustave Le Bon, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895) (translated from the French by unknown) – Crowds act differently from individuals… is this a controversial statement? I’d be willing to entertain a challenge to the premise but from where I sit currently it seems pretty indisputable that something or other happens to people when they get in a united group. I’ve experienced it myself; though I don’t think my crowd-self and my alone-self are all that different, I do feel differently in a crowd than when I am alone.

In the midst of the great global freakout about the lower orders of society that arose in the late nineteenth century, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon decided to figure out what made crowds distinctive. Le Bon was a conservative social critic along with being a doctor and psychologist, and this is more of a work of social criticism (though “scientifically” based, in its own terms) rather than a work of science. Le Bon conducted no study of anything other than his own observations of crowds in Paris (including during the Commune) and reading about them in history. This isn’t all that different from a lot of social science at the time.

Like many figures of the big reactionary freakout of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, Le Bon was fixated on concepts of degeneration. In his view, the crowd is a degenerate, a throwback to “primitive” man (or contemporary woman- women being less advanced than men in his hierarchy). It is less intelligent, less capable of using reason, more emotional, more volatile. Le Bon stresses this can sometimes be used for good — that a crowd is braver than an individual, like “primitives” supposedly were braver than “civilized” men — but in general, crowds were inimical to civilizing influences. He claimed it took decades for ideas to seep into the head of the crowd, which I guess is one way of explaining how the French crowds of the revolutionary period got quite excited about elaborate Enlightenment theory, the kind of thing you wouldn’t expect a “primitive” body to get.

Le Bon claims various things, like the race of a crowd (Latins being more hot-blooded than Anglos and other stereotypes) or what it was assembled for, can influence how a crowd behaves. Leaders can influence crowds, at least temporarily, through the right kind of words and symbols (simple, repetitive ones). But by and large, crowds and their traits are a constant throughout history, in Le Bon’s telling, only now we can’t control them, due to democracy, and things look due to get worse, due to socialism. One of his more interesting claims is that if democracy had existed before the industrial revolution, the latter would never have gotten off the ground- crowd democracy wouldn’t allow it.

Le Bon didn’t really offer any ways out. Various of his readers, which definitely included the fascists and might have included Lenin (I’ve seen the latter claimed but never verified), could argue they were regenerating civilization by creating and embodying ideals that could channel people to more constructive ends. Liberal and conservative critics took Le Bon and his ideas seriously in the early twentieth century, and arguably won out in the battle over “the crowd” by a strategy of neutralization. From the noble goals of education reformers (Le Bon pooh-poohed education as an influence, a major oversight on his part) to the grubbier ends of marketers, a lot of public discourse in the liberal democracies over the last century has been about individuating subjects, preventing them from becoming the sort of crowd Le Bon and his readers envisioned. Sometimes, this backfires- see any Black Friday. But by and large, capitalism has succeeded in short-circuiting the crowd by appealing to the individual, though it had to survive two world wars motivated by crowd psychology (if you buy that kind of thing) to do it. Civilization saved, I guess? That’s certainly what a Walter Lippmann (who I will be reading in this space) would say. I’m less sure. I think we might need our ability to crowd up back… and we might just be getting it. Time will tell. **

Review- Maurer, “The Big Con”

April 7, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

David Maurer, “The Big Con: the Story of the Confidence Man” (1940) – Who doesn’t like old-timey flim-flam men? David Maurer was a linguist who approached the underworld of his time in search of its peculiar argot. Along the way, he got to know dozens of con men, who became his sources for this book. As the title promises, it focuses on the “big” con games, defined by “the send” – the act of sending the mark home to get more money. Ten thousand dollars was considered the minimum score for a big con, and Maurer regales us with tales — typically told by the conmen themselves in their dialect — of routinely taking rich men for hundreds of thousands of dollars, back in the twenties and thirties when that was the equivalent of millions.

Maurer lingers on the details of the craft: the division of labor within the con mobs, the rules of the different games (which all seemed pretty much the same to me- maybe I’m just a poor mark!), the setup of “stores”: fake gambling clubs and stock brokerages where ropers took marks to get fleeced. More than the simpler short cons, the big con relies on the complicity of the mark. Everything about the mob’s performance and the shop setting is designed to “stir the larceny in the mark’s blood.” “You can’t cheat an honest man,” they say- all the games rely on telling the mark that the conmen are bringing them in on the real, i.e. underhanded, way to make big money. They make use of the greed and pride of men who fancy themselves big wheels because favored by the big game of capitalism, but who have niggling suspicions that they’re not in on the real action.

Maurer sued the makers of the movie “The Sting” for allegedly ripping off his book (they settled out of court). You can see why- I thought the elaborate fake storefront they used in that movie was unrealistic, but I guess not. You already need a big bankroll to start a big con game, to pay for premises, help, and fixing the police. That’s another way the con games mirror capitalism as a whole- those with the money to start with are in the best position to gain more. I wonder what an updated version looks like- as far as I can tell, the big con has mostly turned into stock swindles, and the short con is everywhere online, but who knows? Either way, a good read both in content and tone. ****’

Review- Singh, “Race and America’s Long War”

January 8, 2018January 8, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

singh

Nikhil Pal Singh, “Race and America’s Long War” (2017) – I picked this up because I think one of the missing pieces — one of many — in our discussion of the rise of the far-right in the era of Trump is its relationship to America’s role in the broader world. Diplomatic history has, for the last twenty years or so, been working on the relationship between domestic politics and American foreign policy, but it’s still pretty specialized and under-developed. Consider how much angst and ink has been split over the relationship between college campus politics and the rise of the right, and how little of both we see how the fact we’ve been at war for more or less the entire time undergrads today have been alive might condition the situation. This imbalance tells us a lot.

In the essays collected in “Race and America’s Long War,” Singh works to put America’s current wars in the framework of the long war of settler colonialism and capitalist accumulation. War and policing inform each other in a never-ending cycle going back to the wars against the Native Americans and the policing of slaves. Singh argues that in many respects race (and, he alludes, other identity categories, but he spends less time with them) is continually created by an array of policy decisions and the violence that goes into backing them up. If the post-WWII era changed the normative background of how America’s war-police complex was justified — eventually making its peace with a notionally color-blind liberalism while still maintaining deeply racialized structures of inequality — liberal policymakers (like Obama) never challenged the underlying logic of the system. This left the whole thing open to being taken over and rolled back by openly revanchist elements, like Trump.

The devil, of course, in the details. The crises — either spun off or accelerated by the ur-crisis of climate change — are mounting in intensity at a time when the US is, relatively (and maybe absolutely) speaking,declining in power. You have to figure that’s going to make a difference in terms of the type of freak-out we’re likely to see from those in power and those who hold dear to the tropes and methods of racialized power Singh illuminates. Singh offers provocative examples and short case studies, but by and large devotes himself to the big picture in this book. In part that’s probably due to the book’s provenance (essays published elsewhere) and Singh’s efforts to theorize the relationship between America’s foreign and domestic politics. It can be dense going at times (though a lot less so than many theory-inflected writers) but it’s a pretty good start. ****’

Review- Abbott, “Varieties of Sociological Imagination”

December 10, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

celarent

Barbara Celarent (aka Andrew Abbott), “Varieties of Social Imagination” (2017) – Andrew Abbott made a fun decision when he was in charge of the American Journal of Sociology. In each issue for the six years he was in charge, he wrote little (~five page) capsule biographies/analyses of a given sociological figure from the perspective of a “Barbara Celarent,” a scholar writing from a University of Atlantis in the year 2049.

After the first year, all of the sociologists were from outside of the European/American metropole, and a lot of them weren’t sociologists in the conventional, professional sense- including Mariama Ba, a Senegalese novelist, Ali Shariati, the Iranian Islamist philosopher, political leaders like Leopold Senghor, etc. The essays are a good way to learn about a diverse body of interesting figures, especially scholars from peripheral and colonized countries before and around the period of decolonization, who can often be neglected in favor of post-independence figures.

The Celarent framing is fun though sometimes a little forcibly didactic in a twee kind of way. Abbott has some kind of point he wants to make about humanistic social science which sounds agreeable enough, but I could see being irked by someone with a substantial pulpit inventing a cool lady sociologist from the future to pick out a diverse cast of role models to chide his readers with on their assorted inefficiencies. The nature of the medium (and his Borges-gone-all-social-science schtick) means there’s no programmatic statement of how Celarent thinks us pastbound types should be doing it. Still and all, the essays are mostly engaging and edifying, and it’s encouraging to see someone do something a bit off the beaten path in academia for once. ****

Too Much Berard

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