Dissent

SPRING 2012

The Revival of Left Populism in America Gary Gerstle • Michael Kazin • William P. Jones Ira Katznelson • Marina Sitrin

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Food Mark Engler: Radical Eating Marion Nestle: A Utopian Farm Bill

William E. Forbath: Constitutional Rights / Workers’ Rights

Laurie Woolever: High-end Food, Low-wage Labor

Kristen Ghodsee: Post-1989 Nostalgia

Juliana DeVries: Ethics and Vegetarianism

Norman Birnbaum: Reviving the German Left

Maxine Phillips: Food Diary

Godfrey Cheshire: Iranian Cinema

An Interview With Wendell Berry

Brian Morton: The Madness of Art Dan Gerstle: Reconsidering Hiroshima

BOOKS Daniel Luban on David Graeber and the history of debt Isaac Chotiner on Siddhartha Deb and gilded age India Mike Konczal on Thomas Byrne Edsall and austerity

310 Riverside Drive Suite 2008 New York, NY 10025

Karen Bakker Le Billon: Bon Goût

Buying and Selling School Reform: Joanne Barkan The Port Huron Statement at 50: Michael Kazin Fateful Year for Health Reform: Theda Skocpol

E D ITO R ’ S PAG E FOUNDING EDITOR

IRVING HOWE 1920–1993 CO-EDITORS

MICHAEL KAZIN MICHAEL WALZER EXECUTIVE EDITOR

MAXINE PHILLIPS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

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TIM BARKER INTERNS

JORJA KNAUER NATASHA LEWIS SAM SCHUBE EDITORIAL BOARD

JOANNE BARKAN MARSHALL BERMAN PAUL BERMAN SHERI BERMAN H. BRAND DAVID BROMWICH LUTHER P. CARPENTER MITCHELL COHEN MARK ENGLER CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN GARY GERSTLE TODD GITLIN ALAN JOHNSON WILLIAM KORNBLUM SUSIE LINFIELD KEVIN MATTSON DEBORAH MEIER HAROLD MEYERSON NICOLAUS MILLS JO-ANN MORT RUTH ROSEN JAMES B. RULE PATRICIA CAYO SEXTON ARLENE SKOLNICK JIM SLEEPER ANN SNITOW CHRISTINE STANSELL SEAN WILENTZ CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

BERNARD AVISHAI DAVID BENSMAN JEAN L. COHEN BOGDAN DENITCH JEFF FAUX MURRAY HAUSKNECHT AGNÈS HELLER JEFFREY C. ISA AC MARTIN KILSON JEREMY LARNER BRIAN MORTON GEORGE PACKER MARTIN PERETZ ANSON RABINBACH ALAN RYAN CORNEL WEST DENNIS WRONG

However the French presidential elections turn out in the coming weeks, the campaign has produced one memorable moment—when François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, delivered a sharp critique of the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Since the Greeks don’t vote in French elections, this was a rare expression of internationalist solidarity. Of course, the policy of the EU and the IMF is largely dictated by the German government, which makes French opposition something less than heroic. It is important, nonetheless. On the German Left, there have been critical voices (see Norman Birnbaum’s report on p. 9), though not from a party leader in the middle of an election campaign. In the United States, Paul Krugman has led an intellectual assault on the austerity doctrine and its ideological underpinnings. But the leader of the Democratic Party, who is already campaigning for re-election, has been silent.

In Greece itself, the Socialist Party is part of the government coalition trying desperately to do what the EU and the IMF are demanding. It isn’t leading the protests in the streets, though its militants will certainly welcome Hollande’s critique.

What should socialists and leftists generally (and American liberals, too) be doing at this moment? In countries like Greece, it seems to me, they shouldn’t be serving in the government.

Maybe there is no choice, given the balance of power in Europe, but to yield to the austerity demands. But then let the CenterRight and the technocrats make the necessary concessions, while men and women of the Left organize the opposition and work out alternative policies for the future. Long-term changes in Greek society, where tax evasion was a national pastime and civic spirit was in short supply, are indeed necessary. But they should come as part of a broadly conceived left program aimed at redistribution, citizen empowerment, and economic growth, and they should come from a party that both mobilizes and educates its voters. And that party and program should be supported by leftists around the world.

Internationalism is an old left ideology, honored most often in the breach. But it is the effective practice of the Right, whose politicians and bankers have achieved global reach. We need a global response. So what political leaders like Hollande, and like Barack Obama, say in their election campaigns is a matter of critical interest. They should be saying that people in desperate trouble in other countries matter to us; they should be saying that trouble abroad is likely to come home one day; they should be saying that foreign and domestic politics are intricately entangled. And they should be listening to each other—and to movement activists too—and trying to speak with (what has always seemed impossible on the left) one strong and coherent voice.

MICHAEL WALZER 1 1

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E D ITO R ’ S PAG E

Michael Walzer

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Left Internationalism POLITICS ABROAD

Kristen Ghodsee

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Revisiting 1989: The Specter Still Haunts

Norman Birnbaum

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Germany, Far and Near FOOD

Sarah Leonard

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Introduction

Marion Nestle

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Utopian Dream: A New Farm Bill

Mark Engler

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Hijacked Organic, Limited Local, Faulty Fair Trade

Laurie Woolever

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High-End Food, Low-Wage Labor

Karen Bakker Le Billon

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Prêt-à-Manger

Juliana DeVries

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Making Choices: Ethics and Vegetarianism

Sarah Leonard

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Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry ARTICLES

Joanne Barkan

49

Hired Guns on Astroturf

William E. Forbath

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Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution T H E U. S . L E F T: PA S T A N D F U T U R E

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Gary Gerstle

66

Introduction

Michael Kazin

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The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left

William P. Jones

70

Don’t Forget Solidarity

Ira Katznelson

72

Another History

Marina Sitrin

74

Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements

NOTEBOOK

Godfrey Cheshire

77

Iran’s Cinematic Spring

Brian Morton

81

The Madness of Art RECONSIDERATIONS

Michael Kazin

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The Port Huron Statement at Fifty

Dan Gerstle

90

John Hersey and Hiroshima BOOKS

Theda Skocpol 95

Richard Kirsch’s Fighting for Our Health and Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction

Daniel Luban

102

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Isaac Chotiner

107

Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned

Mike Konczal

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Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity

114 L E T T E R S L A S T PAG E

Maxine Phillips

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Diary of a Semi-aware Eater

Dissent (ISSN 0012-3846), issued April 1, 2012, is published quarterly—winter, spring, summer, and fall—by the University of Pennsylvania Press for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, #2008, New York, N.Y. 10025. Phone: 212-316-3120. website: http://www.dissentmagazine.org. For new subscriptions go to: http://www.dissentmagazine.org; for subscription inquiries: pubsvc@tsp.sheridan.com or call 1-717-632-3535 and ask for subscriber services; for editorial and all other inquiries: inquiries@dissentmagazine.org. Address for subscriptions: The Sheridan Press, Attn. Penn Press Journals, PO Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331.

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SUPPORTERS CIRCLE William Amatruda Henrietta Backer William Barron III Allen H. Barton Marshall Berman Norman Birnbaum Francis Bonner Lawrence Bridwell Ken Brociner David Bromwich Ray H. Burton Peter Connolly Ann and Robert Dahl Hal Davis Morris Dickstein Jan E. Ellis Gertrude Friedman Gary Gerstle and Elizabeth Lunbeck Bruce Gluckman Jeffrey D. Gold Robert Goodrich Eva Gossman Josef Gutenkauf Jonathan and Donna Horowitz Ruth & Dan Jordan John Judd Charles Kadushin David Kandel

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POLITICS ABROAD

Revisiting 1989 The Specter Still Haunts

KRISTEN GHODSEE

In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor.

This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, she had been a lawyer in Bulgaria, and one of a core of pro-democracy activists who had been politically influential during Bulgaria’s transition from communism.

With her liberal colleagues, Svetozara had fought hard to banish communist influences from the Bulgarian government and economy.

She believed that democracy and the institution of free markets would improve the lives of her compatriots after more than four decades of totalitarian rule and had worked to make sure that post–1989 elections were free and fair. She had helped reorganize local governments to make them more responsive to citizens’ needs and had supported legislation to make the Bulgarian government less bureaucratic and more open and transparent. She had been a darling of liberal reformers come from the West to dismantle the centralized state and the command economy.

During the first glass of wine, we caught up on each other’s personal lives; after the second glass, the conversation turned to politics.

I remarked that nothing had been done in Bulgaria to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall. She nodded.

“That is because there is nothing to celebrate.”

“What do you mean?”

Svetozara lowered her glass, and gently pinched the stem. She stared down at the table.

“I can’t tell you how disgusted I am, Kristen. I feel like such an idiot. I thought we were fighting on the right side. I thought we were fighting for freedom, for democracy, for principles that I believed in. But it was all a lie. What we have now is worse than what we had before. I used to think that maybe we did something wrong, but now I realize that the whole thing was rotten from the start; 1989 was not about bringing liberty to the people of Eastern Europe; it was about expanding markets for Western companies. They used the language of freedom and democracy, but it was all about money. I was so stupid.”

“You were idealistic. That’s different.”

“No, it’s worse, from my point of view.

I never understood how people could have supported a terrible system like communism, but now I see that they made the same mistake that I made. They believed in something that they thought was good, but that turned out to be very bad. I did the exact same thing. Only the system I helped to build is maybe worse than the system that they did.”

There was a long silence before the bouncy college-student server came to ask if we wanted dessert. Svetozara ordered another glass of wine. I wanted to press her for details, because I knew that she knew a lot about the inner workings of the transition, but that night, I, too, ordered another glass of wine, and changed the subject. She was starting a new life. Better not to dwell on the past.

A few months after that conversation, the East German writer Daniela Dahn gave a lecture at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore titled, “Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Legacy of Democratic Awakening.”

Dahn had been a political activist in the

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German Democratic Republic in the years leading up to 1989 and was instrumental in drafting new laws to eradicate state censorship and guarantee a free press. With her fellow dissidents, Dahn had participated in the process of imagining a new future for East Germany, a new democratic socialist future. She explained, “As I grew up in the GDR, I always longed to live in a democracy.

But not in capitalism. I had no illusions about its tendency to economic and financial crises, its power to create a social divide between the rich and poor, and its inclination to military solutions.”

Dahn cited an opinion poll taken at the end of November 1989 that showed that 89 percent of East Germans preferred to take “the path to better, reformed socialism,” with only 5 percent supporting the “capitalist path.” Dahn and other East Germans longed for greater political rights and Western prosperity, but they also wanted to keep some of the social supports of socialism in place: guaranteed employment, free education and health care, state-supported maternity leave, and kindergartens that allowed women to better combine work and family life. New East German constitutions were drafted, but it soon became clear that their efforts would be in vain. With lightning speed, the West German Constitution would become the new constitution of a unified Germany. Dahn reflected, “Many in the oppositional civil movements would have been grateful for more time to consider how the advantages of both sides could be retained. How the dictatorship could be overcome without subjecting the defenseless population to the rough climate of the market economy. How a humane balance between the market and the planned economies could be achieved. How the GDR’s defects could be corrected by the strength of its own grassroots democracy.”

In the end, German reunification was not the union of two equal parts to make a new whole; for many East Germans, reunification felt more like a territorial grab by the West, an “Anschluss” (annexation) in the words of the Social Democratic politician Matthias Platzeck.

In 2010, 67 percent of East Germans said that they did not feel like they were a part of a unified country. Although the privatization of

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previously state-owned enterprises and the liberalization of capital markets took different paths in different places, economic shock therapy had destabilizing effects in almost all of Eastern Europe. In the fire sale of public assets that followed 1989, oligarchs, organizedcrime bosses, and foreign investors snatched up national infrastructure at bargain prices.

Across the region, German, American, French, or British investors purchased entire industries with the sole intention of shutting them down in order to create new markets for their own goods. In other cases, factories, airlines, or entire resorts were purchased, broken up, and sold off for parts. In Bulgaria, Greek investors stripped hotels of furniture, toilets, sinks, windows, and pipes, leaving behind the hollow shells of buildings and scores of unemployed workers. In almost all cases, privatization contracts had stipulated that enterprises should continue operation for at least two years. But with renationalization as the only punitive measure, it was politically impossible to prevent the abrogation of these contracts. Any government attempts to regulate the market, even in cases of blatant fraud, were coded as “communist.” At the same time, social safety nets were rapidly dismantled. The wild, unregulated form of capitalism that was bundled with democratic ideals and exported to Eastern Europe after 1989 benefitted some new elites. The majority of East European citizens saw their living standards decline.

It should come as no surprise, then, that over the past decade, a wide variety of national surveys detect growing nostalgia for the communist past. Using the 2001 New Europe Barometer, Swedish political scientists Joakim Ekman and Jonas Linde found increasing nostalgia for the material security of communism across Eastern Europe, with a majority of postcommunist citizens evaluating the command economic system in positive terms. These political scientists argued that the desire for a return to the previous system was symptomatic of a “dissatisfaction” with the present system’s ability to deliver the goods—“material or non-material”—meaning that people felt not only materially poorer, but

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ideologically poorer as well.

Citizens of postsocialist states also perceived a large gap between the abstract principles of democracy and the political systems under which they currently live. In a 2009 Pew Research Center study, a majority of respondents in eight of the postsocialist states surveyed agreed that a strong economy is more important than a “good democracy.” East Europeans were also somewhat more likely to answer that it is more important “that the state play an active role in society so as to guarantee that nobody is in need” than “that everyone be free to pursue their life’s goals without interference from the state,” with responses in favor of needs over freedom ranging from 51 percent in the Czech Republic to 72 percent in Bulgaria. This means that in Bulgaria only slightly more than a quarter of the population preferred freedom over state intervention to prevent need (in contrast, in the United States, 55 percent of respondents favored freedom over 36 percent who preferred state intervention to prevent need).

Perhaps the most poignant expression of the frustration that has followed the end of communism was one forty-year-old man’s dramatic seven-meter leap from a balcony onto the floor of the Romanian Parliament two days before Christmas 2010. Adrian Sobaru, an electrician working for the national television station, had an autistic son. The Romanian government had decided to cut the public subsidies that helped him care for his child. Frustrated and desperate, Sobaru, by his jump, reflected the mood of his compatriots across the country. A September 2010 poll found that about 49 percent of Romanians believed that their lives under communism were better than they are now.

All of these stories and surveys complicate the narrative that most of us know about the events of 1989. For most ordinary people in the West, communism was peacefully vanquished by spontaneous outbursts of civil society from within, by East European citizens long tired of consumer shortages, police surveillance, and travel restrictions.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the so-called “end of history,” when totalitarian regimes imploded, and East Germans, Bulgarians, and Romanians gleefully embraced a democratic,

free-market future. But what if it was more complicated than that? What if some of them, like Dahn, wanted the democracy without the capitalism? What if others (like the current communist leaders in China) wanted the capitalism without the democracy? What if there were some who wished for a different way, a democratic socialism similar to the Scandinavian model? Was there another path that could have been taken when the Wall fell, and if so, how was it so quickly foreclosed?

Since 1997, I have been doing ethnographic research and have written three books on how non-elite Bulgarian men and women experienced the economic transition from communism, and how the massive social and political changes affected the rhythms of everyday life. By living among ordinary Bulgarians, I have come to understand that, despite its oppressive and inefficient aspects, the communist system felt comfortable and familiar to many men and women who came of age after the Second World War. Although people lived under totalitarian conditions, daily life for most people was not a life-anddeath struggle. People vote every four years, but they eat three times a day. The everyday rhythms of work, family, and leisure were largely impervious to the disciplining structures of authoritarian states. Even under communism, people fell in love, got married, had babies, got educations, built careers, took holidays, and grew old. Certainly, people’s choices were constrained by travel restrictions and by the government’s stranglehold on free speech, free association, and economic production. Central planning made it difficult for individuals to pursue their desired career paths, and consumer shortages meant that the comforts of daily life were not always readily available. The secret police and their informants were everywhere.

But today, after more than twenty years of democracy and capitalism, people are acutely aware that their choices are still constrained, albeit no longer by the state, but rather by the unpredictability of the free-market system.

Whereas most East Europeans could not travel abroad without exit visas in the era before 1989, today many of them are free to leave but

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no longer have the financial resources to do so. Now career choices are limited by faltering economies, high unemployment rates, and the rising cost of postsecondary education across the region. Digital surveillance cameras are more ubiquitous than state security forces once were. For many outside of the urban centers, the ill-managed transition from communism to capitalism has brought only growing poverty, depopulation, and hopelessness.

Writing for the Guardian on November 9, 2009, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova reflected, “Lamenting the losses that came with the collapse of state socialism does not imply wishing it back. Not all aspects are missed. Mainstream ideological treatment, however, would like us to believe that it was all one package, that one cannot have full employment without shortages, inter-ethnic peace without forced homogenisation, or free healthcare without totalitarianism.”

The conflation of social solidarity and economic security with totalitarianism is a legacy of cold warrior ideology, according to which any state interference in the market on behalf of the common good is coded as “communist.” It has been difficult for scholars to trouble this hegemonic notion of “communism” or to examine critically the ways that all of the various experiments with state socialism around the world are equated with the worst excesses of Stalinism. Equating everything socialist with Stalin prevents many scholars from being able to think of 1989 as anything but a world-historic defeat of communism and the triumphant ascendance of human rights, freedom, and democracy.

Perhaps the events of 1989 were the product of a confluence of historical contingencies and might have produced a new antitotalitarian political system where democratic state regulation of markets produced a more humane economic system. Perhaps it is time to rethink why Eastern Europe imported this one particular brand of neoliberal, unregulated capitalism over all of the other models available in the West.

If I may be permitted a computing analogy, we can imagine that the people of the Eastern

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bloc were stuck with typewriters before 1989.

While they pecked out their prose on these rickety little machines, Westerners had word processing programs on sleek, new, personal computers that allowed for editing on the page before printing. The Easterners wanted personal computers, too; no one questioned that personal computers were better than typewriters. The year 1989 marked the decisive triumph of the personal computer over the typewriter.

But the computers that were rushed into the East were pre-installed with the Windows operating system. East Europeans who wanted personal computers had no choice but to accept Windows, even though there were other options for operating systems in the West. And they could not remove Windows, because if they tried, the Westerners would say that they were not worthy of the computers and take them away. Some people did just fine with Windows, but others hated it, with its bugs and constant security updates and its frustrating propensity to crash all the time. These people became so fed up with the Windows operating system that they began to reject personal computers altogether, and to long for their old manual typewriters.

Perhaps as with the Windows operating system pre-installed on a PC, elites in the West and East who stood the most to gain from software sales strategically bundled capitalism with democracy in 1989. But just as you can have personal computers without Windows, Eastern Europe could have had democracy without capitalism. Mac OS (social democracy?) and Linux (democratic socialism?) are perfectly viable operating systems. What the opinion polls on nostalgia seem to be telling us is that as long as people identify democracy with the Windows equivalent of free-market capitalism, they will look back with fondness on the authoritarian, planned economic past.

Kristen Ghodsee is the director and John S. Osterweis Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. The most recent of her four books is Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, a collection of essays and short stories examining socialist nostalgia.

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Germany, Far And Near NORMAN BIRNBAUM

At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unemployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own budgetary deficit is shrinking due to increases in national income and tax revenues. Indeed, the other European nations expect a relatively prosperous Germany to take more financial responsibility for the Union as a whole—a view not supported by a German majority.

That majority thinks that the German welfare state, with health insurance and retirement pensions and considerable investment in culture and education as well as material infrastructure, is exclusively a national achievement. Having recently spent billions on domestic income transfers (from West to East after reunification in 1990), the German citizenry prefers to keep its money in German pockets. Disdain for Eastern and Southern Europeans serves as a solvent, washing away attention to internal differences in income and life chances that might otherwise move to the center of German politics. A truly yellow national popular press, television commentators as clueless as those we know here, and rigid professors of economics insist on austerity as the one true path to economic salvation. Austerity is prescribed not only for other Europeans, but for those Germans so improvident as not to belong to the upper income groups.

The German Left knows better. One problem is that, like Gaul in Caesar’s history, it is divided into three parts. The largest is the party of socialist tradition, the Social Democrats (SPD). It was the party of Willy Brandt; Helmut Schmidt; and, later, Gerhard Schroeder and is close to the trade unions.

It is home, too, to much of the critical intelligentsia and its educated public. Its major

voting groups are skilled workers, employed women, minor civil servants, and educators.

It is strong in the larger cities and in the north and west of the nation. It has suffered major losses in membership and in the 2009 election had its worst result in more than a century. It has had special difficulty in attracting younger voters.

Its rapid succession of leaders in recent decades has blurred its electoral and ideological profile, and now three people are competing to be the candidate for chancellor in the 2013 national elections. One is the party chair, Sigmar Gabriel, who was Schroeder’s successor as minister president (governor) of Lower Saxony before losing a state election.

He was environmental minister in the 2003–2009 coalition government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats under Chancellor Angela Merkel. He is pugnacious, if not choleric; has acute tactical instincts, but lacks large political ideas. Another competitor is the chair of the party’s parliamentary group, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Chief of staff to Schroeder, he was a successful foreign minister as the senior Social Democrat in the coalition government, then the losing chancellor candidate in 2009. A serious former law professor, he evokes confidence and respect, but not enthusiasm. He is identified with Schroeder’s reforms, which reduced welfare state benefits and forced the unemployed to seek employment at the lower end of the skill and wage scale. He is also identified with a cautious European and foreign policy, in which Germany takes no risks of acting too autonomously or independently, although he can claim credit for encouraging Schroeder to stay out of the Iraq War. The third rival is the former minister president of North RheinlandWestphalia and former finance minister, Peer Steinbrueck. Endorsed by Helmut Schmidt, he is like Schmidt in distancing himself from large ideas of social transformation. The party’s activists are cool to this somewhat distant and ironic figure, but he is popular because of his (carefully projected) pose as

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a disinterested steward of the public good.

At the moment, the party cannot decide on how the choice will be made—by a party convention or by primaries, which would be an innovation in Germany.

The Greens, formed in the eighties by younger activists interested in the environment, in ending the cold war, in human rights and social development, and in women’s issues, have moved indoors from the streets. They have one governor, in one of Germany’s richest states, Baden-Wuerttemberg; were in national government under Schroeder; are in several state governments; and hold mayorships, especially in university cities. Their most prominent figure, Joschka Fischer, has retired, and they are now led by a colorful and contentious set of leaders. Both the national party and the parliamentary group are led by co-chairs, to maintain the gender parity with which the party began. The national party’s chairs are Claudia Roth and a German-born citizen of Turkish descent, Cem Oezdemir. The parliamentary leaders are two former ministers, Juergen Trittin and Renate Kunast. Combative, intelligent, and tactically masterful, Trittin is the most prominent— in a party in which many do not consider prominence a virtue. The leader of the German Green group in the European Parliament is the experienced and reflective Reinhard Buetikofer, and the Greens’ influence there is large despite actual numbers.

The Greens are strong in the western parts of Germany, quite weak in the East. They compete with the Social Democrats for the votes of the intelligentsia and women and still have some attraction for the young despite the party’s integration in the political system.

Some of their leaders insist on keeping open the possibility of a national coalition with the Christian Democrats instead of with the Social Democrats. Their initial emphasis on environmental problems is no longer unique: it was Chancellor Merkel, after the Fukushima disaster, who decreed that Germany would close its nuclear power plants. The Greens have concentrated, recently, on issues of civic participation and health, international human rights, and decent treatment of immigrants.

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In Baden-Wuerttemberg they won more votes last year than the Social Democrats, but there is little immediate prospect of their winning enough working-class votes to achieve national parity with the SPD. Theirs is a classical dilemma. As a vanguard party, raising new issues, they are attractive to many voters.

As part of the mainstream, they lose their distinctiveness.

The third and smallest left party is the Left Party (Die Linke), formed of the remnants of the authoritarian state party, in the East, the Socialist Unity Party (later in its reformed phase the Party of Democratic Socialism) and joined in 2007 by SPD dissidents in the West. One of their major leaders is the former SPD finance minister and party chair Oskar Lafontaine, who quit his posts and the SPD in 1999 to protest Schroeder’s abandonment, as Lafontaine saw it, of social democratic tradition. The most prominent figure from the East remains Gregor Gysi, who took command of the demoralized communist formation just after the Wall was opened in 1989. The party has not been successful in developing convincing younger leaders, a difficulty it shares with the SPD. The Left Party is strongest in the East, is the junior coalition partner of the SPD in the city government of Berlin, and has scattered support in the West.

Its voters in the East come from some of the governmental and economic and cultural cadres of the communist regime, from older persons who miss their secure niches under that regime, and from younger voters who do not find capitalism an unequivocal blessing.

In the West, its supporters are activists and trade unionists who were restless and frustrated in the SPD—and younger persons who find the Social Democrats too complacent and the Greens becoming so.

The three parties could well be able to form a parliamentary majority after the next national election. The Social Democrats emphatically and the Greens more quietly but no less determinedly reject the idea of a national governing coalition with the Left Party, despite being in local coalitions with it. The stated reasons of Greens and Social Democrats for rejecting a national coalition

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are that the Left has insufficiently distanced itself from communist dictatorship and is “unrealistic” and “unreliable” on economic issues. Those are euphemisms for the Left’s project of actually substituting a version of socialism for capitalism. The Social Democrats and the Greens are hesitantly reformist and do not think that projects of large-scale social reconstruction are electorally viable. Social Democrats and Greens are made morally uneasy by association with those whose view of communist Germany is, to them, excessively nuanced. In time, perhaps (the communist state was terminated twenty-two years ago), these differences may fade. They survive on another front. The Left Party is bitterly antagonistic to Germany's remaining in NATO, the more so as it has been transformed into an American-led global alliance.

Social Democrats and Greens have their serious doubts, but seek to avoid a confrontation with the United States and obscure their objections in the language of diplomacy.

The parliamentary majority and government in Germany is now made up of the Christian Democratic Union, headed by Angela Merkel; its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU); and the marketoriented Free Democrats. The Free Democrats are in a political disaster zone, losing consistently in state elections and fearful that their 15 percent of the national vote in 2009 may now be less than a third of that, which would preclude their re-entering Parliament. They, and the segments of the Christian parties especially friendly to capital, are very critical of the chancellor for what they describe as her drift to de facto social democracy. Merkel has been successful at presenting herself as defender of the interests of the entire nation.

That accounted for the political longevity of her patron, Helmut Kohl, who was an ally of the industrialists and bankers but adept at class compromise.

Merkel and her party have mobilized a German majority behind their version of the European Union, in which nations are required to reduce deficits and renounce transfers from richer members of the Union as well as expansionary economic policies.

The imposition of a German (which is to say Darwinian) model of the economy is unlikely

to last. In fact, Merkel has made a huge and potentially disastrous wager—that Germany will continue to attain prosperity by selling capital goods on the European and world markets. Japan, the Germany of the seventies and eighties, now registers a trade deficit.

Germany’s success as an exporting nation will also end, leaving it with an insufficiently developed domestic market and reducing its currently prosperous workers to the economic spartanism now endured by close to a third of German households. Merkel has not asked herself how European states subjected to austerity can also function as customers of German business.

Merkel’s conception of an asocial Europe contrasts with that of the three left parties.

They seek expanded powers for the European Parliament, which at present has little economic and political authority. Its new president is a Social Democrat, Martin Schulz, who opposes the market ideology and asocial practice of Europe’s conservative governments and much of the European Union bureaucracy. The European Commission is rigorously discriminatory against public enterprise and a political economy of redistribution. The three left parties call for expansionary economic policies with public investment to counter the European Union–wide deficit of private investment.

The Social Democrats in office under Schroeder compelled the unemployed to take lower paying jobs. They were then compensated with extra income from the state—a curious form of socialism in which the state helps the private sector exploit its workers.

At present, at least 25 percent of the German labor force is underpaid and usually requires subsidy. Meanwhile, the unions, which were at one point 25 percent of the labor force, are now at about 18 percent—and correspondingly less able to attain decent levels of benefits and wages.

The general economic crisis has had a triple effect on Germany. The global economic recession reduced employment in manufacturing and spread into other areas.

Agreements between the unions, employers, and the state prevented large and sudden

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increases in joblessness. The state subsidized part-time employment. By comparison with our own system, this was positive. However, within Germany it continued the growing trend of diminished income and job security for large parts of the labor force. The second effect concerned the large German banks, the private ones and some of the regional public ones run by the states. German bankers, neither more scrupulous nor wiser than their counterparts elsewhere, bought all kinds of dubious products on the American financial markets and had to be saved by the German central bank or the European Central Bank.

Their situation has lowered their capacity to invest. The general crisis of the Eurozone has been superimposed on these two. Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy may go bankrupt.

The other European nations, led by Germany, have imposed on them large cuts in public employment and expenditure.

At this point, the positive European attitudes of the three parties of the Left have been severely challenged. Many of their voters share the economic nationalism (mixing with actual xenophobia) to which Merkel has catered. She is not alone, as such nationalism is a form of the Social Darwinism congenial to German capital and articulated in government and public opinion by its intellectual allies.

Strikingly, and exceptionally, some German judges argue that the nation’s integration in the European Union and its obligation to comply with its decisions are limited by the German constitutional clauses guaranteeing the rights of the citizenry to economic and social equality.

The Social Democrats, Green Party, and the Left Party have intensified their demands for a European social contract, for more power for the European Parliament, and joined these to a persistent critique of the obsessive pursuit by much of the European Union’s officialdom of austerity. None of the current generation of European conservative leaders can envisage anything like the Europe-wide social investment and employment program proposed by then-Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky decades ago. It is even unclear that a victory for the French Socialist candidate,

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François Hollande, in the presidential election would have much short-term effect. The most detailed plan in Germany has come from the party with no chance to realize it, the Left— which has called for a European investment fund, public ownership of the major European banks, and the closure of the rating agencies.

Meanwhile, the Social Democrats, absurdly, are arguing about whether to continue to endorse raising the age of retirement to sixtyseven—agreeable for civil servants, managers, and professors, but rather less so for those in more arduous jobs. It is as if a part of the party still wishes to prove its fiscal respectability.

Merkel herself (and her Christian Democratic Union finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has a sense of state and society as not identical with a market) have called for a transaction tax, a version of the Tobin tax, on the financial industry. It is a concession to the economic egalitarianism of the German public—a sign of the chancellor’s tactical skills, her watchfulness for openings to weaken the opposition, and her preparation for a coalition after the next election with either the Social Democrats or the Greens.

The results of that election are unpredictable. The situation has been complicated by the emergence of a new and unformed protest party, the Pirates. They obtained 8 percent of the vote in recent Berlin elections. The party is a mixture of libertarian and participatory elements and attracts mainly younger employed voters, and its vote could nullify the possibility of a Social DemocraticGreen coalition one year hence. The Pirates cannot be compared to the Indignados in Spain or the Occupy movement in the United States because of their entrepreneurial and technocratic bias. Meanwhile, in state and local elections, especially in the East, racist and xenophobic groups have been surmounting the 5 percent barrier and entering legislatures.

East and West, those suffering the most from the crisis have lost faith in government and politics: they supply the bulk of Germany’s increasing party of non-voters.

It remains to be seen whether the crisis will activate the socialist conscience of the Social Democrats, move the Greens from their tactical pursuit of office, and revive the alliance of working class and intelligentsia

POLITICS ABROAD

that marked the years of Brandt and those of the more cautious and calculating Schmidt.

Schmidt, now in his early nineties, made an acclaimed appearance at the SPD Congress in December and spoke as if he were one of the younger Social Democrats he so systematically derided as chancellor. Perhaps that presages a welcome rejuvenation of Germany’s oldest party. Whatever its electoral success, it would still have to resolve the difficult question of choice of alliances.

If the Social Democrats obtain the chancellorship, they will have to initiate a new program against poverty—intellectual poverty.

Dennis Wrong once termed social democracy “the highest form of capitalism.” It was a splendid formulation, but true only if capitalism itself functions in textbook fashion.

The long crisis of western capitalism did not begin with the banking collapse of 2008 and will not end even if—and there is no sign of this—current levels of unemployment should be seriously reduced. The Social Democrats conceive of themselves as an integral element in reformed capitalism, but what if the reforms of the postwar period are out of date?

The Greens began as dissidents propounding remedies for the problems the other parties hardly acknowledged: the environment, the oppression of women, the insufficiencies of representative democracy, discrimination against immigrants, human rights and international development, and the pathologies of the cold war. Their themes, one by one, have been confiscated by the larger parties. The Greens now depict themselves as the party with the most proven capacity for dealing with the future—whatever it may entail. Its leaders declare that they deal in problems, not dogmas—true as far as it goes, but not a defense against a reduction of politics to tactics. The Left, divided and quarrelsome, is united only in heavy and monotonous public speech. Its intellectual enclaves are ignored

when not grossly attacked by the major agencies of opinion formation in Germany (foundations, media, universities). Yet some of the dissident traditions of the communist state and the marginalized thinking of unbound spirits in the West are slowly resurfacing in the party’s intellectual orbit. It is far too early to assert that new ideas of western socialism will emerge, but it is also far too soon to declare the party hopelessly enchained by its communist past.

Serious intellectual life in Germany is marked by an astonishing mixture of contradictory currents, with no central themes of argument.

Imagine the American fifties without John Kenneth Galbraith or C. Wright Mills.

Officially recognized intellectuals often outdo one another in officiousness, and the revolts of the sixties are matter for nostalgia rather than reenactment. Yes, Juergen Habermas is still going strong—but he is a veteran of the fifties.

A large part of the public pays no attention, and if moved by indignation at its material and moral deprivations, turns its anger against the poorer European Union populations, immigrants, and fellow citizens branded as lazy or unscrupulous. The German capitalist elite and its intellectual apologists have had one very great success: divide et impera has worked.

Germany is a political vacuum. The parties of the left have to struggle with two very different tasks. One is to offer plausible solutions to the current crisis. The second is to cultivate new ideas for a Europe whose inherited geopolitics is out of date. The two are more closely connected than many of their leaders care to admit.

Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center, and is writing a memoir, From the Bronx to Oxford—And Not Quite Back.

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Food and the Body Politic Americans are in the midst of a food-consciousness revival: on television, in the mouth of the First Lady, in endless articles celebrating urban agriculture can be found a sudden enthusiasm for the politically and, perhaps, spiritually curated dinner table. In this special section, writers explore the perilous state of food and food politics in America and a wide range of responses on the Left. Marion Nestle, in her essay on the farm bill, finds the roots of the existing policy disaster in Reagan-era deregulation. Mark Engler describes strands of left-wing response— buying organic, eating local, and agitating for fair trade—and the ways in which they have succeeded as well as been co-opted, asking, “What’s a radical to eat?” Laurie Woolever uncovers the kind of labor exploitation endemic to the elite dining experience. Karen Bakker Le Billon compares American to French school lunches, unpacking the relationship between food and citizenship. Juliana DeVries explores vegetarianism and the generational politics of everyday life.

Americans are learning (again) to read crisis in the incomprehensible ingredients on packaged food and to see politics in vegetable gardens from the White House to city rooftops.

From obesity to diabetes to a depleted landscape, we are reaping the whirlwind after decades in which corporations sold cheap but unhealthy food and passed along the health costs to the bodies of the taxpayers who subsidized them.

In the interview published here, Wendell Berry—writer, prophet, and cultivator of the small farm—says, “The discussion about food doesn’t make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.” The problem extends deep beneath the over-farmed soil and up through the hierarchy of bought-and-paid-for policy makers. We hope this special section, which is extended online at dissentmagazine.org, begins to address food as bound up with this issue’s other focus: the future of the Left.

SARAH LEONARD

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FOOD

Utopian Dream: A New Farm Bill MARION NESTLE

In the fall of 2011, I taught a graduate food studies course at New York University devoted to the farm bill, a massive and massively opaque piece of legislation passed most recently in 2008 and up for renewal in 2012.

The farm bill supports farmers, of course, but also specifies how the United States deals with such matters as conservation, forestry, energy policy, organic food production, international food aid, and domestic food assistance. My students came from programs in nutrition, food studies, public health, public policy, and law, all united in the belief that a smaller scale, more regionalized, and more sustainable food system would be healthier for people and the planet.

In the first class meeting, I asked students to suggest what an ideal farm bill should do. Their answers covered the territory: ensure enough food for the population at an affordable price; produce a surplus for international trade and aid; provide farmers with a sufficient income; protect farmers against the vagaries of weather and volatile markets; promote regional, seasonal, organic, and sustainable food production; conserve soil, land, and forest; protect water and air quality, natural resources, and wildlife; raise farm animals humanely; and provide farm workers with a living wage and decent working conditions. Overall, they advocated aligning agricultural policy with nutrition, health, and environmental policy—a tall order by any standard, but especially so given current political and economic realities.

What’s Wrong with the Current Farm Bill?

Plenty. Beyond providing an abundance of inexpensive food, the current farm bill addresses practically none of the other goals. It

favors Big Agriculture over small; pesticides, fertilizers, and genetically modified crops over those raised organically and sustainably; and some regions of the country—notably the South and Midwest—over others. It supports commodity crops grown for animal feed but considers fruits and vegetables to be “specialty” crops deserving only token support. It provides incentives leading to crop overproduction, with enormous consequences for health.

The bill does not require farmers to engage in conservation or safety practices (farms are exempt from having to comply with environmental or employment standards).

It encourages production of feed crops for ethanol. In part because Congress insisted that gasoline must contain ethanol, 40 percent of U.S. feed corn was grown for that purpose in 2011, a well-documented cause of higher world food prices. Because the bill subsidizes production, it gets the United States in trouble with international trading partners, and hurts farmers in developing countries by undercutting their prices. Taken as a whole, the farm bill is profoundly undemocratic. It is so big and so complex that nobody in Congress or anywhere else can grasp its entirety, making it especially vulnerable to influence by lobbyists for special interests.

Although the farm bill started out in the Great Depression of the 1930s as a collection of emergency measures to protect the income of farmers—all small landholders by today’s standards—recipients soon grew dependent on support programs and began to view them as entitlements. Perceived entitlements became incentives for making farms larger; increasingly dependent on pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer “inputs”; and exploitative of natural and human resources. Big farms drove out small, while technological advances increased production. These trends were institutionalized by cozy relationships

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among large agricultural producers, farmstate members of congressional agricultural committees, and a Department of Agriculture (USDA) explicitly committed to promoting commodity production.

These players were not, however, sitting around conference tables to create agricultural policies to further national goals. Instead, they used the bill as a way to obtain earmarks— programs that would benefit specific interest groups. It is now a 663-page piece of legislation with a table of contents that alone takes up 14 pages. As the chief vehicle of agricultural policy in the United States, it reflects no overriding goals or philosophy. It is simply a collection of hundreds of largely disconnected programs dispensing public benefits to one group or another, each with its own dedicated constituency and lobbyists. The most controversial farm bill programs benefit only a few basic food commodities—corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar, and dairy. But lesser-known provisions help much smaller industries such as asparagus, honey, or Hass avocados, although at tiny fractions of the size of commodity payments.

The bill organizes its programs into fifteen “titles” dealing with its various purposes. I once tried to list every program included in each title, but soon gave up. The bill’s size, scope, and level of detail are mind-numbing.

It can only be understood one program at a time. Hence, lobbyists.

The elephant in the farm bill—its biggest program by far and accounting for nearly 85 percent of the funding—is SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps). In 2011, as a result of the declining economy and high unemployment, SNAP benefits grew to cover forty-six million Americans at a cost of $72 billion. In contrast, commodity subsidies cost “only” $8 billion; crop insurance $4.5 billion, and conservation about $5 billion.

The amounts expended on the hundreds of other programs covered by the bill are trivial in comparison, millions, not billions—mere rounding errors.

What is SNAP doing in the farm bill?

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and SNAP exemplifies logrolling politics in action. By the late 1970s, consolidation of farms had

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reduced the political power of agricultural states. To continue farm subsidies, representatives from agricultural states needed votes from legislators representing states with large, low-income urban populations. And those legislators needed votes from agricultural states to pass food assistance bills. They traded votes in an unholy alliance that pleased Big Agriculture as well as advocates for the poor.

Neither group wants the system changed.

Health Implications The consequences of obesity—higher risks for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and other chronic conditions—are the most important health problems facing Americans today. To maintain weight or to prevent excessive gain, federal dietary guidelines advise consumption of diets rich in vegetables and fruits. The 2008 farm bill introduced a horticulture and organic title, but aside from a farmers’ market promotion program and some smaller marketing programs, does little to encourage vegetable and fruit production or to subsidize their costs to consumers. If anything, the farm bill encourages weight gain by subsidizing commodity crops that constitute the basic cheap caloric ingredients used in processed foods—soy oil and corn sweeteners, for example—and by explicitly forbidding crop producers from growing fruits and vegetables.

Neither human nature nor genetics have changed in the last thirty years, meaning that widespread obesity must be understood as collateral damage resulting from changes in agricultural, economic, and regulatory policy in the 1970s and early 1980s. These created today’s “eat more” food environment, one in which it has become socially acceptable for food to be ubiquitous, eaten frequently, and in large portions.

For more than seventy years, from the early 1900s to the early 1980s, daily calorie availability remained relatively constant at about 3,200 per person. By the year 2000, however, available calories had increased to 3,900 per person per day, roughly twice average need.

People were not necessarily eating 700 more daily calories, as many were undoubtedly wasted. But the food containing those extra

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calories needed to be sold, thereby creating a marketing challenge for the food industry.

Why more calories became available after 1980 is a matter of some conjecture, but I believe the evidence points to three seemingly remote events that occurred at about that time: agriculture policies favoring overproduction, the onset of the shareholder value movement, and the deregulatory policies of the Reagan era.

In 1973 and 1977, Congress passed laws reversing long-standing farm policies aimed at protecting prices by limiting production.

Subsidies increased in proportion to amounts grown, encouraging creation of larger and more productive farms. Indeed, production increased, and so did calories in the food supply and competition in the food industry.

Companies were forced to find innovative ways to sell food products in an overabundant food economy.

Further increasing competition was the advent of the shareholder value movement to force corporations to produce more immediate and higher returns on investment. The start of the movement is often attributed to a 1981 speech given by Jack Welch, then head of General Electric, in which he insisted that corporations owed shareholders the benefits of faster growth and higher profit margins.

The movement caught on quickly, and Wall Street soon began to press companies to report growth in profits every quarter. Food companies, already selling products in an overabundant marketplace, now also had to grow their profits—and constantly.

Companies got some help when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 on a platform of corporate deregulation. Reagan-era deregulatory policies removed limits on television marketing of food products to children and on health claims on food packages.

Companies now had much more flexibility in advertising their products.

Together, these factors led food companies to consolidate, become larger, seek new markets, and find creative ways to expand sales in existing markets. The collateral result was a changed society. Today, in contrast to the early 1980s, it is socially acceptable to eat in places never before meant as restaurants, at any time of day, and in increasingly large

amounts—all factors that encourage greater calorie intake. Food is now available in places never seen before: bookstores, libraries, and stores primarily selling drugs and cosmetics, gasoline, office supplies, furniture, and clothing.

As a result of the increased supply of food, prices dropped. It became relatively inexpensive to eat outside the home, especially at fast-food restaurants, and such places proliferated. Food prepared outside the home tends to be higher in calories, fast food especially so. It’s not that people necessarily began to eat worse diets. They were just eating more food in general and, therefore, gaining weight. This happened with children, too. National food consumption surveys indicate that children get more of their daily calories from fast-food outlets than they do from schools, and that fast food is the largest contributor to the calories they consume outside the home.

To increase sales, companies promoted snacking. The low cost of basic food commodities allowed them to produce new snack products—twenty thousand or so a year, nearly half candies, gum, chips, and sodas.

It became normal for children to regularly consume fast foods, snacks, and sodas. An astonishing 40 percent of the calories in the diets of children and adolescents now derive from such foods. In adults and children, the habitual consumption of sodas and snacks is associated with increases in calorie intake and body weight.

Food quantity is the critical issue in weight gain. Once foods became relatively inexpensive in comparison to the cost of rent or labor, companies could offer foods and beverages in larger sizes at favorable prices as a means to attract bargain-conscious customers. Larger portions have more calories.

But they also encourage people to eat more and to underestimate the number of calories consumed. The well-documented increase in portion sizes since 1980 is by itself sufficient to explain rising levels of obesity.

Food prices are also a major factor in food choice. It is difficult to argue against low prices and I won’t—except to note that the current industrialized food system aims at

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Even educated and relatively wealthy consumers have trouble dealing with this “eat more” environment. producing food as cheaply as possible, externalizing the real costs to the environment and to human health. Prices, too, are a matter of policy. In the United States, the indexed price of sodas and snack foods has declined since 1980, but that of fruits and vegetables has increased by as much as 40 percent. The farm bill subsidizes animal feed and the ingredients in sodas and snack foods; it does not subsidize fruits and vegetables. How changes in food prices brought on by growth of crops for biofuels will affect health is as yet unknown but unlikely to be beneficial.

The deregulation of marketing also contributes to current obesity levels. Food companies spend billions of dollars a year to encourage people to buy their products, but foods marketed as “healthy”—whether or not they are—particularly encourage greater consumption. Federal agencies attempting to regulate food marketing, especially to children, have been blocked at every turn by food industries dependent on highly profitable “junk” foods for sales. Although food companies argue that body weight is a matter of personal choice, the power of today’s overabundant, ubiquitous, and aggressively marketed food environment to promote greater calorie intake is enough to overcome biological controls over eating behavior. Even educated and relatively wealthy consumers have trouble dealing with this “eat more” environment.

Fixing the Farm Bill What could agriculture policies do to improve health now and in the future? Also plenty.

When I first started teaching nutrition in the mid-1970s, my classes already included readings on the need to reform agricultural policy. Since then, one administration after another has tried to eliminate the most egregious subsidies (like those to landowners who don’t farm) but failed when confronted with

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early primaries in Iowa. Defenders of the farm bill argue that the present system works well to ensure productivity, global competitiveness, and food security. Tinkering with the bill, they claim, will make little difference and could do harm. I disagree. The farm bill needs more than tinkering. It needs a major overhaul.

My vision for the farm bill would restructure it to go beyond feeding people at the lowest possible cost to achieve several utopian goals: Support farmers: The American Enterprise Institute and other conservative groups argue that farming is a business like any other and deserves no special protections. My NYU class thought otherwise. Food is essential for life, and government’s role must be to ensure adequate food for people at an affordable price. Farmers deserve some help dealing with financial and climate risks, and some need it more than others. The farm bill should especially support more sustainable smaller-scale farming methods. And such programs should be available to farmers of fruits and vegetables and designed to encourage beginning farmers to grow specialty crops.

Support the environment: The farm bill should require recipients of benefits to engage in environmentally sound production and conservation practices. Production agriculture accounts for a significant fraction—10 percent to 20 percent—of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sustainable farming methods have been shown to reduce emissions, return valuable nutrients to soil, and reduce the need for polluting pesticides and fertilizers, with only marginal losses in productivity.

Support human health: The United States does not currently grow enough fruits and vegetables to meet minimal dietary recommendations. The 2008 farm bill explicitly prohibits farms receiving support payments from growing fruits and vegetables. Instead, the bill should provide incentives for growing specialty crops. Support payments should be linked to requirements for farm-based safety procedures that prevent contamination with pathogens and pesticides.

Support farm workers: This one is obvious.

Any farm receiving support benefits must pay its workers a living wage and adhere to all laws regarding housing and safety—in spirit as well as in letter.

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Link nutrition policy to agricultural policy: If we must have SNAP in the farm bill, let’s take advantage of that connection. Suppose SNAP benefits had to be spent mostly on real rather than processed foods, and were worth more when spent at farmers’ markets. Pilot projects along these lines have been shown to work brilliantly. Consider what something like this might do for the income of small farmers as well as for the health of food assistance recipients. Policies that enable low-income families to access healthy foods wherever they shop are beyond the scope of the farm bill, but must also be part of any utopian agenda.

Apply health and conservation standards to animal agriculture: The livestock title of the farm bill should require animals to be raised and slaughtered humanely. It should require strict adherence to environmental and safety standards for conservation and protection of soil, water, and air quality.

Utopian? Absolutely. In the current political climate, the best anyone can hope for is a crumb or two thrown in these directions.

The secret process for developing the 2012 farm bill contained a few such crumbs—more money for farmers’ markets and for programs to take SNAP benefits further when spent on fruits and vegetables. Whether that bill would have been better or worse than the one we eventually end up with remains to be seen.

But the failure of that process provides an opportunity to work toward a healthier food system by restructuring farm bill programs to focus them on health, safety, and environmental goals and social justice. These goals are well worth advocating now and in the future.

The one bright ray of hope about the farm bill comes from the burgeoning food movement. Grassroots groups working to promote local and regional foods, farmers’ markets, urban farming, farm-to-school programs, animal welfare, and farm workers’

rights join a long and honorable history of social movements such as those aimed at civil rights, women’s rights, and environmentalism.

Changing the food system is equally radical.

But food has one particular advantage for advocacy. Food is universal. Everyone eats.

Food is an easy entry point into conversations about social inequities. Even the least political person can understand injustices in the food system and be challenged to work to redress them.

Occupy Big Food is an integral part of Occupy Wall Street; it should not be viewed as a special interest. The issues that drive both are the same: corporate control of government and society. The food movement—in all of its forms—seeks better health for people and the planet, goals that benefit everyone. It deserves the support of everyone advocating for democratic rights.

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University.

She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and, with Malden Nesheim, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics. She blogs at www.foodpolitics.com and tweets @marionnestle.

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Hijacked Organic, Limited Local, Faulty Fair Trade What’s a Radical to Eat?

MARK ENGLER

Organic farming has been hijacked by big business. Local food can have a larger carbon footprint than products shipped in from overseas. Fair trade doesn’t address the real concerns of farmers in the global South.

As the food movement has moved from the countercultural fringe to become a mainstream phenomenon, organic, local, and fair trade advocates have been beset by criticism from overt foes and erstwhile allies alike. Now that Starbucks advertises fair trade coffee and Kraft owns Boca soy burgers, it’s fair to ask, “What’s a radical to eat?”

Discerning the worth of different food movement offshoots to the radical eater means grappling with the attacks leveled against organic, local, and fair trade. It means acknowledging the values that these approaches hold in common, while also evaluating their distinct emphases. And it requires pushing beyond individual mealtime decisions and instead asserting food as a field of public struggle.

The starting point for all branches of the food movement is a critique of industrial farming. Today, denunciation of a monocropped, chemically fortified, meat-heavy, factory-farmed, synthetically processed, and globalized approach to feeding the world is not hard to find.

Indeed, over the past several decades this has been the subject of thousands of Diets for a Small Planet and Fast Food Nations. Many of these exposés have been very valuable.

Indeed, they have had significant impact in 2 0 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

raising public skepticism about the large corporations that dominate our food system.

Yet the claims of these manifestos have not been universally accepted—in large part because of agribusiness’s dominance. There is no shortage of Farm Bureau lobbying, industry-funded research, or “free market” apologists to defend corporations against the food movement’s capture of the left plank of the American dinner table. Whether industry defenders are on the payroll of a food conglomerate or have merely internalized an awe of “green revolution” abundance, they are ever ready to extol the wonders of modern agricultural production. Their arguments hold little interest for the radical eater.

A second set of criticisms of organic, local, and fair trade come from those who might be called liberal contrarians. These critics present themselves as sympathetic to the aims of food activists—the reduction of pesticide use, the spread of sustainable farming practices, better wages for farm workers. But then they attack movement methods as misguided or unproductive. (“It is not that I mind eating locally…” a Time Out food writer clarifies, “It is just the extremes that bother me.”)

Usually, liberal contrarians will present their positions as daring and counter-intuitive.

They are unafraid to voice the unpopular truth about organics, they tell us, even if it means risking scorn from their urbane peers.

This is either self-deception or a calculated pose. More often than not, these supposed mavericks simply recycle neoclassical economic orthodoxy about global markets producing the best possible results. And, just as they are often not very contrarian, they

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sometimes aren’t actually liberals. (“There is nothing wrong with being concerned about the working conditions. . .but we don’t believe Fairtrade is the most effective model,” says the Adam Smith Foundation.)

There are times, however, when contrarian stances will draw from or overlap with the arguments of more disciplined detractors.

Of particular note are the views of longtime food activists disgusted by the dilution of the movement’s core principles over time.

Also valuable are critics grounded in a more substantive critique of the market system than that held by alternative food promoters themselves.

The radical eater listens for these latter voices and seeks to separate their arguments from the muck of food industry propaganda.

Hijacked Organic Of the troubling trends within the food movement, the hijacking of organic is perhaps the most well-known story. According to the Organic Trade Association, sales of organic food and beverages in the United States increased to $26.7 billion in 2010, from just $1 billion in 1990. The skyrocketing growth of the sector, combined with the fact that buyers are willing to pay a significant premium for organic food, has attracted keen and corrosive interest from agribusiness corporations.

As early as 2005, the New York Times reported on the decision of McDonald’s to sell organic coffee as a pilot initiative in New England, in partnership with Newman’s Own and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. While still underappreciated at that time, such close relations between “alternative” producers and food industry titans were becoming the rule rather than the exception. Big players were moving to acquire organic brands or develop their own. As the Times noted: General Mills markets the Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen brands; Kraft owns Back to Nature and Boca Foods, which makes soy burgers. Within the last few years, Dean Foods, the dairy giant, has acquired Horizon Organic and White Wave, maker of Silk organic soymilk. Groupe Danone, the French dairy company, owns Stonyfield Farm.

Created by Erika Lade of Occupy Big Food

By 2006, the secret was out. A rash of articles appeared about what CNN dubbed, “The Battle for the Soul of the Organic Movement.” Kellogg, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Smucker’s, and Sara Lee had all entered the fray. Soon, Wal-Mart would move aggressively to position itself as the world’s largest seller of organic products. (Definitive numbers are not available, but it appears likely that it has succeeded.) In his influential 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, writer Michael Pollan described the corporations’ mode of food production and distribution as “industrial organic”—a juxtaposition of terms that would have seemed an oxymoron to the movement pioneers of a few decades earlier.

Narrowly defined, “organic” means growing food without synthetic chemicals.

But the movement was initially interested in promoting a robust vision of sustainable farming. It sought to challenge the industrial system’s vast, uniform plantations, its exploitation of farm workers, and its love of heavily processed food. As Pollan writes, “Acting on the ecological premise that everything’s connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemicalfree farms), but an alternative system of distribution (the anti-capitalist food co-ops), and even an alternative mode of consumption (the

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‘countercuisine’).”

With the rise of industrial organic, these more revolutionary impulses have disappeared. Corporations have adopted practices that make a mockery of what people think they are buying when they pay extra for an eco-friendly label. For one, major organic brands now source from across the globe.

Stonyfield yogurt uses milk from New Zealand, bananas from Ecuador, and apple products from Turkey. Costco gets organic peanuts from China, a country not known for rigorous environmental regulation. And these are not isolated examples.

Even within the United States, organic farming is no longer primarily the domain of small family operations. Massive farms in California growing organic lettuce and other vegetables appear almost identical to conventional agribusiness fields, except that compost, rather than chemical fertilizer, is applied to the crops. The Cornucopia Institute, a watchdog group, has denounced regulatory loopholes that allow chicken and egg producers to keep the organic label (by virtue of using chemicalfree animal feed) despite maintaining “giant henhouses to confine up to 100,000 birds in a single building—without access to the outdoors (as the law requires).”

Since the government assumed a role in setting official rules for the use of “organic” in the 1990s, activists have waged a prolonged battle in Washington, D.C. Through what the movement-based Organic Consumers Association calls “constant vigilance and mobilization,” they have been able to hold off the worst of corporate attempts to water down standards, and they have kept some egregious inputs (most famously, irradiated sludge) from being allowed. Yet, in the fields, enforcement is spotty. Moreover, companies that are willing to downgrade their labels to “made with organic ingredients” can get away with putting manifold synthetic creations into food and still stick a green-sounding seal on their products.

The ex-hippies who have accepted appointments as mid-level executives in multinational food conglomerates (such as Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg, author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World) justify their companies’ actions as being necessary if

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chemical-free farming is ever to reach a broad scale. They say they are “bringing organics to the masses.” The radical eater will be more sympathetic to the contention, advanced by syndicated food columnist Ari LeVaux, that “Even as the demand for organic food continues to explode, organic farmers in America are getting thrown under the very beet cart they helped build.”

Limited Local The local food movement—with an emphasis on supporting farmers within a limited distance of where one lives, reducing one’s carbon footprint, and eating seasonally—offers a second approach to taking on the abuses of industrial agriculture. Worldwatch magazine reported that “in the United States alone, sales of locally grown foods, worth about $4 billion in 2002, could reach as much as $7 billion by 2011.” Although there is certainly overlap between local and organic adherents, locavores may be unconcerned with whether all their food is strictly chemical-free. And many couldn’t care less about whether producers participate in government labeling schemes.

Like organic, local food has drawn numerous detractors. Some of these are not credible. Defenders of “free trade” furiously charge locavores with neglecting (in the words of the popular Freakonomics blog) the “high crop yields and low costs” of globalized markets, thus promoting inefficient land use.

Of course, this position ignores all of the hidden costs of the modern food system—the subsidies and environmental contaminations—that compelled a critique in the first place.

A second line of naysayers contends that, if we help local growers with our purchases, we deprive farmers in the developing world who may more desperately need our patronage. For this reason, Benito Mueller of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies argued in 2007 that the British have a “moral duty to eat African strawberries at Christmas.”

This argument accepts the dubious premise that advanced industrial nations have done the global South a favor by locking it into a system of export-led agriculture.

For their part, liberal contrarians focus

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on attacking the concept of “food miles.” In the early 2000s, Rich Pirog and a team of researchers at Iowa State University analyzed the production of more than two dozen fruits and vegetables. They calculated that the average food item going through the industrial system travels 1,500 miles from the field to your neighborhood grocery store. Since then, this idea of trying to measure—and to minimize—the number of miles food travels on its way to your plate has become a popular conceit. It provides an easy way to talk about the nefarious complexity and CO2-spewing reach of the industrial food system.

As cynics are eager to point out, however, there are some problems with the “food miles” concept. First of all, not all miles travelled are equal. Cargo ships and freight trains moving many tons of food make relatively efficient use of fuel. Therefore, even if a bulk shipment crosses a great distance, the CO2 emissions associated with moving, say, a single pound of pears from Chile might be small. In contrast, when a multitude of local farmers deliver small orders of fruit to market in their old, gas-guzzling pickup trucks, the emissions-perpound are high, even if the distance travelled is limited.

Second, instead of focusing only on the transportation of food to market, critics argue that we must consider CO2 emissions over the entire life cycle of a food product. One oftencited UK study concluded that its better for the English to eat tomatoes shipped in from Spain, which are grown in the sun, rather than dining on local tomatoes produced in a greenhouse, which requires heat from fossil fuels. By railing against imports, the detractors say, locavores miss the bigger picture.

The point is fair, but also limited. Most local eaters are not obsessed simply with the distance their food has travelled. Rather, they promote localism as a means of encouraging an array of sustainable practices. If producers are growing for a local market in limited quantities, it is more likely they rotate between a variety of crops and are committed to more intimate stewardship over the land in question. Conversely, the low prices paid for food on the international market virtually require that farmers plant large monoculture acreages of a single commodity and try to

Farm Aid (farmaid.org)

profit through volume.

Defenders of local food emphasize community—the notion that buying near home fosters a rich and transparent network of relationships between farmers, retailers, and consumers. It creates a sense of accountability, since consumers can verify for themselves what kind of operation is producing their food. In contrast, as one advocate says, “distance kills community.” In a globalized system, the relationships involved in food production are concealed; the methods of farming and conditions of labor are impossible to trace.

This defense of local food is compelling.

Yet, like organics a decade ago, the movement is in a vulnerable phase. Giant food companies are pushing into the market, with Wal-Mart having announced plans in 2008 to spend $400 million annually on produce grown locally. While “community” sounds nice, how many people actually conduct visits to fact-check advertising claims and see how their food is produced? If the industry exerts a downward pressure on standards, “local” will no longer be a reliable marker of sustainable agriculture.

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This danger gives the radical eater pause.

Faulty Fair Trade The “fair trade” food movement, which emerged in the 1990s, is better established in Europe than in the United States.

Nevertheless, it is gaining popularity internationally. Fair trade coffee and chocolate—the movement’s two most significant products— are widely available in stores. Other goods on the market include fair trade bananas, cotton, sugar, honey, tea, and cut flowers, sourced from more than fifty countries.

The basic idea is that fair trade companies guarantee their producers—traditionally, small, worker-run farming cooperatives in the global South—a minimum price for their crops. This creates stability, allowing the farmers to cover their costs of production even if the market takes a plunge. Buyers also

“What is a radical to eat?” is the wrong question. The right one is, “What are we willing to fight for?”

provide an extra “premium” to the cooperatives. This can be used for social programs or for farm improvements. In short, consumers pay a little more for their cup of coffee or chocolate bar marked with the international Fairtrade label, and workers abroad reap the benefits. The New York Times reported in November that $1.3 billion in fair trade goods were sold in the U.S. in 2010, while $5.8 billion were sold globally.

Yet, as with the other food movement offshoots, not everyone believes that fair trade is fulfilling its noble aspirations. The original fair trade companies were solidarity-minded operations like the Massachusetts-based Equal Exchange, devoted to creating a more just and sustainable food system. But with the movement’s growth has come the predictable invasion of the corporate conglomerates.

Nestlé, Dole, and Coca-Cola have had particular products certified as fair trade, although they have hardly changed their

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overall business models. Critics worry that Starbucks and McDonald’s have been able to use the seal to sanitize their corporate images, even though only a small fraction of the coffee they sell is fair trade. Whole Foods and Wal-Mart use fair trade raw materials in some store-brand products, but whether the finished items reflect equitable trade relationships is questionable. Fair Trade USA courted international controversy in September when it announced, as the New York Times explained, that it would “place its seal on products with as little as 10 percent fair trade ingredients, compared with a minimum of 20 percent required in other countries.” Obviously, even 20 percent is not a number that will impress the radical eater.

Beyond this lies a critique of the fundamental economics behind the movement.

“Free market” proponents argue that the fair trade premium merely encourages farmers to stick with a losing commodity, even when the market says it is untenable. It feeds overproduction, drags down future prices, and prolongs the process of campesinos finding a better crop or changing livelihoods altogether.

As right-wing economist Gene Callahan writes of fair trade coffee, “A caffeinated price means more growers, more land destruction, more dependency on a single cash crop.”

Surprisingly, in this case many radicals agree with the conservatives—at least in part.

The export-based market system has never given small farmers a fair shake, and a modest additional subsidy does nothing to change this. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and former analyst at the think tank Food First, classifies fair trade as essentially a form of charity. “The basic price of agricultural goods is low,” he writes, While Fair Trade raises it slightly, the price is not nearly high enough to sustain, much less develop, communities in the Global South. The process of Fair Trade commodities also encourages monoculture—it sucks farmers and rural economies into a single crop. It hitches fortunes of vast parts of the world to desires in the Global North. If you can afford it, you can throw a penny or two to the people who grow your brew or the beans for your chocolate bar. But it’s still the consumer desires, consumer charity,

FOOD and consumer pity that govern the lives, and plantations, of lands far away, with the choices, aspirations, dignity, and demands of the Global South still counting for very little.

Elsewhere Patel writes, “‘fair trade’ isn’t a cure for poverty. It’s a Band-Aid, a temporary patch.”

Fair trade defenders respond that, whatever its limitations, the label helps spread consciousness. It is an invitation, they contend, to critically examine the unfair relationships that govern most food imports and to express solidarity with producers. But even more than local food advocates’ call to “community,” this appeal to “consciousness” rests on an optimistic assumption about how much someone’s choice at the checkout counter will translate into more substantive engagement.

The radical eater views this as suspect.

Personal Consumption, Collective Action Eating is our most basic form of consumption.

And so maybe it is not surprising that the most prominent strains of the food movement are based around consumer decisions.

“Consumers have the ultimate control,” said David Granatstein of Washington State University to the Sound Consumer newsletter.

“They have to be willing to pay for it and the market will shape it.” In Time magazine, Fedele Bauccio, founder of a top organic catering company, echoed this sentiment: “Ultimately it’s going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington.”

Such attitudes abound. Yet they represent the true weakness of organic, local, and fair trade approaches to food issues. They suggest that our most significant decisions are those we make while shopping.

As so often when encountering the limits of liberalism, the role of the radical is to take the issue of food out of the realm of individual action; it is to insist that collective movements be organized to demand political

solutions to what are, in the end, political problems. “What is a radical to eat?” is the wrong question. The right one is, “What are we willing to fight for?”

Those with enough money will always be able to create a market for healthy, sustainably grown food, produced under dignified working conditions. Whether the world’s majority will ever be able to afford such food—whether the economy will ever be designed to produce it on a wide scale—will depend on changing many things, from the subsidy structures that hide the true cost of wanton fossil fuel use and heedless soil degradation to the power relationships that allow farmers in the global South to ship off export crops while themselves suffering from malnutrition. Such changes will involve political conflict.

Fortunately, organic, local, and fair trade consumerism are not all the food movement has to offer. While not as popularly known, other strains of the movement challenge industrial food production in more systemic and overtly political ways. The drive for “food sovereignty,” spearheaded by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, includes demands for debt relief, women’s rights, and land reform in its approach to food justice.

“Beyond organic” activists and proponents of agroecological farming are working to return to the holistic-minded principles that motivated the organic trailblazers of earlier decades, to revive anti-capitalist aspects of the movement’s critique, and to restore the core notion that everything is connected to everything else.

The industrial food system has proven adept at co-opting its critics when they think of themselves in its preferred terms, as consumers. The radical eater, in contrast, is first a citizen.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

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High-End Food, Low-Wage Labor LAURIE WOOLEVER

Some people work in restaurants as a lifestyle choice: they love the fast pace, the quick jokes, the often easy-flowing booze. At the height of a busy shift, if everything’s going right, a team of skilled cooks and waiters can enter a kind of adrenaline-fueled flow state that’s hypnotic and addictive. Some people choose it because they got burned out as grad students or software engineers or attorneys.

Some people work in restaurants to make money until they graduate or get their big break in show business. It can be lucrative, especially for young, good-looking, and agile waiters, working for a great employer in a big city, where customers practically fight for the chance to buy expensive wines and $50 entrées and truffle supplements from the latest hotspot.

But for many others, restaurant work is neither a fun lifestyle choice nor the fulfillment of a foodie dream. It’s a job, a way to feed and house themselves and their families. The barriers to entry in the industry may be low, but the work is repetitive and hard, the conditions can be uncomfortable or even dangerous, and each job requires some specialized skills.

The United States has surely made the transition from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, and that’s good news for American restaurants, which, according to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), take in 49 cents of every dollar spent on food. Despite two recessions inside of a decade, the restaurant industry’s sales grew from $379 billion in 2000 to more than $604 billion in 2011.

This continued growth and success have yet, however, to catch up to many of the more than twelve million people who work in the industry. In November 2011, the average 2 6 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

weekly earning for an employee in a fullservice restaurant was $274, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s an annual income of $14,248, which puts a family of two or more below the poverty line.

Only a small fraction of American restaurant workers have health insurance or paid sick days, and stories of wage theft, both inadvertent and intended, are common. For every high-salary executive chef or waiter who takes home hundreds of dollars in tips per shift, there are many more dishwashers, prep cooks, or bussers applying for public assistance; using a public hospital’s emergency room as a doctor’s office; or living in a car, unable to afford housing. Is the current restaurant model being subsidized by underpaid employees?

What is the true cost of dinner in a restaurant, and is the dining public willing to pay it?

Low Profits, Low Wages Ask any restaurateur, and he or she will tell you that it’s not a big-profit business. “It’s a very difficult business to make money in, as an owner,” says Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of Back Forty, in New York City. “If you’re making any kind of profit, you’re already ahead of the game. Lots of restaurants go out of business because they couldn’t make a profit. Any black number is a good number.” Tom Colicchio, chef and owner of Craft Restaurants, with outlets in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Mashantucket, Connecticut, concurs, saying, “People think that restaurants make a boatload of money. They see a busy restaurant and think the margins are 30 percent, like retail.” Restaurant profit margins, according to owners’ self-reports, typically range from 2 percent to 8 percent.

Food prices are on the rise worldwide, as are rents in many urban areas in the United States, despite the economic downturn. In

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order to preserve profits, restaurant owners often look for ways to save money on labor, which normally makes up about 30 percent of a restaurant’s operating budget. Paying employees the minimum wage is an easy place to start.

The NRA, the nation’s largest restaurant trade organization, has long lobbied against raising the minimum wage. In 1996, Herman Cain, onetime 2012 GOP presidential hopeful and alleged serial sexual harasser, became its chair and then CEO. The previous year, Cain, as CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, had testified to a joint economic committee in Washington that a proposed minimum wage increase, from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour, would destroy jobs and price first-time job seekers out of the market. Once at the helm of the NRA, Cain used the organization’s resources to try to block an increase in both the minimum wage and the tipped minimum wage (the lowest wage that an employer can pay a tipped employee, providing that income from tips, combined with the base wage, equals the federal minimum wage). The custom in the United States of “voluntarily” tipping for good service is a built-in payroll subsidy for restaurant owners and, those owners argue, a way to keep prices affordable, which reflects the troubling and false notion that affordable restaurant food is an inalienable right more valuable than restaurant workers’ well-being.

Established in 1966, the tipped minimum wage was originally intended to equal no less than 50 percent of the federal minimum wage—but it’s now been at $2.13, just 29.4 percent of the federal minimum, since 1991, and was frozen there in 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Minimum Wage Increase Act, which effectively decoupled the tipped minimum from the federal minimum.

According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED), “Inflation has eroded the purchasing power of the tipped minimum wage; as a result, the real value of the tipped minimum wage is at its lowest level since it was established in 1966.” Workers in some states receive a higher minimum or tipped minimum wage than the federal rate, but across the board, tipped workers are more than twice as likely

as workers in other fields to fall under the federal poverty line, according to the EPI/ CWED study.

Unfreezing the tipped minimum wage is one of the main goals of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC-United), a national restaurant workers’ organization whose mission is to improve wages and conditions in the industry. Founded in New York City in 2001 with the original goal of helping 350 displaced workers from Windows on the World, a restaurant atop the destroyed World Trade Center, ROC-United now has affiliates in New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Michigan; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Miami; and Washington, D.C. Among its many initiatives are two worker-owned and run restaurants, in New York City and Detroit, both called COLORS, that provide job skills training. COLORS rents part of its restaurant space to ROC, which provides worker training, an arrangement that in turn allows COLORS to pay its employees a sustainable wage. ROC has worked closely with Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland on H.R. 631, the WAGES (Working for Adequate Gains for Employment in Services) Act, which would return the tipped minimum wage to 70 percent of the federal minimum over two years. Introduced in February 2011, it is currently in committee.

Every time there is a proposed minimum wage hike, business groups such as the NRA and the politicians in their pockets sound the old neoclassical warning about dire effects on profits and jobs. According to a recent NRA Public Policy Issue brief, Wage mandates are an ineffective way to reduce poverty and cause restaurant operators to make very difficult decisions to eliminate jobs, cut staff hours or increase prices. These decisions end up hurting the very employees that wage increases are meant to help.

Numerous studies indicate the opposite: that higher minimum wages do not in fact decrease employment. David Card and Alan B. Krueger’s 1994 study, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food

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Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” published in the American Economic Review, was a landmark piece of research that refuted job-loss claims. A paper by Arindrajit Dube, William Lester, and Michael Reich that built on Card and Krueger’s research design, “Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders,” published in the November 2010 issue of Review of Economics and Statistics, “found that increases in the minimum wage raise workers’ earnings without reducing employment,” according to a summary by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

Working Sick, Without Insurance More recently, the NRA has been outspoken in its support of Senator Orrin Hatch’s American Job Protection Act (S.20), currently in committee, which would repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requirement that employers with more than fifty full-time-equivalent employees offer affordable health benefits by 2014 or face penalties. From a September 2011 NRA press release: “We are an industry with a high percentage of young, mobile, part-time workers, as well as an industry comprised mostly of small businesses. These businesses will be negatively impacted, and jobs lost, if the employer mandate is not repealed or changed,” said Scott DeFife, Executive Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs for the National Restaurant Association.

“The National Restaurant Association appreciates the leadership of Senator Hatch and Congressmen Boustany, Tiberi and Barrow for standing up for restaurant industry jobs.”

Despite the fact that the NRA counts among its members about 175 corporations (including 7-Eleven, Burger King, McDonalds, Marriott International, Starbucks, and Walt Disney World), it is often small restaurants, without the benefit of bulk buying power or sophisticated accounting offices or national brand recognition, that have figured out how to stand up for the people who actually perform restaurant industry jobs.

Celina Tio, chef and owner of Julian in

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Kansas City, Missouri, pays half the premium on her full-time employees’ health and dental insurance plans. Tio explained that in order to afford this, “the only cuts I have made are to my profit.” Gerard Craft, chef and owner of Niche and two offshoot restaurants in St. Louis, Missouri, also covers half the cost of full-time employees’ insurance premiums. For Craft, it’s a way to attract the best employees: “At the end of the day this is an incredibly tough industry with incredibly low margins, but if you can take care of the people who are taking care of you, it’s kind of a win-win.”

Tom Colicchio’s restaurants cover a share of their employees’ health insurance premiums as well. “I think everybody should have health insurance,” he says. “The idea of the transient employee, the college student waiting tables, that’s not how we operate.

People have families to take care of.” As for how his business can afford it, Colicchio says that having benefits creates an incentive for workers to remain in their jobs. “We’re not constantly training people, we don’t have a lot of turnover, so that saves us some money.” According to J. Bruce Tracey, an associate professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, employee turnover can be enormously expensive to a restaurant, eating up, conservatively, between 15 percent and 30 percent of gross wages on a per-employee basis—money that, if saved, could certainly be applied to health benefits or higher wages.

Part-time workers, often not eligible for insurance coverage, would still benefit from the right to earn paid sick days, as would those full-time workers in restaurants whose bottom line could truly not absorb the additional cost of health insurance. However, of the more than 4,300 restaurant workers surveyed nationwide by ROC and various local industry groups, fewer than 13 percent reported having paid sick days, and 63 percent reported working while sick, rather than lose a day’s wages. A cook with twenty-five years’ experience in the industry told ROC-Maine, For me, what kind of benefits have I received? Honestly, like none.…We don’t have any sick day benefits at all. If you’re sick you just don’t get paid.…Not having any benefits has affected my family because,

FOOD when I get sick my family has to pay for it, which is really, really expensive. So I just usually try to suck it up.

“Everyone in this business has a story of going to work sick,” said Andrea Lemoins, co-coordinator at ROC-Philadelphia. “It’s a public health issue. Restaurants are vectors for whatever virus is going around in a given season.” This author recalls a day from her own time working in a busy fine dining kitchen, in which a line cook working with a stomach virus would periodically turn to vomit in a wastebasket while preparing customers’ meals. Food-borne illness outbreaks, whose likelihood would be greatly diminished in a paid-sick-days environment, represent an enormous expense to a restaurant, with industry estimates ranging from $42,000 to $75,000 per incident, and significantly more if a serious illness or death results.

Wage Theft Wage theft of many varieties is common in the restaurant business. It can be inadvertent, as when an employer isn’t fully aware of all the facets of what can be very complex labor laws; it can also be intentional. Some owners are reluctant to change once-legal payment practices that have been outlawed by new labor laws, or claim ignorance to protect the bottom line. Wage theft can take different forms, depending on whether it’s perpetrated against front of the house staff (waiters, bussers, bartenders, who are tipped) or back of the house staff (cooks, dishwashers, cleaners, who are paid a straight hourly wage or salary).

“There’s no question that every variety of sleazy scam is at work on the floor, in the front of the house,” said chef-turned-author (and my sometime employer) Anthony Bourdain, whose memoir of a twenty-eightyear restaurant career, Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, shines a light on some of the unsavory facets of the business. Credit card companies charge businesses, including restaurants, a small per-transaction fee, and some owners take money from the waiters’ tip pool to cover that cost, a practice Bourdain calls “appalling. By the time [waiters] are

taxed out, their paycheck is almost nothing.

If you make the money for the house, you should get to keep all of your cut of it.”

In November 2011, with support from ROC-Philadelphia and the Taxi Worker’s Alliance for Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s City Council passed the Gratuity Protection Bill, which prohibits business owners from taking any portion of a tipped employee’s earnings to cover business expenses.

Tipped employees’ earnings are jeopardized to a greater extent when owners subsidize the wages of non-tipped employees, such as managers, maitre d’s, silver polishers, and napkin folders, by adding them to the tip pool, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Maimon Kirschenbaum, a plaintiff’s attorney who has handled more than a hundred wage-violation cases for employees of New York City restaurants, says, “Restaurants throw all kinds of people into the tip pool as a way of not having to pay them. There’s so much money in the tip pool that historically it’s been very easy [for owners] to take advantage of that.” Roughly 15 percent of the workers surveyed by ROC-United in eight areas of the United States report having a portion of their tips illegally retained by management.

Kirschenbaum and his colleagues also handle cases against New York banquet hall owners and restaurants with private party rooms, which charge clients a service fee (often 20 percent, equivalent to a voluntary tip for excellent service), yet illegally retain some or all of that money, rather than distributing it to the waitstaff. He recently represented a woman whose only income was in tips; the restaurant owners did not pay her a wage at all.

In the back of the house, wage theft often takes the form of overtime violations, with employees not being paid extra for overtime hours worked or being paid less than minimum wage. In her 2009 book, Wage Theft in America, Kim Bobo, founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, writes, “Restaurants are notorious for stealing wages from workers … Every single IWJ-affiliated workers’ center regularly sees restaurant workers who haven’t been paid, with the worst abuse happening with dishwashers,

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table clearers and cooks who work in the back of the restaurants.”

Undocumented workers, who make up approximately 20 percent of the restaurant labor force nationwide, according to a 2008 analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center, are particularly vulnerable to wage theft, because the precariousness of their circumstance makes them less likely to complain or seek redress of grievances, for fear of being fired or deported.

Kirschenbaum said that he has counseled undocumented back-of-the-house workers with legitimate grievances not to bring lawsuits against their employers, because they had no legal protection against being fired.

Undocumented workers who are paid in cash have no record of wage-and-hour violations, and those who are paid “on the books” have provided invalid documents to create the appearance of satisfying owners’ legal requirements for hiring them. “What’s heartbreaking, and what people don’t understand, is that in order to hire these guys, you’re treating them as if they are legal,” says Anthony Bourdain, more than a decade after his book came out.

“They’re paying all their withholdings and taxes, but when refund time comes, they can’t claim anything, or make use of those benefits, because without a valid Social Security number, they don’t really exist. They’re paying into the system, but they’re not benefiting from it.”

Toward a Sustainable Model Despite the stagnant economy, restaurants continue to thrive, adding outlets, enjoying ever-increasing sales, and employing nearly 10 percent of the U.S. work force. Some workers also thrive in the industry, benefiting from sustainable pay and good workplace practices; others do not. Everyone who eats in restaurants, works in restaurants, owns restaurants, or purports to speak for restaurateurs has a part to play in moving the business toward a more sustainable labor model, in which all employees can earn a living wage, maintain their health, and be free from wage theft.

As the business has expanded, working conditions have improved for some workers.

Bourdain notes that immigrant workers have

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been given the opportunity to rise through the ranks in some restaurant kitchens, bringing their pay rate in line with their culinary school–trained counterparts as the workers began to recognize their own worth. In response to a dramatic rise in class-action lawsuits in the last five years, some restaurants have dispensed with shift pay, tip misappropriation, and other forms of wage theft. And new legislation, such as tip protection in Philadelphia, the Wage Theft Protection Act in New York, and recent minimum wage increases in San Francisco and Washington state all contribute to a more sustainable business model.

Nevertheless, owners fail to recognize the value of low employee turnover. In “New Target for The Occupy Movement: You,” a December 2011 Web editorial for the trade publication Restaurant Hospitality, editor Bob Krummert disparaged ROC’s attempts to publicize workers’ problems, writing, “Labor organizations showed up during the latter stages of Occupy Wall Street, eager to co-opt the movement’s energy for their own purposes,” and ending with, “Many customers may conclude that if a restaurant’s workers have complaints about their jobs, they should simply get another one. In the restaurant industry, it’s always easy to do.” Such an attitude demeans both workers and customers, and surely sets the stage for more costly employee turnover.

It is workers who must fight for improved wages and conditions for themselves and their colleagues, both on the job and within a larger organizational framework, be it the Occupy movement; justice organizations like ROC and its affiliates; the Department of Labor; the legal system; or, where they have been established, unions. It’s worth noting, however, that although opponents of ROC are quick to cry, “Union!” in response to its activities, ROC itself is not necessarily seeking to unionize workers. “The endgame is that all workers have dignity and respect on the job,” said Rekha Eanni-Rodriguez, speaking as co-director of ROC-NY (a position she left in November 2011). “Whether that happens through a union or ROC doesn’t really matter to us. It’s ultimately about building power and voice for the workers.” Fabricio Rodriguez

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(no relation), co-director of ROC-Philadelphia, who helped organize the Philadelphia Security Officers’ Union in 2010 before joining ROC, said, “[Restaurants] are just not a sector where the union model makes sense. There are thousands of employers with hundreds of different work arrangements. It just doesn’t lend itself to the union model.”

Fine-dining restaurants, in which some workers and owners willingly sacrifice pay and personal life for the chance to make art from food, do present challenges for employee organizing. However, a percentage of food and beverage workers in the United States have been unionized since 1891, when the American Federation of Labor chartered the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE). Originally segmented into separate affiliates by job title, HERE’s structure was revised in 1973, bringing all affiliates under one local for every region represented. In 2004, HERE, which found itself with limited resources as it organized low-wage workers in the growing restaurant, casino, and hotel sectors, merged with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), whose jobs had largely been moved offshore by the 1990s.

“UNITE was the union that had considerable resources to take on new organizing challenges, but did not have an industry anymore to organize,” said Evan Cobb, communications specialist for UNITE HERE. “At the time it certainly seemed like an ideal marriage of two organizations that would breathe a lot of new life into organizing drives, and it did that in its initial days.” Within five years, the two organizations split, a divorce that Cobb calls “somewhat tumultuous and extremely complicated.”

UNITE HERE now has about 275,000 members, a third of whom work in the food service sector, primarily in higher education food service, public school food service, in-flight catering, business and institutional cafeterias, airport concessions, and stadium and convention center concessions. With a few exceptions, including sommeliers and chefs at some high-end Las Vegas casino restaurants, and the employees of New York’s Central Park Boat House, who undertook a successful September 2011 campaign to

join the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, AFL-CIO, the majority of employees in full-service, freestanding restaurants are not unionized.

“At some stages of history, you would find cities with large numbers of restaurants with union workers, but [fine dining] is a much smaller part of the union at this point,” says Cobb, citing the industry’s high turnover rate and the shift to large corporate entities as reasons for the union’s decline in the high-end context.

Just as conscious consumers seek out locally grown, organic, or fair-trade foods, so must they recognize that low-priced food in restaurants is the result of damaging subsidies at one or more points in the food chain, be they agricultural subsidies that artificially depress prices or low wages that keep meal prices artificially low. We must start to examine and, if necessary, challenge the labor conditions in the restaurants where we eat. Voting with one’s feet and dollars is an important first step, albeit one that can only happen as a result of workers organizing and broadcasting their demands to owners and consumers.

In December 2011, ROC-United published the “ROC National Diners’ Guide 2012,” which indexes pay rates, sick-day policies, and opportunities for advancement at the top 150 highest-revenue-grossing restaurants in the United States, as well as conditions at the “high road” restaurants that have partnered with ROC. The guide, by no means comprehensive, is meant to be a starting point, said Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of ROC-United.

“The real discussion has to be about people demanding an increase in the minimum wage, demanding the right of all workers to earn paid sick days, and asking managers and employees about conditions in the restaurants where you spend money. We want consumers to start by using the guide, but I think there’s a myth out there that the individual food choices we make are going to change the industry. They’re not. It can’t just be about our individual choices.”

We may also look to the Danish example, where restaurant prices are high, employees are generally happy, and business is

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better than ever. “Lunch in a restaurant in Denmark—a sandwich, a salad and soup and a glass of wine—it’s $100 if it’s a nickel,” says Mitchell Davis, vice president of the James Beard Foundation, which offers events, programs, and education around the culture of food. “And it’s because the employees are paid full wages, and everyone gets full benefits.

There’s a 25 percent tax added to every transaction in Denmark, and so you lead a different life than you might in the States—you have different expectations—but the restaurants are full, and there are tons of them. So there’s clearly another successful way to operate restaurants, but people have to believe in paying higher prices.”

We may also look to the Italian or French examples, where restaurant prices are higher than in the United States, because waiters are paid a living wage and taxes are higher, yet business remains vibrant.

However, Davis (and others interviewed for this story) also pointed out the recent example of France, where a new thirty-five-hour work week and other labor reforms in the finedining sector have increased the cost of doing business to the point that many restaurants are now closed two or more days per week, rendering them less profitable and in jeopardy of closing altogether.

Occasionally, worker organizing dovetails with a consumer boycott, creating a ripple effect far beyond the initial protest. In New York, workers from two outlets of the Saigon Grill restaurant group spent nearly two years picketing the restaurants and calling for a consumer boycott in protest of wage-andhour violations and retaliation firings against delivery workers who were paid less than $2 per hour and intended to file a wage-and-hour lawsuit. In 2008, the workers were awarded

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a $4.6 million settlement for federal and state labor law violations, and Saigon Grill owners Simon and Michelle Nget were arrested and charged with falsifying records and evidence tampering; Simon was given a threemonth jail sentence. The two outlets, one in Greenwich Village near New York University, and one on the Upper West Side, were sold to separate owners. At the Upper West Side branch, ongoing labor issues, including wageand-hour violations, age discrimination, and the new owners’ failure to pay the balance of the workers’ settlement as promised, have led to renewed picketing and a boycott, under the auspices of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association and National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS). Inspired by the Saigon Grill workers and led by NMASS, community members, faith-based organizations, and students have now embarked on a campaign to make the Upper West Side a “sweatshop-free zone,” with sixty businesses, including restaurants, nail salons, pharmacies, and other retailers, pledging to follow fair workplace practices and comply with all labor laws. Tracy Kwon, an organizer with the Justice Will Be Served campaign, also an NMASS project, described the picket at the heart of this campaign. “On any day, you’ll see workers from factories in New Jersey, workers from other restaurants on the Upper West Side, community members, residents, and people whose work is taking care of children or the elderly. It’s not just the workers from Saigon Grill. So you wonder, do they just want to see these specific workers at Saigon Grill get justice? Or are they all just fed up with the state of affairs for workers in general?”

Laurie Woolever is a graduate of Cornell University and the French Culinary Institute. She works as a writer and editor in New York City.

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Prêt-à-Manger Why the French Have Their Cake and Eat It, Too

KAREN BAKKER LE BILLON

Even if you weren’t aware of the rising intensity of debates over food politics in recent years, the face-off between Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama probably caught your attention. One of Michelle Obama’s most high profile acts as First Lady was to plant an organic food garden on the White House lawn—ironically later found to be contaminated by sewage-sludge-based fertilizer, rendering the lovingly grown vegetables off limits. The launch of the Obama Foodorama (the First Lady’s foodie blog) and “Let’s Move” (Obama’s cause célèbre child anti-obesity campaign) soon followed. Palin’s subsequent attacks on Obama’s “interference” in personal food choices culminated in her visit to a Pennsylvania primary school, where Palin publicly proffered cookies to schoolchildren, in a presumed attempt to warn them of nanny state “food police.”

The Palin-Obama food fight (farcical as it might seem) indicates the polarization in America’s food wars. Underpinning this debate are two sets of diametrically opposed views: “personal responsibility” versus “government regulation”; and “conventional” versus “alternative” agriculture.

Supporters of conventional approaches argue that intensive agricultural production and associated government subsidy schemes are our best bulwark against food insecurity and farm-family penury; they reject calls to use government policy to promote more “healthful” foods, arguing in favor of personal responsibility and consumer choice (and, hence, markets as the locus of solutions). The “alternative” food movement, in contrast, tends to favor Michael Pollan-esque Small Ag

solutions, celebrating organic production and locavore consumption (although its proponents tend to be agnostic, or divided, on the question of market versus government action).

The result is often a confrontation between “Big Ag” and “Food Snobs.”

But what if these options weren’t a stark either/or? What if, in other words, this is a false dilemma? Consider the case of France, which is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of agricultural and processed food products (despite being ranked twenty-first in terms of population size) and Europe’s largest agroindustrial producer. Although agro-industry is its largest industrial sector, France is also the country that personifies Small Ag, as symbolized by the paysan and the terroir so dear to the French: local farmers who live and work on the landscape to which consumers have adapted both buying habits and regional cuisines. The French have never forgotten what North Americans are now trying to relearn with foodie fads like the 100-Mile Diet, whose authors spent a year eating only food grown within a hundred miles of their home.

French consumers’ tastes are demanding, as any visit to a local food shop or market will quickly reveal. Agro-industrial producers have adapted accordingly (and haven’t necessarily suffered for it, if the performance of multinational companies such as Danone is any indication). In short, the French have their cake and eat it, too: a highly modern, efficient, profitable food system and the tasty, fresh, local products that foodies crave.

This suggests a new twist on the famous French paradox, which has had scientists scratching their heads for years: French adults eat higher amounts of fat and spend twice S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S EN T 33

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as much time eating, yet are less overweight and very rarely obese, and have lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The muchdebated explanations—more exercise? more vegetables? fewer calories? more red wine?— have generated some wonderful, even wacky, scholarship, such as a transatlantic comparison of McDonald’s meals that found that a serving of “medium fries” was 72 percent larger in Philadelphia than in Paris.

But less attention has been paid to the reasons why the French have a food system that enables them to eat this way. One reason is that Common Agricultural Policy—largely shaped by French interests—differs from its U.S. counterpart (the Farm Bill) in important ways. Both pieces of legislation have been heavily criticized for over-production, a relative neglect of the environmental impacts of industrial farming practices, and the suppression of prices via commodity “dumping” in other countries—threatening farmers’ livelihoods. But leaving these largely valid criticisms aside, there are still some positive examples we might take from the CAP. First, it supports the domestic production of fresh fruits and vegetables to a greater degree than the Farm Bill (although public health is not an explicit goal of the CAP). In contrast, the U.S. Farm Bill provides a greater degree of support to fewer products, among them wheat and feed grains, oilseeds, cotton, sugar, and dairy. Critics such as Marion Nestle argue that the Farm Bill’s subsidies are misguided, and encourage over-production of foods detrimental to public health (such as high-fructose corn syrup), thereby contributing to the national obesity epidemic. Put simply, agricultural policy now operates at cross-purposes with public health goals.

But the example of the CAP suggests that it doesn’t need to be this way.

School lunch policy also highlights the differences in food politics in France and the United States. Every day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays schools for more than thirty million school lunches on a per-mealserved basis, partly in cash and partly in kind (through direct donation of agricultural commodities). Critics argue that the National

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School Lunch Program largely neglects fresh fruits and vegetables; some go even further, and assert that a nutritional disaster has resulted from the program’s focus on products such as corn, soy, and potatoes that convert into nutritionally poor processed foods. Food reform advocates argue that this bias arises in part because food industry profit is prioritized over educational and public health goals, creating conflicting incentives in agricultural policy, food aid, and school food policy.

In France, in contrast, agricultural policy and food policy are more clearly separated, at least when it comes to school lunches— served to six million French children every day. The French Ministry of Education sets stringent regulations: vegetables and fruit have to be served at every meal (raw one day, cooked the next); some foods—notably fried food, ketchup, and sweetened desserts—are served no more than once per week. Vending machines are banned in all French schools, and children are strongly discouraged from bringing lunches from home (and generally don’t). Implementing these regulations falls to municipalities, which have complete control over the three-course (bien sûr!) menus and food sourcing—which is often used to support local food producers. Costs are recovered locally, with transfers from the national government to municipalities for specific programs—such as the CAP-sponsored fresh fruit campaign. Cross-subsidies enable all children access to the same high-quality meals. In Paris, for example, children of the wealthiest families pay $7 per meal, but the lowest price is just 18 cents (with the average meal costing approximately $3, only slightly more than the average cost for U.S. school lunches). The French approach means that meals are both affordable and healthy (not to mention tasty)—and don’t get caught up in special-interest politics at the national level.

Now, how might the French (and European) approach inform American food fights—for example, the current Farm Bill debate? When American policy makers refer to the CAP, they usually focus on the total dollar amount of subsidies, in order to bolster arguments about maintaining levels of farm subsidies in the United States. But instead of focusing on the existing subsidy system, what

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if we took inspiration from France’s broader approach to the food system?

We might start by considering how the political economy and cultural economy of food are interrelated: through exploring, for example, how questions of food are entangled with issues of identity and citizenship, as much as nutrition and health. To begin, we might pay a visit to the French International Agricultural Salon: the world’s largest agricultural fair (and the largest annual event in Paris, outstripping even the fashion industry’s trade fair). Every February, the Salon—with its tractor test-drives and dressage competitions, culinary samplings and wine tastings, bull semen sales and donkey petting zoos— brings together more than 1,000 exhibitors, 5,000 animals, and 600,000 visitors. It is a measure of its centrality to the French national psyche that President Nicolas Sarkozy chose the Salon to launch his new French gastronomy campaign in 2008. Declaring that French food was the best in the world, Sarkozy praised the role of farmers and food producers as the “source of our country’s gastronomic diversity,” and announced that he was seeking recognition from UNESCO of the French gastronomic meal as global cultural heritage.

Sarkozy’s statements and the UNESCO campaign sparked controversy in France and beyond. Foodies in France and abroad decried the “museification” of French haute cuisine, with some arguing that France was already at risk of ceding its cutting-edge status to other countries, notably Spain. And many questioned whether food could be considered “cultural” heritage. Yet the UNESCO award, as its defenders pointed out, was not targeted at gourmet cooking, but rather at something much more prosaic: the French family meal.

Every day, more than 90 percent of French families sit down to a three-course family meal (in contrast, the 40 percent of American families who eat dinner together on a regular basis do so only two or three times per week, and 10 percent never eat dinner together at all). The primacy of the French family meal is so important that most major retailers outside of tourist areas close on Sundays and limit split shifts.

As Sarkozy reminded his detractors, his

campaign was focused not only on what the French eat, but also on how they eat: simply put, the rituals of the family table express the (albeit increasingly contested) norms of French citizenship, identity, and patrimoine—and thereby make a unique cultural contribution. After two years of debate, UNESCO agreed, awarding the status of “intangible cultural heritage” to the French gastronomic meal, which joined an illustrious list that includes Spanish flamenco, Chinese acupuncture, Azerbaijani carpet weaving, and Turkish oil wrestling. And the political significance of food in France was underscored by another event that took place the same day: European Parliament deputy José Bové was sentenced for uprooting a field of genetically modified corn in southwestern France. Bové—a longtime union activist with the Confédération Paysanne—first gained international recognition in 1999, when, in protest against threats to traditional French cuisine, he dismantled a McDonald’s in his hometown of Millau, carting much of the building away and depositing the pieces on the lawn of the local town hall before being stopped by police. He is equally famous for his flamboyant defense of food sovereignty and local food production, smuggling fifty pounds of Roquefort cheese into the United States during the Battle of Seattle protests that same year. Bruno Rebelle, former director of Greenpeace France, summed up the subsequent outpouring of national support: “You see, in the United States, food is fuel. Here, it’s a love story.”

Sarkozy and Bové seem, at first glance, to be unlikely bedfellows in this love story.

But their passion for protecting French food culture signals the ways in which the debates over the political economy of food complicate (and even transcend) traditional left and right allegiances. How, then, is food political for the French? As Adam Gopnik points out in The Table Comes First, the birth of both the restaurant and the café (in the modern sense) can be traced back to eighteenth-century France. One of the first laws passed by the National Assembly shortly after the Revolution in 1789 was a

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decree that made it legal to sell both coffee and alcohol (wine and spirits) in the same place—lending momentum to the new trend of public restaurants that had begun only a few decades before in the Palais Royal square.

The subsequent emergence of Paris as the “Capital of Modernity” was centered, in part, on its unprecedented forms of sociopolitical discourse among citoyens—much of which took place in cafés and restaurants.

Indeed, it was in the French café that the three core principles of French gastronomy were developed. The first two principles are well known: good taste (bon goût) and good manners (gastronomie, or social rules governing both what and how one eats). But these principles are often misunderstood: bon goût is best understood as a shared rather than a snobbish sense of taste, to which all classes (not just the elites) have access; and gastronomie (which literally means “rules of the stomach”) is not a set of ironclad, oppressive regulations, but rather a set of satisfying food rituals (such as the four-course meal, the cheese course before dessert, the art of conversation at the table) shared by all citoyens.

But the third principle of French food— conviviality—is often overlooked by foreigners. The French never eat alone if they can help it, either at work or at home, and dining companions are often called convives (which means “table companion,” but literally translates as “living together”). Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the founder of modern gastronomy, argued that social discourse around the table was what distinguished dining from mere eating. The long meals shared by the French today (where many shops in provincial towns still close for up to two hours at lunch) express the importance of conviviality in defining the act of eating as a shared social practice. Indeed, French school lunches are based on the notion that access to healthy food is a precondition for effective participation in public life—although a lively debate has occurred in recent years over the failure to include halal and kosher foods in (and thus potentially exclude observant Jewish and Muslim students from) public school cafeterias.

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This underscores the relevance of food to questions of citizenship. Food education is (for the French) one of the means by which modern states educate citizens to participate in the collective polity. As surprising as it may sound, food—as science, art, politics, and culture—is integrated into the school curriculum in France. Younger children, for example, develop sensory and gross motor skills through school gardens, visiting local markets, and learning about local foods; older children critically analyze media messages about food and learn about France’s patrimoine culinaire (culinary heritage) as part of their social studies lessons. The French National Ministry of Education makes this clear: “School is a privileged place in which children are educated about good taste, nutrition, and food culture. Good taste must be taught and learned, and can only be acquired over time.”

Most important: all children have equal access to good taste. Food education, for all French children, not just elites, is a form of citizenship training, where the republican principles of égalité and fraternité (expressed as the notion of “conviviality” in eating together) are put into practice. That this would seem alarmingly “socialist” to a segment of the American population illustrates the fact that food is by no means a straightforward signifier of citizenship—particularly in a multicultural society. Indeed, this is one case where the French might learn from the U.S. example, where inclusion is not framed as conformity, but rather as greater tolerance for a plurality of political views, cultural norms, and religious practices, as in the Dearborn, Michigan, schools that serve halal to Muslim schoolchildren, or the kosher Subway sandwiches that some school lunch programs offer.

Yet we might also learn something from the French. How, for example, might we tackle the question of personal versus social responsibility? The French case suggests that this opposition is misleading: a sustainable food politics requires both personal responsibility and collective action in order to create a better “food environment” (social, commercial, and institutional influences on food choice) as well as a more equitable, sustainable food production system. The French, for example, foster personal responsibility for eating well—

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notably clever parenting practices that enable children to mangent un peu de tout (eat a little bit of everything). Yet the French state also supports families through food industry regulation and a relatively stringent approach to healthy school lunches. It is no coincidence that France’s rate of child obesity is one of the lowest in the developed world, even as rates of overweight and obese children are at an all-time high and rapidly increasing in most wealthy countries, with the United States leading the pack. Yet the French government is not complacent: a slight rise in the (admittedly low) child obesity rates in the 1990s was met with a rapid response, including the above-mentioned reforms to school lunch nutritional requirements, the national ban on school vending machines, and a national nutritional campaign that included health warnings on televised snack food ads—all scientifically supported strategies for obesity reduction. Since then, child obesity rates in France have stabilized and even declined slightly. Many of these strategies have been advocated for decades in North America—to little or no avail.

The French example also suggests that food debates have the potential to transform, rather than entrench, existing political allegiances. After all, it was Sarkozy—a notably right-wing president—who oversaw the UNESCO award and also the tightening of already stringent school lunch regulations by the French National Ministry of Education; yet food is also important for a significant fraction of the French Left, as the Bové example suggests. Here at home, one could argue that food has the potential to transcend predictable partisan politics: everyone from evangelical homeschoolers to urban hipsters seems to be celebrating families, healthy food, and the humanizing role that growing and eating food can play in our communities.

This suggests that something like a Frenchstyle approach to funding school meals—in which local governments have greater control over menus, prices, and suppliers—might be politically feasible (although in the American case school lunch programs might also be sponsored by grassroots community organizations, which, in distinction from France, might also be eligible for funding). Indeed,

the high degree of “social capital” that would be required is already obvious in the numerous food-related community groups around the country, from Slow Food school lunch campaigners to Jamie Oliver–inspired “Food Revolution” mommy bloggers, to inner-city urban community gardeners. This might entail following the French example of devolving responsibility for the provision of school lunches to the local level, while setting stringent national nutritional standards— which would require radically reworking mechanisms for funding and sourcing school lunches. Here, recent discussions around the Child Nutrition Act and the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act (signed by the president in late 2010) have provided some potential pathways for change, such as the Farm to School grant program, which was designed to enable farmers to supply fresh produce to local schools. In continuing to reform this legislation, we might do well to look at the French focus on poverty as a central contributor to food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly through French insistence on cross-subsidies.

Taking the French example seriously might also mean that food politics campaigners might engage in more dialogue around strategies that would enable Big Ag to support and complement—rather than compete with— Small Ag. One French example is the appellation d’origine contrôlée—a geographical “origin” labeling scheme best known abroad for wine, but also used for other agricultural products.

The AOC—overseen by a national regulator but governed by local producers co-ops— allows small-scale farmers to command a premium and access national markets—all based on the notion of terroir, that rich link

More Food Politics articles online at www.dissentmagazine.org

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between landscape, taste, and cuisine that the French have cultivated for centuries. Even vegetables can receive the label “AOC,” such as the Coco de Paimpol (a savory white bean) that comes from the tiny Paimpol region in western Brittany, but which is renowned and sold all over France. One of the main goals of the AOC program is to support farmer livelihoods and local, sustainable agriculture without excluding Big Ag. So some AOC “brands”—such as poulet de Bresse and sel de Guérande—are produced or distributed in large quantities by agro-industry, in an apparent win-win for French producers and consumers.

Granted, American food ways are still a far cry from the French ethic of sublimely moderate indulgence. But French gastronomie took centuries to develop, and the American foodie craze (which shows no sign of abating) celebrates an authentically American food culture. Regional cuisines—from Tex-Mex to Creole, Cajun to Floribbean—have a long history. So, too, does terroir, that “taste of place” synergy between cuisine, soil, climate, and food: think of California wines, Vermont maple syrup, or Alaskan salmonberries.

(Read Rowan Jacobsen’s American Terroir.)

An authentically American (and necessarily

multicultural) food culture is, of course, only part of the solution. Activists need to re-politicize the “alternative” food movement, squarely addressing the intersection of poverty, class, gender, and race with issues such as nutrition, food access, environmental toxins, environmental racism, and obesity.

Indeed, some food-system reformers are starting to ask these questions. What if, for example, we were to think of good food as an emblem of citizenship, rather than as fuel (or self-indulgent foodie-ism)? What if we were to reform the food system through aligning the interests of consumers with workers, farmers, and (yes) animals and the environment—a suggestion that has recently ignited debate amongst Slow Food chapters across America and beyond? What if food was a properly political topic, and a touchstone for socioenvironmental justice? Maybe one day, just like the French, we might be able to have our cake, and eat it too.

Karen Bakker Le Billon is the author of French Kids Eat Everything: How our family moved to France, cured picky eating, banned snacking, and discovered 10 simple rules for raising happy, healthy eaters (Morrow/HarperCollins, April 2012). (karenlebillon.com)

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Making Choices: Ethics and Vegetarianism JULIANA DEVRIES

I was seventeen and taking an elective course in Earth and Environmental Science. We were learning about farming and the food system— genetic modification, land use, organic labeling—when our teacher assigned us an article about beef.

The article explained the following process: the U.S. government subsidizes corn, so we feed it to our cows, because corn is cheap and fattens the cows up quickly. Cows are biologically designed to eat grass, so their livers are unable to process the corn. The cows’ livers would actually explode if they were permitted to grow to full maturity, but we slaughter them first. This, combined with their living in close quarters and wading in their own feces, causes the cows to get ill often, so we feed them a constant stream of antibiotics, a practice that strengthens bacterial strains such as E. coli. Roughly 78 percent of cows raised for beef undergo this process. Similarly nauseating practices are used to raise chickens, turkeys, and pigs, 99 percent, 97 percent, and 95 percent of which, respectively, come from factory farms. Nowadays, these details are less than shocking. Movies such as Food, Inc. and Super Size Me, as well as books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation have raised consciousness, if not much action, on the topic of our food system. But, for me, it was a new story.

I had eaten meat all my life, and it had never bothered me. I fished often and, though I had never hunted, maintained that I could hunt, if the situation arose. But I sensed a deeper cruelty in the narrative of the cow than in the timeless hierarchy of the food chain. A classmate agreed to compete to see which one of us could last longer not eating meat. He managed until the end of the week. And here I am, six years later, winning by a landslide.

My knack for vegetarianism did not surprise me. I was trained since childhood to accept that not all available foods are for eating. When I was young, my family kept a kosher home. This meant that eating required effort, not only for the obvious reasons, but also because kosher meat was unavailable in our small town in New Hampshire. We coveted that circled U like addicts. Whenever a friend or family member was driving up from Boston, I would hear my mother on the phone in her auctioneer’s voice, “How many can you get me? Three chickens? How about five, can you get five?” Food, especially meat, was valuable and imbued with meaning that extended beyond its flavor. As we grew older, other issues eclipsed dietary laws, and by the time I was in high school, kosher chicken was something we prepared only when my grandparents visited. I wouldn’t say I consciously replaced kosher dietary laws with vegetarianism, but I can’t help seeing a connection.

Vegetarianism is an identity-marker, a reminder of who I am and who I aspire to be.

In my hope to be a person awake to injustice, vegetarianism is a way for me to remain conscious instead of complacent as I go through each day. Every meal requires me to take into account the limitations I have imposed upon myself and to ask others to accept them as well. I must constantly, and often uncomfortably, justify my concerns to those who eat with me or who are kind enough to cook for me, as well as to myself as I ogle a bacon cheeseburger. Again and again, I return to the issues at stake: climate change, land use, animal rights, workers’ rights. I pull from my invisible knapsack an explanation tailored to the person I am addressing. As I explain my vegetarian identity to someone, I also scrutinize my own ideals and re-commit to them.

I was surprised to find how many other people my age also identify with vegetariS P R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S EN T 39

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anism. The Vegetarian Times reports that 43 percent of American vegetarians fall into the eighteen-to-thirty-four-age group. According to Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, published in 2009, 18 percent of American college students are now vegetarians (as compared to 2.3 percent of the nation as a whole). A more conservative number from Bon Appétit Management Co., for the four hundred schools it serves, reports that 8 percent of college students in the 2005–2006 school year self-identified as vegetarian and fewer than 1 percent as vegan.

A 2009–2010 survey by the same company showed 12 percent as vegetarian and 2 percent self-identifying as vegan.

Vegetarianism has long been intertwined with utopian hopes. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates responds to the suggestion that citizens of the ideal state should eat meat.

“I see; you want not only a State, but a luxurious State,” he says. “To feed all these superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbors’ land, and they will want a part of ours. And this is the origin of war…”

Vegetarianism thrived in India and China, concomitant with millions of conversions to Hinduism and Buddhism and their doctrines of nonviolence. Henry David Thoreau took a copy of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita with him to Walden Pond, writing on the struggle between his predatory instincts and what he saw as his moral duty to abstain from eating animals. In America, the vegetarian diet enjoyed a re-emergence as part of the counterculture movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer argued that animals should have rights, because they have the capacity to suffer. Twenty-first-century America may be written into this narrative as the next big surge in vegetarian popularity.

It is not hard to imagine why young people dominate this surge.

Members of today’s older generations, especially holders of political power, appear to view climate change as something, like the deficit, that they can push off dealing with until their political or actual deaths. For our generation, impending global catastrophe on multiple fronts is a reality, one we will likely

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face within our lifetimes. (As I write this, it’s February in New York, and the temperature is in the high sixties.) Every year that goes by, more young people I know come to care deeply about climate change. Those who have thought about the issue often realize that eating less meat will be a key component of living sustainably on the planet. It is now widely known that the methane gas produced by farm animals is a significant contributor to global warming and that growing vegetable protein for human consumption is a much more efficient use of land. While cars, trains, planes and boats account for 13 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, livestock farming generates 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” Growing demand for meat causes deforestation to make way for grazing, as well as increased nitrous oxide and methane gas, greenhouse gases with an impact on global warming 296 and 23 times, respectively, of CO2. Yet, in the United States, per-capita meat consumption is almost five pounds per week, a figure that has nearly quadrupled since 1950. By continuing on this path, we place our future in jeopardy.

Meat consumption, so dangerous to our fragile climate, is utterly unsuited to a sustainable future in myriad other ways. Over 900 million people are hungry worldwide.

Yet in the United States, we feed 157 million tons of vegetarian protein—all of it suitable for human consumption—to livestock, producing only twenty-eight million tons of animal protein. Food-borne illness has been on the rise since the 1980s, especially in meat products, a fact linked to overuse of antibiotics in factory farming. Human Rights Watch calls working at a slaughterhouse “the most dangerous factory job in America,” and the total lack of transparency surrounding the American food system and genetically modified organisms looms as a largely unknown threat to human health and well-being. It seems only natural to young people to urgently consider how what they eat will affect the world they live in, and it is not surprising to me that increasing numbers are giving up a food that sits at the center of a dense web of troubling consequences.

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Vegetarianism has of course become trendy, as well as a trend, and in some ways Americans have never been more conscious regarding matters of health and food. Being a vegetarian is easier than ever before, with products such as quinoa, tofu, and fake meat more readily available. Restaurants, hospitals, and schools have instituted “Meatless Mondays,” creating more friendly environments for vegetarians. There is even an iPhone application called Vegetarian Scanner, which takes a photograph of ingredient lists and tells you whether the product contains meat products. The Internet can provide support and information—although often to a ridiculous extent. A seething debate, for example, recently broke out on Slate over whether vegans could eat oysters, as those particular mollusks apparently lack a central nervous system.

Celebrities, from Bill Clinton to Gwyneth Paltrow, promote the diet, something People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) apparently encourages by sending celebrity converts a vegetarian starter set. Yet, when I read about the opening of Stella McCartney’s newest store in Soho, where she served an all-vegetarian dinner, floated out to attendees on miniature boats, past the display of ice sculptures and the Champagne fountain, my stomach turned almost as much as it would at a pig roast. For me, this display misses the point. When the practice of vegetarianism is combined with the gratuitous consumption of the very wealthy, it loses its connection to mindfulness and becomes merely a new accessory for the wasteful.

Vegetarianism can be a form of individual resistance to an unjust society, in the tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi. But it can just as easily act as a mechanism by which we lose sight of the bigger picture, while simultaneously thinking we’re doing something

praiseworthy. Just as individuals turning off lights do not solve our larger, systemic energy use problems, individual vegetarians will not overcome the injustices of the food system if we lose track of the larger issues at stake. Each vegetarian I’ve spoken to has cited a slightly different reason for his or her actions, denying his or her kinship with other vegetarians, past and present. Many “health vegetarians,” for example, claim they have no ethical reason for their diet. Environmentalist vegetarians concerned chiefly with climate change find animal rights activists too idealistic. Vegans criticize vegetarians for their lack of commitment. But to fail to see the intersections—between health and animal rights, between environmental destruction and unsafe working conditions—is to deny any hope for a unified politics that might encourage more widespread vegetarianism as one step toward de-escalation of our growing ethical and environmental problems.

I come from a family that discusses dinner at lunch. We form our lives around food, in more ways than we realize, in many more ways than I could list here. For those of us lucky enough to have options about what we eat, those choices have meaning beyond taste and individual health. What we choose to eat is as personal and intimate as a family dinner, but simultaneously fits us into a relationship of compassionate interconnectedness not just with other species, but also with our own futures and those of our children. So many young people are turning to vegetarianism because we cannot afford to be complacent about climate change or complicit in the consumption-oriented lifestyle offered to us as default. The story of the cow I learned at age seventeen is not just the story of a suffering animal. It is a story of a web of injustices, injustices we can choose to overthrow.

Juliana DeVries is a writer living in New York.

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Nature as an Ally An Interview with Wendell Berry

Each generational wave of environmental concern seems to lap at Wendell Berry’s doorstep. He gave up teaching and writing in New York in the sixties to return to Kentucky, establishing a small farm at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, and dedicating himself to writing about the roots of the life he leads there. Readers have sought his inspiration to overcome the incessant churning of environmental destruction and industrial food production. Berry embodies a certain sort of alternative. When I arrived at Lanes Landing, I knew that many seekers had come before me to put a face to the writing, and to see this life for themselves.

Berry is best known for his attention to place—an insistence on community and an intimate knowledge of home, from the soil to the weather patterns to the human history. I initially came to his work through the Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve Southerners who in 1930 published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto against Northern industrialism and the loss of a romanticized, rooted, agrarian life. Berry’s resistance to capitalist definitions of progress rhymes with a long intellectual tradition of skepticism of American urbanization, mechanization, and hypermobility. His 1973 “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” begins with the image of the uprooted, commercially oriented modern: Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.

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When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

Even as he subjects market society to a scathing critique, he seeks out the tensions that remained deeply unresolved in the writings of the Agrarians: how people might become more free—free from patriarchy, racism, and so on—without becoming deracinated. In The Hidden Wound, Berry explored race through his experience growing up on a Kentucky farm, and in essays like “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” he set freedom in relation to the productive household economy; feminism for him, and male freedom too, is full and free employment within an independent household, minimally reliant on commodities.

Berry’s influences can be traced beyond the Agrarians to ecological and religious conceptions of nature. He asks how we can develop our understanding of our environment so that we can respect its limits as we arrange our human lives. He therefore opposes the national-parks model of conservation: purity on this side, despoliation on the other.

“Agriculture using nature,” he has written, “...would approach the world in the manner of a conversationalist....On all farms, farmers would undertake to know responsibly where they are and to ‘consult the genius of the place.’”

All of this raises serious questions about a sort of agrarian epistemology. If we can’t count on technocratic solutions, how can we determine our limits? How do we consult the genius of place? Berry approaches this question through discussions of the farming life, but through religion and poetry as well.

His most recent book, The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, is a tribute to the

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poet whose work explored Paterson, New Jersey, with all the sensitivity and accompanying understanding that Berry brings to poetic explorations of his own place.

Lest this all sound too abstract, the first thing Berry placed in my hands, after a glass of water, was the 50-Year Farm Bill, a long-term proposal largely devised by his friend Wes Jackson of the Land Institute “for gradual systemic change in agriculture.” The proposal focuses on redeveloping the natural biodiversity of land, and Berry has been to Washington to lobby on its behalf. Berry has been active as well in opposition to the coal industry in Kentucky, and recently withdrew his papers from the University of Kentucky after it accepted coal money to build a dormitory for the basketball team.

Berry, now seventy-seven, has received many accolades for his work. This year he was chosen to give the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the federal government’s top honor in the humanities. The Michael Pollans of the world pay him tribute openly and often.

But the state of ecological affairs in America and the world is now more dire than when he started writing.

Berry’s farmhouse sits on a steep hillside overlooking the Kentucky River and land about which he has long written, “a place I don’t remember not knowing.” It is heartening to see Berry honored and his works quoted, but Berry asks us to be concerned with the whole agricultural process, from the land to the workers, all the overlapping realms of economy discussed by the authors in this special section. This is not an easy thing to do

in the face of impending environmental catastrophe, a situation that would seem to demand quick fixes. We began with Berry’s lamentation that food alone should so dominate public discussion.

SARAH LEONARD

Wendell Berry: The discussion about food doesn’t make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance. How are you going to get the best farming and the best food from a landscape that has removed its fences, which means the animals have been removed from agriculture? Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers. Corn and bean people, I’m afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

Sarah Leonard: Can you talk about how you think about your farm working?

WB: [The British agricultural scientist] Sir Albert Howard said that in her management of the native forest—and, [Land Institute founder] Wes Jackson would say, of the native prairie—nature never farms without livestock. And Howard’s understanding of nature’s “farming” in undisturbed ecosystems is the scientific bedrock of organic agriculture. . . . The difference, then, between a large Midwest farm practicing a corn and soybean rotation on every tillable acre and a good small farm with an orderly diversity of plants and animals is one of structure, and this is a critical difference. There is no structural

Photo of Wendell Berry © Trevor Humphries S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S EN T 43

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complexity at all in a corn and bean rotation.

The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.

SL: And more grotesquely in meat production.

WB: You’re talking about the industrial system that confines the animals closely in one place and grows their food in another place, usually distant. This breaks the fertility cycle and violates all the principles of nature on which sustainable agriculture and a dependable food supply depend. The proper role of animals in agriculture is to complete the ecological integrity of farms, and to produce food for humans from pastures— especially pastures on land that is mainly, or entirely, suitable only for grazing.

Do you know the phrase “mind-numbing work”? This is a cliché that for a long time has been used to denigrate farming. If your economic policies drive farmers off the land, you are pleased to have saved them from “mind-numbing work”—which is usually associated with smaller farms. But if you have several thousand acres of corn, and you’re getting up in the morning to spend all day long driving a cultivator, or a sprayer, or a combine through those identical rows, day after day. . . that’s dull. And it would dull your mind. But suppose you have, say a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of rolling land, maybe twenty-five Jersey cows, a few hogs, a garden, flowers everywhere, cliff swallows nesting against the barn wall, and children playing and wandering about. That isn’t dull.

That requires hard work, of course. But it also requires constant attention and intelligence; it gives a lot of pleasure, and you’ll probably find that it depends on love.

SL: Do you think that a large portion of the population would be happy doing this kind of work?

WB: Maybe not. . . .But, you’ve switched the conversation to the question of vocation.

It would be wrong to assume that every person is called to be a farmer. To use the Amish example, the agrarian community needs mechanics, manufacturers (there are things they need that we don’t make), farriers, harness makers, horse breeders, carpenters, and so on. I have never, ever said that

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everybody ought to be a farmer. But I do say that everybody ought to work at something useful and necessary, and not destructive. Our substitution of “job” (any “job”) for vocation is disastrous.

SL: Why do you think urban agriculture has gotten so much attention?

WB: We have everything to gain from urban agriculture. But that’s not farming.

Louisville, Kentucky, for example, is not going to feed itself from gardening alone. They need milk and meat—things that you can’t produce in the city. Every time someone in Louisville plants something to eat, we’re better off out here. Urban gardeners know something of the biology, the art, and the chanciness of growing food, which makes it possible for them to imagine the life and work of farming out in the countryside. From this and the interest in local food, you get an urban agrarianism that I think is simply indispensable.

SL: Why do you think the emphasis has been so heavy on urban agriculture, and not on things outside the city?

WB: Well, urban people have been permitted, by cheap fossil fuel and other subsidies, to think of themselves as somehow islanded. Independent. And you could contrast that with the ancient Greek idea of the city, which included both the built-up urban center and the tributary landscape.

Ancient Greek cities and towns had granaries and stables. Harvested grain would be brought into the city, and the flocks and herds would be driven into the city at night for safety. That was an immediate contact between city and country, and we’ve lost that.

Louisville lost the Bourbon Stockyards and much of the meatpacking industry that was there, and most Louisvillians seem to have counted that as progress. I tried to help an effort to relocate a stockyard in the Lexington, Kentucky, neighborhood but the people didn’t want it at all, anywhere. They wanted the meat, but not the live animals or the manure.

That’s hard to deal with, also crazy. You’ve got to put your mind on the whole fundamental economic structure, from field and forest to city, so that you can have economic justice (some sense of parity along the line), and you

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don’t have any demeaning work. If you’ve got a large-scale meat-processing industry, for instance, where some poor soul has to knock cows in the head all day, that’s demeaning to everyone involved.

But any kind of drudgery is horrible.

Drudgery is having too much repetitive work to do, for too long, with no choice but to do it, with no sense of vocation, and under the rule of a boss. When everybody here had a tobacco crop, an uninitiated person from some suburb or city who came to our work at harvest time would just be horrified. It was extraordinarily difficult work. Hot. Long days, virtually from dark to dark, and strenuous. But that didn’t last all year around. And we were doing it with our neighbors and for no pay. (The old rule was, nobody’s done until everybody’s done.) This was not drudgery.

SL: One of the trends among young people (maybe a bit of a revival?) is WWOOFing [Worldwide Opportunity on Organic Farms]—in which people travel and work on organic farms for a time. The farms are all listed in a book and online now. The young people can go and work on the farm. The time you stay can range wildly. It’s agriculture without place. People use it to travel…

WB: To really be effective, the apprenticeship probably needs to last a whole year— to get the annual cycle and see how the whole thing works.

SL: I think for people who want to go work on a farm, it seems like it would be fulfilling. It takes on a therapeutic ethos.

WB: You have to see the whole picture.

Nobody comes to farm to dispose of dead livestock or to cope with a disease outbreak.

Nobody comes to mend fences, although I happen to like mending fences myself. You have to have some sense of how each task is gathered into the larger pattern.

SL: A lot of people—not just supporters of agribusiness—wonder if there were a world of small farms, could we feed the world population as it exists now?

WB: No, it can’t be definitively answered.

For one thing, we don’t know anything about the future. For another thing, the “small farm” can’t be defined once for every place. There

are all kinds of critical questions requiring answers. Is there such a thing as a bad small farm? Are there good large farms? You have to study and evaluate a range of examples. If you have a lucrative grain market, and virtually every farmer is growing soybeans or corn on every acre that’ll hold up a tractor, and fertilizing it with chemical fertilizer, the inevitable runoff going into the local watershed and on into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico—that so-called dead zone in the Gulf—you can say that is wrong. There is nothing in that scheme that guarantees you a long-term food supply. You are destroying the land resource, the land communities, and the soil itself. The soil is part of the land community, which is where you have to start, and that’s where the 50-Year Farm Bill starts.

It addresses not food production but the problems of agriculture as it now is: erosion, toxicity, and the destruction of the husbandry cultures in local communities. If you are feeding people by destroying the land, and the rural communities, and polluting the water systems—and if you consider that damage to be a sustainable cost—you’re crazy.

This turns us toward the need for a better general criticism than we have of the economy and the culture. One crucial thing to consider is what Wes Jackson calls the “eyes to acres” ratio. If you’re going to take care of the land well you need to have enough people caring for it and watching over it. In industrial agriculture, a few people “farm” a lot of land with big machines and a lot of chemicals—with the results I’ve just described. That’s the largescale farming some people think will “feed the world,” the billions of people now mostly in cities. It’ll feed them for a short time. But we need to feed them for a long time. My side of the argument says it’s possible to have a more complex, long-term structure. It’s possible to have a farming culture in which everything helps everything else—following the example of nature. A good farmer I know used to say, “It’s good to have nature working for you.

She works at a minimum wage.” Nature is a powerful ally, if you respect her and her ways.

If you work against her, as we are now doing, she’ll work against you. The penalties may be severe.

The agri-industrialists have what they

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think is a rhetorical question addressed to my side: “If you farm by your principles, who’s going to decide who’s going to starve?” We could put that question back to them: “Who’s going to decide who is going to starve when you get done polluting and eroding the arable land, and destroying all the world’s cultures of land husbandry?”

SL: The Southern Agrarians looked to religion to do what nature does—to be something all powerful and uncontrollable and mysterious.

WB: Nature has a very high place in poetic tradition. What I want to insist on about religion is not that it’s spiritual, but that it’s economic. The practice of religion is economic.

And that’s more or less insisted upon in the Bible. Ellen Davis at Duke has written about that in her book Scripture, Culture, Agriculture.

SL: If, in America, we were to develop a system of farming that was not corporate, the scale of the change would be enormous, it would take politics.

WB: I’m committed to the 50-Year Farm Bill, which is directed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s one of my last causes.

When they ask me to go to Washington and advocate for that bill, I will go.

SL: Is that, in fact, happening?

WB: Well, Fred Kirschenmann [of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University] and Wes Jackson and I did carry that bill to Washington, and were kindly received by [Deputy Secretary of Agriculture] Kathleen Merrigan and her staff in the Department of Agriculture, also a few senators or their staff people. Since then, the bill seems to have gained more attention and maybe a little momentum. Maybe you could call it the beginning of a significant change.

So I’m hardly against politics. I’m committed also to the movement against mountaintop removal. That movement is certainly growing, and it is drawing more attention. But state government here is mostly owned by the coal industry. It’s hard to influence people who are corporate properties.

SL: Do you think of good farming, or farms that are on a proper scale, to be compatible with capitalism or with free markets?

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WB: To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits.

Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.

That is why we have supposedly limitless economic growth in a finite world. Good agriculture is formal. You can have limits without form, but you can’t have form without limits.

If you look around the country and find small farmers who have prospered in hard times, you’ll probably find that they’ve prospered because they’ve accepted their limits. Among other things, they’ve increased production by complicating structure.

But good agriculture is a community enterprise, too. The Amish prosper and net a high percentage of gross, partly because they are good neighbors to one another. The great Amish asset is neighborliness. That’s a religious principle: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

But it’s also an economic asset. If you’ve got a neighbor, you’ve got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbors, you can’t have a limitless growth economy.

You have to prefer to have a neighbor rather than to own your neighbor’s farm. There’s a fundamental incompatibility between industrial capitalism and both the ecological and the social principles of good agriculture. The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands. People talk about “job creation,” as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The original Luddites were right. The aim was to replace people with machines.

SL: Are you a socialist?

WB: From what I’ve read and heard, socialism and communism have been just as committed to industrial principles as capitalism. My own inclination is not to start with a political idea or theory and think downward to the land and the people, but instead to start with the land and the people, the necessity for harmony between local ecosystems and local economies, and think upward to conserving policies such as those of the 50-Year Farm Bill.

SL: Are there political figures who you think have

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been good at this?

WB: No. No politicians are standing up for this. No politicians. And the prominent economists whose work you see in newspapers or magazines never mention the land or the land economies.

SL: Michael Pollan figures. . . talk about food and maybe less about farming. Do you think that the people who have taken up this burden are as concerned with the farming as you are?

WB: I don’t know—I don’t know how you’d measure somebody’s concern. I know that Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and others know what is wrong with the industrial food production systems, and that includes farming. There are several good younger writers now writing about agriculture, and I’m more grateful for them than I can easily say.

It may be that a lot of the people most disposed to go back and farm are those with the least farm experience. Too many farm-raised young people want to work in industry or the professions to get away from the economic constraints their families have suffered. Their families are telling them “Get out of this,” and you can’t blame them. I was talking to a group of people in Central Kentucky about the importance of keeping the farm-raised kids in farming. Someone in the audience said, “By the time they get out of college they have so much debt they can’t afford to farm.” I said. “Then we’ve got to keep them out of college.”

SL: I want to get at this idea of looking for some intrinsic value in what’s around you, a persistent theme in your nonfiction and your poetry. I wonder if it could be described as … “wonder”?

WB: “Wonder” is a word that applies. To live and work attentively in a diverse landscape such as this one—made up of native woodlands, pastures, croplands, ponds, and streams—is to live from one revelation to another, things unexpected, always of interest, often wonderful. After a while, you understand that there can be no end to this. The place is essentially interesting, inexhaustibly beautiful and wonderful. To know this is a defense against the incessant salestalk that is

always telling you that what you have is not good enough; your life is not good enough.

There aren’t many right answers to that. One of them, one of the best, comes from living watchfully and carefully the life uniquely granted to you by your place: My life, thank you very much, is just fine.

SL: Andrew Nelson Lytle in I’ll Take My Stand writes something similar. I know you’ve written about the Twelve Southerners, too. I wonder if you ever think about region as useful to thinking about agriculture, whether it obscures the way people think about land and agriculture.

WB: I did talk about that in an essay on the Civil War. The South is a region, but mainly in the political sense. Geographically, ecologically, even historically, the South has many regions. Kentucky has many regions. But that won’t tell you how to farm. What we’re talking about is adapting the farming to the farm, and to the field. . . . John Todd wrote a sentence that has mattered immensely to Wes Jackson and me: “Elegant solutions will be predicated on the uniqueness of place.” One of the wonders of modern agriculture is that agricultural science—like all other science—is founded on evolutionary biology, which sees local adaptation as an absolute necessity for every species, but we have we managed to exempt the human species.

SL: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

WB: Here’s the tragedy of agriculture in our time. In the middle of the last century, Aldo Leopold was writing and publishing on the “land community” and ecological land husbandry. Sir Albert Howard and J. Russell Smith had written of natural principles as the necessary basis of agriculture. This was work that was scientifically reputable. At the end of the Second World War, ignoring that work, the politicians, the agricultural bureaucracies, the colleges of agriculture, and the agri-business corporations went all-out to industrialize agriculture and to get first the people and then the animals off the land and into the factories.

This was a mistake, involving colossal offenses against both land and people. The costs have not been fully reckoned, let alone fully paid.

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A

J o u r n A l

o f

I d e A s

spring 2012

First Principles:

The Progressive Citizen . . . and much more.

An older liberalism once championed the idea of civic responsibility. Then came the battles for rights. Those were and are necessary. But today, to revive progressivism, we need to rediscover the language of obligation and engagement, foster civic agency, and launch a new and redemptive twenty-first century movement to reanimate citizenship.

In our Spring Issue, we invite James Kloppenberg, Carmen Sirianni, and Eric Liu to present a progressive vision of citizenship. You’ll also find Heather Gerken on federalism and rights, Larry Bartels on the politics of austerity, David Rieff on democracy promotion, Michael Lind and Lauren Damme on service vouchers for eldercare, and more.

“One way to guess what Obama might do.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer Visit us at democracyjournal.org.

To read us in print, call 888-238-0048 for a subscription—just $24— or ask for us at your local bookstore.

For your print subscription , go to w w w.democr acyjournal .org

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ARTICLES

Hired Guns on Astroturf How to Buy and Sell School Reform

JOANNE BARKAN

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions.

Devolution of a Movement For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and marketstyle accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and forprofit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores.

Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010, critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K–12 schooling are about $525 billion a year. Nevertheless, a half-billion dollars in discretionary money yields great leverage when budgets are consumed by ordinary expenses. But the

reformers—even titanic Bill and Melinda Gates—see themselves as competing with too little against existing government policies.

Hence, to revolutionize public education, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction, reformers must get state and local governments to adopt their agenda as basic policy; they must counter the teachers’ unions’ political clout. To this end, ed reformers are shifting major resources—staff and money— into state and local campaigns for candidates and legislation.* Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003–2011), sums up the thinking: “We’ve learned the hard way that if you want to have the clout needed to change policies for kids, you have to help politicians get elected. It’s about money, money, money” (Education Next, Winter 2012; the publication is sponsored in part by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, $4.2 million from Gates, 2003–2009).

The Great Political Opening The Obama administration created the perfect opening for the ed reformers’ political strategy.

The U.S. Department of Education stipulated that in order to win federal funds in the 2010 Race to the Top contest, applicant states would have to pledge to abolish limits on charter *The ed reform movement comprises a large network of nonprofit organizations and consultancies whose funding comes mostly from private foundations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—with assets six times larger than Ford, the next largest foundation in the United States—dominates the movement. To give some sense of the interconnections and the scope of the colossal foundation, I note in parentheses the amount of money various groups have received from Gates.

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schools, legislate teacher and principal evaluations based in part on students’ standardized test scores, and fully implement statewide data-collection systems. The mandates spurred money-starved states to propose controversial new education laws. Candidates running for office—from state senator to local school board member—took sides. The ed reform organizations plunged into both legislative and candidate battles, ratcheting up the campaign spending and rhetoric, casting each contest as a battle for the future of the nation through public school reform (tales of the campaigns further on).

The movement’s market-modeled reforms have so far produced more failures than successes. Study after study throws into question the value of most charter schools, incessant standardized testing, and grading teachers or closing schools based on student test scores. The ed reformers’ drive to get new laws passed aggravates matters by making bad policy mandatory and more widespread.

It is mindless micromanaging gone amuck.

Take the case of Tennessee, where 35 percent of every teacher’s evaluation is now based on standardized test scores. On November 6, 2011, the New York Times reported that no tests exist for over half the subjects and grades, including kindergarten, first, second, and third grades, art, music, and vocational training. So state officials ruled that a school’s average scores for another subject and grade will be used for teachers without student scores. For example, fifth-grade writing scores will be plugged into, say, a first-grade teacher’s evaluation. In addition, teachers can choose the plug-in subject themselves for 15 percent of the 35 percent. This means they have to bet on which classes will produce the highest scores. A travesty? Not for the everready boosters of the ed reform movement, including the New York Times editorial page.

The Times offered this judgment on November 11: “…political forces [in Tennessee] are now talking about delaying the use of these evaluations. State lawmakers and education officials must resist any backsliding.” Anything goes as long as it’s stamped “ed reform.”

A summary critique of the reform strategy comes from Frederick Hess, executive editor of Education Next and director of education

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policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003– 2011). Hess swears allegiance to market-based reforms but often criticizes the quality of his allies’ actual work. This is from his November 16, 2011 blog post on Education Week ($4.6 million from Gates, 2005–2009): By turning school reform into a moral crusade, in which one either is, to quote our last President, “with us or against us,” would-be reformers wind up planting their flag atop all kinds of half-baked or illconceived proposals.…Would-be reformers insist that overshooting the mark with half-baked proposals is actually a strategy, because that’s how they’ll cow the unions and change the culture of schooling. Indeed, they think concerns about program design are quaint evidence of naiveté.

Chipping Away at Democracy Yes, the policies of ed reformers are wreaking havoc in public education, but equally destructive is the impact of their strategy on American democracy. From the start, the we-know-best stance, the top-down interventions at every level of schooling, the endless flow of big private money, and the imperviousness to criticism have undermined the “public” in public education. Moreover, the large private foundations that fund the ed reformers are accountable to no one—not to voters, not to parents, not to the children whose lives they affect. The beefed-up political strategy extends the damage: the ed reformers (most of whom take advantage of tax-exempt status) are immersing themselves in the dollars-mean-votes world of lobbying and campaigning.

The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United (January 2010) and a related federal appeals court ruling in SpeechNow.org (March 2010) created loopholes for nonprofit organizations that effectively abolish all limits on campaign contributions. Ed reformers exploit the new legal framework exactly like other political operatives. This has two marked consequences. First is the fate of the original deal established by Congress—tax-exempt status in exchange for staying away from

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politics while serving some public good. The deal was eroded before Citizens United; now it has collapsed. In the world of ed reform, the political strategy makes a mockery of the tax-exempt privilege of the foundations and nonprofit groups involved. Second, most ed reformers have benefitted from branding themselves as progressives or “lifelong Democrats” (“I love labor unions—just not teachers’ unions”). This has given them credibility with liberals who, like most voters, haven’t paid close attention to the content and results of the ed reforms. The labeling has always been a ruse, but the politicking reformers have obliterated dividing lines: they work in local and state campaigns alongside corporate free-marketers and right-wing social conservatives who’ve long and openly supported privatizing public education, ending social programs, and eviscerating labor unions. In practice, they are one team.

Some funders and their tax-exempt grantees have hesitated to get more involved in politics. On occasion the reluctance has been cultural: they’ve always shied away from public debates on government policy and advocacy in general. More often it’s fear of jeopardizing their tax status. According to IRS regulations

• private foundations—a type of 501(c)3 organization—cannot lobby (defined as trying to influence legislation); they cannot campaign (defined as supporting or criticizing a candidate for public office); they can, however, “educate” anyone, including lawmakers, on any issue;

• most of the recipients of foundation money for ed reform are nonprofit groups with a different 501(c)3 status; they can do a specified amount of lobbying but no campaigning for candidates.

Here is the loophole: this second type of 501(c)3 can set up affiliated groups that do lobby and campaign. It can set up the following:

• political action committees (PACs), which have limits on the size of contributions accepted

• Independent Expenditure Committees

(super PACs), which can accept unlimited contributions but cannot “coordinate” work with a candidate or party (an almost meaningless restriction)

• 501(c)4 “social welfare” organizations, such as the AARP and NAACP, which can accept unlimited contributions as long as political activity is not their “primary” activity (another weak restriction)

• 527 organizations that advocate only for issues, not candidates, and can accept unlimited contributions (the line separating issues from candidates is fuzzy)

Pro-politicking ed reformers routinely set up a full array of such groups and solicit contributions for each. In this way, they can collect unlimited funds from many donors for different purposes. Having mastered the nitty-gritty of political money, these reformers have been trying to convince their hesitant colleagues to join in and pony up.

Wary of Politics? Get Over It On May 12, 2010, six reform leaders made their pitch to a roomful of funders, consultants, and staffers of nonprofits at the annual “summit” of the New Schools Venture Fund.

The panel was called “Political Savvy: Guidebook for a New Landscape.” Speakers included executives from Green Dot Public [charter] Schools (Gates, $9.7 million, 2006–2007), Bellwether Education Partners (Gates, $951,800 in 2011), Hope Street Group (Gates, $875,000 in 2008–2009), Stand for Children (as noted above, $5.2 million from Gates, 2003–2011), Democrats for Education Reform (a PAC), and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (one of the largest ed reform funders, nonetheless a Gates grantee, $3.6 million, 2010).

Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman— who has turned his nonprofit into a political machine with prodigious fundraising capability and offices in eleven states—articulated the afternoon’s main themes: “We’re not using money for political purposes almost at all in this movement. If one percent of the money that’s going into charter schools went

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into politics and elections in the support of education reform, we would end up with way more progress for the movement.” Later, he exhorted, “And if you search your heart and you feel uncomfortable using certain tools, get over it.” He also addressed the legal issue: “It really needs to be ‘by any means necessary,’ and you can do a lot legally. What you can’t do legally in terms of electioneering, that’s where partnerships come in.” Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (another robust political outfit with affiliates around the country), offered more specific advice: “Find more creative lawyers. We need them [ed reform nonprofits] to fire all of their lawyers that tell them ‘no’ all the time, if they have traditional 501(c)3 lawyers….”

Another of Williams’s comments reveals what is so misguided about this brand of education reform: “I think charter schools should be paying advocacy organizations for their advocacy work out of their per-pupil dollars. If you think of running a school as running a business, any sound business is going to allocate right off the bat a certain percentage of their funding towards lobbying, advocacy work.”

But why think of running a school as running a business? Striving for efficiency is one thing—a good thing in many human endeavors, including school administration.

But the analogy doesn’t hold beyond that: a school’s “bottom line” is not measured in dollars of profit; it shouldn’t waste resources on winning “market share” away from other schools. And why should charter schools pay for advocacy out of per-pupil dollars? Those are taxpayer dollars meant for those children’s education; the students “carry” those dollars away from a regular public school and give them to a charter school.

Williams’s position is self-serving: the per-pupil “fee” for advocacy would go to him and others among the multitude of salaried ed reform advocates. This problem of selfinterest goes far beyond dunning kids for advocacy dollars. The ed reform movement has turned itself into an industry—an industry made up of scores of nonprofit groups of every size that operate locally, statewide, and nationally. They employ hundreds of people, many at high salaries (Williams’s 2010 salary

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was $250,000); they rake in money from private foundations, wealthy individuals, and government. (As critics note, George Bush’s signature ed reform program, No Child Left Behind, quickly became No Consultant Left Behind.) The nonprofit ed reform industry has a growth model: the more of its agenda that becomes law, the greater the demand for personnel to design, implement, study, and revise government-mandated programs.

To opponents, this looks like a racket. For ed reformers, it’s only, and always, about “helping children.”

It Takes a Bundle: The New School Board In one model of democracy, local school board elections would be genuinely local.

With a few hundred dollars, a stack of lawn signs, time to ring doorbells, and one or two endorsements, you could win a position of importance in your community: a say in how children would be educated and how a sizable amount of public money would be spent. In the real world until recently, only teachers’ unions and the Christian Right paid much attention to these elections (the Christian Right recognized their importance as a political stepping stone some thirty-five years ago); few citizens bothered to vote. Now the ed reformers have jumped in, turning school board races into battles requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars per candidate and outside operatives. This sabotages both rootedness in the community and access. A potential forum for grassroots democracy is lost.

Consider the November 1, 2011 school board race in Denver. Three candidates ran as a “reform slate” for the three open seats on the seven-member board. Colorado doesn’t limit contributions in school board elections, so money from the ed reform movement and corporate CEOs poured in.

According to the final tallies posted on Colorado’s Campaign Finance Disclosure website, the reform slate took in $633,807 (an average of $211,269 per candidate). Just six donors—including executives in the oil, health-care, construction, and financial industries—accounted for $293,000 of the total. One of them, Strata Resources president Henry Gordon, told the Colorado Statesman (October

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17, 2011) that he wasn’t familiar with the candidates when he gave the slate $75,000 but simply complied with the request of another major donor. The market approach to ed reform appeals to business leaders in general. Depending on their industry, some of them also stand to gain from reform-generated contracts.

Stand for Children (headquartered in Portland, Oregon) gave the reform slate $88,511 in “non-monetary” contributions of staff support and canvassing services. When an outside organization hires and pays for staff and vote solicitors and then “donates” their work to a candidate, the work looks like grassroots organizing but isn’t. It is “astroturfing”—a term the late U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is believed to have coined in 1985. Astroturfing is political activity designed to appear unsolicited, autonomous, and community-rooted without actually being so.

Astroturfing is the modus operandi of the ed reform movement. Contributions of staff and services skyrocketed in Denver in 2011.

Two years earlier, for example, the candidate who is now the pro-reform school board president received just $310 in non-monetary contributions. In 2011, in addition to the $88,511 from Stand for Children, the reform slate took in $34,231 in mostly non-monetary contributions from a 501(c)4 group called Great Schools for Great Kids (Education News Colorado, December 2, 2011). The original source of this money isn’t clear—501(c)4s are not required to disclose donors. But the record shows that Great Schools for Great Kids transferred money to a super PAC that has the same registered agent and office suite as a Stand for Children affiliate. The money sloshes around.

The six other candidates in the nonpartisan race raised a total of $212,973 (an average of $35,495 per candidate). This, too, seems like a lot of money for a school board race, and yet, on a per candidate basis, the reform slate took in six times as much money as opponents did.

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association endorsed two candidates. One of them received $71,240 from the union in monetary and non-monetary donations; the other

received $40,720. According to the Denver Post (December 2, 2011), the union spent another $86,000 through a committee called Delta 4.0 on mailers to advocate for the two candidates.

Labor unions [501(c)5s in the IRS code] have tax exempt status, as do business associations and political campaign organizations. Unlike ed reformers backed by private funders, however, the teachers’ unions are mass organizations with established local affiliates and elected leaders accountable to dues-paying members. Whatever their strengths and weaknesses, teachers’ unions are tied to schools, students, parents, and communities through their members.

Two of the three Denver reform candidates won; the third lost by only 142 votes to the union-endorsed incumbent. The deluge of money certainly helped the reformers retain their four-to-three majority on the board.

Equally important, the ed reform operation reached a pivotal goal: to eclipse the longstanding power of the teachers’ unions in the political arena. The expense and acrimony of the race prompted a Democratic state representative to re-propose spending limits.

Unfortunately, after Citizens United, limits can end up funneling even more money into the web of political committees, where it’s harder to track and where individual donors can remain anonymous.

Denver wasn’t the only absurdly expensive school board race in 2011. For other examples, see page 56.

The Company They Keep Ed reformers liven up their websites with photographs of happy-looking school children, many of them minorities: the kids are busy at work or smiling into the camera.

Meanwhile, their self-appointed benefactors ally with politicians who are slashing school budgets, cutting social services and benefits, gutting jobs programs, undercutting healthcare reform, pummeling public sector unions, and passing laws that make it harder for the children’s parents to vote. The disconnect between what ed reformers claim to be doing for low-income children and what they actually bring about boggles the mind.

The poster child for this moral disconnect

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is former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor and ed reform celebrity Michelle Rhee. Rhee resigned her D.C. post in October 2010 after her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, failed in his reelection bid. Within weeks, Rhee had set up a 501(c)4 advocacy organization called StudentsFirst; she announced a five-year fundraising goal of $1 billion. Rhee explained the purpose of her project this way (Daily Beast/ Newsweek, December 6, 2010): When you think about how things happen in our country—how laws get passed or policies are made—they happen through the exertion of influence. From the National Rifle Association to the pharmaceutical industry to the tobacco lobby, powerful interests put pressure on our elected officials and government institutions to sway or stop change. Education is no different.

Rhee had a hectic first year. She started 2011 with gigs as ed reform policy advisor to three conservative Republican governors: Florida’s Rick Scott, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and Ohio’s John Kasich. Walker and Kasich provoked mass protests in their respective states by pushing through laws that rolled back not only the salaries and pensions of public sector workers (including teachers) but also their union rights. Rhee came under fire for helping to shape the teacher-related provisions of the laws. She tried to wash her hands of the matter by saying that she didn’t work on collective bargaining issues and didn’t endorse everything in the laws. But during a March 5, 2011 interview on Fox News, she asserted that unions “don’t have a place in getting involved in policies, and so I think that the move to try to limit what they bargain over is an incredibly important one.”

No one knows how much money Rhee has raised so far or from whom: at this writing, the tax returns haven’t been filed, and she keeps her donors anonymous (although Rupert Murdoch is rumored to have given $50 million). Regardless, Rhee made a splashy debut as a high-rolling lobbyist. Her lobbying entity in Michigan, called United for Children Advocacy DBA StudentsFirst, spent $951,018 from January through July 2011 to influence

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the content of ed reform legislation. This made Rhee the biggest spending lobbyist in the state. She accounted for nearly half of the 11.6 percent increase in total lobbying spending compared to the same period in 2010. The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Michigan Education Association, ranked sixth, spending $324,197.

Rhee also set up a super PAC in Michigan called Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First. It contributed $73,000 of its $155,000 bankroll to oppose the recall of Paul Scott, Republican chair of the state House Education Committee. Scott voted to cut K-12 spending while advancing ed reform bills.

According to the Flint Journal (January 1, 2012), the Michigan Education Association contributed $140,000 to support the recall.

Scott raised almost double that amount. Rhee’s major allies in this battle included the rightwing billionaire couple Dick and Betsy DeVos (his father co-founded Amway). The DeVos family has funded education privatization efforts around the country since 1990; they are among the biggest promoters of vouchers (perpupil public funds that students can withdraw from the public system and use to pay for private schools, including religious schools); they also fund Christian Right schools. The recall effort succeeded by 197 votes.

In New Jersey, Rhee connected with two hedge-fund managers—David Tepper, a Democrat, and Alan Fournier, a Republican.

The duo had recently joined the club of no-expertise-in-education billionaires dedicated to changing public schools. In March 2011, Tepper and Fournier launched a 501(c)4 called Better Education for Kids, Inc., and a super PAC called Better Education for New Jersey Kids, Inc. During the summer of 2011, the super PAC spent about $1 million on TV and radio commercials to promote Republican Governor Chris Christie’s ed reform program.

In the fall, the super PAC gave $400,000 to support four pro-reform candidates for state Assembly: two, both Democrats, won; the two Republicans lost. Since then, the 501(c)4 has been offering New Jersey teachers $100 gift certificates to participate in private meetings about teacher evaluations. Tepper and Fournier’s super PAC and 501(c)4, it turns out, constitute the New Jersey branch of Rhee’s

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StudentsFirst. The ed reform network expands while remaining knit together by money and the strength of the moral crusade.

Jammed Down Their Throats: An Inside Story Hubris is a core characteristic of today’s ed reformers. Of necessity, it informs their politicking. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ed-world scandal that Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman created (his name reappears because he’s a prime mover of the political strategy). At a session of the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 28, 2011, Edelman told his story of how the Illinois chapter of Stand, under his direction, shaped the state’s education reform bill and helped get it through the legislature. A video of Edelman’s presentation went viral on the Web, causing great embarrassment for Illinois lawmakers and teachers’ unions. They promptly denounced him and tried to correct the record. Edelman made a public apology, and Stand’s Illinois chapter appointed a new, if nominal, director. Still, Edelman’s account is extremely useful for understanding the attitude and style of ed reformers.

The Illinois law, which the governor signed on June 13, 2011, makes it easier to fire tenured teachers and revoke certification, eliminates seniority as the top consideration in layoffs, bases teacher evaluations on to-befinalized measures of student performance, gives Chicago’s school administrators the unilateral power to lengthen the school day and year, and makes a strike by Chicago’s teachers nearly impossible.

Maneuvering for the law began with the 2010 elections to the state legislature. Chicago Democrat Michael Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House for twenty-seven years, was running again. Edelman had raised more than $3.5 million for Stand’s Illinois war chest, mostly from Chicago’s wealthiest families, Republicans as well as Democrats. Since the substance of the story is in Edelman’s telling, here are excerpts from his talk (for the complete video, see the festival’s website): …So our analysis was he’s [Madigan] still going to be in power, and as such the raw politics were that

we should tilt toward him, and so we interviewed thirty-six candidates in targeted races.…I’m being quite blunt here. The individual candidates were essentially a vehicle to execute a political objective, which was to tilt toward Madigan. The press never picked up on it. We endorsed nine individuals, and six of them were Democrats, three Republicans…. …That was really a show of—indication to him that we could be a new partner to take the place of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. That was the point.

Luckily, it never got covered that way. That wouldn’t have worked well in Illinois. Madigan is not particularly well liked.

[Stand for Children, which gave $610,000 to its endorsed candidates, was one of the biggest contributors in the election.]…After the election, we went back to Madigan…and I confirmed the support [for Stand’s legislative proposal]….The next day he created an Education Reform Commission, and his political director called to ask for our suggestions who should be on it….In addition, we hired eleven lobbyists, including four of the absolute best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We raised $3 million for our political action committee. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

And so essentially what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. And I can tell you, there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers’ unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier. …And so over the course of three months, with Advance Illinois [another ed reform group, $1.8 million from Gates in 2008] taking the negotiating lead…and Advance and Stand working in lockstep… they [the union negotiators] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed. …We fully expected [on the collective bargaining issues] that our collaborative problem-solving of three months would end, and we would have an impasse and go to war, and we were prepared. We had money raised for radio ads, and our lobbyists were ready.

Well, to our surprise, and with [Chicago’s newly elected mayor] Rahm Emanuel’s involvement behind the scenes, we were able to split the IEA [Illinois Education Association, a statewide union] from the

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Chicago Teachers’ Union. …So the Senate backed it [the bill] 59 to zero, and then the Chicago Teachers’ Union leader started getting pushback from her membership for a deal that really, probably, wasn’t from their perspective strategic. She backed off for a little while, but the die had been cast. She had publicly been supportive. So we did some face-saving technical fixes in a separate bill, but

the House approved it 112 to one. … We’ve been happy to dole out plenty of credit, and now it makes it hard for folks leading unions in other states to say these types of reforms are terrible because their colleagues in Illinois just said these are great. So our hope and our expectation is to use this as a catalyst to very quickly make similar changes in other very entrenched states.

Astroturf—Says Who?

The 1 Percent for School Board Louisiana: The usually low-key elections for state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education cost well over $1 million in the fall of 2011. According to state campaign finance data, a proreform funding group called the Alliance for Better Classrooms took in more than $750,000, 40 percent of it from construction mogul Lane Grisby and family members ($200,000) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s trust ($100,000). The state’s most important business lobby, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, gave pro-reform candidates at least $250,000, according to Stateline, a news service sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts (Gates, $1.4 million to the Pew Research Center, 2011). The proreformers won six of the seven races.

Wake County, NC: The fall 2011 school board elections were the most expensive in the county’s history, costing more than $500,000, according to an early tally by the News & Observer website (November 8, 2011). At stake was a nationally acclaimed program that uses busing to achieve economic— and thereby racial—diversity. In 2009 multimillionaire conservative Art Pope (profiled in the New Yorker, October 10, 2011) spent heavily to get a Republican majority elected that would dismantle the program. The board promptly devised a plan to do that. The backlash against Pope, his allies, and the board produced a Democratic sweep of the five open seats in 2011. This vote for school integration made news around the country.

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Jonah Edelman’s exploits offended not only Illinois legislators and unionists but also African American clergy in Chicago.

BlackCommentator.com posted this account by David A. Love on July 29, 2011: Edelman attended a community meeting of black Chicago clergy with what observers have called a “slick dog and pony show.”…According to Rev. Robin Hood, executive director of Clergy Committed to Community, SFC [Stand] wasn’t the least bit interested in the concerns of the black community. “They were interested in getting people to see [the pro-charter film] Waiting for Superman….I found they were anti-union when we met with Stand for Children. It was all about money.”…

Although SFC spread around a lot of money in Chicago communities, Rev. Hood emphasized that not one of the pastors in his group would take any of it.

The Edelman Affair is a sorry tale, not only because Jonah is the son of civil-rights leader Marian Wright Edelman and poverty analyst Peter Edelman, but also because Stand started out as an authentic grassroots organization in Oregon. When the scandal broke, longtime activists who had quit or become inactive “spoke out” online. Their reports are remarkably similar. The following is from an open letter to Edelman from Tom Olson, a decade-long volunteer and local leader, posted on the Parents Across America website on July 22, 2011. Olson and his wife had cancelled their sustaining memberships fifteen months earlier: [I]n 2009, a number of us began to observe a serious erosion of your commitment to true grassroots operations....One of the “reforms” you and your staff began to tout

SCHOOL REFORM was a call for legislation to create more “flexibility” for schools. This was obviously a thinly disguised attempt to erode negotiated teacher contract agreements and to create more charter schools. It was clearly modeled after some Colorado legislation you had pushed as you shifted to demanding attention to a national agenda supported mostly by corporate and Wall Street millionaires.

Dropping grassroots activism in favor of the ed reformers’ top-down strategy put Stand in sync with the rest of the movement. Ed reformers rarely concede, let alone lament, that they deal mostly in astroturf paid for by wealthy whites. So a frank assessment

by Jeanne Allen, founder of the Center for Education Reform, merits attention. In 2010 CER received $275,000 from Gates to launch the Media Bullpen, a baseball-themed website that rates education reporting according to reform criteria. (I gladly disclose that my article in Dissent, Winter 2011, “Got Dough: How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” received a “strike out,” the lowest rating.) Allen posted the following online on December 19, 2011: The main reason that poor and minority communities fail to engage in our movement has very little to do with elected Republicans or Democrats and everything to do with us. As a movement (and I’ve seen this first-hand for more than twenty years), we believe advocacy is when a professional shows up in their friend the majority leader’s office and has a good meeting....

Real grassroots efforts are on the ground, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, long-term, sustainable education efforts to engage and fortify REAL people, to be REAL voices.

Neither ConnCan [flagship branch of 50CAN, $2.4 million from Gates in 2011], nor Stand, nor any of those who claim to do grassroots do it....It’s the failure of people who love and advance an issue through their own narrow (albeit powerful) lenses and fail to recognize that the marketing and lobbying firms they hire are clueless about what is really necessary to truly make progress.

Endgame A strong democracy requires a public education system, one that is excellent throughout and open to all. The United States failed even to aim for this standard until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed racial segregation in schools. Since then, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (which directed federal funds to low-income schools), the nation has made progress toward access and excellence. Too slowly, of course, but progress nonetheless (see Richard Rothstein’s March 8, 2011 analysis for the Economic Policy Institute). Ed reformers ignore the data, claiming that poor and minority children are no better educated now than thirty or forty years ago. In fact, progress has slowed only in the last decade, since No Child Left Behind was implemented and the reform agenda gained traction. Other factors may play a role, but the ed reformers certainly haven’t improved progress.

The line of battle for the future of public education is clear. Allied on one side are freemarket zealots in the business community, pro-voucher social conservatives, and this peculiar breed of reformers whose political movers are often wealthy, private-school educated, white, male, and under the age of fifty. They are the junior plutocracy, strivers whose do-good goal twenty years ago would have been a seat on the board of the municipal art museum. They are typically clueless about public education. On the other side are public school students, their families, their teachers, and believers in the link between democracy and public education. The first side has money, powerful political connections, and an infrastructure of nonprofit organizations with paid staff. The other side has this: the ability to become a true grassroots movement.

This looks like an unequal contest. But with sustained effort, citizen activists at the grassroots can trump hired guns on astroturf.

Joanne Barkan is a writer who lives in Manhattan and Truro, Massachusetts. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where she attended public elementary and high schools.

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Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution W I L L I A M E . F O R B AT H

Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire, unchecked corporate power, and the deprivations and inequalities they bred were not just bad public policy—they were constitutional infirmities. Today, with the exception of employment discrimination, such concerns have vanished from progressives’ constitutional landscape.

That has to change. For constitutionalism is the language Americans most often use to talk about the rights of citizens and the duties and purposes of government. It supplies the “higher law” against which existing social arrangements and the laws upholding them are judged so wrong as to warrant extraordinary engagement and even disruption in the name of supplanting them. For most of U.S. history, the popular constitutionalism of social movements has been the seedbed of congressional and court constitutionalism.

And the highbrow oppositional constitutionalism of academics and policy experts is a dress rehearsal for the arguments of courts and lawmakers, when the political moment is ripe.

The air today is thick with constitution talk. But nearly all of it, both popular and highbrow, is on the right. The Tea Party and its legislative and judicial allies have brought the old laissez-faire constitutional case against 5 8 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

public provision from the right-wing blogosphere and the work of the libertarian intelligentsia into congressional debate and the opinions of federal judges. The argument that Obamacare is an unconstitutional interference with individual freedom, which once seemed absurd, is now a plausible view that the Supreme Court just might embrace.

Right-wingers are bent on reviving the anti-redistributive, laissez-faire tradition in constitutional law and politics. Many of them are “originalists,” for whom history obliges us to return to the political economy embodied in early twentieth-century opinions such as Lochner v. New York, which, in 1906, struck down a maximum hours law for bakers.

The originalist theory of constitutional interpretation is bunk. But originalists are correct in their practical understanding of constitutional politics. Movements for basic change need an account of past constitutional contests and commitments that add up to a vision of the nation that the Constitution promises to promote and redeem; and conservative revivalists have constructed such an account. Their Constitution promises to restore an America fundamentally committed to rugged individualism, personal responsibility, godliness, and private property safe from state interference and redistribution. And this story has aroused citizens, lawmakers, and judges on the right to act boldly on its behalf.

Progressives’ common response to this story line has been defensive: the Constitution, they declare, does not speak to the rights and wrongs of economic life; it leaves all that to the give and take of ordinary politics. This may be understandable, but it is wrong as a matter of constitutional history and wrong in principle. And it is bad politics.

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Historically, there is a venerable rival to the laissez-faire tradition: the rich, reform-minded distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics. We need to remember this tradition and examine why it is now all but invisible.

It does a better job than current progressive constitutional discourse at capturing the kind of nation the Constitution promises to all Americans. It also offers new paths for the development of judge-made law. But it does not call on courts to take heroic actions against the other branches. Rather, it reminds lawmakers that there are constitutional stakes in attending to the economic needs of ordinary Americans, their dread of poverty and want, and their worries that mounting inequalities are eroding our democracy and its promise of equal opportunity. And so it provides a sturdier basis on which to uphold regulations that the Right has begun, once more, to assail. At the same time, it offers a baseline of popular constitutional commitment to all Americans—alongside the courts’ necessary interventions on behalf of callously excluded minorities and vulnerable fellow citizens.

The gist of the distributive tradition is simple: gross economic inequality produces gross political inequality. You cannot have a constitutional republic, or what the Framers called a “republican form of government,” and certainly not a democracy, in the context of gross material inequality. Gross economic inequality produces an oligarchy in which the wealthy rule; and insofar as it produces deprivation and a lack of basic social goods among those at the bottom, gross inequality destroys the material independence and security that democratic citizens must have in order to think and act on their own behalf and participate on a roughly equal footing in political and social life. Finally, access to basic goods such as education and livelihood is essential to standing and respect in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the community.

For their part, the Framers believed that personal liberty and political equality demanded a measure of economic independence and material security. They declared that the new national Constitution, plus equality of rights and liberty at the state level, would ensure that measure for all hardworking white men and their families. Eighty

years later, this same political economy of citizenship animated the Fourteenth Amendment.

Its main aim was to give African American men the same rights of contract and property that were thought to guarantee to white men the opportunity to pursue a calling and earn a decent living.

In the wake of industrialization and urbanization, generations of reformers declared that the United States needed a “new economic constitutional order” securing the old promises of individual freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing. Amid these turn-of-the-century battles over economic life, the growing concentration of power in corporations, and widening class inequalities, Progressivism was born. Its heart lay in the contest between “Wealth” and “Commonwealth.” This struggle prompted popular interpreters of the Progressive constitution to proclaim that in industrialized America “social justice” was indispensable for “legal justice.” Figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Jane Addams, and William Jennings Bryan insisted that the United States could not remain a constitutional republic without social and economic reform. America was becoming a corporate oligarchy; working people were wage slaves, ciphers and servants, ill-equipped for democratic citizenship.

The New Deal brought this progressive constitutional vision to partial fruition. FDR and the New Dealers claimed not only that Congress had the power to enact New Deal legislation, it had the duty to do so. In speeches and radio addresses, Roosevelt set out to win the nation’s support for what he termed a “redefinition of [classical liberal] rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.”

In the pre-industrial past, FDR explained, when the “Western frontier” was open and land “substantially free,” the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights “in acquiring and possessing property” joined with the ballot and the freedom to live by one’s “own lights” to ensure the Constitution’s promise of “liberty and equality.” Not so today. The “turn of the tide” came with the close of the frontier and the rise of great “industrial combinations.”

The “terms” of our basic rights “are as old

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as the Republic,” FDR proclaimed, but new conditions demanded new readings. “Every man has a right to life,” and a “right to make a comfortable living.” The “government,” he went on, “formal and informal, political and economic, still owes to everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of [the nation’s wealth] sufficient for his needs, through his own work.” Alongside education, “training and retraining,” decent work, and decent pay, FDR’s Second Bill of Rights set out rights to decent housing and social insurance, including health care.

But social rights were not enough. No less central to the New Deal Constitution was the old Progressive idea that “political democracy” was impossible without what reformers called “industrial democracy.” Industrialization had turned a citizenry of artisans and farmers into property-less wage earners locked in what the New Deal Court and Congress called “inherently unequal” and “dependent” relations with industrial employers. The problem was not only material want. It was dignity, the tyranny of the boss or foreman, the wage earner’s lack of freedom, voice, or authority in the workplace. Wage slaves could not function as democratic citizens.

To “maintain a republican form of government,” the great New Deal senator Robert Wagner explained, we must bring “constitutional democracy to industry.”

Workers had fundamental rights to form unions, engage in “concerted [economic and associational] activity,” and bargain collectively with their employers. These were constitutional claims resting on freedom of speech, assembly, and association and on the economic liberties enshrined in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Long before the New Deal, state legislatures and Congresses embraced these arguments, enacting prounion measures only to have them overturned by obdurate state and federal judges.

With the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), Congress passed a new and robust set of protections for labor rights. The contradiction between “our republican form of government,” declared Wagner, the act’s sponsor, and the “serfdom” in “our factories,

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mills, and offices” was “over.” The responsibilities and expectations of citizenship—due process, free speech, assembly, and petition— would find their place at work. The lower courts condemned the Wagner Act, but with Congress’s and the White House’s prodding, the Supreme Court made its famous “switch in time” and upheld the statute. The Wagner Act’s safeguards against reprisals for talking union, joining the union, or going on strike, along with its requirement that employers bargain with workers’ duly chosen representatives, were seen as constitutional safeguards, even though they ran against employers and not the government.

These rights lie in ruins today. The future of the distributive Constitution may hinge on re-inventing and restoring them. Still, the New Deal was only half a victory for the distributive Constitution. The main legislative embodiments of Roosevelt’s “second Bill of Rights”—the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards and Social Security Acts of the 1930s—were great achievements, but they were crafted to exclude African Americans. The same Southern Democrats who insisted on these exclusions joined forces with conservative Republicans to thwart FDR’s later efforts to enact national health insurance, remedy the many gaps and exclusions in the New Deal statutes, and create a federal commitment to full employment. Thus, the constitutional bad faith—on the part of both parties and most of white America—that had earlier led all three branches of the federal government to abandon Reconstruction and condone Jim Crow and black (and poor white) disenfranchisement in the South continued to deprive black Americans of civil and political rights. And it also prevented all Americans from securing the full benefit of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights.

After the 1940s, social rights talk fell into disuse. New industrial unions had emerged as the only powerful, organized constituency for social and economic rights. Frustrated at every legislative crossroads in their efforts to join forces with FDR to “complete the New Deal” by enacting a more encompassing and inclusive welfare state, industrial union leaders began constructing a robust private welfare state via collective agreements with

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large corporate employers in the prosperous core of the postwar economy. Contract unionism became a vehicle for private entitlements to job security, cost-of-living adjustments, private health care, and pension plans for union members. In that prosperous core, a vast new American “middle class” took shape, as union workplaces set a standard that even adamantly anti-union firms adopted.

In the prosperous post New Deal decades, progressive constitutional lawyering and politics focused on racial and gender justice.

In the realm of work and social provision, that meant overcoming the exclusions that blighted the labor market, the private welfare state, and the caste-ridden system of social insurance and public assistance bequeathed by the New Deal. “Civil rights” became synonymous with these struggles. During this prosperous era, progressives forgot the distributive tradition and its core idea that the Constitution speaks to harsh class inequalities and the deprivation and domination they breed.

Today, the New Deal settlement is dead.

The nation’s once ample supply of stable, secure, decently paid unskilled or semi-skilled jobs has dried up, and the divided system of public and private social provision is vanishing. The end of welfare has melded the “undeserving poor” into the “working poor” and the long-term unemployed. In the thick of a Great Recession, we see the results of a decades-long crusade against corporate and governmental responsibility for individual welfare, which swept like a grim reaper through pension plans, health insurance, and labor standards, cutting the bonds of social solidarity and shifting the burdens of and responsibilities for economic risk from government and corporations to workers and their families.

Standard explanations for these developments hinge on globalization and heightened international competition. Yet, other nations have done well in meeting these challenges over the past three decades without succumbing to America’s mounting inequality and abandoned social bonds. But those nations still have an institution that we lost: robust private sector unionism. Since the 1970s, U.S. union density has plummeted from roughly 40 percent to less than 10

percent of the private work force, thus weakening the political clout of working people.

More than any other factor, political scientists and seasoned journalists agree, the erosion of organized labor explains Congress’s failures to counteract the growing inequalities and inequities of the past few decades.

If the distributive tradition is right, and constitutional democracy depends on a measure of social democracy, then we are living through a constitutional crisis in slow motion: a crisis that today’s attacks on public sector unions are sure to worsen. Intriguingly, while private sector union density has declined, public sector unionism has grown to 37 percent of the public work force. This has not offset the sharp diminution of organized labor’s political heft, but it has mitigated it.

What explains the striking contrast between the decline of private sector unionism and the strong and still growing presence of public sector unions? The legal landscape has played a critical role. Different bodies of law govern in the two sectors. A key difference is that in the public sector, you don’t put your job and paycheck on the line by “talking union” or getting involved in union activity. In the private sector, where the NLRA governs, the odds are good that you’ll be fired, and neither the law nor the union will be able to do much about it.

The NLRA has become a toothless lion, which no longer provides any meaningful protection for the rights it enshrined.

Beginning in the 1980s, as corporations began dismantling the postwar private welfare state, they also mounted aggressive efforts to thwart organizing and prevent union election victories. These anti-union campaigns are rife with textbook violations of the NLRA. Firing union activists is flatly illegal, but it carries no significant penalties. If Labor Board sanctions finally arrive, they are treated as a paltry cost of doing business, a small price to pay for defeating the union.

The reason you do not put your job on the line by “talking union” at a government workplace is that most public sector workers, at state and federal levels, are covered by civil service law and cannot be fired without “just

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cause.” If a union organizer or activist is fired in the midst of an organizing campaign, the public employer has the burden of showing that the firing was not in retaliation for taking part in the campaign. As a consequence of these laws (and the culture they have shaped), retaliatory firings and serious workplace reprisals for union activity are rare in the public sector.

Private employers, by contrast, are free to fire employees at any time for any reason at all—good, bad, or indifferent—as long as the reason is not forbidden by some other body of law, such as race or sex discrimination law— or like the NLRA, which, in theory, outlaws firings or reprisals for union activity. It is the worker’s burden to show that the firing was to thwart the union campaign, but the employer can always claim that the reason for the firing was “malingering” or “insubordination” or “lateness” or literally anything else. And even if a Labor Board official eventually determines that union involvement motivated the firing, and a court upholds it, the sanction is trivial.

What is to be done? Organizing the unorganized should not be so enormously costly and perilous. Progressive labor and employmentlaw scholars and policy mavens are brimming with good ideas for fixing our broken framework of labor rights. Astonishingly, though, during the seventy-five years since the Wagner Act was passed, there has been only one significant set of changes to the statute, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and it was antiunion. Since the New Deal, organized labor’s many legislative successes have involved pushing through Congress laws that benefited working people across the board, union and non-union alike, which is surely a good thing.

But organized labor has failed repeatedly to overcome the intense and unified opposition of employers to even modest pro-union reforms; and that failure has grown into a calamity.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not passed until the civil rights movement had mounted mass protests and mobilized support throughout the country—the case won’t be different here.

Labor law reform will happen if and when the

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labor movement once more takes on the aspect of a civil rights movement.

Fortunately, among the most dynamic private sector unions, organizing campaigns show promise of doing just that. For example, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, have won decent pay and benefits, worked with employers to fashion meaningful job ladders and training opportunities, and helped their predominantly new immigrant and African American members gain political clout in cities as disparate as Los Angeles, El Paso, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, New York, and Atlanta. These unions have turned to bold, industry-wide, community-based strategies.

Operating outside the broken legal framework of the NLRA, they have reinvented the kinds of mass organizing campaigns and political alliances forged by unions of unskilled new immigrant workers at the turn of the last century. Their victories have demonstrated the restiveness and organizing prowess of these workers. But they also confirmed the extraordinary hurdles that the nation’s legal order puts in the way of union organizers.

HERE and SEIU have developed canny new strategies aimed at today’s national and international corporate structures. SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaigns, for example, do not simply negotiate and bargain with the office-building service contractors in the cities where its members work. Instead, the union has tracked the growing consolidation of building maintenance companies and of the ownership of high rises around the nation. Members of one local union fly across the country to sit in at bargaining sessions of another local, and a nationwide bond has developed among the janitors. If the local on strike in Los Angeles sends one picket to a building cleaned by the same employer or owned by the same real estate investment trust in New York, the New York janitors will not clean the building. Often, building owners bring fierce pressure on contractors to settle.

Meanwhile, the wages of L.A.’s downtown janitors have risen from the minimum wage prior to unionization to roughly seventeen dollars an hour today. The union locals’ immigrant members have mastered the arts of democratic self-rule in union governance and

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mutual aid and advocacy in grievances against employers; they also played a signal role in electing that city’s first Hispanic mayor in more than a century.

Working in hotels, especially housekeeping and food and beverage work, is seen as the classic low-wage, dead-end job. Yet, in many U.S. cities, HERE has fashioned labormanagement partnerships that have changed the architecture of work, benefiting both hotel companies and workers. The logic of these partnerships has been to provide job security, solid pay, continued job training, and genuine career ladders for hotel workers (often recent immigrants and former welfare recipients), while, at the same time, overcoming severe recruitment, retention, flexibility, and skill deficit problems on hotel management’s side.

These union-management consortia have become known as premier sources of training and good jobs; they are also premier examples of social citizenship.

But we shouldn’t be deluded by these union success stories. Employers greet labor’s innovative political maneuvering and blistering publicity and boycott campaigns with libel and conspiracy suits and restraining orders; they meet strikers, pickets, and protests with injunctions and mass arrests. Surprisingly, these attacks have opened opportunities to change these labor contests into civil rights struggles.

These campaigns may be the context in which federal courts finally recognize the constitutionally protected status of boycotts of “unfair” businesses and resurrect the short-lived constitutional right to picket over a labor grievance—a right they recognized briefly in the 1940s, but interred in the 1950s.

The mounting vigor of the Roberts Court’s commitment to robust First Amendment protection for all manner of expression, from business advertising and corporate campaign spending to cross burning, anti-abortion demonstrations, and sex on the Internet, suggests that its interest in consistency here may outweigh its anti-labor bias. Consider the Court’s eight-to-one vote last term in favor of full First Amendment protection for the “raucous,” in-your-face, anti-gay pickets at a soldier’s funeral, and it seems possible that doctrinal development has reached a point where the Court, whose most forceful conserva-

tives pride themselves on doctrinal consistency, may be ready to revisit labor picketing.

Union organizing without effective legal and constitutional safeguards remains a Herculean task. Like labor picketing, the scanty First Amendment protection enjoyed by labor boycotts as compared to civil rights boycotts rests on notions that fitted the doctrinal landscape decades ago, but not today. Above all, the rationale for not extending First Amendment protection to labor boycotts has been that they involve one self-interested economic actor seeking to inflict economic injury on another, whereas civil rights boycotts involve matters of common public concern. This vexed notion seems especially vulnerable in the face of organizing campaigns such as those waged by HERE and SEIU.

The organizing campaigns they wage and the boycotts they promote depend on laborcommunity alliances that dramatize the artificiality of the opposition of “economic” versus “political” or labor versus civil rights protest. These campaigns involve predominantly African American or Hispanic and new immigrant workplaces; they engage the local NAACP, local politicians, clergy and community leaders, and immigrant rights organizations, all of whom view the boycotting in support of workers in terms of community uplift and civil rights.

Campaigns like these may enable progressive attorneys to revive the Court’s short-lived understanding of the public, political nature of labor grievances and weave the strands of First Amendment protection enjoyed by community-based pickets and civil rights protestors back into labor law. It is not hard to imagine Justice Scalia and some of the other conservative justices adopting such a view in the name of doctrinal consistency and a vibrant First Amendment across the board: a tit for tat in the wake of Citizens United’s controversial new First Amendment safeguard for unlimited corporate spending in the electoral arena. If the Justices go down this path, they will give organized labor a golden opportunity to focus the media spotlight on the basic freedoms and civil liberties at stake in labor struggles.

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But whether or not the justices oblige labor in this fashion, union activists at all levels understand the urgency of harnessing popular discontent to rebuild the labor movement.

Let’s imagine the door is open once again to labor law reform. What kinds of reforms will be on the table? First of all, firing workers for talking union should face the same kind of tough sanctions as other illegal firings based on race or sex. There is a modest enough way to accomplish this. A private right of action against anti-union discrimination would mean that labor law enforcement no longer rested solely with the weak NLRB. Individual and aggregate suits could be brought in federal courts, where the prospect of large damage judgments would enlist the private plaintiffs’ bar and make employers pay attention.

Other reform paths are also possible— and essential. Some progressive advocates champion legally mandated forms of worker participation and labor representation with unions playing a more resolutely cooperative role inside the firm. Others hope to rekindle traditional unionism and collective bargaining through a combination of strengthened protections for union activity and “quicky elections” less subject to employer interference. Some aim instead to revive an older labor reform ideal of “collective laissez-faire” through a grand bargain: broader freedom of collective action exchanged for fewer legal safeguards than exist under the present NLRA (which keep established unions insulated from challenge). Still others suggest that our laws should offer employers a choice: either adopt robust and effective worker participation measures inside your business or submit to a reinvigorated framework of union representation.

But none of these pro-union measures will pass Congress unless the labor movement once more takes on the aspect of a civil rights movement. That may call for great internal changes in the more stodgy and autocratic unions—to bring movement energy, aspirations, and rights claims into their campaigns and restore the link between labor rights and American liberties. Meanwhile, liberals and progressives in public debate could respond

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to right-wing constitutional politics with a rekindled account of the broader commitments embodied in the distributive Constitution for which organized labor has done the heavy lifting.

The former constitutional law professor in the White House has spoken eloquently about the Constitution and its commitments. In characteristically muted fashion, Barack Obama’s familiar narrative echoes the account of the progressive Constitution I have sketched. It starts by proclaiming fidelity to the Founders, the “brave band of settlers” and “colonists.”

In the next breath, though, it affirms that the Constitution is a work-in-progress, transformed by Civil War and Reconstruction and later amendments. And recall the key words in Obama’s constitutional phrase book: “a more perfect union.” Progressives could gain a firmer footing on the contested ground of racial justice in the twenty-first century by attending to what Obama has had to say about the “part of our union that we have yet to perfect.”

When he talks in this constitutional key, he is evoking the tangled knot of race and class at the heart of the narrative: “the complexities of race in this country that we have never really worked through.” The president recounts the New Deal programs that provided unions, good jobs, housing loans, and other opportunities for white America and left blacks in the cold, with a legacy of poverty many have not yet overcome. Today, however, many white Americans, abandoned by a plutocratic government and “a corporate culture rife with . . . greed . . . [and] economic policies that favor the few over the many,” have come to resent affirmative action and civil rights laws. Obama laments that they now see opportunity “as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”

The Constitution, then, promises real equality of opportunity; it calls on all three branches of the national government to ensure that all Americans enjoy a decent education and livelihood, a measure of freedom and dignity at work, a chance to engage in the affairs of their communities and the larger society, and a chance to do something that has value in their own eyes. These are key parts of the liberty and equality that America promises

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everyone. It means that Congress has not only the authority but the duty to underwrite these promises; and the judiciary has the duty to ensure that the vulnerable are not callously excluded.

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This broad constitutional narrative is no less

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venerable and resonant than the Republicans’ story of rugged individualism, free enterprise, and the rights of property. And like the latter in the hands of conservatives, this progressive narrative may flow from the broader realm of constitutional politics and culture into the interpretive judgments of a liberal-minded justice, as she decides not only headlinegrabbing constitutional issues, but questions of statutory construction, federal preemption, and the like.

Our national constitutional dialogue is still without a strong defense of the basic precepts of the progressive constitutional tradition.

If these problems are not addressed, the deep fears of hitherto secure “middle class” Americans that they or their offspring will end up in poverty may well produce illiberal and authoritarian responses. All the policy ideas that address our current impasse face severe political obstacles. Progressives need to argue that there are constitutional stakes in overcoming them. They need to demand that we address our unequal and unfair society as though our constitutional democracy depended on it. After all, it does.

William E. Forbath is a professor of law and history at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Harvard, 1991), the forthcoming Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain, many other works and on legal and constitutional history and theory.

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T H E U. S . L E F T: PA S T A N D F U T U R E

Introduction GARY GERSTLE

On September 24, 2011, Michael Kazin published an important essay in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In it he examined the “populist left’s” historic role in shaping politics and policy discussions in the United States, especially in moments of past capitalist crisis and the relative failure of this Left to gain influence in the current crisis. A week before this essay was published, unremarked by almost everyone in America, several hundred protesters, inspired by developments in Tahrir Square in Cairo, had gathered in lower Manhattan to protest economic inequality and the decline of democracy in America. By the middle of October, Occupy Wall Street had riveted the attention of the nation. Until winter weather and municipal police forces shut down Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and scores of other encampments that had sprung up around the country, the Occupy movements created a space for left politics that had not existed for a very long time.

In light of these unexpected developments, it seemed appropriate to ask Kazin to revisit his New York Times essay and the pessimistic reading of post-1960s left politics it presented.

In “The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left,” an updated and revised version of the New York Times piece, Kazin discerns possibility in the Occupy movements, while expressing skepticism about their desire to be “leaderless” and warning how hard it will be to escape America’s history of “failed ideas and strategies on the left.”

We have solicited three responses to Kazin.

In “Solidarity Forever,” historian William P.

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Jones argues that Kazin has both slighted the way that race deformed the populist Left from the end of Reconstruction until the Second World War and misunderstood the strategies the Left has pursued successfully to achieve solidarity among African Americans, women, unionists, and other groups that the Right has stigmatized as “discrete” and narrow.

In “Another History,” political scientist Ira Katznelson pushes this line of critique further, arguing that America’s most successful moment of left mobilization occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, after the civil rights revolution had succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow and the racially exclusive brand of class politics that the Southern supporters of Jim Crow in Congress had enforced. From this perspective, Katznelson concludes, “the Left today possess[es] legacies… more auspicious than Kazin’s history portrays, yet also more difficult.” Finally, in “Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements,” sociologist and attorney Marina Sitrin steps outside debates about the history of the Left in the United States, insisting that the Occupy movements in America belong to a Left that is international and new. This Left, Sitrin argues, is not bound by the past; moreover, it has already succeeded in changing political discourse and in generating spaces in which novel, and participatory, democratic forms can develop.

We hope that Kazin’s essay and the three responses to it will themselves open new space, in the pages of Dissent and beyond, to discuss and debate the past and future of the Left, in America and in the world.

Gary Gerstle‘s publications include Ruling America: Wealth and Power in a Democracy (2005), co-edited with Steve Fraser. He is currently writing a book on the state and democracy in America from the Revolution to the present.

He teaches American history at Vanderbilt University.

T HE U. S . LEF T: PA S T A ND FU T URE

The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left MICHAEL KAZIN

Until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a disturbing absence marked American political life. The nation’s economic miseries continued, with unemployment high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens yawned wider than at any time since the 1920s. Yet, except for the big demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin, critics of big business, big finance, and government cutbacks had failed to organize a serious protest movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession in the first place.

What happened to the anti-corporate Left?

During their surge to prominence last fall, the Occupiers seemed to render that question moot. They set up camp in scores of cities and thrust the problem of economic inequality onto front pages, home pages, and into the center of political debate. It was as if, in a startling rewrite of Beckett’s great play, Vladimir and Estragon had not been waiting in vain: Godot decided to show up after all. Alas, by late winter (as I write) few of the occupations still exist, the non-left media have mostly lost interest, and activists appear divided and dispirited about what should come next.

And we still have to account for the long silence of the activist Left on the intersecting issues of corporate power and stagnant working and living standards.

Perhaps the preparation is all. During the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle.

In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was underway. The liberal triumph was rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

Similarly, the populist Right, now centered in the Tea Party, originated among articulate spokespeople and well-funded institutions that emerged long before the current crisis began. The pro-labor Left and free-market Right would have disagreed about nearly everything, but each had aggressive proponents who, backed up by powerful social forces, established their views as the conventional wisdom of an era.

The seeds of the 1930s Left were planted in the Gilded Age by figures such as Henry George. In 1886, the veteran journalist and author of a best-selling book that condemned land speculation ran for mayor of New York City as the nominee of the new Union Labor Party. George attracted a huge following with speeches that indicted the officeholders of the Tammany Hall machine for engorging themselves on bribes and special privileges while “we have hordes of citizens living in want and in vice born of want, existing under conditions that would appall a heathen.”

George also brought his audiences a message of hope: “We are building a movement for the abolition of industrial slavery, and what we do on this side of the water will send its impulse across the land and over the sea, and give courage to all men to think and act.” Running against candidates from both major parties and the opposition of nearly every local employer and church, George would probably have been elected, if twenty-eight-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican who finished third, had not split the anti-Tammany vote.

Despite George’s defeat, the pro-labor and anti-corporate movement that coalesced around him and others kept growing. As the turn of the century neared, wage earners mounted huge strikes for union recognition on the nation’s railroads and inside its coal mines and textile mills. In the 1890s, a mostly rural insurgency spawned the People’s Party, which quickly won control of several states and elected twenty-two congressmen.

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Democrats, under William Jennings Bryan, had adopted important parts of its platform— the progressive income tax, a flexible currency, and support for labor organizing.

During the early twentieth century, a broader progressive coalition, including immigrant workers, middle-class urban reformers, muckraking journalists, and Social Gospelers, established a new common sense about the need for a government that would rein in corporate power and establish a limited welfare state. The unbridled free market and the ethic of individualism, they claimed, had left too many Americans at the mercy of what Theodore Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth.” As Jane Addams put it, “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, if floating in mid-air, unless it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Amid the boom years of the 1920s, conservatives rebutted this wisdom and won control of the federal government. “The business of America is business,” intoned President Calvin Coolidge. But their triumph was brief, both ideologically and electorally. When Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into the White House in 1932, most Americans were already primed to accept the economic and moral argument progressives had been making since the heyday of Henry George.

Will Rogers, the popular humorist and a loyal Democrat, put it in comfortably agrarian terms: “All the feed is going into one manger and the stock on the other side of the stall ain’t getting a thing.…We got it, but we don’t know how to split it up.” The new unionists of the Congress of Industrial Organizations echoed his argument, as did soak-the-rich demagogues such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The architects of Social Security, the minimum wage, and other landmark New Deal policies did so as well.

After years of preparation, welfare-state liberalism had finally become a mainstream faith. In 1939, John L. Lewis, the pugnacious labor leader, declared, “The millions of organized workers banded together in the C.I.O. are the main driving force of the progressive movement of workers, farmers, and profes-

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sional and small business people and of all other liberal elements in the community.”

With such forces on his side, the politically adept FDR became a great president.

But the meaning of liberalism gradually changed. The quarter-century of growth and low unemployment that followed the Second World War understandably muted appeals for class justice on the left. Liberals focused on gaining rights for minority groups and women more than on addressing continuing inequalities of wealth. Meanwhile, conservatives began to build their own mass movement based on a loathing of “creeping socialism” and a growing perception that the federal government was oblivious or hostile to the interests and values of the white middle class.

In the late 1970s, the grassroots Right was personified by Howard Jarvis—a feisty, cigar-chomping businessman-activist (and a Mormon). Having toiled for conservative causes since Herbert Hoover’s campaign in 1932, Jarvis had run for office on several occasions. Like Henry George, he had never been elected. Stymied at the ballot box, he became an anti-tax organizer, working on the belief that the best way to fight big government was “not to give them the money in the first place.” During the 1970s he spearheaded the Proposition 13 campaign in California to roll back property taxes and make it exceedingly difficult to raise them again. In 1978, Proposition 13 gained almost two-thirds of the vote, and conservatives have been vigorously echoing Jarvis’s anti-tax argument since then.

Just as the Left had once been able to pin the nation’s troubles on heartless big businessmen who exploited workers and consumers, the Right honed a straightforward critique of a big government that took Americans’ money and gave them little or nothing useful in return. Indeed, one reason for the growth of the Right was that most of those in charge of the government from the mid-1960s through the 2000s—whether Democrats or Republicans—failed to carry out their biggest promises. Lyndon Johnson failed to defeat the Vietcong or abolish poverty; Jimmy Carter was unable to tame inflation or free the hostages in Iran; George W. Bush neither accomplished his mission in Iraq nor controlled the deficit.

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Like the Left in the early twentieth century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to develop and disseminate their ideas.

Their think tanks, legal societies, lobbying firms, talk-radio programs, and popular periodicals have trained and financed two generations of writers and organizers. Conservative Christian colleges, both Protestant and Catholic, provide their students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious schools led by liberals. Conservatives have marshaled such media outlets as Fox News and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to their cause.

The Tea Party is thus just the latest version of a movement that has been evolving for more than half a century, longer than any comparable effort on the liberal or radical Left. Conservatives have rarely celebrated a landslide win on the scale of Proposition 13, but their argument about the evils of big government has, by and large, carried the day.

President Barack Obama’s inability to solve the nation’s economic woes has only reinforced the Right’s ideological advantage.

The signal achievement of the Occupy movement, at least so far, is to challenge the conservative reasoning and the narrative that accompanies it. “We are the 99%” conveys a deeply moral, democratic message that represents a leap beyond what most left activists have been saying since the 1960s. Gender equality, multiculturalism, opposition to military intervention, and global warming are all worthy causes. So was the sometimes disjointed attack on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that briefly shut down Seattle in 1999. But each represented the passions of discrete groups whose opponents were able to belittle them as “special interests.” For all their virtues, each cause was either absorbed into the political culture (feminism) or (as with environmentalism and the movement against the invasion of Iraq) confronted powerful enemies able to wage a grossly unequal fight.

But the Occupiers made the brilliant decision to appeal to anyone with a grievance of any kind against the visible corporate hands who helped bring us low and have suffered little or not at all for their actions. One result of this inclusiveness was a flood of new

activists, some of whom had no experience with the organized Left. In Las Vegas, one of the Occupiers I spoke with on a National Public Radio talk show in October was a small businesswoman who usually votes Republican but became incensed when no bank would give her a loan and no insurance company would provide affordable care to her employees.

But the very breadth and openness of this proudly leaderless uprising make it difficult to sustain. Even if it endures, such an insurgency is unlikely to grow into a movement that can bend politics in its direction. Forty years ago, the feminist activist Jo Freeman presciently warned of the severe limits that “structurelessness” imposes on an anti-authoritarian movement: The more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages….Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be.

Without a structure, it is almost impossible to come up with a strategy for the movement, and tactical decisions can easily go awry.

Take the “General Strike” called by Occupy Oakland last November. On the one hand, this event showed the daring and creativity of a movement aware of the history of economic protest. In the mid-1930s, general strikes played a critical role in persuading Congress to enact the National Labor Relations Act and helped galvanize the surge in union organizing that followed. This time, although only a few thousand workers walked off their jobs, many businesses did close for the day, and the idea of a mass strike evoked the days when workers were the spearhead of a large and powerful Left. The local labor council and several unions were happy to endorse the

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protest, and some of their members came to serve barbeque and join the throng that, at one point, approached ten thousand.

Yet “strike” organizers never made clear why closing the Port of Oakland was the central aim of the day. And it led to several angry standoffs between protestors and union truckers who wanted to go home for the night and then make it back to work the next morning. Only the intervention of officials from the ILWU, the longshore union that has been a bastion of the Left since its creation by veterans of the real general strike that took place in San Francisco in 1934, may have prevented a fracas similar to the “Hard Hat Riot” in lower Manhattan during the Vietnam War, in which dozens were injured.

In Oakland, later at night, a small group of protesters broke into a downtown building, set a fire in a trashcan, and scrawled graffiti before the cops arrested them. Inevitably, the media coverage focused on acts by a violent few who seemed to think that running amok would advance their cause.

So the Occupy movement gave American leftists a chance to appeal to millions of their fellow citizens who care about the same crisis they do and were willing to listen to egalitarian solutions. But the open-ended nature of the movement and, to paraphrase Marx, the incubus of failed ideas and strategies on the left still weighs heavily on its fortunes.

What will the Occupiers do now that the media frenzy has passed? Whether they will be remembered as the beginning of a newer, more inclusive Left or a spirited remnant of an older, now unpopular one depends on their answer. Their protests have revived a conviction that such bygone activists as Henry George took for granted: without a strong connection to ordinary working Americans, the Left will be unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there.

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent. His latest book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.

Don’t Forget Solidarity W I L L I A M P. J O N E S

A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George’s bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. That arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and

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tremendous influence in the nation as a whole.

When leftists won elections in New York and other northern states, whether as Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or Progressives, their influence was constrained severely by the disenfranchisement of working-class voters and the weakness of organized labor in the “Solid South.” Not until a coalition of civil rights organizations, interracial unions, women’s clubs, and left-wing groups set out to “re-align” the Democratic Party during the Second World War did the Left begin to transcend the legacy of 1877.

I recount this history not to dispute Michael Kazin’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the Occupy movement but to complicate the distinction between the “anticorporate Left” and the “passions of discrete groups” that, Kazin contends, have limited the appeal of the Left since the 1960s. A. Philip Randolph, a socialist who led the postwar

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civil rights movement, insisted that its objective was not simply to win voting rights and equal protection for African Americans in the South but to end the unfair advantage that white supremacy lent to conservatives across the United States. “Our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not, and we know that we have no interest in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty,” Randolph told the quarter-million people who joined his March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. “Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, or Federal aid to education,” he continued, “and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.”

To the degree that Randolph and his allies were emblematic of the American Left, as I believe they were, they adopted a strategy that essentially reversed the approach that Kazin attributes to Occupy Wall Street.

Whether calling for the abolition of slavery, equality for women, or the unionization of workers, leftists succeeded not by appealing to “anyone with a grievance of any kind against the . . . corporate hands” but by convincing large numbers of Americans that their own hopes and dreams coincided with “the passions of discrete groups.” Such causes have often been dismissed as “special interests”—none more so than organized labor—but they have also inspired the most transformative social movements in American history.

It is true that Henry George’s 1886 campaign anticipated the open-ended appeal of the Occupy movement—he claimed to represent “the ninety-nine per cent…[who] must pay the other one per cent” just to live and work in New York City; but he also pledged to prohibit housing discrimination against black New Yorkers and condemned rumors of voter fraud and anti-white violence that he called “the manufactured excuse for murdering black men” in the South. Perhaps most remarkably, George opposed efforts to bar immigration from China, a cause that he championed in previous decades, on the grounds that anti-immigrant rhetoric would

distract native-born workers from more pressing demands. The Knights of Labor, who supported George despite his reversal on Chinese exclusion, captured his message of solidarity in their timeless slogan, “An injury to one is the concern of all.”

That logic was expressed most recently by the protests last year in Wisconsin, which were sparked by restrictions on the collective bargaining rights of a relatively small percentage of workers in the state.

Conservatives charged that public employees represented the worst kind of “special interests,” who used collective bargaining to hijack public services, demand exorbitant pay and benefits, and milk taxpayers of their hard-earned cash. Yet by mobilizing quickly and effectively, educators, firefighters, prison guards, and hospital workers succeeded in convincing hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites that attacks on public employees were just the first stage in a broader assault on the democratic process, the quality of public services, and the rights of workers in the private sector. It is not clear how long the movement can sustain that sense of solidarity, but it has already led to the recall of two state senators who voted to restrict collective bargaining, inspired the repeal of similar restrictions in Ohio, and forced the governor of Wisconsin to defend his actions in a recall election.

The politics of solidarity have particular relevance for Occupy Wall Street, which has been slow to confront the barrage of Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement of ex-offenders that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls the greatest assault on voting rights since the Compromise of 1877. The Occupy movement has reminded us that mass protest and civil disobedience can influence political debate as decisively as voting and running for office, but it is difficult to imagine how it can address economic inequality or restrain the power of corporations without increasing turnout among working-class voters, most of them black and Latino, who are most likely to be disenfranchised by these changes. “Voting rights attacks are the flip side

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of buying a democracy,” NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous explained in a direct appeal to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of corporate domination of elections; “First you buy all the leaders you can, and then you suppress as many votes as possible of the people who might object.”

Rather than seek to release itself from the claims of so-called “special interests,” today’s Left must understand that a revival of solidarity requires it to defend the voting rights of people of color, equality for women, and the

collective bargaining rights of workers. If the Occupy movement fails to do so, it may find itself facing the same limitations that the Left did a hundred years ago.

William P. Jones teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South and The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, which will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2013.

Another History I R A K AT Z N E L S O N

Michael Kazin’s bracing intervention asks us to consider why, despite circumstances of rising inequality and ample sources of discontent, it is the Right, not the Left, that has more effectively mobilized populist instincts and possibilities.

His thoughtful historical answer is marked by an internal tension. Kazin ends by calling on the Left to “stop mourning” and “start organizing,” but as his analytical history portrays a Left without adequate assets, one must wonder whether his call to arms is a form of wishful thinking. From where might the Left’s initiatives come after a lost half-century?

Persuasive answers to this pressing question will not be found, I believe, unless some features that he does not discuss are given more prominence.

The largest tier of Kazin’s argument concerns time. Movements rally best when they draw on languages, conventions, experiences, and organizations that offer “years of preparation.” The successful New Deal benefited from “decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing” by late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century populists and progressives who crusaded against the privileges of wealth and capitalist monopolies.

Today, he argues, it is the populist Right that most benefits from comparable bequests. That

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movement has patiently been built over the course of a half-century. The Left, he writes, has not kept up.

Kazin’s history of positive movementbuilding on the left before the New Deal proceeds without noting how seventeen states at the heart of the Democratic Party coalition practiced mandatory racial segregation.

Despite episodic populist biracialism, the larger story not only in the South, but across the nation, was the way blacks were shunted to the side of progressive life and institutions.

The “broader progressive coalition” of the early twentieth century accommodated to and advanced the era’s pervasive racism; it was led by figures, including William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, who articulated the values of white supremacy.

The story of New Deal achievements— well worth celebrating as an answer to the taunts by the era’s dictatorships that democracies could not solve big problems—is in part the story of this legacy. With the congressional Democratic Party dominated

by Southern leaders, committee chairs, and pivotal numbers in the House and Senate, non-Southern reformers pushed progressive legislation with Southern partners and left Jim Crow alone. Southern influence thus both rescued and deformed American democracy. But other parts of the New Deal story, including the creation and growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the

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rise of vigorous challenges to black exclusion, rejected limited democracy and opened space for profound changes to citizenship and public policy that culminated in the 1960s.

At its most potent, this new progressive alliance combined social and economic mandates for greater equality. It was less a climax of pre-New Deal populist impulses than a fresh constellation of social forces and political strategies that advanced the civil rights revolution and produced a dramatic expansion in national state responsibilities.

The period of the Great Society witnessed Medicare and Medicaid, a host of programs to ameliorate widespread poverty, and the black rights revolution that, in turn, helped spur a women’s movement and opened the way to rebellion against the repression of homosexuality.

These matters of membership and meaning constitute remarkable instances of progressive success during the past half-century. With the demolition of the legal separation of the races, an end to the whites-only franchise, the creation of a much wider door for legal immigration, dramatic changes to the lives of women and conditions of gender, and the development of gay rights in matters both intimate and military, a social, cultural, and political Left has triumphed in ways that hardly could have been projected when John Kennedy assumed the presidency. Who then imagined that a black president would integrate the military across lines of sexual preference and appoint pro-choice women, respectively Puerto Rican and Jewish, to the Supreme Court?

From this perspective, we possess legacies that are more auspicious than Kazin’s history portrays, yet also more difficult. More auspicious because American citizenship has been made radically more democratic; the spectrum of actual and potential support for progressive initiatives has grown. But more difficult because powerful countercurrents of resistance to democratic cultural and economic change, developed over decades, now have a tight grip on key media and backward-looking move-

ments in American life.

The vigor of right-wing populism is not simply the product of better organization or policies promoted by dedicated think tanks funded by reactionary interests or even the smart use of the Internet and social media.

The tax revolt, the assault on entitlements, the exaggerated focus on the debt, the trickledown economics, and the tolerance for vast inequalities—each a characteristic of the political economy of modern conservatism— have been propelled by the cultural counterrevolution with which these views have been fused. Passions have been mobilized to resist affirmative action, guard the borders, roll back legal abortion, combat gay marriage, even contain voting rights. Exploiting such issues, the organized right wing has achieved an electoral realignment in the South while shifting much white working-class support away from the Democratic Party. Underneath it all lie coded messages about race.

Calls to “start organizing” are more likely to succeed if this double-edged history is recognized. Right-wing populism will win unless it can be confronted by a competing rhetoric joined to concrete policies, an approach that proudly connects fairness achieved in civic life to the goal of economic fairness. Although unions have weakened, they are in direct touch with millions of Americans. Any meaningful strategy will have to bind organized labor with the plethora of institutions outside the workplace, including the women’s groups and alternative press named by Kazin, as well as immigrant centers that cross the divide separating work from home. The Left also needs a strategy to win back adherents in the South who have been influenced by demagogic portrayals of the cultural revolution; not by yielding past gains, but by showing how a comprehensive program for fairness under conditions of fast-moving domestic and global change offers better possibilities than rightwing populism.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. His Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time will be published by W.W. Norton Co. in spring 2013.

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Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements MARINA SITRIN

This essay puts forward the basic premises around which the Occupy movements in the United States are organized, locates the movement globally, argues that the movements themselves are the ones that should determine their own success, and then distinguishes these positions from those that Michael Kazin puts forward in his article, “The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left.”

Kazin argues that the way to determine if the Occupy movements will be successful is if they articulate “what a better country would look like and what it would take to get there.”

This, however, is the wrong way to evaluate the Occupy movements. The intention of the thousands of assemblies taking place around the United States, as well as in Greece and Spain, where I have been most recently, is to open spaces for people to voice their concerns and desires—and to do so in a directly democratic way. These movements emerged in response to a growing crisis, the heart of which is a lack of democracy. People do not feel represented by the governments that claim to speak in their name. The Occupy movements are not based on creating either a program or a political party that will put forward a plan for others to follow. Their purpose is not to determine “the” path that a particular country should take but to create the space for a conversation in which all can participate and in which all can determine together what the future should look like.

At the same time, these movements are attempting to prefigure that future society in their present social relationships.

The Occupy movements throughout the United States, Spain, and Greece all have sought to use direct democracy to create horizontal, nonhierarchical social relationships that would allow participants to openly engage with each other. The term “horizontalism,” from the Spanish horizontalidad, was first used in Argentina after the 2001 popular

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rebellion there. In what we can now see was a dress rehearsal for the current global movements, Argentines, during an economic crisis, went out into the streets by the hundreds of thousands. Banging pots and pans (cacerolado) and serenading officials with “Que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo” (“They all must go, not even one should remain”), the protesters forced out five consecutive governments. In the process, they formed the first neighborhood assemblies grounded in horizontalidad, a word that had not been used previously. Movement participants described horizontalidad as the most natural way to listen and to connect to one another. They rejected representative democracy and the empowerment of leaders that such delegation of authority entailed, for this kind of politics was thought to have caused the crisis in the first place. The spirit of horizontalidad simultaneously emerged in workplaces and movements of the unemployed and then into the fabric of countless social relationships, where it was seen as a tool to create more participatory and freer spaces for all—a process of awakening and empowerment similar to that which Eduardo Galeano portrays as occurring in Utopia. Horizontalidad has since become a word and expression used throughout the world to describe social movements seeking selfmanagement, autonomy and direct democracy.

In addition to cultivating horizontalidad, Occupy movements have also created new territories in which forms of direct democracy can flourish. The alternative structures and actions of the Occupy movement have emerged in these new geographic spaces of assembly. Here basic necessities, such as food, legal support, and medical care are coordinated. Novel actions have included the occupation of homes in the United States to prevent evictions and of cash offices in hospitals in Greece so people do not have to pay the newly imposed cost of health care.

Towns and cities across the United States have

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created barter networks, generated alternative adjudication processes, and instituted free childcare. I know of one village in Northern California where people are using an alternative currency and another town outside Albany, N.Y., that has set up a free medical clinic. This is all self-organized horizontally.

The point of reference of the movements is not the state or politics conventionally defined.

There is no desire to take over the state or to create a new party. The Occupy movements reject this form of representative politics, focusing instead on people taking control of their own lives and expanding the democratic spaces in which they live and work. The fact that the movements do not have the conquest of the state as their goal does not mean they do not want countless things changed. To the contrary, they want the power of corporations contained and even broken, access to housing and education expanded, and austerity programs and war ended. But democracy is the crux of Occupy politics, and democracy practiced in such a way so as to upend vertical political relationships and expand horizontal ones. From these new forms of horizontal relationships, located in neighborhoods, villages, workplaces, and schools, and giving rise to novel forms of direct action, the Occupy movements will continue to grow. The question for the future is not how to create a plan for what a better country will look like, but how to deepen and broaden the assemblies taking place and how to enhance participatory democracy in the process.

Upon what does Kazin base his argument that the Occupy movements so far have not succeeded or are in the process of fading

away? The declining number of physical occupations? The mainstream media covering the movements less? Differences in the visions of the participants? A comparison with a movement that has profoundly different objectives? Many within the Occupy movement, as well as the participants with whom I have spoken in Greece and Spain, believe that they have succeeded in important ways: in changing national and global political discourses; in making concrete changes in individual lives; in restoring power to social movements from below; and perhaps most important, in allowing people to feel that society and the world can be different and that their agency can make that happen.

The Occupy movements have made democracy a live question. People have not felt represented in the “democracies” in which they live, and they have exposed the connection of governments to corporations.

People around the world say, in our many languages, “We have woken up” and “We will not be put back to sleep.” Success, I believe, has to be decided by those people in struggle, those who are organizing for their own goals and dreams. And from this perspective, while there are many challenges ahead, the Occupy movements have been and will continue to be successful.

Marina Sitrin is a postdoctoral fellow with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press) and the forthcoming Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Press).

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L. to R.: Leila Hatami as Simin and Peyman Moadi as Nader in A Separation. Photo by Habib Madjidi © Sony Pictures Classics

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NOTEBOOK

Iran’s Cinematic Spring GODFREY CHESHIRE

In December of 2011, I hosted a preview showing in New Jersey of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation for an audience of approximately four hundred film-savvy professionals and retirees, predominantly Jewish. Before the show, I asked how many had ever seen an Iranian film; only a few hands went up. Two hours later, the audience overwhelmingly voted it the best film they’d seen in the season.

Their reaction mirrored my own first exposure to Iranian cinema twenty years ago, when an editor asked me to attend the first festival of post-revolutionary Iranian films held in New York. What had I expected?

Well, given that Iran was an Islamic theocracy containing at least some citizens who periodically rush CNN’s cameras with fists brandished as they immolate an effigy of some hapless representative of the “Great Satan,” I thought I would find a cinema both obvious and crude, although perhaps earnest and well-intended. What I found was film after film of astonishing sophistication and artistic originality, with a principled and impassioned humanism that recalled the Italian neorealists and made most Western films seem mechanistic and cynically amoral by comparison.

In the years following that 1992 festival, Iranian cinema enjoyed a steady global ascent.

Though virtually unknown at the beginning of the decade, by the end of the nineties Iranian films had been embraced by festivals around the world and won virtually every major prize they offer. During this time its cinema may well have been the most significant imageenhancer the decidedly image-challenged Islamic Republic enjoyed internationally.

Having visited Iran several times to study and report on its cinema, I am often asked how filmmaking of such beauty and sophistication could exist there. The first answer

has to do with the richness of a culture that long predates the Islamic theocracy. Ancient Greeks described the cosmopolitanism of the Persians, and today the quality is still a defining one­­­. In the realm of cinema, the last shah’s government sought to burnish its image by encouraging (if also regularly censoring) the works of an Iranian “New Wave” that burned brightly in the 1970s, before being swallowed up in the fires of revolution. In that fraught historical moment there was real doubt whether cinema, which many Islamists considered a Western toxin, would survive the transition to a new Iran.

As it happened, the Ayatollah Khomeini, reportedly a fan of certain Iranian films, gave his permission for cinema to have a place in the Islamic Republic. By 1983, a group of young intellectuals in the government had formulated a comprehensive plan for a revival of the industry, a plan that envisioned quality “artistic” films—which exist alongside more crudely commercial and frankly propagandistic ones—as useful for conveying proper Islamic values to Iranian viewers as well as being able to go abroad and win friends for Iran in international forums.

Although many conservative and pious Iranians are proud of their culture and its cinematic accomplishments, the relationship between the regime and its filmmakers has been as rocky as it was under the shah.

Filmmakers who worked under both governments tell me the problems are very much the same; the only difference is in which subjects are forbidden. The Islamic Republic has a set of content restrictions that forbid countless things, from showing women’s hair to unmarried men and women touching affectionately (much less kissing or anything more risqué); but many observers believe such obstacles have only stimulated the creativity

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of filmmakers. In any case, the government has continued to support the country’s film industry while also making life difficult for filmmakers in recurrent cycles. When the new film industry was being formed under moderate minister of culture Mohammad Khatami in the 1980s, the hardliners were preoccupied with the Iran-Iraq War. When the war ended in 1989, they had time to target liberals and artists. When Khatami was elected president in 1997, a new era of loosened restrictions began. When he was replaced by conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, the cultural climate again grew chillier.

Since the disputed presidential election of June 2009 that returned Ahmadinejad to power and subsequent protests that the government brutally suppressed, filmmakers and intellectuals have come under increased pressure and intimidation. In July 2009, the prominent director Jafar Panahi was arrested after attending a demonstration memorializing Green Movement martyr Neda Agha-Soltan. Though released after a brief detention, he was rearrested the following March on serious charges of subversion including making an unauthorized film about the previous summer’s events. After an international outcry, the government released him, but subsequently put him on trial, where he received the draconian sentence of six years in prison and twenty years of being banned from making films. (Another filmmaker tried at the same time, Mohammad Rasoulof, received a somewhat lighter sentence.) In January of 2012, the government shut down Khaneh Cinema (House of Cinema), Iran’s rough equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, reportedly because the independence prized by the filmmakers’ association had become too nettlesome to the regime.

Given all this, it’s important to recall that that regime is authoritarian, not totalitarian.

Visitors often marvel at how candid and open Iranians are in expressing their displeasure with the latest official idiocies. As soon as one set of troublesome newspapers gets shut down, another springs up. Punk rock, heavy metal, and rap flourish in underground Tehran, and the blogosphere remains a

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hotbed of dissident opinion of every sort. This cultural climate helps explain the apparent paradox that, while Iranian filmmakers are hemmed in by restrictions and impediments on every side, they keep making vital films, sometimes great ones. Within days of Khaneh Cinema’s being suppressed, Farhadi’s A Separation, which later received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, became the first Iranian film to win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film. And as it plays across the United States in early 2012, our art houses will also see the release of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, made clandestinely while the director was under house arrest awaiting the appeal of his prison sentence.

Although each of these films is artistically formidable in its own right, together they represent different sides of the spectrum that is current Iranian cinema. A Separation was temporarily shut down during production after writer-director Farhadi made a statement supporting certain filmmakers in disfavor with the regime, but it was completed, received top honors at the state-sanctioned Fajr Film Festival, went into release, and became a major box-office hit in Iran. In contrast, it is inconceivable that This Is Not a Film will ever be released under the current regime (though Iranians manage to see pretty much everything, foreign and domestic, via underground DVDs). While Panahi’s film is overtly political, Farhadi’s evinces the subtlety and resonance that have become hallmarks of Iranian filmmakers examining their culture’s complex challenges.

A Separation opens with an upper-middleclass couple, Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi), asking a judge for a divorce.

There’s no hostility in their voices, but plenty of exasperation. That’s because they really don’t want a divorce. She wants the couple to move abroad for the sake of themselves and their eleven-year-old daughter, and has gone to months of trouble to obtain all the necessary permissions, which will soon expire. Her husband now won’t go along with the plan because he has to care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. She: “He doesn’t know you are his son.” He: “But I know he’s

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my father.” Divorce seems the only solution.

This opening scene is shot from the point of view of the judge (which effectively puts us in the position of judging the couple), who is heard but never seen. It’s one of three important passages in the film involving magistrates, and all three men seem fair and reasonable. If Farhadi were out to skewer Iranian officialdom, he might have started here. However, his intent, it seems clear from the context, is neither to make nor to avoid a political statement, but rather to show how such situations play out in Iran. More important, and politically suggestive, are the emotions elicited by these men. When Simin is asked why she doesn’t want to bring up her daughter in Iran, she replies, “Because of the conditions [here].” The judge gets no response when he asks, “What conditions?”

The set-up for the rest of the movie, this scene typifies the delicate ingenuity of A Separation. The couple’s dilemma is affecting in part because it could happen anywhere in the world. But it has a special sting taking place in Iran. In a sense, the movie exists to answer the judge’s question, “What conditions?” Iranian audiences don’t need to be told the manifold reasons an educated, affluent woman would want to move abroad, and indeed would want to so badly that she would split up her family. Farhadi leaves it to other viewers to deduce Simin’s motives from the rest of his story, which has a second main level of conflict beyond that of the couple.

Once Simin moves out to stay with her parents before leaving Iran, Nader, needing someone to care for his father while he’s at work, hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a poor, devout woman who’s always accompanied by her young daughter. The first day on the job, Razieh has a crisis when the old man soils himself. Calling a religious hotline, she’s told it’s not a sin to clean him, but feeling uncomfortable with this new responsibility, she urges Nader to hire her husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) instead. Nader is willing, but when Hodjat is sent to jail by his creditors, Razieh is obliged to return. One day, Nader comes home and finds his father on the floor with one hand lashed to the bed. When Razieh returns, apparently after running her own errands, he berates her furiously and pushes

her roughly out of the apartment. The next day, he and Simin learn that Razieh has had a miscarriage and blames Nader. Thus begins a confrontation between two families that will bring them in front of a second magistrate, to whom virtually all the main characters will tell different sorts of lies.

Beyond the divorce requested in the first scene, the title’s “separation” could refer to the distance Simin wants to put between herself and Iran or to the chasm of class separating these two families. This is a common theme in Iranian films, one that often implies a lingering disappointment over the failure of Iran’s revolution to produce a truly egalitarian society. But here again, the film isn’t out to score obvious polemical points.

Farhadi has extraordinary gifts as a writer and director, and the meticulous construction of his script (which received Iran’s first-ever Best Screenplay nomination in this year’s Oscar contest) and the energetic precision of his staging, which entails terrific performances from the whole ensemble, together create a drama that seems to shift subtly from one character’s perspective to another. As in the films of Jean Renoir, “everyone has their reasons,” and Farhadi scrupulously avoids playing favorites; it’s a mark of his humanism that we are finally invited not to judge the characters but to understand them in a way that transfers our concern from the individuals themselves to the entire society—“the conditions”—surrounding them.

Jafar Panahi got his start in film working as an assistant to Iran’s most celebrated director, Abbas Kiarostami, who is generally credited with introducing cinema itself as a subject for Iranian films. Through the Olive Trees (1994), for example, the last film on which Panahi assisted Kiarostami, dramatized the making of Kiarostami’s previous film, And Life Goes On (1992), which itself concerned a film director journeying through the ruins of an earthquake. Panahi took up this self-reflexive motif in his second film, The Mirror (1997), which follows a little girl trying to make her way homeward across Tehran, until the child actress playing the lead suddenly rips off her costume, says she’s sick of acting and

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runs away. Panahi plays himself in the film, a director confounded by the impetuous abdication of his star.

In This Is Not a Film, Panahi, returning to the role of Panahi, finds himself confounded at being confined to house arrest while awaiting the appeal of his six-year prison sentence.

The regime has also forbidden him from making films for twenty years, but he reasons that only means writing and directing, not appearing in front of a camera. So, just as this is not a film (in the usual sense), Panahi is not acting as a filmmaker, he’s a filmmakeras-actor in a documentary-like fiction (or fiction-like documentary?) about his own life. In the hands of many directors, such a premise might end up looking like bad reality TV; but Panahi is one of the Iranian cinema’s acknowledged masters, and his execution renders it faultlessly understated and witty.

Panahi deadpans his way through an account of one day in his life as a sidelined filmmaker, talking to his lawyer on the phone (she’s not optimistic), playing with his daughter’s pet iguana, musing on DVDs of his previous films (including The Circle and Crimson Gold), acting out scenes from one of his un-produced screenplays, and joking around with documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who runs the camera when Panahi is not running it himself.

The blending of fiction and documentary is another tactic that Iranian cinema is known for, and it here produces results that are both droll and revealing. Although much that we see seems improvised, it’s hard to tell for sure. Without question the film registers certain current Iranian realities that are fascinating to ponder. One is the ubiquity of media technology. Pahani is surrounded by digital cameras, computers, DVD players, TVs, iPhones, and so on; indeed, he’s able to

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make himself into a one-man movie studio thanks to these gadgets. Watching this, one can’t help but think back on the importance of cell phones and social media to Iran’s 2009 protests and the Arab Spring uprisings; whatever the controls exercised by repressive regimes, these technological enablers seem to point inexorably toward individual empowerment and democratic decentralization.

Other realities are recorded in the film’s amusing final scene. It is now the evening of Fireworks Wednesday, the pre-Islamic holiday that precedes the Persian New Year at the vernal equinox. We hear a television news report that, in the wake of the 2009 protests, the Ayatollah Khamenei has denounced the holiday as impious. But that evidently has not kept Iranians from celebrating. As fireworks explode everywhere outside, Panahi is visited by a young man who is collecting trash in the now near-empty building. Panahi grabs his camera and follows the amiable guy as he continues on his rounds, talking about his life as an art student and having to take on lots of crummy jobs like this one to get by.

Whether scripted and acted or a bit of actual documentary, this wonderful passage serves to remind us that Panahi’s film is ultimately not about him alone but about the whole social environment he inhabits.

This Is Not a Film was smuggled out of Iran into last year’s Cannes Film Festival and from there has made its way into distribution around the world. A remarkable piece of cinematic samizdat, it testifies to the tenacity, courage, and sheer film smarts of a resilient artistic vortex that perhaps has no real equivalent anywhere in the world. Its final title tells us it is “Dedicated to Iranian Filmmakers.”

Godfrey Cheshire is a filmmaker, journalist, and critic who has written extensively about Iranian cinema. He lives in New York City.

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The Madness of Art BRIAN MORTON

In Henry James’s short story “The Middle Years,” an ailing writer is troubled by the conviction that only now, after many books, has he begun to find his true voice. All the work he’s done so far has been nothing more than a sort of apprenticeship, in preparation for the truly great work that he’ll be able to do if only he is granted more time.

In the story’s last pages, the writer comes to accept the fact that he’s dying. He won’t get more time. The magnificent works that he might have written will never be written.

What he has done already is all he’ll ever do.

The story isn’t depressing, because in his last days, the writer meets an admirer, a young doctor who has read all of his books with an intelligent appreciation. The young man’s devotion, a devotion that verges on the idolatrous, helps the writer understand that his life hasn’t been in vain. “The thing is to touch someone, to make someone care,” the writer says to his admirer. “You happen to be crazy, of course, but that doesn’t affect the general law.”

Near the end of the story, the writer sums up what he’s learned: “A second chance! That’s the delusion.

There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

The entire passage has become well known, the last phrase especially so: “the madness of art.”

The phrase has been taken to be a summation of everything that’s glorious about the artist’s life. Why did James Joyce labor for seventeen years over Finnegans Wake, a novel so idiosyncratic in its language that no one can fully decode it? What compelled Honoré de Balzac to spend fifteen hours at his writing desk, day after day, year after year, and to believe in his vision so completely that

he would sometimes leave social gatherings with the explanation that “I must rejoin the real world”? How did Emily Dickinson find the inner strength to go on writing her fiercely distinctive poetry despite the absence of any recognition or encouragement? All of them were in the grip of the madness of art. If you Google the phrase, you will find tens if not hundreds of commentators who take it to be the very definition of the creative impulse.

I think, though, that if we take another look at the passage, we’ll find that for James, or at any rate for his hero, Dencombe, it had the opposite meaning.

The first part of the passage seems clear enough. “A second chance! That’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” We get just one chance, and the chance we get is the opportunity to “work in the dark,” with no assurance as to the value of our work. And this very lack of assurance, this doubt, is one of the things that spur us on. (If an artist could ever be sure that she’d gotten it exactly right, she might not feel the need to keep going.)

Then, finally: “The rest is the madness of art.”

We’re in the habit of reading the passage as if Dencombe had ended with “This is the madness of art”—as if he were grandly encapsulating everything he’d just said. But he didn’t. The rest is the madness of art. The artist’s calling is to do what one can, to give what one has; the artist’s calling is to explore one’s doubt, one’s task, one’s passion. And the madness of art? The madness of art is everything else.

If James had been a folksy Yiddish writer, he might have called it the mishegoss of art. It wouldn’t have been as elegant, but it would have been more precise.

If people have been getting the meaning of the phrase wrong, does it matter?

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Well, it might matter to you if you’re an artist, and especially if you’re a young artist.

If you’re a young artist, it might help to be reminded that alongside all the nobility and beauty of your calling, there’s a certain amount of frustration, a certain amount of mishegoss, that you’ll never be able to avoid.

The fear that you’re not gifted enough; the fear that you don’t know enough; the fear that you haven’t come into your own yet; the fear that you’ve already peaked; the fear that someone else’s talent or success renders your efforts pointless—it’s all just the mishegoss of art.

These distractions are just the badlands you need to cross while you do your work.

And the dream of reaching a stage where worries of this kind will cease to bother you—that’s just a distraction too. That, too,

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency

Mar 14– Jun 2, 2012 The James Gallery The Center for the Humanities centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery

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is the mishegoss of art. You’ll never get past the badlands. Only a saint can rid himself of distractions like envy and insecurity, and saints, as a rule, make lousy artists.

It might also help, if you’re a young artist, to be reminded that art and madness aren’t the same thing.

The usual interpretation of the phrase “the madness of art” conjures up an attractive cliché: the writer as a creature possessed, spilling out words in a divine frenzy. This isn’t the normal experience of the practicing fiction writer, the writer who’s found a way to keep going over the long haul, and it isn’t the idea of the artist that James had in mind.

Let’s listen again to Dencombe: “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” I love the fact that he uses the word “passion” and the word “task” in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace.

More than this, I love that he equates them.

Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-toearth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence.

Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.

Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity. The “Middle Years” is a story about the passionate sanity of the artist. It’s a story about the sanity of art.

Brian Morton directs the MFA fiction program at Sarah Lawrence College. His novels include Starting Out in the Evening and Breakable You.

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The Port Huron Statement at Fifty MICHAEL KAZIN

The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, written fifty years ago this June, is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left. It is also, at just over 25,000 words, undoubtedly the longest one. But it had to be lengthy to accomplish its aim—to propose an entire “agenda for a generation.” Consider the variety of topics about which Tom Hayden and his fellow delegates to that SDS meeting held at the FDR Camp in Port Heron, Michigan, had intelligent and provocative things to say: moral values, American politics, the U.S. economy, the nation’s intellectual and academic life, the labor movement, the cold war, the nuclear arms race, the anticolonial revolution, and a vivid description of why the black freedom movement was so pivotal to the birth of a new Left. All this was informed by a sensibility attuned to what one might call the “national psychology.” And that’s just a summary of the first half of the statement.

The second part—“What Is Needed”— glowed with a passion and elegance not usually found in such a long and detailed document. What was needed, according to the thirty-five or so young drafters, included both such strategic aims as consolidating the Democrats into a principled liberal party by expelling the Dixiecrats and details finegrained enough to delight the heart of any policy analyst. To wit: “there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally ill in 1959 than there were in 1948.”* In addition, the statement combined *All quotations are from the complete text appended to James Miller’s “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987).

varieties of prose not commonly featured in one document: existential longings inspired

by Albert Camus, a quote from an encyclical

by Pope John XXIII, urgent descriptions of the most serious issues facing humankind (then known as “mankind”), and far-reaching proposals for how to go about the prodigious task of democratizing the nation and the world.

Remarkably, most of the activist-intellectuals who accomplished all this were still in their early twenties. Hayden, at twentyone, was the age at which most students are preparing to graduate from college. The previous year, the Activist, an obscure magazine edited at Oberlin College, had published Hayden’s “A Letter to the New (Young) Left.”

After Port Huron, that article read like a textbook example of false modesty: “It is not as though we even know what to do,” Hayden wrote in the Activist, “we have no real visionaries for our leaders, we are not much more than literate ourselves.” Somehow, he and his comrades figured it out. I cannot imagine a group of Americans, of any age, writing such a manifesto today. In our era of high anxiety and blasted visions, we could certainly use one.

But, for all its brilliance, Port Huron was not so much a break with the radical tradition as it was an artful meld of what remained fresh and stirring in the often tortured history of the American Left. Thus, “young,” the adjective Hayden had placed in parentheses, was more accurate than “new,” which remains the word nearly everyone since has affixed to the movement of which SDS played a vital part.

The statement managed to fuse two types of ideological advocacy that are often viewed as antagonists: first, the romantic desire for achieving an authentic self through crusading for individual rights and, second, the yearning for a democratic socialist order that would

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favor the collective good over freedom of the self. This fusion was wrapped in language whose utopian tone resembled that articulated by other messianic movements in American history—from the abolitionists and Owenite socialists to the Wobblies and Debsian Socialists to such radical feminists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman.

The similarity to the language of the abolitionists was particularly strong. Consider this bold assertion from the Values section of the statement: “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with…popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic….This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.” Compare it to the late-life reflection by the anti-slavery crusader Theodore Weld: “The starting point and power of every great reform must be the reformer’s self,“ declared Weld. “He must first set himself apart its sacred devotee, baptized into its spirit, consecrated to its service, feeling its profound necessity, its constraining motives, impelling causes, and all [the] reasons why.” Devout Christians were a distinct minority at the conference; evangelical Protestants were entirely absent. But the SDSers were expressing the same ultraromantic idea that a free society can be built only by individuals who define that freedom for themselves that had inspired fervently Protestant abolitionists more than a century before.

In this sense, Port Huron demonstrated how the new, young Left—in its rebellion against a managed society and its hunger for an authentic one—was beginning to turn back, if unintentionally, to similar impulses that had inspired Weld and such fellow crusaders as his wife, Angelina Grimke, as well as

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William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Walker. Both groups insisted that one had to live one’s politics as well as preach them. Both took delight in smashing taboos about interracial sex, about the proper roles of men and women, and even about dress and diet. Both experimented with styles of communal living they believed would allow individuals to realize their “true” nature and to find happiness in doing so.

Whether pious or secular, radicals before the Civil War and their counterparts during the Cold War both struggled fiercely to free their minds and bodies from an evil society and to fill the world with individuals who aspired to perfection. The passion for self-improvement in the cause of social transformation could be found nearly everywhere on the young left in the 1960s and 1970s. “I had to find out who I am and what kind of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable,” confessed Eldridge Cleaver, in a neglected passage of Soul on Ice. In 1970, in his Politics of Authenticity, Marshall Berman observed, “the New Left’s complaint against democratic capitalism was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough.” In 1977, the black lesbians in the Combahee River Collective asserted, “Our politics…sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.” So the final American Left of the industrial age gestured back, in spirit, to the first.

At the same time, long stretches of the Port Huron Statement echo not just the spirit but the letter of the social democratic tradition,

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which these young radicals were determined to transcend. One sees this in the statement’s harsh attack on corporate power and its vision of an egalitarian society that would expand civic participation rather than restrict it, as in both capitalist and communist nations.

Michael Harrington bridled at the “anti-antiCommunism” of the section on the Cold War, but he could have found little to argue with in the lengthy list of proposals for economic planning, party realignment, mobilizing black voters, and more.

Even when the statement criticized organized labor, it did so in a tone of disappointment and with hope for its renewal.

“Labor continues to be the most liberal—and most frustrated—institution in mainstream America,” the SDSers commented. Then they noted that, although union members showed little enthusiasm for politics, “there are some indications…that labor might regain its missing idealism”: the threat of automation, splits among union leaders over nuclear testing, and the demand by black activists for labor to take a clear stand for equal rights and to organize interracial unions in the South and elsewhere. The statement continued, “Either labor will continue to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements.”

SDSers were not in thrall to what C. Wright Mills called “the labor metaphysic,” the idea that only the proletariat could bring to birth a new world from the ruin of the old. But of organized labor’s significance, the statement left no doubt: “a new politics must include a revitalized labor movement.” At the time, not coincidentally, that not-so-vital movement was keeping SDS in business. The United Auto Workers and other unions were the main contributors to SDS’s modest budget, and the FDR Camp, where the meeting took place, was owned by the Michigan AFL-CIO. Moreover, as Nelson Lichtenstein pointed out in his biography of Walter Reuther, most of the program outlined at Port Huron was already the “common coin of the UAW leadership strata.”

Thus, like socialists from Eugene Debs and Crystal Eastman to Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph, Hayden and his comrades understood the need to straddle the line between imagining a radically new society and improving the lives of the people who had to live in the deeply flawed old one.

So it should not be startling to read in Hayden’s memoir that ”Immediately after the Port Huron convention, [SDS president] Al Haber and I drove to Washington to take our statement to the White House. We met there for an hour with Arthur Schlesinger [the historian and Kennedy advisor]…and he agreed to bring our views to the attention of the president. For the occasion, I wore a tie.”

Of course, early SDSers did break with some hallowed traditions on the American Left: they usually eschewed the socialist label and, most important, they followed the moral lead, the north star, of the black freedom movement. This was a clear break from the labor-centered vision and strategy of a social democracy created and led by white people.

But, at the time the statement was written, progressive union stalwarts like Reuther and Jerry Wurf of AFSCME were, at worst, the uneasy allies of most civil rights organizers.

And at best, labor liberals and civil rights activists could rock the nation together, as they showed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom just fourteen months after the campers had returned to their colleges and urban enclaves.

And is it even necessary to point out that close to a majority of the participants at Port Huron were secular Jews? That demographic fact also represented a continuity with both the socialist and communist Lefts over the previous four decades. The association of radicalism with opposition to the First World War and the ensuing rupture in the Socialist Party had led, fairly rapidly, to the desertion of most of the white working-class Christians who had been the majority in the People’s Party, the pre-war SP, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Few of their grandchildren rushed to join SDS. But Jews continued to be prominent in the white New Left out of all proportion to their numbers in the American population— just as they were in Marxist parties from

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the 1920s through the 1950s. Tom Hayden, Paul Potter, Jane Adams, Greg Calvert, and Diana Oughton, all of whom were raised as Christians, were outnumbered by the likes of Dick Flacks, Todd Gitlin, Paul Booth, Heather Booth, Paul Berman, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Robin Morgan, Abbie Hoffman, Karen Nussbaum, and Mike Klonsky—not to speak of middle-aged Jewish mentors such as Arnold Kaufmann, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky. This ethnic continuity may help explain why, after SDS imploded and disappeared, its more historically minded survivors found much to praise in the Old Left tradition they had once been so keen to bury.

One aspect of the old Marxism that Port Huron mercifully interred was its twin faith in the inevitability that world capitalism would collapse and that a free and equal order would surely arise from the rubble. Carl Oglesby, in a brilliant essay published in 1969, called this faith “almost a carrion-bird politics. Distant and above it all for the moment, the revolutionary cadre circles, awaiting the hour of his predestinated dinner.” The introduction to the Port Huron Statement replaced such grim delusions with the grim realism of the nuclear age: the next global conflict would destroy the human race, not liberate it.

The statement then moved briskly to propose a fresh, utopian alternative to the old vision of state socialism that had been smashed into dust six years earlier by Khruschev’s not-so-“secret” speech and then by the bloody suppression of Hungary’s revolt that he directed a few months later. SDS’s alternative was “participatory democracy.” As Jim Miller wrote insightfully, “p.d.” was, at its creation, a profoundly ambiguous idea that did not become any more coherent over time.

“It pointed toward daring personal experiments and modest social reforms,” wrote Miller. “It implied a political revolution” but with a patriotic ring, evoking New England town meetings where neighbors debated and made the key decisions that affected their communities.

What appealed to most of the young people who began to use the term was not so homespun a tradition. It was the promise of participatory democracy to utterly transform the society of over-managed, bureaucratic,

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formally representative institutions they believed were stifling their independence of thought and action. That is why Mario Savio’s famous speech in 1964 on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall with his feverish plea to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” of the “odious” machine became so emblematic and why consensus decisionmaking turned into the process of choice for many SDS chapters and then for the growing radical feminist movement as well.

The merits of participatory democracy, as an ideal and a practice, should be obvious.

Only when “the people” stand up for themselves in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, and the streets of their cities will they learn how power works and how they can use it to advance their own interests. The Port Huron Statement went further, arguing, in one of its most famous lines that, “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.” Aided by this implicit promise of psychic benefits, the white New Left, at its zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s, convinced several million Americans to engage in modes of civic life— ranging from teach-ins to civil disobedience to consciousness-raising groups to running wild in the streets—that were educational, exhilarating, and at times almost orgasmic.

However, participatory democracy was plagued by major blind spots, too. Claimed as the path to the good society, it had no answer to the question of what happens to the vast majority of citizens who have little or no taste for politics. Only an activist aflame with the impatient desire for a revolution could believe that the apolitical masses are a bunch of alienated, sad human beings who would welcome liberation by young zealots they have never met. Most people, after all, prefer to have their orgasms in private.

It was also a serious mistake to equate democracy with participation in a social movement and to view all elected officials as either ineffectual cogs or corrupt parasites in an unjust system. The history of the American Left from the abolitionists to the civil rights

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movement proves that only when representative and participatory forms of democracy work together do egalitarian reforms succeed and political leaders emerge who can be held accountable to the will of their constituents.

Tom Hayden recognized this himself in the mid-1970s when he took to wearing a tie on a daily basis in his new career as a progressive and often successful Democratic politician.

In 2011, we witnessed protests—from Tunisia to Madrid to Madison to Tel Aviv to Cairo to Moscow to Zuccotti Park—that were reminiscent of the kind of change the Port Huronites were advocating. Notwithstanding their vast differences, all these demonstrations sought to bring people out of isolation and into politics without requiring that they abandon their individual desires for the uncertain security of a hierarchical organization. Many of the protests were either organized by or helped to gestate mass movements. In the United States, the Occupiers took up the slogan, “This is what democracy looks like.”

Unfortunately, that is just a partial truth and one that contains the seeds of disillusionment, if not a movement’s decline. The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier is skeptical about nearly every mass protest, yet he did recently ask a good question: “Why do demonstrators always confuse the quality of their own experience, their mystical moments of unity, with the condition of their country, with its progress?”

Later in the 1960s, I was among the SDSers who imagined that our takeovers of campus buildings and our huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities were the tip of a popular rebellion that would not stop with ending the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s, we discovered the need to identify and campaign for peace-minded politicians too.

But by the time George McGovern was nominated for president in 1972, he was unable to mobilize the dwindling energies of the antiwar movement without being held captive to its popular image as a band of scruffy, violent anti-Americans.

Since most Americans were not about to become full-time political activists, it was natural for the writers of the Port Huron

Statement to pin their hopes for a truly radical, fully democratic society on the only group whose members had the time, the vigor, and the inclination to dedicate their lives to bringing it about: college students of all races with a strong intellectual bent. Academia was “an overlooked seat of influence,” they argued, because of its “social relevance, the accessibility of knowledge, and internal openness.

These together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.” The statement added that, to grow, the New Left would require a partnership between liberals and socialists; the university was “a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.”

Just a few years later, that last goal sounded naïve and outmoded, when opposing the war in Vietnam consumed most SDS activists. Since liberal presidents and their appointees had planned and carried out the assault on Indochina, “humanist liberals,” as Oglesby, then the president of SDS, called them in 1965, had to denounce that legacy or else become what he called “grudging apologists for the corporate state.” Soon, on campuses from Palo Alto and Kent, Ohio to Cambridge and Manhattan, SDS members were battling liberal administrators and forcing liberal professors to choose up sides.

The grand synthesis of liberalism and radicalism was stillborn.

However, by the end of the sixties, the reigning culture at universities was beginning to undergo a rapid and, for young radicals, a most salutary change. The delegates at Port Huron had not anticipated this. Ironically, they lodged a critique of academic life that was as damning as anything Allan Bloom, the idol of neoconservativism, would say a quarter-century later. “The actual intellectual effect of the college experience,” they complained, “ is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel— say a television set—passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college more ‘tolerant’ than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations.”

While young radicals did not overthrow

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the System, they certainly helped alter what passed for “stock truths” in every humanities discipline and in most of the social sciences as well. Alas, the “long march through the institutions” that German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke had called for, was, in the United States at least, more successful in colleges and universities than anywhere else. Ironically, the former student activists who went on to careers in academia did more to create a refuge from the nation’s rightward drift than a mass base for progressive social change. Last December, Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine who helped create Occupy Wall Street, declared, “Revolutions always start at universities.” Perhaps. But they can end there too.

The emphasis at Port Huron and after on the radical potential of the young also obscured an analytical flaw beneath the undeniable excitement of a generation on the move.

The fact that the New Left heralded itself as a young Left was critical to its growth—and to its ultimate demise. Radical movements everywhere depend on the zealous energies of people who need little sleep and do not have to worry about the feeding, clothing, and sleep schedules of children. The average age of the Bolshevik leaders who took power in Petrograd in 1917 was all of twenty-six.

But never before had an American Left made youth itself a badge of rebellion—or prided itself on breaking away from its older predecessors. Jack Weinberg, the Berkeley radical who coined the famous line—“We don’t trust anyone over 30”—meant it as a rebuttal to the charge that subversive adults were pulling the strings. But few people, inside or outside the Movement, got the joke.

The notion of a “revolution” made almost exclusively by the young was both brilliant and absurd. On the one hand, it expressed the self-confidence of activists from a generation that was both larger and better educated than any in U.S. history. College enrollment tripled during the 1960s to nearly ten million, and few students had experienced the privations of the Great Depression. For many Americans who believed that one can always remake one’s life, the plain-spoken brashness of young radicals was often appealing, even when they disagreed with the point of their

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protests.

Yet age has no intrinsic political merit, and the impatience of nearly all young radicals and the arrogance of some also led them astray. Contemptuous of liberals, they came to spurn the very idea of inter-class, interracial reform coalitions that was still a live option for the authors of the Port Huron statement. Disenchanted with old formulas for remaking American society, they gave little thought to devising new ones. For the antiwar militants who flooded into SDS after 1965, “participatory democracy” seemed too hazy and abstract both in meaning and application to guide a revolution. Frustration at the lack of an alternative led an aggressive minority in the movement to take up one variety of Leninist dogma or another, while other activists sought to refashion a liberalism cleansed of cold war hypocrisies. Neither project was successful.

So Port Huron’s “agenda for a generation” devolved, perhaps inevitably, into a set of stirring principles for an activist, mostly white minority of that generation. And by the end of the sixties, the visibility of the text itself had faded. Even as a much abridged pamphlet, the statement was not high on the reading list at most SDS chapters. The radical movement had grown much larger, as well as much angrier and prone to an ideological rigidity that had been refreshingly absent at the convention camp. The New Left Reader, a popular anthology edited by Carl Oglesby in 1969, included documents by everyone from Louis Althusser and Fidel Castro to Huey Newton and Mark Rudd—but not a word of the Port Huron Statement.

And for all its capaciousness, Port Huron had nothing to say about three groups that would become major factors in American politics and culture by the end of the decade: environmentalists, feminists, and the New Right. It would be unfair to criticize the Port Huronites for failing to anticipate the coming of Earth Day or the emergence of the women’s liberation movement; Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring wasn’t published until the fall of 1962, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did not reach bookstores until half a year

RECONSIDER ATIONS

later. But the conservative Young Americans for Freedom had roughly 30,000 members in 1962. That March, YAF sponsored a rally that filled Madison Square Garden. In a text that devoted thousands of words to the shortcomings of liberalism, some attention might have been paid to what, even then, was its main opposition.

Still, what was produced at Port Huron has aged better than the apocalyptic, hypermilitant pronouncements that drew so much attention forty years ago yet elicit mostly puzzlement or derision today. “I liked both the longing for a total explanation and the uncertainty as to what it might be,” Todd Gitlin recalled about his first reading of the Statement. Indeed, for radicals, a little self-doubt is a valuable thing.

In the class I teach about the 1960s, I show undergraduates a film clip of Mario Savio shouting on the steps of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus about throwing his body on the machine. Then I ask, “What was this man so angry about?” They haven’t got a clue, although his passion is rather compelling.

Huey Newton’s talk of “revolutionary suicide” has, thankfully, no appeal at all. To young Americans who worked hard to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and have sympathized or taken part in Occupy events, the idea of building a movement to restructure the system instead of blowing the whole thing up just sounds like common sense.

But they need—we need—the utopian spirit of Port Huron as much we do its attention to posing practical solutions to the outrages committed by power elites at every level of society, in the United States and around the world. Fifty years ago, that band of twentysomethings dared to imagine the making of a more decent, more humane as well as a more democratic society. “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity,” they declared. That one sentence captured the larger ideal that animated many civil rights organizers as well as the feminist and gay

insurgencies soon to come. These movements greatly expanded the scope of individual freedom in America: to work wherever one is qualified, to live anyplace one can afford, and to love and marry anyone who loves and wants to marry you—to an extent unimaginable at the time the statement was written.

Today, the international regime of freebooting capitalism has delivered neither material abundance, nor social harmony, nor security to most of the world’s people. Failed states, religious wars, environmental disaster, austerity in the face of poverty, clashes between immigrants and the native born are common features of current history, as they were in previous eras. But the perception that there is no alternative to chronic crisis but, somehow, to muddle through only exacerbates the problems.

At the end of his book about the Port Huron Statement, Jim Miller rhapsodized that “for anyone who joined in the search for a democracy of individual participation— and certainly for anyone who remembers the happiness and holds to the hopes that the quest itself aroused—the sense of what politics can mean will never be quite the same again.”

For those who believe in and work for beneficial and enduring change, such longings should never be dismissed as merely “utopian.” They are, instead, the very soul of realism—the only way to motivate large numbers of people to join and commit themselves to the lofty purposes of left-wing social movements. As the memorable coda of the Port Huron Statement put it, “If we appear to seek the unattainable…then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”

Future writers of manifestos could do worse than to begin right there.

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and author, most recently, of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University. This article is taken from an address given in Santa Barbara, California, at the “Port Huron Statement at 50” Conference held February 2–3, 2012.

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John Hersey and Hiroshima DAN GERSTLE

The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011 gave rise to very different sentiments in this country than it did in Japan. Whereas our press, seeking cultural and historical reference points, invoked Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Godzilla, the Japanese responded to the trio of disasters— earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima—with gestures to two moments, two acts of war, two cities vaporized: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who would be forced to resign amid intense questioning of his indecisive response to the disasters, was quoted as saying that his nation’s predicament was “in a way the most severe crisis in the past sixty-five years since World War II.” Writing in the New Yorker, novelist Kenzaburo Oe admonished his countrymen for their desire to harness nuclear energy by calling on them to remember their first experience of it at Hiroshima.

For the Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki still loom in the imagination. But just as Japan is now rethinking its relationship to nuclear energy by looking to its past, Fukushima should have prodded us to retrospection. If the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “crises,” they were, after all, man-made crises. Yet we persist in imagining the atomic bombings as the natural culmination of the exigencies of war. They are inscribed in our memory as inevitable, depersonalized events; they do not have a human, or a moral, cast.

One way we can connect to the current Japanese mindset regarding nuclear energy and to our role in it is to reconsider one of the original and seminal documents of the nuclear age: John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which was selected by a New York University panel in 1999 as the best piece of journalism of

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the twentieth century, ahead of such notable works as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate revelations, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

In the spring of 1946, Hersey, who started at Time and made his name at Life, traveled to Hiroshima on assignment for the selfconsciously sophisticated and liberal-minded New Yorker to interview survivors, in the end choosing six to write about: a clerk, two doctors, a Methodist pastor educated in America, a tailor’s widow, and a missionary German priest. Back in New York, he fashioned a detailed account of the bombing and its aftermath through their eyes. He borrowed the prismatic narrative structure of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, cutting at climactic moments from one character to another, as if he were editing a movie. The result is a report that speaks for a city, and even a nation, and that retains its immediacy to this day.

For maximum effect, the editors of the New Yorker published the 31,000 words of “Hiroshima” as the entirety of their August 31, 1946, issue. Hersey’s article became an immediate cultural sensation. It was serialized in newspapers across the country, read on national radio, and published in book form that fall. On the evidence of letters to the New Yorker, the article’s appeal lay in Hersey’s depiction of his subjects as individuals with commonplace hopes and fears—as fellow human beings. Hersey disabused readers of the virulent, dehumanizing racism that had characterized American wartime attitudes toward the Japanese. “Hiroshima” was also a challenge to the narratives of martial triumph and technological utopianism surrounding the bomb. Whether as spectacular and thoroughly justified payback for Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March or as the heralds of a new age of limitless energy, the bombings

RECONSIDER ATIONS

were often viewed positively in this country.

By foregrounding the bomb’s victims, Hersey made it possible for Americans to think anew about their former enemy and the weapon that had ended the war.

A pioneering writer, Hersey helped to create literary journalism—journalism that reads like fiction because it seeks to recreate rather than disinterestedly report events.

“Hiroshima” was only his last and most successful attempt to use the techniques of the fiction writer to make the war vivid and accessible for Americans on the home front.

In the seventies, Tom Wolfe credited both Hersey’s earlier writings for Life and Hiroshima as necessary to the development of the New Journalism. Today, when you read an artful, unsentimental magazine article or book about grunts in a firefight or cruising down an IED-infested street, you are reading Hersey’s journalistic patrimony.

What was lost on Hersey’s readers in 1946 and what remains lost on us today is that Hersey did more than recreate the atomic bombing in an empathetic and stylistically innovative way. He intended Hiroshima to be a comment on the Second World War and the man-made crises that defined it. He wanted to memorialize all of the mass killings of the war—not just the murder of European Jewry by the Nazis, but the Allied bombing campaigns against German cities that commenced in 1942 and continued through early 1945 and the firebombing of Japanese cities in 1944 and 1945 by the United States.

(Even though he spent the war’s last winter in Moscow, Hersey had no inkling of Stalin’s policies of murder.)

Hersey did not view these acts as moral equivalents. Rather, he perceived the qualities common to them all. His extensive travels and experiences made this perception possible. For Hersey as for few others, the war had truly been a world war. It began in 1939, in Chungking, China, and ended in 1946, in Hiroshima. In between, he reported from the Pacific theater, North Africa, Sicily, Moscow, Eastern Europe, and China for a second time. He witnessed battle firsthand on Guadalcanal and in Sicily, serving as an ad hoc stretcher-bearer for American wounded in each instance. This panoramic view of human

suffering and persistence imbued in him an uncommon sense of the things all men and women, regardless of nationality or politics, share. Without this prehistory, Hiroshima would have taken a very different form, or may not have been written at all.

Henry Luce, co-founder and publisher of Time, sent the twenty-five year-old Hersey to the Far East in the spring of 1939 with an eye on the growing importance of the region in world politics. In May, arriving in Chungking, China, the capital of Chang Kai-Shek’s government, Hersey surveyed the aftermath of the aerial bombardment of the city by Japanese bombers. In an exhaustive letter to his parents, he described the scarred landscape in measured language that hints at the approach he would take in writing Hiroshima.

Hersey knew his parents would want to hear about his experience, and not just because he was their son. Like Luce, he was born to American missionaries in China.

Throughout his life, Hersey retained affection for the nation of his birth. But the bombing of Chungking did not put him in a vengeful mood. It provoked him to rumination. He remarked in his letter to his parents that Chungking made him think of republican Guernica, which had been the target of fascist bombers in 1937. Hersey had not seen the bombing of Guernica, yet his first impulse was to connect it to Chungking, not because both cities had been bombed by enemies of liberal democracy, but because he immediately recognized that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was a new method of slaughter that tempted every country at war.

Soon after the Allies’ strategic bombing of German cities—euphemistically called “area bombing,” with the intent of “dehousing” German civilians—intensified in the summer of 1943, Hersey, by then a Life mainstay, composed what must be one of the strangest passages in American reporting on the war.

In a long picture-essay for the magazine—the art by GIs, the accompanying vignettes by Hersey—called “Experience by Battle,” from December 1943, Hersey told readers about the life of the American fighting man. Displaying the range of his travels and empathy, Hersey

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described what it was like to be a GI in Sicily, a Marine on Guadalcanal, a sailor in the Pacific, and a wounded soldier retrieved from the front lines whose war has ended and who must piece together what remains of his body and mind.

In “Experience by Battle,” Hersey purposefully and almost exclusively wrote from the perspective of his subjects. But in assuming the vantage of the American bomber crews who helped to ignite Hamburg in late July and early August 1943, he broke from this practice. Taking an imaginative leap, since he had not flown with them or witnessed the raids, he chose to write about what the men in the bombers were not thinking: “It was not for our fliers to see in their minds’ eyes that Hamburg was as bad as the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, where flakes of fire fell on naked sinners. . . . As fliers with an important job to do they could not afford to have nightmares about people driven from shelters by heat into an ocean of flame outside; or about the city gradually dying—water no longer running, gas gone out of the mains, telephones silent, bus lines stopped, food distribution crippled—finally a city populated by people either dead or blank in the face.”

Perhaps no other American wrote so empathetically about dying Germans at the time.

Though the physical and temporal distances between Guernica and Chungking and Hamburg were immense, in Hersey’s moral geography the cities were nearly coterminous.

That Hamburg was an enemy city meant only that he had to invent an acceptable way to write about the annihilation of its populace; Americans were not ready for one of their own to speak on behalf of the enemy.

Yet for all the connections he drew from one bombed city to another, Hersey understood that Hamburg represented something new. A series of propitious circumstances—in the view of Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command, who planned the raids—converged at Hamburg, and the roiling conflagration that engulfed the city had an effect on its survivors that would not be observed again until Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It left them at a loss for words. Thus the unusually evocative language Hersey turned to in describing what American fliers could not bear to ponder may

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have been the result of an overriding desire on his part to grant a modicum of agency to their helpless, anonymous victims.

Sent to Moscow for the winter of 1944-1945

by Time and Life, Hersey came into contact with Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe. At the start of his assignment, he found himself helpless in the face of Soviet opacity. Access to information about political and military developments was so limited that he resorted to writing long essays on Russian composers and novelists. His professional and personal fortunes changed only when Soviet authorities saw an opportunity to demonstrate the turpitude of the Germans. In late 1944, Hersey and other foreign reporters in Moscow were flown to a forest in Estonia, near its capital, Tallinn, and shown the remains of funeral pyres built by—and composed of—Estonian Jews. And in 1945, shortly before his departure from Moscow and shortly before the end of the war in Europe, Hersey was brought to Poland for a tour of razed Warsaw and the Nazi camp at Radogoscz.

Later in life, Hersey wrote of the revelatory nature of these experiences. “The sights of pyres at Talinn . . . and of the warehousedungeon at Rodogoscz [sic] beside whose high walls still lay the broken bodies of those who had preferred jumping from upper-story windows to the horrors being transacted inside the buildings . . . to an American traveling naïve in the totalitarian jungle, were shaking, to say the least.” In the same reflection, he recounted the combined effect of all he had seen during the war, and claimed to have sensed upon surveying Hiroshima a fundamental connection between his nation’s use of the atomic bomb and the Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe.

It is tempting for this reason to think of Hersey as a political radical. He didn’t think of himself as such, though. His politics were left of center, but not far. He was a liberal, not a socialist or communist or pacifist. But politics in the usual sense did not truly interest him.

When Luce offered Hersey a Time editorship in the fall of 1944, he turned it down because he recognized that Luce—who was well on the way to becoming the right-wing ideologue he

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would be remembered as—was beginning to use the magazine as an organ for his nationalist agenda.

Hersey objected not so much to Luce’s views as he did to the notion that Luce was sacrificing the truth to promote them. In a cable to Luce, he explained that the editorship would not suit him because “my interests are primarily humanistic rather than political.”

Hersey considered himself a reporter, not a shaper of public opinion. He would not have found the prospect of editing a liberal magazine any more enticing than the prospect of editing Time. At a time when Luce and most other people viewed the world through a dual lens of nationality and ideology, Hersey’s humanism set him apart. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s fair to say that he was a radical, just not in any of the common meanings of the term.

Hiroshima begins at one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” Yet the most prominent feature of the early passages is not the bomb’s “flash,” but the premonition shared by the city’s residents that an aerial attack was inevitable.

They lived in perpetual fear of American bombers, figuring their time would come: “Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29.”

This was not dramatic foreshadowing on Hersey’s part. More Japanese were killed during the March 1944 firebombings of Tokyo than were killed at Hiroshima. Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe suffered enormous death tolls. The war’s rising trajectory of slaughter, and the litany of scarred or obliterated cities— Guernica, Chungking, Cologne, Hamburg, Nagoya, Dresden, Tokyo—reached its apogee before Hiroshima. By August 1945, the

Japanese had grown accustomed to the fiery destruction of their cities.

And though the residents of Hiroshima realize something different has befallen them, the initial violence of the bombing gives way to massive, fast-moving fires. Hersey’s subjects, stunned and bewildered, flee to safety, search for loved ones, and attempt to help some of the many thousands of wounded and dying. Two—Mr. Tanimoto, the Methodist pastor, and Dr. Sasaki (no relation to the clerk of the same name)—act heroically. Tanimoto scours the ruins searching for his wife and child yet, in a kind of macabre picaresque, is unable to stop himself from aiding every wounded person he comes upon. Dr. Sasaki, the only unharmed doctor at Hiroshima’s Red Cross Hospital, treats survivors nearly without rest for three interminable days.

Hersey’s subjects were simple folk caught up in an event largely beyond their comprehension. They were not bloodthirsty fanatics or racial supremacists or even ardent nationalists, but men and women devoted to their families and their city. The greater theme of Hiroshima—as a comment on the contempt for civilian life that defined the Second World War—thus stands on the shoulders of its prosaic ones. Toward his story’s end, Hersey characteristically records that in the weeks and months following the bombing its survivors remembered sharing “a curious kind of elated community spirit, something like that of the Londoners after their blitz—a pride in the way they and their fellow-survivors stood up to a dreadful ordeal.” No reader could miss the implication that the humanity of the Japanese was no different from the humanity of the English.

The inhumanity of the weapon unleashed upon the Japanese becomes all the more salient in contrast. Hersey did not temper the details; he wanted his American audience to imagine experiencing the event they almost alone among the war’s belligerents were spared: the mass murder of civilians and the death of a city. Midway through the book, Tanimoto comes upon a group of soldiers and sees that “there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their

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melted eyes had run down their cheeks.”

Other survivors succumb to full-body burns and suppurating skin. The wounded and dead are ubiquitous, and the reader becomes inured to their presence. But that was part of Hersey’s point. Surrounded by a hundred thousand dead and dying, survivors respond with existential indifference, not outrage.

Just as he had been in describing the bombing of Hamburg, Hersey was alert to the lack of historical precedent for Hiroshima.

What made the latter unique was the fallout.

Dr. Sasaki is one of the first to encounter and classify the bomb’s lingering effects. As he and his colleagues treat survivors, they observe an “unprecedented disease unfold and at last evolve a theory about its nature,” deducing that radiation is the cause. They discern three stages of the disease: “The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness. . . . It killed ninety-five percent of the people within a half mile of the center. . . . The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing.

Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next. Twenty-five to thirty days after the explosion, blood disorders appeared. . . . The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills. . . . In this stage, many patients died of complications, such as infections in the chest cavity.”

Still, the majority of the survivors are left “too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power.” Late in Hiroshima, Hersey writes about the swarms of American scientists that descended on the city after the war’s end and under the auspices of the Allied Military Government, scientists who collected data while marveling at the bomb’s unfathomable force. In their eager curiosity, they seemed to be oblivious to the human toll of their prized new weapon.

In emphasizing the experimental nature of the bomb, Hersey quietly carved out his moral position. It is no surprise that he grants one of the few explicit moral judgments in Hiroshima to Dr. Sasaki: “‘I see,’ Dr. Sasaki once said,

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‘that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.’”

This statement should still have the power to unsettle us. And it is in Sasaki’s words that we can locate the origins of the renascent Japanese discomfort with nuclear energy. No nation would soon forget its unwitting participation in a deadly experiment undertaken by its enemy. The existence of the Fukushima plant has inevitably been a monument to this experiment, but has only just been revealed as such. As the novelist Oe points out, the Japanese have become enthralled, as Americans were from the start, with the promise of nuclear energy’s peacetime uses.

Now they have been thrown back on their past and must decide whether this promise outweighs the memory of Hiroshima.

Writing in 1946, Hersey could not have foreseen the relevance of Hiroshima sixty-five year on. He might have sensed that, if nothing else, it would endure as a statement about the humanity of the Japanese and the potential for heroism in common men and women who are forced to confront catastrophe. Most who have come across it since its first publication have seen it as such. Fewer have seen it as the culmination of an empathetic writer’s record of man’s crimes against his fellow man during the Second World War. The key to understanding Hersey appears at the very end of Hiroshima, where he reprints a German Jesuit priest’s letter to the Vatican, a letter seeking solace and guidance in the aftermath of the bombing: “The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?” Self-effacing to a fault, Hersey relied on the priest to voice his own preoccupations. But read with Hersey’s prior writings in mind, the implications of the letter become inescapable. Hersey, by the end of his war, was just such a moralist, and Hiroshima was his clearest answer.

Dan Gerstle is on the editorial staff of Hill and Wang.

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Flashpoint in Health-Care Reform THEDA SKOCPOL Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care A Right in the United States

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Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform

by Paul Starr Yale University Press, 2011, 336 pp.

Health care is an explosive flashpoint in U.S. politics this year more than ever. By 2013, Americans will either be headed, however slowly and fitfully, toward virtually universal access to decent health care or most of us will be struggling to use dwindling public vouchers to purchase ever more expensive private insurance. These alternate futures reflect what will happen if there is a Republican takeover of the presidency and Congress in January 2013 compared to what is likely if Barack Obama secures re-election in November 2012 or if Democrats have control of at least one chamber of Congress.

Four years ago, proposals to expand health insurance coverage were a hot topic among candidates Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain.

Citizen groups and health-care stakeholders alike realized that 2009 might bring another attempt at legislating “comprehensive health reform”—to expand coverage to tens of millions of uninsured and get a grip on rising health-care costs. That is just what happened, although the legislative slog was long and hard. In March of his second year in office, Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

This reform promises massive federal subsidies to make decent health insurance coverage available at a reasonable price to lower- and lower-middle-income Americans.

States will set up regulated “exchanges” through which citizens and businesses can compare and purchase health coverage. States can choose to feature public health plans, even to institute single-payer coverage, as Vermont is doing. Where private insurers are allowed to offer coverage and use subsidies on the exchanges, they will have to make profits by offering better coverage at lower cost, not by avoiding or dumping patients who suffer chronic conditions or become ill.

Major social policy breakthroughs like Affordable Care always remain contentious for years after a president signs the bill into law. Social Security was under partisan attack for years and took two decades to become securely vested; the implementation of Medicare amid cries of “socialism” led to sharply rising costs and launched battles over cost controls that have never gone away. Since its enactment, Affordable Care is actually being implemented more steadily than media coverage would lead us to believe.

Many Republican governors whose attorneys general are arguing that Affordable Care is unconstitutional have nevertheless accepted federal subsidies to expand coverage and plan for the new health-care exchanges.

Across the country, insurance companies, hospitals, and citizens groups have been haggling over new rules of the health coverage game and setting up arrangements that vary from single-payer in Vermont and competition between public and private plans in Oregon to regulated private insurance in Utah. Health-care providers and insurers are also hard at work on cost-saving experiments encouraged by the new law, some of which are panning out. Medicare costs are already coming down, and young adults are gaining coverage by remaining on parental health S P S R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S EN T 95

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plans, as the law mandates.

But Affordable Care remains in the political bull’s-eye. Leaving aside legal challenges to every part of the law—challenges on which the Supreme Court will rule one way or another in mid-2012—Obama’s historic breakthrough is under unremitting attack by a radicalized Republican Party. That is the real story about U.S. health care right now. Only a few years ago, Republicans said that they, too, wanted affordable health coverage for all Americans—it was just that they had other ways to get there compared to Democrats.

Now the pretense has been dropped.

Republican popular constituencies show open contempt for the idea that all Americans should have help to get decent health care; and Republican ideological elites, funders, and officeholders and candidates compete to see who can promise more sweeping cutbacks in public funding and responsibility for health coverage.

Every 2012 GOP presidential contender is on record promising to repeal “ObamaCare”— and, ironically, the loudest commitment to repeal comes from Mitt Romney, whose effective and popular Massachusetts health insurance reform is the model from which Affordable Care was devised. No matter.

If he gains the GOP nomination and wins the presidency, Romney will preside over repeal or evisceration of Affordable Care.

All Republican candidates and officeholders these days worry about funding and popular support for primary challenges on their right.

If they have the votes and the presidential pen in early 2013, Romney and congressional Republicans will act quickly, so as to parry any accusation of softness in getting rid of ObamaCare.

Worse, Republicans also have a radical plan to cut taxes by slashing health-care spending for an aging U.S. population. They are targeting very popular parts of U.S. healthcare provision: Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor and disabled. In virtual lockstep, Republicans, including Romney, have signed on to a budget-slashing plan devised in 2011 by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. That plan does away with Medicare’s guarantee of coverage for elderly retirees; it frees up future billions to cover

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big tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by forcing senior citizens into the private insurance market with vouchers of sharply decreasing value. The Ryan plan also radically changes Medicaid, the federal health subsidy plan for the poor and for elders in nursing homes, by turning it into limited, diminishing grants to fiscally hard-pressed state governments. Republican governors have already shown that health care and education for the poor and the middle class are much lower on their list of priorities than tax cuts for businesses, so we can imagine what turning Medicaid over to the states will mean, especially in states with large uninsured populations of lower-income people. But it won’t be just the poor who suffer, because Medicaid covers nursing home costs for many middleclass families. Under Ryan’s budget, the United States will launch an inter-state race to the bottom in funding decent health care for the majority of Americans.

How has the United States arrived at an epochal election that includes such a sharp fork in the road on health-care policy, not to mention all other areas of social and economic policy? From whence come older, white, middle-class Tea Partiers taking to the streets carrying lurid signs depicting Obama as a Nazi because of his support for health reforms to help ordinary working people? Why are post-2008 Republicans defying public opinion to realize a right-wing ideological dream of abolishing Medicare and Medicaid? And how does it happen that a millionaire GOP presidential contender whose only public achievement heretofore was the creation of a health exchange and near-universal coverage in Massachusetts is now determined to prevent any similar reforms in the rest of the nation?

Two new books—Richard Kirsch’s Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care A Right in the United States and Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform—offer some guidance, but each ultimately disappoints.

Unlike some on the left, I will not hold it against Kirsch and Starr that, in the end, they supported Affordable Care rather than holding

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out for Medicare for All or a strong “public option” at the national level. Both were right to see Affordable Care as a huge step forward in the century-long struggle for universal health coverage in America. Still, I question how clearly either Kirsch or Starr understands the ways in which health care fits into the current political war over national community and social equity. All Americans are conscripts in this war launched by the privileged and powerful.

From 2008 to 2010, Richard Kirsch was the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a coalition of unions, providers, and citizens groups that agitated for progressive possibilities in Affordable Care, including a strong “public option” modeled on Medicare. Kirsch operates inside and outside of the Beltway. He works with state and local partners and stresses putting citizen pressure on congresspeople, not just running expensive television ads or funding D.C. lobbyists.

Fighting for Our Health is the best account available of the formation of a coalition of unions and advocacy groups in support of comprehensive health reform. Organizers in the union and citizens’ advocacy sector realized well before the 2008 election that health reform might again come up in Washington, D.C., and they knew that the last time, during the Clinton debacle of 1993–1994, those on the center left were divided and unprepared. So they assembled a broad coalition of groups and put a lot of effort into hammering out a comprehensive series of policy goals for health reform.

HCAN came up with a policy approach to bridge the divide between erstwhile singlepayer supporters and market regulators who would predominate in Congress. The ideas of political scientist Jacob Hacker were used to sketch reforms that would put Medicarestyle, publicly funded health insurance plans into direct competition with private health insurance plans on a new health exchange for comparison shopping. Private plans would have to reduce profits and unnecessary costs, Hacker argued. In addition, reformers in HCAN called for the same sorts of subsidies to low-income people and small businesses that other reform supporters, including parts of the business community, were advocating.

Indeed, by the mid-2000s, as both Kirsch and Starr recount, a rough consensus was forming on the kinds of changes that Affordable Care would eventually embody.

Beyond rich description, Kirsch’s book is less satisfying. It engages in a lot of selfcongratulation. HCAN’s funders are flattered, and there are many claims about how much difference HCAN efforts made in the passage of reform, especially through the formation of alliances with liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives. In particular, Kirsch argues, congressional Democrats turned to HCAN for help when Tea Party protesters invaded their town halls in August 2009. As one who studied the entire 2009–2010 episode in detail, I find it plausible that HCAN made a difference, even though the alliance could not, in the end, overcome Senate resistance to including a public option—or an expansion of Medicare—in Affordable Care. That all came down to Senator Joseph Lieberman from Connecticut, who, as usual, betrayed the cause in the end. But HCAN did keep the public option alive until early 2010, when liberals in the House extracted from the Senate better subsidies for lower-income people and higher taxes on the wealthy in return for dropping the public option. That was important, because until the House liberals stood firm, the Senate was planning to lower subsidies and obtain funding entirely from overall cuts in existing public health spending.

Kirsch recounts many battles with the White House, from which he draws the conclusion that left reformers should have kept up more pressure on the president for goals such as the public option. I find this unconvincing. Obama and White House advisers hostile to the Left were not the reason the public option was dropped. Congressional maneuvers accomplished that. Throughout the battles over Affordable Care, left-wing pressure on Obama mattered little, except to force him to keep going until final passage of some comprehensive law. And if progressive pressures helped to keep the White House engaged until a law passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mattered more in bringing about the final enactment of comprehensive reform.

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Her fierce determination was remarkable.

As for other lessons that might be learned, Kirsch’s book never reflects on why HCAN was unable to counter misinformation about Affordable Care. When Americans hear about new insurance rules and new subsidies to pay for coverage, they support them by large bipartisan margins. Yet HCAN, along with Democrats, failed to get this message out. What is more, in 2010, HCAN and other supporters clearly failed to protect Democrats in Congress who voted with them. Dozens of brave supporters of Affordable Care lost in 2010, and not just because of the down economy.

Kirsch offers no discussion of what HCAN and other progressives did, or failed to do, in those congressional elections; nor does he look ahead to what progressives might do better for 2012, when the very survival of Affordable Care is at stake, along with the long-term existence of Medicare and Medicaid. U.S. right-wingers understand the importance of punishing and supporting legislators in the House, the Senate, and state legislatures. Until liberals and progressives can do the same—and until they can spread a better understanding of the actual provisions of laws such as Affordable Care— they will not muster the popular power and leverage Kirsch desires.

If Richard Kirsch is an outside-in player in D.C. battles, a man who believes that power lies not so much in argument as in organization and coalition-building, Paul Starr is a consummate insider, who thinks and speaks for inside-the-Beltway types. Starr’s day job is as a professor of sociology at Princeton.

Years ago, he authored The Social Transformation of American Medicine, a masterpiece that traces with rich social context the rise of a powerful health profession and private institutions for health-care financing and delivery in the United States. In the early 1990s Starr became more of a health policy wonk. He helped design the ill-fated Clinton health reform plan of 1993, and he has repeatedly published articles defending the content and political wisdom of that plan.

Indeed, a big part of Remedy and Reaction recounts at length the policy discussions over the 1993–1994 Clinton plan and alternatives

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to it. Starr’s account adds nothing to already published analyses and seems to be an opportunity to advocate, once again, for a plan that he implies was better and more sweeping than the Affordable Care Act of 2010. But Starr offers no credible evidence that Clinton’s plan was more powerful than Affordable Care. Obviously, Obama succeeded where Clinton failed: passing a reform is huge, compared to just proposing one. What is more, by virtue of its major subsidies for lower income people financed by taxes on business and the wealthy, Affordable Care is much more sweeping and equality-enhancing than Clinton’s 1993 proposal would have been, even if every page of the 1,342-page proposal had been swallowed by Congress.

The strength of Starr’s overview of a century of attempts at health reform lies in his presentation of the policy proposals—from efforts pushed by Progressive Era reformers through the minutiae of recent debates in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Especially excellent are Starr’s descriptions of Richard Nixon’s reform proposals in the 1970s, of Reagan administration efforts to introduce cost controls into Medicare, and of the roots and political background to Romney’s Massachusetts health reforms, including the “mandate” requirement for individuals to buy some kind of coverage on an exchange. Starr knows his health plans.

This is a good book to have on the shelf when you want to know what Nixon and Carter proposed compared to Clinton and Obama.

When it comes to political analysis, though, Starr is less effective. He looks at politics from the prism of whether this or that health reform plan “remedies” problems of access and cost in the preexisting health care system. But politics is about interests and power struggles as well as deliberations over solutions to problems; and politics has mass as well as elite components. I see no evidence that Starr talks very often with non-elites or that he ever engages right-wingers seriously. Starr treats conservative critics as emotional ideologues without probing the economic and political interests they have in defeating even the most market-respecting of Democratic-sponsored health reforms. Because Affordable Care incorporated specific ideas previously endorsed by

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Republicans, Starr seems genuinely mystified about why Obama’s reform effort has aroused such fierce, all-out political opposition from the Right since 2008.

The chief shortfall of Remedy and Reaction lies in Starr’s weak analysis of how the politics of health reform has changed. Starr’s overall framework, a reasonable one, draws (without much acknowledgment) from previous studies

by Jacob Hacker and Lawrence Jacobs. Their key insight is that after universal health reform failed in the middle of the twentieth century, the United States got caught in dilemmas created by the coexistence of partial insurance coverage with public subsidies for a highly expensive and technologically innovative health-care system. Many businesses and health-care providers gained a stake in expensive public subsidies and provided expensive care for the segments of the population fortunate to enjoy good insurance coverage. But as costs rose, coverage receded.

Employers found private insurance too expensive. Future reforms had to be “comprehensive,” in that cost controls and extensions of coverage had to be attempted at the same time. This set the stage, especially after 1970, for reform efforts that failed repeatedly.

Political opponents of any given reform effort can always drag out the legislative battle and appeal to stakeholders whose profits might be trimmed. They can also arouse anxieties in the general middle-class public by portraying new reforms as threats to those who already have good health coverage. The situation is made worse because the chief beneficiaries of reform are lower income people or less powerful business people who cannot weigh in as effectively as those who stand to lose.

But Starr uses this scheme very mechanically, without noting how encompassing battles about taxes and public spending make health reform dilemmas ever more ideologically explosive.

Both the Clinton and the Obama bills were profoundly shaped in some of their most explosive political details by the requirement that health reform has to “pay for itself” and not increase the long-term federal budget deficit. What the Congressional Budget Office would “score” as cutting the deficit could be included in a bill, whereas what the CBO

would not score as effectively cost-cutting had to be jettisoned. All congressional deals in health care must bridge liberals who want expanded coverage and non-liberals who want to be able to claim they are cutting deficits.

CBO scoring rules are why the Affordable Care Act included the so-called individual mandate—the provision that says everyone will have to buy some kind of basic insurance coverage once subsidies kick in or else pay a small fine. Conservatives have used this provision to scare Americans (many of whom do not know what the mandate is but who respond more positively once its purpose is explained and once they realize they will have subsidies to make insurance affordable before the mandate kicks in). In his book and in a constant stream of op-eds, Starr argues that the individual mandate was a “miscalculation” by Obama. But there was no mistake here. The mandate was included because the CBO projected it to make Affordable Care less costly. Without this provision, Congress would not have passed the law in an era of tight federal budgets.

And why are budgets so tight? Because, over recent decades, Democrats and moderate Republicans have retreated on taxing people, especially the wealthy, to pay for federal programs. The chickens are coming home to roost, with an aging population, a financial crisis, and ever more fanatic right-wing resistance to taxes. Health reform suffers particularly from tax resistance, because health coverage costs money. Starr claims that financing Affordable Care was not a big problem, but he could not be more mistaken.

There were tough battles to the very end about where to get money to pay for lower income subsidies and the huge expansion of Medicaid. In the last days, the Democrats in the House forced higher charges on business and wealthy Medicare beneficiaries, making Affordable Care more redistributive—but also arousing new determination by the privileged to avoid those charges.

Starr’s scattered explanations of the success and failure of different legislative efforts attribute too much political sway to public

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opinion. Public opinion actually favors most specific aspects of health reform, including, by bipartisan majorities, the new rules and subsidies of Affordable Care. In the abstract, the public is always ambivalent about large government reform efforts. But it hardly matters, because the general public does not decide the content of policy battles. Politicians, interest groups, and some experts are the key actors. Starr fails to explain why certain interest groups, such as many health providers, have, over time, switched their positions to become more open to federally subsidized expanded coverage as a way to ensure that patients can pay for services. And he never tells us why Republicans have moved in such an extreme opposite direction—to the point that marketoriented plans such as Romney’s that were considered conservative orthodoxy only a few years ago are now denounced as “unconstitutional” and “socialist.” The GOP has moved into an alliance with business sectors and privileged citizens who do not want to pay for universal coverage.

Starr portrays recent decades of U.S. politics as a series of yo-yo sways alternating between left and right. He suggests that partisan polarization is relatively even. But this is an unhelpful portrayal. Republicans have gained dominance and galloped much further to the right since 1980. The center in national policy debates has moved steadily toward tax cuts, deregulation of business, and cuts in vital social programs—and, in tandem, inequality has grown to ancien régime proportions. Starr lists all the relevant facts. But his model of long-term political change is not informed by the changing ideological, organizational, and socioeconomic context. Consequently, Starr does not explain why taxes and public budgets are now such flashpoints. Yet superrich resistance to paying any higher tax rates is exactly what lies behind the GOP turn against Medicare and Medicaid. And opposition to Affordable Care is fueled by the unwillingness of certain business interests to accept lower profits along with reductions in public subsidies for wasteful insurance programs and restrictions on fraudulent marketing practices.

Tea Party populism hardly makes an

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appearance in Starr’s book, either. Yet thousands of grassroots Tea Partiers stoked a lot of fervor against Obama. The Tea Party brings together elite, ultra-free-market actors who press the GOP never to accept taxes or regulations on the wealthy, with older white middle-class Americans who are deeply anxious about public programs such as Affordable Care or education that might use taxes to pay for benefits to lower income people, younger adults, and immigrants. At the grassroots, the Tea Party is a generational populist movement of resentment; and Tea Partiers will accept privatization of Social Security and Medicare for future generations as long as these programs remain for them in their old age. That is why the Ryan plan is structured as it is—to protect Medicare now while imposing new costs through privatization on younger age cohorts.

Starr stresses the individual mandate as the popular Achilles’ heel of Affordable Care, but that is surely wrong. The “death panel” lie— the false claim that Affordable Care would empower bureaucrats to deny life-saving care to the elderly and disabled—was far more effective in 2010 because it has a metaphorical resonance. Many older whites are worried that their public programs will be cut to pay for Affordable Care. Their worries are not entirely irrational, given that both Clinton and Obama endorsed “Medicare cuts” to help pay for more universal health coverage, to include the mainly younger workers who are the ones left out. True, the Medicare cuts were aimed at costly private insurance plans and did not cut benefits to regular subscribers, but that is not the public perception. In an era when Democrats are unwilling to speak frankly to the public about taxes, they turn to all kinds of regulatory gimmicks and cuts in existing programs to pay for major new social spending. That is what Clinton did—and Obama did it again in 2009 with Affordable Care. The downside of this approach is public misunderstanding about how new benefits will be financed, allowing the right wing to fuel popular fears. Tea Partiers are just the conservative cutting edge of Obama hatred and fear of the generational and class redistribution promised in Affordable Care.

In sum, Starr underestimates the political

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will and interests of opponents to health-care reform. He mistakenly thinks that Affordable Care is a very moderate reform effort— because he focuses on Obama’s willingness to compromise a bit with private insurance companies and other health care businesses.

Many on the left share this preoccupation.

But that misses the fiscal and economic redistribution central to Affordable Care.

The guts of the new law are the huge expansions of Medicaid and expensive subsidies to make insurance available to people earning incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty line. Affordable Care’s new insurance market regulations and fees on health providers also threaten to trim profits in the health industry.

These are not minor matters in the view of affected business interests or wealthy rightwingers determined to block taxes.

Stark political interests are also at stake for Democrats and Republicans. Affordable Care, on top of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, could strengthen the bond between middle-class Americans and a national government that supports security for all. If all these program survive and flourish, as most Democrats would prefer, right-wing Republicans have little future, especially in a society where young people, Latinos, and minorities are gaining ground demographically and find the Democratic Party of the Obama era relatively attractive. What seems like a timid reform to some on the left is well understood as a threat to future Republican prospects by those on the right. They see 2012 as a last chance to cut off Democratic reforms and preserve an everyone-for-himself economy in which conservatives continue to call the shots.

Republicans and right-wingers are right.

In health care, as well as in other areas with economic and fiscal impact, the stakes in 2012 are as high as in any pivotal election in U.S. history (except 1860). Not because Obama is perfect, but because he has, however partially, set out a better path that is scary enough to the Right to arouse fierce counter-mobilizations.

It will not do for liberals to engage in backward-looking self-congratulation or hold out for pie-in-the-sky perfection or underestimate the rational fierceness of the opposition they face. Progressives need to stop focusing

on what was left out of Affordable Care and understand that the law is a redistributive and regulatory breakthrough worth fighting for. Going forward from 2012, Americans are either going to have more broadly shared health care paid for in part through taxes that hit the wealthy along with others or we are going to endure increasingly bitter battles over dwindling health-care spending, while the super rich use ballooning tax cuts to build bigger mansions and rig elections. Small turns can prove irreversible, and 2012 has all the markings of such a critical juncture.

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University and director of the Scholars Strategy Network, an alliance of university-based scholars with progressive values. Her recent books include Health Reform and American Politics (with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2010) and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (with Vanessa Williamson, 2012).

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Indebted DANIEL LUBAN Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber Melville House, 2011, 554 pp.

As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public notoriety had come in 2005, when Yale controversially refused to renew his teaching contract for reasons that Graeber and his supporters linked to his anarchist politics and outspoken activism. When his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years was released in July 2011, there was little to suggest that it had in any way captured the zeitgeist.

Within weeks of the book’s release, the debt-ceiling standoff between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans nearly sent the American economy over a cliff and put the national debt at the center of political debate. Within months, the Occupy Wall Street movement had become a media phenomenon, and Graeber had emerged as one of its most prominent leaders and its most important theorist. Almost overnight, Debt was taken up as a manifesto for the moment and a formulation of Occupy’s overall stance—an impression furthered by the book’s most striking political takeaway, its call for a biblical-style Jubilee in which all debts (national as well as personal) would be forgiven.

Against this background, readers would be forgiven for picking up Debt expecting a political polemic in the tradition of Howard Zinn or Naomi Klein, writers whose books (whatever their undoubted merits) tend to appeal more to activists than to scholars. To do so, however, would be to underestimate both the ambition and the originality of Graeber’s 1 0 2 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

book. Although its polemical aims are never entirely absent, they are contained in a meticulously researched and wide-ranging work of real theoretical importance. Debt offers both a reconceptualization of the nature of economic relations and a grand theory of history—all interspersed with themes ranging from the socio-historical origins of Axial Age philosophies to the nature of blood-debts among the Lele of the Congo to (fear not) a few good shots at the big banks and the International Monetary Fund.

The book’s scope and ambition inevitably mean that it contains both hits and misses. But Debt is frequently successful and fascinating even when unsuccessful. It is worth reading even for those who cannot ultimately sign on to all of its conclusions.

The book’s argument begins with a thorough demolition of what Graeber terms “the myth of barter.” Familiar from innumerable economics textbooks, it goes like this: in the beginning, before the existence of money, there was only barter. Primitive hunter-gatherers survived by swapping nuts for berries or axes for arrowheads, leading to an increasingly developed division of labor. The obvious inconveniences of this system, however, made clear the need for a common medium of exchange, and thus money came into being.

Over time, the ubiquity of money made systems of credit possible in turn—hence a historical progression from barter to money to credit.

The problem, as Graeber suggests, is that historical evidence suggests the opposite progression. There is no record of any society’s being primarily oriented around barter; on the contrary, barter tends to exist only in the interstices between societies or following the collapse of existing money economies.

It is credit, not barter, that is historically primary; pre-money economies were built

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upon ongoing relations of obligation between neighbors and kin rather than atomistic exchange between strangers. Someone who coveted his neighbor’s cow would get it not by swapping baubles or bowstrings, but simply by taking it with the neighbor’s consent, thus incurring an obligation that might be only vaguely specified (or officially denied, in the case of gift-giving) and need not be reciprocated with a material object at all. As Graeber acknowledges, this line of argument is not original to him; anthropologists have been puncturing the myth of barter for a century.

Yet the case has rarely been presented so convincingly, and perhaps his book will force economists to take some notice of it.

Dispelling the barter myth is important because of its broader implications for our conceptions of economic life. To believe that pre-monetary economic life consisted of isolated hunter-gatherers swapping goats for arrowheads is both to project the supposedly universal motive of “economic self-interest” onto all behavior throughout history and to abstract from the real social relationships (neighbors, parents, lovers, rivals) in which all such behavior was necessarily embedded.

Graeber, somewhat unfairly, attributes this notion of the isolated homo economicus to Adam Smith, whose views he tends to caricature throughout the book. (Far from reducing all sociability to a form of exchange, as Graeber alleges, it would be more accurate to say— with the historian Emma Rothschild and others—that Smith took exchange to be just one form of sociability.) But origins aside, we frequently take for granted that there is something called the “economic sphere” in which people act out of “economic motives”—above all, self-interest—and whose logic is either autonomous or, more strongly still, serves as the model for all other domains of human life.

Against this kind of reductionism, Graeber proposes (in one of the book’s most important chapters) a different account of “the moral grounds of economic relations.” Even in economic life, he argues, the tit-for-tat logic of reciprocity and exchange is only one of the principles structuring human behavior; it exists alongside, and presupposes, what he labels “communism” and “hierarchy.”

Communism (a deliberately provocative

coinage) refers not to collective control over the means of production but to behavior according to the basic principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—the principle that we take for granted when caring for a child or giving directions to a stranger. Hierarchy, on the other hand, justifies the inequalities between (what are presumed to be) qualitatively different classes of people by reference to a logic of custom and precedent.

Exchange differs from communism in its presumption that every good turn must be reciprocated (rather than that it merely would be if the need arose); it differs from reciprocity in its presumption that the parties enter and leave the transaction as formal equals. Debt, on this account, occurs during the time that an exchange between presumed equals has not yet been brought to completion—a time when the logic of hierarchy takes over and the debtor is presumed to have incurred a kind of moral guilt.

The point of this framework is that not all of human life can be reduced to forms of exchange and debt; they exist alongside other principles without which social life would be impossible. It is also worth stressing (although Graeber notes it only in passing) that the boundaries between these principles are themselves ambiguous, unstable, and contested: reciprocity can break down into hierarchy or communism into exchange—as when we discover that what we took to be a selfless favor has, in the eyes of the other party, incurred a reciprocal obligation. To what extent Graeber has reconceptualized economic life “pretty much from scratch,” as he claims, is open to debate. His theory fits rather easily into the “substantivist” tradition of economic anthropology, whose leading representative was Karl Polanyi. But the discussion here undeniably breaks new ground and forms the core of the book’s theoretical argument.

The real heart of the book, though, is its varied and provocative investigations into the forms and mutations of debt relations across time and place. Many serve (and succeed) primarily as individual set-pieces. One thinks, for instance, of the discussion of the origins

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of patriarchy in the ancient Middle East, in which Graeber suggests that it was the everpresent threat of having one’s daughters seized as debt-pawns and sent off to labor in a stranger’s house that gave rise to a compensating set of repressively protective practices such as veiling. (Graeber is particularly good at reminding us that debts have constantly been cashed out not merely in money but also in human beings, and that the logic of debt has been intertwined with slavery and indentured servitude throughout history.) But on the whole there are two central narratives that dominate Graeber’s historical investigations.

The first narrative concerns the transition from “human economies” to “commercial economies”—from societies in which economic behavior is oriented toward rearranging relationships between human beings to those in which it is oriented toward the accumulation of wealth. There are echoes here both of the old sociological story of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and of the Marxian notion of fetishism, the general theme being the breakdown of the old communal and personal world of relations between people and its replacement by a newly abstract and impersonal world of relations between things.

Debt differs from other and older kinds of obligation, Graeber suggests, in that it can be quantified—and thus transferred from one party to another outside the sphere of immediate social relationships. Quantification, in turn, can be achieved only through violence, which allows humans to be treated as homogeneous and precisely calculable by wrenching them from their social contexts.

The transition from human to commercial economies is above all the story of the destruction of the old personal communities through the use of large-scale (particularly state) violence.

Graeber’s second and more striking grand narrative concerns the cyclical alternation between periods when transactions are conducted primarily through credit and those in which bullion and coinage prevail. The first great bullion period, he suggests, was the Axial Age, which he dates from roughly 800 BCE to 600 CE; it was followed by the

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collapse of the great ancient slave empires and a medieval period of credit that lasted until roughly 1450 CE. The modern era saw a second age of bullion that lasted until the 1970s, with Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to take the United States off the gold standard serving as a bookend. Graeber’s claim is that we are now entering a new age of credit, with all that entails.

What, exactly, does it entail? The prevalence of cash, Graeber argues, goes hand in hand with the dominance of great conquering empires, with war-making, and with slavery.

The portability and transferability of coins outside the sphere of immediate social relationships makes them conducive to plunder and ideal as soldiers’ pay; in turn, it is only strong central states that are able to impose standardized systems of coinage. Periods of credit, on the other hand, tend to be eras of relative peace and stability. When freed from the violent intrusions of the state, credit systems blur into local relations of sociability, trust, and mutual aid; it is these systems, for Graeber, that constitute genuine free markets as distinct from the state-backed plunder characteristic of capitalism.

Graeber traces the ramifications of these cycles of credit and bullion beyond economics proper into the realms of thought and culture. Some of this discussion might lead the reader to suspect that a rather crude notion of economic base and cultural superstructure is lurking in the background. (It is striking, to take just one example, that the Greek city of Miletus saw both the first example of Greek coinage and the birth of pre-Socratic philosophy, but there are any number of causal stories that one could invoke to explain this correlation beyond the simple notion that coinage produced materialist philosophy.) Nonetheless, Graeber’s vision is often dazzling, even when open to skeptical objections, and represents the kind of attempt at grand historical narrative that has fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Perhaps the only work of similar scope and ambition that comes to mind from the previous twenty years is Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century.

This cyclical narrative also has a clear takeaway for the future. Insofar as we are

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shifting from a period of bullion to one of credit, the implication is that the era of great state-based military empires—above all, the current American imperium—is coming to an end. While Graeber is cautious not to predict the precise shape that the future will take, he hints that it will look more like a return to localized communities of trust and mutual aid, coupled perhaps with new global institutions to protect debtors. Like many current doomsayers, his favored historical analogy is the fall of Rome and the transition to feudalism—but for him such a vision is largely grounds for optimism.

What are we to make of this story? One would need scholarly expertise across a great number of disciplines to properly assess its plausibility, and I do not claim the requisite knowledge of financial history or West African anthropology or Sanskrit literature (to pick only three such disciplines) to be able to do so. It may, however, be worthwhile simply to look at the presuppositions of this final argument about the coming age of credit, for it seems to me that even Graeber’s own analysis may point in another direction.

In Graeber’s scheme, relations of credit and debt fall principally under the logic of exchange rather than communism or hierarchy. Of course, credit relations may not be entirely tit-for-tat—the neighborhood bartender may never confront the down-atthe-heels regular with his full tab—in which case they shade into communism and mutual aid. But there is nonetheless a difference between credit and communism; the fact that credit transactions may proceed on a basis of trust does not imply that the transactors have altruistic motives. This, at least, is the impression we get in the earlier, theoretical sections of the book.

When we get to the later, historical sections, however, these distinctions are set aside, and credit is frequently treated as if it were synonymous with communism and mutual aid.

Adam Smith, for instance, comes under attack for his famous claim that economic transactions proceed from self-interest rather than benevolence, which Graeber takes to mean that such transactions operate on the basis

of cash rather than credit. But this would be true only if credit were identical with benevolence—and Graeber has gone to some lengths to show that credit and debt spring not from benevolence but from hierarchy and exchange.

This may seem to be a minor inconsistency, but it is notable insofar as it calls into question the book’s later historical argument that credit economies are in some sense kinder and gentler than cash ones. At some risk of oversimplification, we might say that the rather sinister figure of “debt” in the early parts of the book, with its undertones of selfinterest, servitude, and violence, turns in the later parts into the more appealing figure of “credit,” with its undertones of trust and mutual aid.

Graeber does have a response to this apparent contradiction. It is above all violence, in his story, that warps the healthy forms of credit into the perverse ones, and it is above all the state that is the agent of such violence.

There are bottom-up forms of markets and credit that spring from local communities outside of state control and top-down forms that spring from the poisonous conjuncture of state coercive power and market imperatives.

It is “the legacy of violence [that] has twisted everything around us,” he suggests at the end of the book, and in such a world any debt that we incur is merely “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.” Liberated from such violence, “genuinely free men and women” will step onto the scene to decide for themselves what they owe to each other.

Readers will have different reactions to these sentiments; I find them a bit pious. We may leave aside any philosophical questions about the possibility of such “genuinely free men and women”—a phrase that reminds us that however much Graeber may disparage “bourgeois” modes of thought, his anarchism is ultimately rooted in liberal notions about individual freedom and autonomy. And we might similarly leave aside qualms about Graeber’s apparent conflation of coercion with violence—and, at times, violence with state violence—which downplays the ways in which all human communities, even apparently peaceful and harmonious ones, rest on various forms of power and coercion short of outright violence. Finally, although

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the suggestion that violence has “twisted” or “corrupted” human societies might seem to suggest, rather naively, that there exists some “natural” form of human society uncorrupted by violence, let us take this as merely a notional ideal for the future, not a depiction of any society in the past. (Elsewhere in the book, Graeber does in fact stress precisely the ubiquity of violence throughout history, and is careful not to downplay the inhumanity that was often prevalent in “human economies.”)

Suppose we accept that we are indeed entering a new cycle of credit, and that credit economies, freed from large-scale violent predation, can indeed turn into locally embedded communities of trust and mutual aid. We might then ask whether there is any indication that this nascent age of credit will take the benign rather than the malign form.

The financialization witnessed over the last few decades has certainly not resulted in a scaling down of economic transactions to fit the social relationships of local communities; quite the opposite. A term like “globalization” may have been overused to the point of banality, but it does adequately express the idea that the economic system is scaling up— well beyond the possibility of embeddedness in any conceivable community—rather than scaling down. The forms of credit prevalent in such an economy would have to be considered more “top-down” than “bottom-up” by virtually any standard. And regardless of the apparent waning of American hegemony,

there is little indication that the world is becoming more peaceful or that economic transactions are becoming decoupled from predation and coercion. Perhaps the fact that the first decades of the supposed new credit era have so thoroughly diverged from Graeber’s notions about what such an era entails calls for a reevaluation of his overall framework.

Graeber recognizes all these facts, but prefers to put his hopes in the long term. We are a mere forty years into the new age of credit: “The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that surprising new ideas will certainly emerge.” This is incontestable, and it would be sheer hubris to assert that the beneficial changes he foresees are impossible. On the other hand, perhaps we should also recognize that there is no particular indication that they are likely. It is inevitable that the future will surprise us, but it is neither inevitable nor even probable that it will pleasantly surprise us.

If Graeber’s grand narrative is not entirely convincing, this does not necessarily detract from the achievements of his work as a whole.

Its strength lies less in any single thesis about history or politics or social life than in the intelligence and fervor with which it opens up a startling array of problems. While undeniably a book of the moment, it is likely to be read long after the moment has passed.

Daniel Luban is a doctoral student in political theory at the University of Chicago.

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Gilded Age India ISA AC CHOTINER The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

by Siddhartha Deb Faber and Faber, 2011, 272 pp.

In referring to his book as “a portrait of the New India,” Siddhartha Deb has opted to engage in a debate about recent Indian history. After more than forty years of protectionism and centralized planning, the country has, in the past two decades, privatized and deregulated large sectors of its economy.

International trade has been prioritized, often at the expense of domestic industry.

Urban development schemes, frequently the result of partnerships between business and government, have been implemented without much debate.

There can be little doubt that India has succeeded in creating a dynamic and growing market economy. But economic success has had its costs, and writers and civil-society activists have begun to call into question the wealth disparities and rural displacement that have accompanied liberalization. In five selfcontained narratives, Deb, a novelist and journalist, skillfully delineates the displacements that have come with privatization and deregulation. His contribution lies in his insistence that this story be told, no matter what one thinks of India’s metamorphosis. Deb wants to remind those thriving under this new order of the underbelly of their success.

The Beautiful and the Damned begins with a quote from Mark Twain about the Gilded Age and is followed by a chapter entitled “The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India,” which allows Deb to compare the India of 2011 with the United States of Twain and, later, Fitzgerald. Deb’s Gatsby is Arindam Chaudhuri, a writer, entrepreneur, and

management guru—a man who has founded consulting firms, invested in Bollywood films, and started his own health and development charity. Deb writes that Chaudhuri has “achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent,” which is not the only time that Chaudhuri calls to mind Donald Trump rather than Jay Gatsby. Trump is hardly a Gatsby-esque character; nor, in Deb’s telling, is Chaudhuri. Both lack Gatsby’s pathos and romanticism, thus making the comparison a strained one. Chaudhuri’s unconventional charisma can be found on display at one of his lectures to young businesspeople: [It] was the juxtaposition of this homeliness with his wealth, success and glamour that created a hold over the leadership aspirants in the audience. By themselves, the Bentley Continental, the ponytail, and the designer glasses, or the familiar way Arindam had of dropping names like Harvard, McKinsey and Lee Iacocca, would have made him much too remote. But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow characteristics. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petite bourgeoisie.

What interests Deb is that, unlike Gatsby, Chaudhuri did not work his way up from nothing—that in India, as in Gilded Age America, there never was a truly self-made man. Instead he used his father’s connections, taking over the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, the modest business school founded by Chaudhuri the Elder.

Chaudhuri received his degrees from his father’s school before eventually expanding the family’s business. But he did so, Deb tells us, by falsely advertising everything from the school’s rankings to its facilities to its relationships with major corporations. Professors from Harvard and Columbia who each gave a single S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S ENT 107

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lecture while passing through India were described as “visiting faculty.”

Deb reveals that the former’s management institute and business school are vaguely cultish places: Arindam’s desire for greater influence also created a conflict with his closed style of running the company. Within [the company], he was surrounded by loyalists, people who subscribed to the cult of Arindam. Relatives became colleagues, while former students and classmates became employees and continued to refer to him in the nice, middle-class Indian way as “Arindam Sir.” The employees were so enamored of Arindam that when I visited him at the [campus] or stood near him... some of them displayed a barely disguised hostility. Upset at the proximity I had stolen, sensing that I did not entirely share their faith in the guru, that I was not one of them, they seethed with the desire to protect Arindam from me.

Chaudhuri is managing organizations dependent on his charisma and dubious publicity campaigns. Moreover, as Deb explains, not only do most of his students go on to work for him, but they do so while making lower wages than they would likely have received from other business schools.

Chaudhuri profits from what appears to be a convoluted pyramid scheme: the revenue that he generates from student fees pays those same students when they work for Chaudhuri after graduation. Deb is not the first to report on this elaborate scam. Although many Indian bloggers helped bring Chaudhuri’s dishonest claims and inflated persona to the public’s attention, Deb believes that they, too, are beholden to the values of Gilded Age India: Even though the bloggers were right in much of their criticism, they seemed unable to comprehend that the questionable practices of [Chaudhuri] were an expression of the times, and that Arindam wasn’t so much a rogue management guru as a particularly blatant manifestation of the management principle of making money.... None of the bloggers seemed willing to consider that the corporate practices they cherished necessarily spawned imitators.... The cult 1 0 8 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

represented by Arindam...was only part of the larger cult that was India Shining. [This was an election slogan of the right-wing party in the elections of 2004, and it is now often used as shorthand for New India.]

Deb is correct to detect something dangerous in the mixture of the cultish and the money-worshipping, for much of Chaudhuri’s success stems from the “aspiration and resentment” of modern Indians, which, along with economic insecurity, Deb views as products of capitalism. But it could be argued that these qualities, defined so loosely by Deb, could be found in every age and human society, and that the preponderance of fraudulent gurus on the subcontinent, as well as the willingness of people to trust authority figures who peddle spiritual improvement and self-help, has a long history in India. After exploring this world of capitalist confidence artists, Deb turns his attentions to the aspiring middle class. In a visit to Bangalore, the city considered the model of twenty-first-century Indian life, Deb meets an engineer named Chak, who works in the city for a company whose offices stand “behind high walls and a guard booth, encased in silence and reserve.”

The descriptions of Chak’s office evoke the more sterile corporate office buildings in midsize American cities (“No one would bother me as long as I had gone through the proper security procedures and stayed within my designated space”). Chak himself compares his surroundings to Arizona, where he once worked, but the difference, of course, is that in India Chak is surrounded by startling poverty and underdevelopment, which he only notices when traveling between home and work. Even Deb finds himself looking at impoverished Indians and not quite believing they inhabit the same country that houses Chak and his “Special Economic Zone.” Deb’s question, unasked but perceptible, is whether there is not something inherently unstable and dehumanizing about this state of affairs.

The most fascinating engineer Deb meets is a poet who has decided to spend his creative energy on nanopoetry, which is written in “a binary language” and can only be understood by other engineers. In other words, this form of technological/artistic expression is

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another way in which rich Indians demarcate the boundaries between themselves and the rest of society. Many of the engineers Deb meets look down on Indians who do any sort of physical labor; they also keep their workplaces and homes eerily clean, so as to play up the contrast with the general level of dirt and filth in the country. Misanthropy and rightwing politics are the norm, and even the less religious engineers gravitate toward a Hindu chauvinism that disdains the downtrodden and is devoted to free market economics. (In another conscious echo of America, some of the engineers call themselves libertarians while expressing an interest in free markets but not in civil liberties.) Deb, indulging in some pop psychology, theorizes that their bigotry and selfishness are really forms of selfhatred, but there is no doubting the torpor of the engineers’ lives.

In later sections of the book, Deb shifts gears again, making his way from top, to the middle, and then, finally, to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Turning from the problems of the tech wizards of India’s Silicon Valley to the travails of the agricultural worker, he finds farmers burdened by corrupt middlemen, known as seed-dealers, who set prices for crops and offer risky loans. Due to a combination of broken promises from the government (often in the form of shelved irrigation plans) and advertised bank loans that never materialize, the farmers are at the mercy of these middlemen, who frequently change their minds on a whim and leave farmers with products they cannot sell. Free market reforms have not simply taken away their subsidies; the changes have left them unable to decide their own fate. This is a sector in which almost 200,000 farmers committed suicide between 1995 and 2006, often because of excessive debt (this count only includes men); in which the method of suicide is often the ingestion of pesticides; in which the only alternative to farm labor is temporary serfdom requiring extensive travel between jobs. Even a reader already cynical about the media’s near-exclusive focus on the Indian tech sector would be alarmed by Deb’s statistics: the number of software workers in the country is

approximately one million, while the number of people who depend on agricultural work is nearly four hundred million.

Deb has a fine eye for detail: he notices a Maoist union organizer using an Infosys yellow notepad because his daughter works for the company. Some of his passages put one in mind of Rebecca West’s travels through the Balkans, where she made clear her preference for the rural or traditional over the urban or modern: The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in. Here, there would be no escape from the self in objects or technology.

There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee or an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships.

Deb’s partiality conveys his emotions, although it occasionally blunts the impact of the devastation he is trying to describe.

India is often considered the world’s largest democracy, and not without reason, but the factory workers Deb encounters exhibit a brand of fear more common in authoritarian states. When Deb is allowed to speak with them—admittedly something that might not be allowed in Zimbabwe or China—he notes, I went to the barracks and tried to talk to the workers and found that none of them wanted to talk to me in any detail. I understood why the workers were wary of me.

In spite of my telling them that I had the managing director’s permission, they felt uncertain about my permission—afraid that I might be a government labor inspector come to see their living conditions—and were determined—in the way of migrant workers—to avoid any discussion that might imperil their jobs. Some of the workers were teenage boys, in the most obvious violation of laws against hiring children, and they were the ones most anxious to avoid me.

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This is not just a picture of abject servitude, but also a snapshot of how Indian laborers view their government: regulators are more likely to endanger their jobs than to improve their working conditions.

For Deb, those conditions recall Upton Sinclair: “The men visible through the smoke and the noise were infernal creatures, rags wrapped around their faces to protect themselves from the heat, inevitably dwarfed by the extremity of the place, with everything so large, so fast, and so hot. It was as if they were being worked by the machines and materials rather than the other way around.”

The living quarters, which Deb calls “the most squalid and miserable place I have ever seen in my life,” are filled with “broken chairs and fans, discarded items of clothing, vegetable peelings, leftover food and empty pint bottles of cheap liquor. There was a constant smell of shit in the air.”

But while Deb captures the squalor of factory work, he is less convincing when he broadens his focus and argues that “the changes that have been wrought in India in the past two decades have not been kind to the poor.” He follows this with some stark and harrowing statistics, and, to be sure, his detailed reports capture the reality of these statistics. But he doesn’t mention that poverty statistics in India have always been astronomical, and he doesn’t tell us that the numbers have improved over the past twenty years. (Precise statistics are difficult to come by, but between 1994 and 2005, according to the World Bank, poverty declined by approximately 20 percent. The UN reports that poverty in India was 51 percent in 1990, and is expected to fall all the way to 22 percent by 2015.) The same problem presents itself when Deb, writing about relocation from rural lands to urban centers, claims that the impetus behind such movement is usually the result of tragedies such as partition and famine. The inclusion of the latter might be a hint that rural life in India has never been idyllic for the vast majority of people, but what is absent from Deb’s analysis is any acknowledgment that for millennia people have yearned to make the transition from the farm to the city.

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Deb eventually returns to the metropolis (in this case to New Delhi) and attaches himself to Esther, a young woman who works in a restaurant in the capital. Esther’s job has given her a certain amount of self-confidence and pride, but her universe is just as sheltered as that of the nanopoet engineer. Esther describes her work with the term “F&B”— short for Food & Beverage. As Deb explains, “She always used the phrase in its abbreviated form, and she used it often, so that it ran through our many conversations like a potent code, generating positive or negative meaning depending on how Esther was feeling that day about herself, her work, and her life.”

Esther’s work allows her to come into contact with different kinds of people and upper-class goods, but as Deb notes when the two of them visit a different establishment, “The view from [food and beverage] was about serving, not about being served. It was about what one was able to offer to the customer sitting at the table, across that improbable, almost impregnable barrier of class. At the Barista, Esther happened to be on the wrong side of the table. She would know everything on the menu, down to the minute details, if we had been at Zest, or at Shangri-La. She would be able to advise customers on what mix of drinks, appetizers and entrees to order. But she hadn’t waited tables at a Barista, and so the menu there became an unfamiliar, alien document, something she hadn’t studied sufficiently.”

Esther hails from Northeastern India, and it is perhaps her foreign physical appearance that accounts for her awkwardness. As Deb notes, to many New Delhi residents, Esther “probably looked no more than vaguely Mongoloid, perhaps a Nepali, or perhaps— in the pejorative language used in Delhi for all Mongoloid people—a ‘Chinky.’” Still, I once had a similar experience: in Bombay, a bartender friend who worked at a fancy resort in the city appeared ill at ease when we went, on his suggestion, to the Taj Mahal Hotel for a drink. The work he was doing in the enclosed world of a luxurious hotel did not provide him with the necessary social skills to patronize another hotel.

It is not at all obvious that women like Esther are worse off than they would be

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without these employment opportunities, and it is when facing—or rather avoiding— this question that Deb’s book is weakest.

His reporting shows that capitalism and consumerism, especially since the country was “opened up,” have caused millions of Indians great harm. But this is a far cry from demonstrating that India is worse off than it would have been absent the large-scale changes of the last twenty years, and Deb’s narrative would ultimately have been more effective had he presented alternative ideas about the course India could have taken. The challenge for those concerned with Indian democracy and poverty is to fashion policies that address worsening inequality but that take as a given both rural India’s historic shortcomings and the country’s place in an interconnected world. Deb may very well agree with this, but it would have strengthened his book if he had provided more specific ideas.

The strength of The Beautiful and the Damned is its focus on Indians who have been damaged by the loosening of economic controls and government support, not to mention the sickening embrace with which large sectors of Indian society have greeted a new class of homegrown plutocrats. Of the countries that have remained relatively stable politically over the past quarter-century, few of them have changed as decisively as India.

Although these changes may be in some form inevitable, Deb effectively shows that India’s transformation has had painful consequences for far too many of its people.

Isaac Chotiner is executive editor of The Book: An Online Review at the New Republic. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Atlantic Monthly.

Kinder, Gentler Cuts MIKE KONCZAL The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics

by Thomas Byrne Edsall Doubleday, 2012, 272 pp.

Arizona has sold its state capitol. Government budgets are contracting, especially when it comes to services and goods essential for the poor. A quarter of a million state and local government workers have been cut in the past year alone. Conservatives look to privatize and voucherize what remains of the Great Society and New Deal.

According to Thomas Edsall, it’s going to get worse for liberals. He argues that for reasons ranging from ideological temperament to political convictions, liberals are at a huge disadvantage when there is slow growth and

budget cuts. Conservatives, however, thrive in such an atmosphere.

Edsall contends that an aging population putting stress on the welfare state, combined with a weak recovery following the Great Recession, is forcing contraction in government spending. This austerity leads to a politics of what Edsall calls loss allocation, under which someone—either the military, the sick, the poor, the rich, or several other groups—has to take real losses. For deficits to be reduced someone has to pay more or get less, and assigning these losses is not easy in a democracy. Retrenchment leaves each group fighting for its own stake, and cooperation breaks down.

Using the latest research on the “moral underpinnings of partisan conflict,” he argues that conservatives and liberals have different values that have important implications for loss allocation. Conservatives are concerned with “the institutions of family, patriotism,

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loyalty to one’s group, and recognition of the legitimacy of hierarchy and order as beneficial to the larger society.” Conservatives are also less tolerant of compromise and more willing to see force as an appropriate response to conflict situations. Dismantling the welfare state is an appropriate target for someone with these values. The poor get tough love to break their dependency while the winners in the economy don’t have to pay a larger share.

Liberals, on the other hand, value compromise and avoid conflict, which means the Democrats’ base is less likely to view partisan conflict as a necessary step toward achieving their ends.

Conservatives haven’t blinked at cutting programs for the poor. And they’ve turned out to be much more capable and willing to do this than liberals are to raise taxes on the rich. Liberals spent 2011 arguing that those making more than $250,000 but less than $1 million a year aren’t technically that rich, and that tax increases shouldn’t impact them.

Conservatives had no such conflicts in determining which poor are desperately poor—they have shown equal opportunity in cutting.

The other major advantage that conservatives have in the battles over austerity is that their base is more homogenous and more affluent than their opposition. Edsall identifies two overlapping sets of coalitions in the austerity battles. The first set consists of haves versus the have-nots. Those who have benefitted the most from the changes in the economy over the past thirty years tend to side with conservatives, while those whose incomes have stagnated or dropped side with liberals. Those with more would like to see programs cut, while those with less would like to see taxes raised on the rich.

The second conflict is between an older, whiter coalition that skews conservative and a younger, demographically diverse population that is more liberal. Liberals believe that demographics are stacked against the conservative movement. The next generation will be more diverse ethnically and more liberal socially. This influx of nonwhites constitutes an emerging Democratic majority.

Nevertheless, Edsall argues that the 2010 election demonstrates that conservatives can appeal to older, whiter voters, and can ignore

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or antagonize rapidly expanding groups such as Latinos and win elections for the time being.

One big problem with The Age of Austerity is that Edsall assumes that the high deficits of the Great Recession are a problem requiring a solution. In fact, deficits normally go up in recessions for two reasons. There’s less tax revenue because fewer people are working.

Spending goes up because automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid go up. Less money coming in and more money going out will naturally bring about a larger deficit.

These are appropriate responses to a recession, because running a larger deficit is the optimal response of the government to boost a weak economy. The real government debt problems are long-term issues surrounding health care. Edsall never questions whether a debate over austerity is the proper one to have during a time of high unemployment (hint: it’s not). And he gives short shrift to the fact that the U.S. government’s current ultra-low borrowing costs would make this an ideal time for the government to be spending more on public infrastructure.

Edsall also presents a symmetry between conservatives and liberals, claiming that both groups try to reduce the deficit. But this doesn’t capture what is happening in this recession. The GOP budget plans create large tax cuts for those at the top of the income distribution, which explode the deficit rather than reduce it. And instead of being focused primarily on budget issues, two of the first battles Tea Party state conservatives have waged have been against unionized workers and Planned Parenthood. The initial budget of the conservative governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, cut corporate taxes, changed the funding structures for unions in an attempt to destroy them, went after family planning, and had provisions for no-bid sales of such state assets as power plants.

The conservative movement has pushed to expand abortion restrictions, voter registration laws, and laws that impede or dismantle unionization. Meanwhile, its voters

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are dismantling the already fragile welfare state for the poor alongside mass layoffs of government workers. This may be their last chance to dismantle the Great Society and the New Deal, completing the revolutions Reagan and Bush started, before their base disappears, and they are taking it. This is a program far more radical and expansive than that of the budget-conscious conservatives Edsall presents in his book.

Edsall never considers that there is another path for liberalism than the austerity debates.

Rather than finding a kinder way of doing painful austerity, the liberal approach should be an aggressive government program to provide for full employment and a growing economy. The last downturn of this magnitude brought the country the New Deal and the Keynesian revolution. And that is precisely what we need now. A large infrastructure bill designed to boost employment, a strengthened safety net, aid to states and localities to prevent layoffs, and a public jobs program would all increase demand and speed the recovery while laying the foundation for future growth. Aggressive debt restructuring in the housing market would get households spending again and reduce the spillover effects of mass foreclosures. These actions would put people to work, which ultimately will reduce the deficit.

For a brief moment Barack Obama seemed

to represent the alternative path for liberalism. The original stimulus program was an important step in the right direction. It was too small and that has allowed Republicans to argue that the whole effort was futile. In fact, it was Obama’s premature turn toward austerity and his futile attempt to work with Republicans that has failed. If Edsall is right, and the political debate is over how we implement austerity, then Democrats are likely doomed. But if the debate is austerity versus growth and fairness, that might lead to a very different kind of outcome.

The austerity battle is costly and unnecessary. The short-term deficit is a result of a weak economy. The long-term deficit is the result of health-care costs, which, if not confronted, will bankrupt the entire country.

For all the references to scarcity in his book, Edsall’s argument doesn’t point out that we’ve never been richer as a country. The economy is currently weak because of a lack of government action, not too much deficit spending.

The book does an excellent job of tracking why liberals are losing the fight over austerity.

The real question that needs to be answered is why they are even bothering to play.

Mike Konczal is a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, where he works on financial reform, unemployment, inequality, and a progressive vision of the economy. He blogs at Rortybomb.wordpress.com.

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Alinsky’s Ghost Editors: Nelson Lichtenstein’s otherwise excellent review of Frank Bardacke’s otherwise extraordinary book on Cesar Chavez and the farm workers union (Winter 2012) repeats Bardacke’s misreading of Saul Alinsky’s ideas about organizers and leaders and the relationship of each to building democratic people power.

The debate is expressed in phrases like “top-down versus bottom-up organizing” or “staff-driven versus member-run.” Like most pithy phrases, these obscure as much as they clarify.

The question is important because many people on the left have romanticized ideas about building people power. The result is an “immaculate conception” of people power organizations—they spontaneously arise (perhaps assisted by leftists who immerse themselves in the workplace or community in which they sprout), develop structures, and build sustainable people power.

Saul Alinsky carefully studied people power. He worked closely with the early CIO Packinghouse Workers Union, which put him in touch with Herb March, one of the best Communist organizers in the country, and led to a close relationship with the democratic socialist president of the union, Ralph Helstein. In Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), he formulated the idea of a full-time professional community organizer, and put it into successful practice. Communists, socialists, Catholics, and others united to defeat the Chicago meat packers and clean up the Back of the Yards slum neighborhood.

Here’s Lichtenstein’s first misreading of Alinsky: “Chavez’s…sense of social commitment had been framed…[in] Alinsky’s Community Service Organization (CSO), where he learned that the successful organizer had to put people into social motion without forfeiting his own autonomy or becoming entirely linked to their sometimes prosaic interests.”

It is upon people’s material and moral interests— prosaic and broad—that a democratic “people power” organization is built. The organizer is always partially, as Alinsky put it, “off-stage,” thinking beyond what’s next, and after what’s after that. Alinsky taught the meaning of democracy by engaging people to become democratic citizens.

Lichtenstein criticizes Chavez’s belief that “without…organizer direction and management, rank-and-file leaders would be forever trapped in a competitive individualism, incapable of building their own movement or fulfilling their moral destiny.”

An Alinsky organizer (I was one), a union international’s organizer sent to a work-site, a “salt” who leaves campus radicalism to build within the working

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class, and other “outside organizers” are needed because insiders are typically trapped by perspectives shaped by being inside. (As Bardacke demonstrates, local leaders were skillful in winning victories. They had not figured out how to turn those into ongoing power.)

Here’s what Alinsky might have said: “Without organizers, rank-and-file leaders would be incapable of building their own movement into an ongoing powerful organization/union.” Isn’t there substantial evidence that this is the case? Isn’t it indisputable that “outside organizers” played an important role in, for example, building the CIO? In the Deep South civil rights movement, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers (I was one) were often outsiders.

Discussing Chavez’s relationship with the union infrastructure, Lichtenstein writes, “Not unexpectedly, Chavez saw [union stewards] as a challenge not only to [his] leadership but to his…Alinskyite vision of an organizer-driven farm worker movement.”

What, exactly, does “organizer driven” mean?

When I organized in the southeast part of San Francisco, I showed up at one of our early leadership meetings and, literally, no one was there. We had suffered a bad defeat in an often-defeated community.

The fragile leadership body I was putting together lost heart and voted with its feet.

For the next several weeks, I talked with local leaders about what happened, why it happened, and why it wasn’t necessarily the death knell of the organization. I agitated them to act on what they earlier had told me was very important to them. They came back. We built a vibrant, multi-ethnic and racial, multi-issue organization that put the neighborhood on the city’s political map. What I did was “organizerdriven.” If I’d not done it, there wouldn’t have been an organization. If I were still doing it two years later, there would have been something wrong with my organizing. By the end of an organizing drive, the organization is driven by the leadership team, active members, and the organizer (if there still is one).

Alinsky’s distinction (leaders and members v. organizer) broke down in the farm worker’s union.

Chavez was both the central leader and organizer.

The healthy tension between those two roles was lost; the one person who might have re-established it was unwilling.

That person was Fred Ross, Sr., who told me this story about CSO, which he organized, and where he met and trained Cesar Chavez: The leadership made a decision that was outside the framework of CSO policy. Fred, the organizer, said, “We need to bring this to the membership.” The leadership declined.

He continued, “If you don’t, I will.” “But,” they said, “you work for us.” “No,” he replied, “I work for the membership.” In the farm workers’ union, Ross

LET TERS became an adviser to, and extension of, Chavez rather than a counterweight to autocratic developments.

Alinsky’s influence on Chavez and the farm worker’s movement was substantial. Bardacke captures some of it, but misses most. Lichtenstein simply misses.

MIKE MILLER San Francisco, California

Nelson Lichtenstein Replies I can’t speak for Frank Bardacke, but on the evidence offered in his book, and on my own reading of the Alinsky tradition, which I episodically encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, it does seem to me that those who hope to put people in motion have to take the Alinsky legacy with at least a grain of salt. Organizers are cadre, people with experience, a program, and resources to give them some staying power. They are essential if you want to organize virtually anything: a demonstration, a union, a political party, a revolution.

Nothing happens spontaneously. There are always organizers to start things off and in this century they are often, of necessity, outside agitators funded and trained by people and forces outside the community that become the object of their concern. That is why people in power hate them: they upset a seemingly naturalistic hierarchy with alien ideas and impulses.

But in the long run, organizers are successful only if they build a democratic organization, only if they leave structures in which people can genuinely make their own voice heard without fear of reprisal or continuing help from the organizers. The test of their success therefore lies in making themselves irrelevant. That is what happened to the CIO organizers of the 1930s and the same phenomenon repeated itself during the civil rights era. Alinsky may well have understood this somewhat more than Caesar Chavez. After all, the Back of the Yards organization in Chicago came to have a life of its own, while in the United Farm Workers Chavez steadfastly opposed the creation of ranch locals where union members could elect their own officers who would in turn have a large voice in UFW affairs. It is impossible to know everything that motivated Chavez on this score, but what does seem clear is that the UFW leader’s appeal to the Alinsky organizing tradition helped legitimate centralization of power in that union.

Which Side Are You On? Editors: As a cartoonist and freelance illustrator who is also a “millennial,” I fall into the category of workers whose entire profession is defined as freelance work—there is (almost) no such thing as a staff cartoonist any more. I have long been intrigued by the Freelancers

Union advertising I have seen around New York City. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian raises some very important concerns that have only deepened my own wariness of the slick FU (“The ‘I’ In Union,” Winter 2012). However, she fails to follow one line of thought I think is very critical, and is the primary reason I decided against joining the FU. As she notes, the FU is not actually a union. It is a nonprofit, run

by Sara Horowitz. Unlike what I have always understood as the basis of unionism, there is not even the pretence of democratic election of leadership. What the FU stands for, prioritizes, advocates for, what side it takes on issues, is entirely the whim of one person: Sara Horowitz. Did freelance workers really want to support Bloomberg for a third term? I doubt it. Perhaps knowing that she is the scion of traditional labor that has its own problems with internal democracy helps explain her preference for that model. That, and I mistrust instinctively any organization that claims to be progressive while clearly spending so much time and effort on slick advertising campaigns.

ETHAN HEITNER New York, New York

The Freelancers Union Replies: As the democratically elected member representative on the Freelancers Union’s Board of Directors, I was surprised and dismayed to read Ethan Heitner’s criticism.

Freelancers Union is a new union for the new work force. Spread out in coffee shops and home offices, independent workers like me can no longer organize on the shop room floor. We need a new way to come together, work for change, and support each other—which Freelancers Union is doing for its nearly 170,000 members.

At the union’s monthly member meetings, I see how engaged my fellow members are. I was there when members came together to decide which candidates to support in local elections. I was there when members collaboratively built new resources, like a step-by-step contract creator and a crowd-sourced client scorecard. I was there when dozens of members gathered in the New York state capital to demand fairer taxes and stronger wage protections for independent workers. And Sara Horowitz was there to support us and lend her years of expertise every step along the way.

With nearly one in three working Americans now “independent,” we are already seeing the future of tomorrow’s work force. Freelancers Union is a critical partner in making our collective voices heard.

JOSEPH CASERTO Member Rep. to the Board of Directors, Freelancers Union

S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 DI S S ENT 115

T H E L A S T PAG E

The 1950s: The food is salty, starchy, soothing. Milk arrives in glass bottles; eggs are delivered by a farmer. We can our own tomatoes and fruit. Frozen food is too expensive. I feed sugar cubes to the junkman’s horse.

The 1960s: College food is salty, starchy, and much less soothing. My roommate and I supplement with Ritz crackers, peanut butter, and jam. She sneers at my store-brand label.

The word “foodie” hasn’t been invented. I go to France to study. I marvel at the quality of dining-hall food. I discover cheese that is not Velveeta. I eat cow stomach, calf brain, beef liver, and chou, a vegetable whose name is a term of endearment that doesn’t translate. I gain fifteen pounds. I cut out the after-class visits to the pâtisserie. Returning stateside, I find that yogurt has not crossed the Atlantic.

In grad school, I notice that more undergrads attend demonstrations against lousy cafeteria food than against the war in Vietnam. They burn their cafeteria cards. My own meals consist of cream of mushroom soup, canned tuna, canned peas, and rice. At the end of the decade, a boyfriend in New York prepares fresh green beans for me. Another serves me a salad of raw mushrooms and spinach.

These are not Proustian moments; more like entering Narnia through the wardrobe, to a world of real food. And in this world, men know how to prepare it. Michael Harrington’s Other America sparks a War on Poverty. Edward R. Murrow’s CBS special on “Hunger in America” shocks, shocks the nation.

The 1970s: My welfare rights auxiliary group promotes living on a welfare diet for a week. I am glad when the week ends and the headaches go away. My commune joins a food co-op. We discuss whether dessert is necessary at every meal and whether those of us who want it have the right to supplement from our own pockets. Later, after the commune is in the dustbin of history, I read Diet for a Small Planet and expand my newfound culinary skills to non-meat-centric dishes. I no longer dismiss vegetarians as people in denial of their true carnivore nature.

The 1980s: I am too old to revert to the 1 1 6 D ISSE N T S P R I N G 2 0 1 2

Atkins diet whenever I need to drop ten pounds. I have to eat rationally and healthfully. Pregnancy gives me a reprieve on the rationality, I think, and I am disheartened to learn that Chinese takeout, even if mainly vegetarian, is not considered healthy by my midwife. I stop drinking caffeine because I don’t want a jumpy child. Later, I don’t want to be a jumpy mom. At a birthday party in East Harlem, a twenty-year-old with four children admires my rotund four-month-old, who weighs more than her one-year-old.

I remember that welfare diet. A few years later, the elfin director of our progressive day care center gives us a book that claims that children know what is good for their bodies and will eat a healthy diet if presented with good choices. We embrace this idea. We do not yet know about vending machines in schools or unregulated children’s television advertising.

The 1990s: My ashen-faced nine-year-old tells us what happens to animals on factory farms. She will henceforth be a vegetarian. I see that the argument about too much grain being used to create one pound of beef has now shifted from a global justice one to an animal rights one. But really, will a nine-yearold be able to maintain a pasta and ice cream diet for more than a week? Her sister chews chicken strips in front of her.

The 2000s: Midway through the decade, the younger sister announces that she, too, is now a vegetarian. She gives no reason. I suspect her Marxist social studies teacher, who smokes cigarettes but does not eat meat.

A farmers’ market opens three blocks away.

It takes food stamps. The younger daughter returns from four months in India and introduces us to vegetables that are not terms of endearment. She, like her sister, joins a vegetarian co-op at college. Six months out of college, she phones from D.C. “Everyone in my house is going to live on a welfare diet for a week. Do you have any recipes?”

I am not nostalgic.

MAXINE PHILLIPS

SPRING 2012

S P R I N G

The Revival of Left Populism in America

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Food

Gary Gerstle • Michael Kazin • William P. Jones

Mark Engler: Radical Eating

Ira Katznelson • Marina Sitrin

Marion Nestle: A Utopian Farm Bill

William E. Forbath: Constitutional Rights / Workers’ Rights

Laurie Woolever: High-end Food, Low-wage Labor

Kristen Ghodsee: Post-1989 Nostalgia

Juliana DeVries: Ethics and Vegetarianism

Norman Birnbaum: Reviving the German Left

Maxine Phillips: Food Diary

Godfrey Cheshire: Iranian Cinema

An Interview With Wendell Berry

Karen Bakker Le Billon: Bon Goût

Brian Morton: The Madness of Art

Buying and Selling School Reform: Joanne Barkan

Dan Gerstle: Reconsidering Hiroshima

The Port Huron Statement at 50: Michael Kazin

BOOKS

Fateful Year for Health Reform: Theda Skocpol

310 Riverside Drive Suite 2008 New York, NY 10025

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74470 64790

Mike Konczal on Thomas Byrne Edsall and austerity

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Isaac Chotiner on Siddhartha Deb and gilded age India

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Daniel Luban on David Graeber and the history of debt