Civil Disobedience--Henry David Thoreau

 

American political philosopher, social activist and Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is a major figure in modern political thought and has served as an inspiration to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr amongst many others. He opposed the institution of slavery and denounced the American-Mexican War (1846-48) which, incidentally, led to American ‘acquisition’ of more than half of Mexico’s pre-war territory. The area acquired makes up a large part of the modern American Southwest, including most of California, Nevada, Utha, New Mexico, Arizona and portions of several other states. (Texas had been annexed earlier).

The pamphlet, Civil Disobedience, -- too slim to be called a book -- is a powerful and profoundly moving tract addressing issues that may be termed eternally and universally valid: the nature of the state and the appropriate relationship of the individual with the state.

A useful experiment would be to try and provide a glimpse of Thoreau’s ideas from Civil Disobedience, in his own words.

‘That government is best that governs least….’

‘Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient…’

‘……government itself, which is only the mode which people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it…’

‘...I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.’

‘Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?’

‘I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.’

‘Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.’

‘The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies…  In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense…  Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.’

‘How does it become a man to behave towards this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.’

‘All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.’

‘…… there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who... sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say they know not what to do, and do nothing…they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil.’

‘Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.’

‘...the respectable man, so called... despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him.’.

‘...under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.  The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.’

‘Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.’

‘Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? ...Why does it (government) always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?’

‘I know this well… if one HONEST man, in this state of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were to actually withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it:..’

“When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.’

‘The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to…is an impure one; to be strictly just it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.’

‘There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.’

‘Nuff said.

A People’s History of the United States ---- Howard Zinn

 

Historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010), a working-class lad of immigrant parents, was born in Brooklyn New York, was a shipyard worker for three years, served as a bombardier in the US Army Air Force during World War II, went to college on the GI Bill, earned his doctorate in history from Columbia University and was a university teacher and social activist thereafter.

The book under discussion here has a wide canvas - ranging from the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492  to around the year 2000, and is more than 680 pages long. It is, therefore, neither a quick nor an easy read, though a very rewarding one.

 The stories -- fascinating and deeply disturbing -- that Zinn tells are many, but all have in common a ‘bottoms up’ approach. This requires us to see the happenings of the times from the viewpoint not of the powerful, rich and important, but of those who were poor, dispossessed, exploited and politically ‘invisible’.

Orthodox histories, the author argues, are written by the victors, the powerful and important. Such histories all too often pass quickly over -- or completely ignore - the dark side of the events they describe. For example, he quotes a prominent Harvard historian who acknowledges that Columbus committed genocide in the Caribbeans, but then buries that harsh assessment under a mound of fulsome praise about his other qualities -- ‘…his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence…..his seamanship.”

Zinn contends that ‘to state the facts...and then bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader ‘…yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important -- it should weigh very little in our final judgements ;..’

What any historian chooses to emphasize in the vast mass of ‘facts’ available is an ideological choice. Historians can, and usually do, emphasize the glory but not the gore attendant on the achievement of that glory, especially if the gore was of the losers, the victims. The history of the Spanish ‘conquest’ of South America -- Columbus in the Bahamas, Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru -- is a brutal example of overwhelming greed as a driver of unconscionable violence against fellow humans by a ‘civilizing’ power bringing God and culture to ‘savages’ undeserving of anything other than the sword and slavery.

A similar though more long drawn out pattern of death and displacement was initiated by the British settlers on the east coast of North America.

The Pilgrims came to a land inhabited by indigenous peoples. The inaccurate term ‘Indian’ has stuck despite the fact that Columbus had wanted to but failed to reach the Indies, but nonetheless the inhabitants of the newly discovered continent were termed ‘Indians’.

‘The Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony …created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum”. The Indians, he said, had not subdued the land and therefore had only a “natural” right to it but not a “civil right”. A “natural right did not have legal standing”. The convenient application of the laws of another land and people to a different land and people without, of course, any consultation with the indigenous inhabitants  would be laughable were it not the harbinger of human tragedy on a vast scale.

The story of the white man’s interaction with the Indian tribes in North America is one of displacement and decimation, of superior weapons, deceit and broken treaties   overwhelming smaller and inadequately armed populations. The Indians fought back, but lost more battles than they won and were     gradually pushed westwards and ultimately into ‘reservations’ to accommodate the growing requirements of profitable agriculture and the rising tide of land hungry migrants from Europe flooding the New World.

 The story of slavery -- Black Africans imported into North America to work the vast landholdings of rich white men in both the North and the South colonies –(later states) is another distressing tale.

The Dutch and the English dominated the enormously profitable slave trade. The margins were so large that the high ‘losses’ in transit -- inhuman conditions aboard the slaver ships led to very high ‘losses’ -- did not discourage the traders. In 1619, a Dutch ship brought a cargo of 20 Black African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia and slavery came to North America. By 1763 there were approximately 170000 slaves in Virginia, about half the population! As the colonies grew so did the demand for cheap labour for the plantations. The Indians were too ‘unruly’ to be good labourers for the plantations, poor whites who came as indentured servants from Europe had time-bound contracts and were also ‘difficult’ for the purpose. The Black African, torn from his land, family and society, brutalized in capture and in transit, tightly controlled, physically and psychologically,by the masters and their supervisors, and a lifelong asset that was cheap to maintain was the ideal solution to the labour problem. Racism served to justify slavery and also, by driving a wedge between white and black, to ensure that poor whites did not collaborate with the blacks. It was an effective instrument of control.

“James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and spend only $12 or $13 on his keep.”

As the colonies expanded, they needed the British much less than the Empire needed them and their resources and wealth. The conditions for a conflict emerged and the American Revolution occurred (1775-83).

The famous first line of the famous second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (1776) reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Stirring words, written by Thomas Jefferson, who, incidentally, was a slave owner all his life! The equality talked about did not apply to Black African slaves, Indigenous Indians and women. The author contends that ‘The use of the phrase “all men are created equal” was probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women. It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible.’

Wars are an effective means of uniting people and suppressing internal conflicts between rich and poor in the face of a common enemy. The Revolution, the author argues, was a good illustration of the fact that war makes the ruling elite ‘more secure against internal trouble’.

The issue of equality was carefully ignored when, for example, in Maryland ‘by the new constitution of 1776, to run for governor one had to own 5000 pounds of property, to run for senator 1000 pounds. Thus 90% of the population were excluded from holding high public office. Between 1776-1780 new constitutions were drawn up in all the states, but only Pennsylvania abolished the property qualifications for voting and holding office.

The story of slavery is a long one as is that of ‘removal’ of the Indian from lands that were needed for white immigrants, railroads, plantations and an expanding agriculture.

The drivers of slavery were economic. In 1790, 1000 tonnes of cotton were produced  in a year in the South and in 1860 the production was 1 million tonnes and the number of slaves grew from 500000 to 4 million.  The international trade in slaves was prohibited in 1808 (though the prohibition was honored in the breach all too often) but slavery continued until 1865 and of course, segregation, discrimination, racial violence and exploitation all buttressed by racism continued for much longer.

 When the Civil War ended, 19 out of 24 Northern states did not allow blacks to vote. By 1900 all Southern states had passed laws for the disenfranchisement and segregation of Blacks. The battle for desegregation was protracted and extremely painful -- lynchings, race riots and enormous courage in the face of adversity. The Ku Klux Klan had four and a half million members in 1924! When the US entered World War II, the US armed forces were segregated by race and military segregation was formally ended in 1948, but took till 1954 for the process  to be completed.

The Civil Rights movement and consequent legislation that effectively dismantled racial segregation and disenfranchisement happened only around the mid-20^th century..  

 The Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to fight in their place.

This provision was used by JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and James Mellon.

‘Mellon’s father had written to him that  “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable”’.

A story well worth mentioning here is that of American expansionism. The newly minted republic looked longingly at rich and fertile lands adjoining it and began ‘acquiring’ them -- primarily at gunpoint, in the 19^th century. Texas was annexed in 1845, a war was very successfully waged against Mexico (1846-48) and only about half of that nation was taken over. Most of the present day states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and parts of Arizona, Colarado and Wyoming were thus added to the United States from the Mexico Cession. While Louisiana was ‘purchased’ from France, Florida was acquired through cession from Spain.

The author quotes a phrase that became very famous in this context. The editor of the Democratic Review said that it was “Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

As the 19^th century was ending, in 1897, Teddy Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “In strict confidence I should welcome almost any war, for I think the country needs one.”

Prophetic words that can perhaps be said to have set the tone for the coming century.

The USA evolved into an economic and military superpower and power, inevitably, needs to be demonstrated. American power was on successful display during the two world wars and a colossal failure in Vietnam, despite the horrific carnage it wrought on a tiny country  about 13000 kms away. There were many other ‘interventions’, covert and overt, in South America and elsewhere to guard the ‘free’ world against the Commie menace and US oil interests in the Middle East.

Zinn does not merely list these military adventures but tells the stories that lay beneath the events, and they are distressing stories. More than 100000 Japanese origin residents of the US -- three quarters of whom were born in the US and therefore citizens -- were interned in concentration camps for three years during WWII. A useful lesson learned from British colonialism in South Africa and Fascism in Hitler’s Germany!

When at the start of WWII, Germany bombed civilian targets -- cities in Europe and Britain -- Roosevelt described these as “inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity”. Then, of course, the Allies undertook saturation bombing of German cities, including the fire bombing of Dresden in which about 100000 people died. Tokyo was not spared either and the end came with the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The justifications given for using the nuclear option have been seriously questioned and Zin provides evidence that seems to validate the questioning.  

Post war, the Anti Commie hysteria built up, Senator Macarthy got into action as did the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Loyalty, of citizens and organizations, began to be questioned rigorously.

President Dwight D Eisenhower, formerly a Five Star General and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII, had warned of the growth of an “immense military establishment and a large arms industry’ that had created a “military -industrial complex” which could acquire ‘unwarranted influence’ over government policy.

Eisenhower’s words were to also prove prophetic!

‘Defence’ began to dominate government expenditure and social services invariably took the hit when income tax cuts were introduced by various, primarily Republican, governments.

The mid 20^th century saw a ‘black revolt’ against segregation and in 1955 ‘Mrs Rosa Parks, a 43 year old seamstress… refused to obey the Montgomery (Alabama ) law  providing for segregation on city buses,… and decided to sit down  in the ‘white’ section of the bus.’ She was arrested, but this sparked off a huge protest movement that would ’sweep the south in the next ten years’.

Dr Martin Luther King emerged as a leader of the movement and a series of Civil Rights laws were passed in response, over time.

The anti-war movement burgeoned as the Vietnam war dragged on, women got the vote in the 20^th century and the Supreme Court in Roe Vs Wade (1973) ruled that the state could not prohibit abortions, except in the last three months of pregnancy. Discrimination by sex in federally connected employment was banned in 1967.

Zinn has written a history that documents the struggles of ordinary people -- the inequities that the powerful and the rich imposed on the rest ever since white Europeans found the Bahamas and a new continent between Europe and the Indies.

The book seeks to redress an imbalance in the popular version of American history that tends to ignore what may be termed the dark side of the process.

To conservative critics of Zinn, one can say that when a reality was rather unbalanced it can perhaps be a trifle disingenuous to look for a ‘more balanced point of view’.

Happy reading.

 

Battles Half Won -- India’s Improbable Democracy - By Ashutosh Varshney-

 

                                      

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths By Marianna Mazzucato

 

 

Any book that effectively challenges well established assumptions about how the world works is both an exciting and a disturbing read. Economist Marianna Mazzucato’s book under discussion here, is one such work.

The author, with hard data, establishes a set of simple but very powerful and provocative propositions.

During the   twentieth century, and beyond, consistently huge investments by the US state in scientific and tech research have yielded results that have been the basis of much of the economic growth -- and social transformation -- the US and the world have witnessed. The state has taken serious risks, met with some inevitable failures, but significantly created whole new spaces for human endeavour, transforming both economy and society in the USA and across the world.

All too often, in many industries, the direction of growth is path dependent. The huge historical investments in existing technologies deter any serious attempts to look at new and very different technical directions. The US state has, however, gone where no one has gone before and created new and previously unimagined possibilities.  The critical issue here is that while state investments create the wave, the private sector comes in and surfs the waves for huge profits. It simultaneously debunks the role of the state, asking for lesser taxes, a smaller state footprint and more commercial freedom; but not ‘freedom’ from state funding of scientific and technical research. The relationship tends to be frankly parasitical when ideally it should be symbiotic.

In effect, the risks of investment in scientific and technical research have been socialized while the rewards have been privatized.

The Internet has transformed the way the world works and it was created by the state funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Most significant General Purpose Technologies have been created by state funded research -- avaiation tech, space tech, Internet tech, information tech and nuclear power technologies, to name some of the more significant ones. Breakthroughs in life sciences, nanotechnology and new ‘green’ technology have come from state funded research as have the major discoveries in the pharmaceutical space. Basic scientific research has been funded primarily by the state with private funding constituting less than 20% of the total.

Between 1993 and 2004  75% of New Molecular Entities (new drugs) were based on research by publicly funded National Institute of Health (NIH) Labs. Big pharma has consistently reduced its basic research funding and focused it on ‘me too’ drugs -- slight variations on existing drugs. The annual budget of the NIH at the time of writing was USD 30 billion. The detailed story of big pharma’s exploitative pricing of drugs developed by state research -- taxpayers money -- given to them free or at minimal cost and out of reach of most taxpayers, is enormously disturbing.

It is interesting to note that the poster boys of the ‘from garage to world domination’ startups, viz Google and Apple, owe their success to state funding , both direct and indirect. Apple put together technologies created by state funded research to give their products their world conquering features and Google developed their famous algorithm with help from state funding. To elaborate a little -- ‘Apple’s success did not hinge on its ability to create new technologies; it hinged on its designing, operational and organizational capabilities in integrating, marketing and selling these low hanging technologies’ created by state funded research’.

The compulsions of profit maximization ensure that even the vaunted Venture Capitalists look at high potential growth, relatively low tech complexity, and capital intensity and a short time horizon to get to IPO status and bank their profits. Only the state has the capacity to look at high risk and high cost investments that may well fail to deliver results.

The policy conclusion from this is that the state needs to share in the rewards from the marketing of technologies funded by it so that it can continue to undertake high risk scientific and technological investments. The irony is that those who benefit the most from state sponsored research, work hard to avoid paying taxes. The ‘shifting’ of profits to tax havens thus deprives the state of resources that would, in the long run, contribute to tech advancement that would in turn benefit the self-same private sector that seeks to minimize its tax outflow.

It is interesting to note that over the years big private research labs have begun to be down sized or simply shut down. The Fortune 500 spent, between 2000-2010, US $4 trillion on share buybacks which benefit corporate bonuses and the relatively small set of share holders and left basic research to state funding ie: the taxpayer. (This applies particularly to Big Pharma and Big Energy.)

The US state, despite its many limitations, has served as an engine of growth and transformation. The knowledge economy that is the basis of continuing US domination of the world economy is underwritten by state funding. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a lesson for a dysfunctional state funded research infrastructure that we are familiar with in India.

The book is seriously worth reading for everyone curious about how the real world actually works.

Happy reading.

The Road to Freedom--Economics and the Good Society - --By Joseph Stiglitz

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s writing is clear, simple, convincing and very disturbing. The principal issues the author addresses are

·      How should freedom, a core human value, be defined

·      What economic and social structures are best suited to ensure freedom and deliver efficiency, equity, sustainability and justice

·      Under-regulated ‘free’ market systems (neoliberal capitalism, in the author’s words) do not ensure freedom and the good society.

 

Considering the last item first, Stiglitz emphasizes, most vigorously and effectively, that the theoretical conclusion that ‘perfect’ markets

 lead to an ‘optimal’ economic situation -- optimality being defined in a particular way -- is utterly irrelevant to the real world and the functioning of markets therein. Markets are imperfect and highly so. Furthermore, conflating theoretical ’perfect’ markets with unregulated ‘free’ markets in the real world  is incorrect because unregulated real world markets  are very, very far from ‘perfect’. The assumptions that underlie and define ‘perfect ‘markets are not to be found in the real world and so the contention that ‘perfect’ equals ‘free’ unregulated markets,  and these are the best possible economic option for any society, is technically false. But we need not enter into the technicalities of economic theory to understand this. My coal burning power plant may be making healthy profits for me and my shareholders, but by polluting the environment it contributes to global warming and disastrous consequences for the weather and the planet.

 

The availability of information is asymmetric and market power is unevenly distributed -- look at big tech, big pharma, big defense, big media, to name but a few. Real world markets when un/under-regulated can spell disaster for society. The financial crisis of 2008 was a direct result of under-regulation of financial markets in the USA, excessive risk taking and poor risk management by financial institutions. Overwhelming, unconstrained greed created an international crisis and the creators thereof -- the banks -- then demanded and got huge amounts of US taxpayer money to bail them out because they could not be allowed to fail. So powerful market players can cause disasters and then be rescued by the taxpayer for the mess they made! The crisis originated in the USA and spread worldwide, but the lesson is for all to learn. Real world markets need regulation and the only regulator can be the state.

 

The need for effective state regulation of markets is further underlined by the evident power wielded by big tech, big pharma and big social media.

Big social media collects data on individual preferences by our actions on the Internet and uses it to target us for whoever is prepared to pay. Moreover, it can also mould mindsets by pushing content that reinforce a perceived tendency or even propagate disinformation when paid to do so, contending that as a content distributor it is not responsible for the nature or accuracy of the content distributed.

The basic contention is that beliefs, tastes and consumer behaviour can, and  are, shaped by media and all too often we are unaware of this. The meta narrative of how society and economy work are all too often  set by big tech and big media platforms. ‘We do not freely choose the lens through which we see the world’.

 

A disturbing revelation in this context is that the most strident advocates of ‘freedom’ from state intervention are those that have benefitted the most from state intervention. Innovations that have driven huge growth and attendant profits have originated from heavy state investments in basic research—the Internet, the mRNA platform, to mention two major areas. Google, Apple and Tesla all benefited from state financial assistance too!

The matter has been brilliantly summarized in the phrase ‘socialized risk, privatized profit’ by economist Mariana Mazzuoato in The Entrepreneurial State (see my forthcoming blog).

 

This brings us to the vexed question of freedom and its definition. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from exploitation (in effect from injustice) and freedom to be able to live up to one’s full potential as a human being are some components of freedom that are undeniable. But freedom has tradeoffs -- one person’s freedom can be another’s unfreedom. The freedom that the first version of the US constitution promised was for rich, white men, some of whom were slave owners! Freedom for whom, and at whose expense, has to be worked out. A balance between individual freedoms and restraints is imperative and this requires collective action—a proactive welfare state that counterbalances the inequities of imperfect markets and corrects undue concentration of political power that inevitably results from concentration of wealth characteristic of imperfect markets. The ‘invisible hand’ can only do so much; the rest has to be done by the state. Adam Smith, incidentally, also qualified the virtues of the invisible hand and underlined the dangers of concentration of economic power. But this last is too often forgotten.

The author, having been an advisor to the US President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, is well versed with economics as practiced in the real world. In this context, he underlines the imbalance and inequity in international agreements on trade and investment. He emphasizes that agreements between unequals makes for unequal and exploitative agreements! The IMF and the WTO are significant examples of institutions responsible for such agreements internationally. And these are not just assertions by a ‘guru’, he backs them up with examples relating to subsidies, tariff structures and taxation rules, all of which favour the developed nations.

 

As we read Stiglitz we realize that his primary focus is the US economy and polity. Nonetheless, the lessons from his study do have universal validity and hence are of great interest to the ‘developing world’.

The alternative to ‘neoliberal capitalism’ that Stiglitz suggests is Progressive Capitalism in which the state plays a positive and proactive role. The unbridled greed of unregulated markets is not allowed to destabilize the economy with periodic crises and equity, justice and social protection against the vicissitudes of life is ensured.

 

Stiglitz backs up his views with examples, data and reasoning. It is therefore important to read him without preconceived ideological blinkers. He emphasizes that the proponents of neoliberal capitalism, Friedman and cohorts, assert the significance of ‘free markets ‘ as a religious belief unrelated to reason and established technical economic logic. And he does not repeat that error.

Here lies the final lesson -- ideology based, emotionally charged points of view devoid of reason are not only logically incorrect, but also extremely dangerous for society at large.

Happy reading.

 

Seeing Like a State -- How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed ------James C Scott

 

Strong states have authoritarianism in their DNA and ruling elites -- political, administrative, technical and academic -- suffer from hubris. When this is combined with a ‘high modernistic ideology’— technical ‘experts’ know best and the masses and their experience and knowledge is largely irrelevant and obsolete -- and an incapacitated civil society, the stage is set for large grandiose schemes of socio-economic reengineering.

Such schemes often fail because they are ill conceived by ‘authoritarian high modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half baked) social theory’, formulated by experts with little knowledge of ground realities and their complexity and ruthlessly implemented by a ‘politicized authoritarian bureaucracy’. In effect ‘the progenitors of such plans regard themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really are and, at the same time, regard their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really are.”

But we have started with the conclusion and need to backpedal to get to the beginning.

Anthropologist and political scientist James Scott of Yale begins his remarkably disturbing book by establishing that as states gather the strength they need to expand their capacity for intervention in the socioeconomic entity that they govern. To create capacity, they have to make society and economy ‘legible’. They have to simplify, standardize and homogenize a complex, diverse reality to focus on the issues they want to tackle, and this necessitates a degree of ‘tunnel vision’. The author gives fascinating examples of how simplifications occur to facilitate ‘taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion’ -- the immediate requirements of a strong state seeking direct control over its people instead of indirect control via feudal intermediaries. Systems of land tenure, which are often unimaginably complex in long established agrarian societies, were simplified and standardized to enable stable and growing land revenues (the Permanent Settlement is a case in point here). People, too, had to be made legible: surnames enforced, censuses conducted, language standardized… the list goes on.

Once society and economy are legible, ‘high modernistic ideology’ provides the desire, an authoritarian state the determination and an ‘incapacitated civil society the level terrain’ on which to build newly conceived socio-economic structures. What is far too often left out of all calculations is the complex organic ground reality. And this omission usually proved fatal for the success of the grand centrally thought out plan.

Powerful examples of such disastrous social engineering  are spelled out in detail: Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Tanzanian  attempts to transform agriculture by relocating and reengineering villages, and most interestingly, the creation of ‘scientific forestry’ in  Germany.

In order to efficiently exploit forest resources for financial purposes (maximize timber yields) the German state apparently experimented with replacing organic diverse forest cover with mono cropped (most profitable tree species) strictly regimented forests that could be scientifically harvested. However, diverse forests are resilient while monocultures are vulnerable and fragile. The removal of undergrowth, dead trees and the whole ‘mess’ of an organic and diverse vegetation cover led to declining soil quality and timber yields. The environmental impact on animal and bird species and vegetation was also significant.

An interesting sidebar here -- the British colonial state used German experts to ‘manage‘ Indian forests for revenue maximization too. And in the tropics, diversity of vegetation is far more -- and more significant -- than in temperate climes. The rights of forest dwellers and other people living on the periphery in the forests and the products thereof were, of course, swept aside when scientific forestry became the norm.

Such top-down, expert driven development planning excludes local knowledge and expertise accumulated over generations. The experts are really not very knowledgeable at what they pretend they know and the end results are far from satisfactory.

This argument, when examined in the context of modern development planning is disturbing in the extreme. Economists are hailed when they shed light on how the processes of poverty work, but the irony is that the self-same economists are also charged with planning for poverty removal -- and they’ve been doing it long before they understood poverty. Of course, none of the experts have ever been poor themselves or even lived amongst them!

Administrative convenience, expert ignorance and political ambition-cum-arrogance determine the direction and details of development plans and perhaps account for their rather dismal progress in most post-colonial economies.  

The author does offer some commonsense rules for development planning:

Take small steps because consequences are not always clear

Ensure reversibility because irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences

Plan on surprises

and

Plan on human inventiveness at all levels

Do not plan for abstract citizens but real ones in a particular socio-economic -geographical context.

Develop institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse and adaptable.

I can imagine a senior administrator looking at such recommendations and setting them contemptuously aside. (He went to Harvard for a three- month course on development! Besides… Yalies …you know..)

Happy reading.

The Narrow Corridor-How Nations Struggle for Liberty by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson

 

 

 

It can be safely assumed that human beings and agglomerations of humans that we call societies, aspire for peace, prosperity and liberty. It follows therefore, that an interesting subject for study and debate is the whole issue of how these aspirations can be fulfilled and whether societies have managed to fulfil these aspirations in history, and if not, why not.

The 1640s were very violent and troubled times in Britain and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes responded in 1651 with the book, Leviathan, in which he recommended that people should ’submit their Wills’ to a strong centralized state - the Leviathan - to ensure peace, and presumably, prosperity.

Unfortunately, strong states have a penchant for dominance - despotism is part of a state’s DNA - and liberty, all too often, is quietly abandoned by the powers that be, as neither necessary nor sufficient for social welfare. This very frequently leads to the emergence of a Despotic Leviathan.

The authors argue that between an Absent Leviathan and a Despotic Leviathan there is a very narrow ‘corridor’ in which a strong and effective state can coexist with a capable, well-organized society that can take collective action to keep the state ‘shackled’ and control its naturally despotic tendencies without curtailing its effectiveness in other areas of endeavor.

Theorizing about the nature of great states is interesting, but what is fascinating about this book is the wealth of real world examples that the authors have collated and put forth for our edification.

Athens, around 594 BCE, built a Shackled Leviathan through the efforts of Solon, who was appointed Archon - a kind of executive President - for a year. The authors quote Plutarch as saying,”The rich found him(Solon) acceptable because of his wealth and the poor because of his integrity.” Solon instituted reforms that created a balance of power between the rich and the poor and empowered the common man without crippling the executive capability of the state. Apart from his perspicacity, a significant point in this example is Solon’s integrity - a rare quality in modern day leaders and perhaps the reason for the predominance of Despotic Leviathans rather than Shackled Leviathans in today’s world.

The Chinese state from ancient to modern times offers an example of a Despotic Leviathan, while Western Europe has several examples of  Shackled Leviathans. The role of history is significant here. The fall of the Western Roman Empire at the hands - or swords - of Germanic tribes brought together the centralized hierarchical administrative structures of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church with their traditions of consensual decision making via assemblies characteristic of the Germanic tribes. The confluence of these two rather divergent societal characteristics enabled the emergence of Shackled Leviathans - effective states constrained by strongly mobilized, well-organized societies. ’Path Dependence’, as the academics call it, makes history important,  though the authors argue that agency - charismatic leaders, cohesive civil society groups et al - is very significant too.

An interesting ,though far too brief, analysis of the Indian situation is worth mentioning here. A fragmented society divided by caste and so at war - or at least in conflict - with itself cannot come together to shackle a strong state. Furthermore, Colonial powers created state institutions, but not any means whereby society could monitor and control them. And post Independence these institutions continued without any significant alteration in ethos.  Thus India, the logic goes, is unlikely to evolve into a Shackled Leviathan. This analysis can be the starting point for a detailed examination of the state in India, the path dependence leading to the Despotic Leviathan and the conditions needed to get to the corridor of the Shackled Levaithan. This is an exercise waiting to be done.

Sub Saharan Africa yields several examples of the Absent Leviathan and Russia and Georgia yield outstanding examples of the Despotic one.

A detailed analysis of the evolution of the American Leviathan is remarkably educative. The limitations of the Constitution, the compromises with the slave owning constituencies of the South, the Bill of Rights and its limitations and much more make for fascinating reading.

The problem and its history have been brilliantly analyzed by the authors .The solutions are, however, hard to pin down. There is no single route to reach the ideal Shackled Leviathan; history matters a great deal; the emergence of charismatic leaders is important…

There is no clear prescription for curing the despotic tendencies of a strong centralized state. Societal mobilization of the non-elite is required, but how can that be achieved in a fragmented, hierarchical society?

We have to look elsewhere for answers.

The knowledge that this book imparts and the questions it raises are worth the effort required to read it.

The book is highly educative and strongly recommended.

Happy reading.