The Open Veins of Panem

A Note: If you haven't read The Hunger Games, parts of this post won't make much sense. Also, you should read The Hunger Games - they're quite good.

There are many interpretations and analogies one can pull from Suzanne Collins' rich chronicles of a young woman named Katniss Everdeen and her struggles in a dystopian United States (now called Panem) against its repressive government. However, one plausible metaphor throughout is that The Hunger Games actually serves as a sustained look at a left-wing set of ideas about the workings of the global economy known as dependency theory - a set of ideas which had tangible and significant policy implications for Global North-South relations in the 1970s.

Let us start with the basic concept of dependency theory: that the world is separated into three types of countries. The first are the "core" countries, the rich nations of the U.S. and Western Europe. The second are those in the semi-periphery, countries relatively better off than many, but still poor. The majority of nations in this understanding are those of the periphery, countries like a Bolivia or most anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In The Hunger Games there are fairly direct parallels: the Capitol represents the core, District 1 is semi-periphery and Districts such as Katniss' District 12 are the periphery.

The central argument of dependency theory holds that European colonialism fundamentally altered the economies of nations on the periphery to service the interests of the core - as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galleano put it in his now infamous book, The Open Veins of Latin America, "our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison." While aspects of this analysis were quite old, it became a formalized set of academic writings beginning in the mid-1960s and then popularized by figures including Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Norman Girvan.

For these and other authors, dependency is created by the core nations through a wide array of methods. Core nations, in this understanding, derived great wealth primarily from mining and agriculture conducted in peripheral nations - think of silver mines in Bolivia or the giant sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. In doing this, core countries transformed the entire economies of peripheral lands towards benefiting the core; the richest agricultural land was geared towards export crops rather than food, the wealth of gold and silver sent abroad rather than providing benefits domestically. Dependency theorists, especially the more sophisticated ones understood that Europeans did not do this alone - they took advantage of existing divisions in these societies and forged alliances with (or helped build up) local elites who benefited from the overall system. This allowed for some development in the periphery, but always one closely watched by the core (for example, by controlling access to advanced technologies).

The number and depth of parallels to Collins' description of the Districts is striking. In The Hunger Games each of the twelve district has a product which it produces for export to the Capitol, seeing little of the benefits at home. The district that Katniss Everdeen comes from, District 12, produces coal - yet at the beginning of the first novel she remarks that the district is "lucky if we get two or three hours of electricity a day." Similarly, Collins captures some of the nuances in the better dependency theory pieces differentiating social conditions within the "periphery." District 12 itself is broken into several areas, with two of the most important being the Seam (where Katniss is from and the poorest sector) and the Merchant section, which has some level of material prosperity and whose residents (such as the mayor) maintain a certain social distance from the rest of the population.

Furthermore, the Capitol's rules for the districts on issues such as hunting (which is forbidden) nicely fit into the broad model of dependency theory positing the core will take active steps to reduce the autonomy of the periphery (in the U.S. for example, many mining communities in the late 19th/early 20th century did not pay workers in regular dollars, but "company scrip" redeemable only at company owned stores).

Who knew a popular young adult series would be a leading educator in radical economic theories?

Mike Daisey's English Abolitionist Predecessor

The controversy over the fabrications storyteller Mike Daisey incorporated in his tale of abuses in factories in China making Apple products has exploded over the past few days. While nothing fundamental about the criticisms of Apple is affected by Daisey's lies, it is still a surprising and tough revelation to grapple with. My fear is that his stories will become like the "Climategate e-mails"; a rhetorical foil that opponents to improving labor conditions at Apple's suppliers will use against all opponents, essentially saying "well, Mike Daisey told some lies so how can we believe anything we hear about Apple?"

Figures such as Daisey, great storytellers who have (or may have in the case of our subject for today) lied about parts of their stories to make them more impactful in a social justice fight have precedents. One of them is the man above, Olaudah Equiano, one of the great heroes of the anti-slavery movement in the United Kingdom which spanned roughly from the 1780s to the 1830s. Equiano appeared relatively early, a freed slave living in London who connected with white anti-slavery figures to aid the cause. This he did primarily through the release in 1789 of his autobiography, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which quickly became a bestseller among the English public. The book told of Equiano's youth, his capture by an opposing African nation and then his sale to European slave traders, followed by the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery in North America.

The book galvanized the public and was a key piece of the larger organizing efforts made by anti-slavery activists in these years. Equiano himself was a brilliant organizer; among other tactics he offered discounts to anyone who bought more than six copies and he placed model petitions at the start of each copy.

Part of the success of the book emerged from how Equiano framed it; while stories of slavery’s horrors were prominent, much of the book detailed Equiano's life as the personal servant of a British naval captain through a series of Horatio Hornblower/Master and Commander-type adventures. As one example: Equiano recounts the story of how he went on an expedition surveying near the North Pole. While on land, he became separated from the rest of the crew and ran into a polar bear who he fought to the death, killing it with his own bare hands. His story also emphasized his conversion to Christianity, his education, and his love of England to build sympathy among his predominately white English readership.

Both at the time and since, questions have been raised about the veracity of Equiano's story. In particular, historian Vincent Carretta has argued based on baptism records that Equiano was born in South Carolina (here is a handy chart detailing both sides of the debate). Carretta has argued that Equiano likely relied on stories he heard from other slaves to fill-in the first part of the book to make himself and the case of African slaves more compelling. While we will likely never know for sure, Equiano's Narrative is still taught in many a college and he remains firmly in the pantheon of abolitionist icons. That is not to argue that he was right or that Mike Daisey's fabrications (which of course are proven) are unimportant. But to not grapple with the clear effectiveness of an Olauduh Equiano or Mike Daisey is to ignore tough, but needed conversations over the mechanics of social change.

Actually, Rutherford Hayes IS Important

Rutherford B. Hayes is getting a lot of attention these days thanks to President Obama, who in a recent speech, related an anecdote about our nineteenth president to make a point about openness to new technologies. The story tells how Hayes, upon being shown an early model of the telephone; remarked: "It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?" Obama then added his quip: "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

Apparently this is not accurate - Hayes welcomed new technologies and there is no proof he ever said that. However, all snark and needed corrections aside, having Rutherford B. Hayes enter the modern conversation is still useful. While the popular imagination essentially views the string of presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt as a somewhat indistinguishable mush, this is not accurate. Hayes in particular played an important role in solidifying conservatism in the United States. This was not because he was a strong ideologue, but someone who acted with great expediency and in a difficult political environment. However one apportions his exact role, it's impossible to question he presided over two major moments that helped set the course for U.S. politics: the end of federal Reconstruction and the great railroad strike of 1877.

Hayes of course came to the presidency after an incredibly close election and the "corrupt bargain" that followed. In the aftermath, Hayes put to a final close federal Reconstruction, pulling the last federal soldiers out of the South. To blame Hayes for "ending" Reconstruction is an overstatement - the program of aiding the former slaves and bringing democracy and modernization to the South had been suffering for some time. Some of this had to due with economic downturns, some with the desire of white northerners and southerners to put the war behind them, and also from the continued terrorist violence of white paramilitary groups in the South (if you want to find something anathema to U.S. ideals in the 1876 election, look less to Hayes and more to the White Line and other terrorists who suppressed the black vote with violence).

That said, by ending federal Reconstruction, Hayes signaled to the nation the essential abandonment by the federal government of any role in aiding the freed slaves to make a fairer society, thus paving the path for Jim Crow governance to overtake the whole south and entrench itself for almost a century. I would argue few events more dramatically altered the course of this nation's politics - by allowing a white reactionary elite to reclaim power in the South, a deep conservatism took hold, one which radical Reconstruction had begun to challenge. The South became a national filibuster of sorts on all manner of progressive change, from helping to undermine the late 19th century Populists to Southern Democrats constricting the New Deal's horizons to the South halting the spread of mass unionization in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hayes was also the first president to employ the full power of the U.S. federal government in strike-breaking - specifically by deploying troops to end the epic Great Railroad Strike of 1877. While Hayes was not a mustache-twirling villain in this case (he expressed real respect and sympathy for the strikers as individuals), he showed, at most, a patronizing sympathy to the workers' demands or to the very idea of collective action or industrial democracy. Writing in his diary shortly after the strike, Hayes remarked that "Every man has a right to decide for himself the question of wages, but no man has a right to decide that question for other men." His actions set a precedent for massive government interventionism in the workings of the free market through the regular dispatch of troops (federal and state) to crush strikes and other worker protests and the constant use of court injunctions and other legal mechanisms to undermine labor organizing.

These sentiments provide insight into the larger trend within the GOP of this time in which classic liberalism and laissez-faire ideology were gaining prominence. Not that the Republican Party's more progressive strand, represented in the 1860s and 1870s by figures such as Benjamin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens and in the early twentieth century by politicians like Robert La Follette, had disappeared from the party. However, such perspectives were being pushed into the minority and would suffer a major blow in 1912 when Taft's candidacy helped cement the conservatives as the leaders of the party.

Rutherford B. Hayes is an important figure for understanding how U.S. politics have been shaped - let's not get caught up on whether he liked the telephone.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, which appears an especially needed moment to reflect and recommit to women's equality in the face of (in the United States) of the recent attacks on women, particularly around reproductive health. Of note about March 8 is the strikingly similar history it shares with another international holiday, May Day or International Workers' Day. Both started in the United States by radicals on the left, in the case of International Women's Day it was the idea of women involved with the Socialist Party. Both became globally-recognized days when leftists in Europe and elsewhere looked to commemorate tragedies occurring in the U.S. (the Haymarket massacre in the case of May Day, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in the case of International Women's Day). Then, particularly with the claiming of the holiday by the Bolshevik revolution, the holiday quickly lost cache in the United States.

Remembering this history is important for a few reasons. First, much as the conservative right tries to label everything liberals do as radicalism, progressives should recognize that part of the proud history of the left (broadly speaking) has been radical forces pushing the big visions and often pointing to injustices before anyone else. Second, the origins of International Women's Day remind us that to concentrate too much on specific issue silos (labor, feminism, GLBTQ, etc.) makes us miss the interconnections among them.

This is not to say that one must devote oneself to all issues equally, but to at least acknowledge the relationships is vital. Certainly on the conservative right such relations are recognized; one can see this in the fact that many of the same GOP governors who have flexed their legislative muscles in attacks on labor rights have also targeted women's health. At the same time, it is important not to become carried away by the overlaps, as with those who attempt to create a model where one core issue sits as a sun, with other issues as mere orbiting planets, miss the point. For example, the marginalization of women has strong economic components - that does not mean it is a mere function of our economic system (newsflash: the oppression of women is a much older feature of society than capitalism). And it is only natural that personal interests and experiences will direct people to specific causes. We should instead always endeavor, whether it is in how we frame a public address or how a coalition is constructed, to at least be aware of how interdependent all of these causes are.

Conservatives believe in conservative ideas

For many liberals in the U.S., one of the great recurring hopes is that a moment will come when social conservatives lay down the culture wars and realize that their real interests lie with supporting progressive economic policies. Such a hope grows from a view, most famously expressed in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, that predominately white working-class voters are being suckered by "culture war" issues into voting GOP. More fundamentally, it lies in an analysis of the right-wing in the U.S. that sees a distinct "social conservative" base as opposed to the "economic conservatives," who are portrayed as small in numbers, rich in dollars.

Such views are overly simplistic and misunderstand a basic point: conservative activists believe in conservative ideas and such notions for many are based in a worldview that easily encompasses "economic" and "social" concerns. As Seth Ackerman points out in a terrific piece at Jacobin on Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's new book on the Tea Party, "liberals have spent too long condescending to conservatives as if they were the perpetual victims of a bait-and-switch scam." For the thing is, the "social conservative" wing of the party which came roaring to the fore of GOP politics in the late 1970s did not focus on "cultural" issues in distinction to economics, but saw them as wrapped together in an ideological whole. As Michael Sean Winter's argues in his new biography of Jerry Falwell, many on the religious right always viewed laissez-faire capitalist ideas and social conservatism as deeply intertwined, with important origins in mutual hatred of communism.

While the story of the interconnections between the Christian right and free-market ideology has many facets, one piece of it involves conservative Protestants' reaction to the leftward shift of many white mainline Protestant churches in the 1970s on economics, and particularly their challenge to multinational corporations. Starting in the mid and late 1960s, particularly in response to the black freedom struggle, many Protestant churches began looking institutionally, financially, and morally, at their place in the larger economy. The role of church endowments became of special interest and by the early 1970s, many churches were seeing church investments as a tool for fighting for justice.

One prime manifestation of this came in 1974 when National Council of Churches merged two existing projects to create the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR helped church groups and denominations use shareholder resolutions and other means to challenge corporate policies domestically and overseas. Most prominently, ICCR and the churches took on U.S. multinational corporations over investments made in South Africa under apartheid. Furthermore, it was ICCR that helped to launch the Nestle boycott in the late 1970s, which many corporations (as well as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation) viewed as a major front in what was seen as a national and global "war" on the free market in these years.

In response, in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a number of conservative religious thinkers connected to the larger "religious right" began actively formulating arguments tying Christianity to pro-market values. This was an important part of creating the overall ideological message of the Religious Right. For example, in 1982, Catholic conservative thinker (an important part of Falwell's legacy being the uniting of Catholic and Protestant conservatives), released his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, constructing a theologically-based argument for capitalism. Jerry Falwell's newsletter the Journal-Champion in its early years carried numerous articles defending corporations from government regulators such as OSHA, tying into the sense within the U.S. corporate community that they were under attack at home by a combination of government regulators and leftist activist groups, such as ICCR. Such trends continue to this day; while the Tea Party at first was seen as an economics-focused libertarian uprising, with more careful research and with time the deep ideological and social links between much of the Tea Party base and the religious right have become apparent.

For political activists of all stripes, moving beyond easy cliches towards understanding your opponents is important, whether that is to create a more humanistic and understanding politics or to better crush them in future fights. Whatever the case, progressives should recognize that conservative ideas, as contradictory as one might think they seem, are their actual beliefs.

Thoughts on #OccupyWallStreet

I. Occupy Wall Street

In Warren Beatty's epic film Reds, there is a scene where journalist and communist activist John Reed debates the course of the still infant Bolshevik revolution with the anarchist Emma Goldman. While Reed has plunged into the work of aiding the Soviets, Goldman already recoils at the horrors being perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Pensive and tired, Reed eventually answers her critiques by saying:

"It's just the beginning E.G. It's not happening the way we thought it would, it's not happening the way we wanted it to, but it's happening."

While Reed was dramatically wrong about the Soviet Union, his sentiments have something to say about responses to the ongoing mobilization known as #OccupyWallStreet. For progressives who have been hoping for some kind of public mass uprising against our financial overlords since the onset of the Great Recession, a couple hundred young, "activist-y" types camping out on Wall Street may seem far from the dream of a mass uprising by everyday people. Yet, this is what is actually happening, and it appears to be gaining momentum as local unions and other activist groups join in. As Mark Engler details in a very thoughtful piece at Dissent magazine, the protestors have done a number of things "right" - especially on point I would say is how protestors have made their general youth into an advantage. Rather than seeming like spoiled kids, they are pointing to how the finance-led, deregulated economy and the Great Recession are betraying the implicit notion in the U.S. that the nation's society and economy will build opportunities for subsequent generations.

A lively debate continues to rage over the protests, particularly over what their demands are and should be. This is a vital dialogue to have and I appreciate the urgency of those demanding more concreteness from the protests. That said, looking historically, often more important than demands has been momentum. Such mobilizations have long been a target of frustration and scorn from sympathetic observers and activists. In the lead up to the American Revolution, street protests became commonplace, but members of the Revolutionary elite typically viewed with apprehension such actions. Similarly, the first major street actions after the crash of 1929 were not run by wholesome grassroots activists, but were organized by cadres of the Communist and Socialist Parties. While it would have been preferable to have marches not organized by people (in the CPUSA case) looking to Stalin as their model, it was the communists who had the energy to get out and so something. If progressives want to shape the protests, they should do it directly - after all, this is an action emphasizing its internally democratic character!

II. A Modest Protest and History Suggestion

Given the Tea Party loves to reference history, it couldn't hurt for our side as well. One off the top of my head that is completely unoriginal, but counterintuitively might make a splash, is to have protests dress like the Tea Party. After all, why should conservatives have a monopoly on the Revolution? The American Revolution is all our inheritance - it is an event distant and distinct enough from today that for anyone to claim a direct political lineage is rather silly. Certainly, progressives and radicals have as much claim to the American Revolution and its ideals as anyone.

This is especially the case with the actual event of the Boston Tea Party. For one, the original action in Boston was essentially a demonstration against the collusion of government and high finance - the acts being protested were designed by the British crown to prop up the faltering British East India Company. Furthermore, the first post-Tea Party protest in U.S. history to explicitly reference that event came with demonstrations in the 1840s against foreclosures of New York farmers by banks - a slightly relevant historical dynamic for today.

The Fight for Reaction: Reconstruction and the Franchise

A new front in the modern Republican Party's effort to depress voter turnout has emerged from Pennsylvania, where the party seeks to alter the way the electoral college vote is counted to strengthen their hand. This comes along with a concentrated effort to restrict voting in a number of other key battleground states through restrictive voter ID bills (among other measures).

Such measures certainly fly in the face of the (generally agreed) U.S. consensus, built over our history, that democracy means people have easy access to the ballot. It also points to the way that reactionary forces in the nation's history have worked diligently to limit the vote to promote their agenda. No more dramatic example of this exists than the massive disenfranchisement of African-American voters that came as a core element of the rollback of Reconstruction in the 1870s and onward.

When discussing the fight and justice of African-American voting rights, we tend to disassociate access to the franchise from the political implications of its use. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s did not make partisan advantage a mainstay of their case; they rightly emphasized the basic immorality of denying people the right to vote in a nation which sees that power as core to its national identity. Yet, in pondering the implications of African-American men winning the right to vote in the late 1860s, and then losing it over the course of the next several decades, we should not only emphasize the basic civic and moral outrage, but the way these transformations affected the shape of American politics.

Put succinctly, it is certainly plausible, and I would say likely, that African-Americans' loss of the ballot box helped ensure an enduring and powerful conservatism at the heart of our politics. Counterfactuals are of course riddled with challenges. However, in the case of Reconstruction, we do not have to rely on pure speculation. After all, for several years in the late 1860s through the 1870s we can see how, particularly at the state level, politics would develop with the franchise available to African-American men. What one finds is a starkly different and certainly more progressive United States. Consider some of the programs and policies implemented by Reconstruction governments which included substantial African-American representation (this is all taken from pages 156 of Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction):

• Public schools, hospitals, enitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were either established for the first time or whose funding was increased
  
• South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens
• Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants
• Laws were changed expanding divorce rights, property rights for married women
• State legislatures excluded all manner of small farmers and workers from having their basic livelihoods upended by debt collectors
• Progressive taxation, primarily of large land holding implemented
  

Of course, not all policies passed by the Reconstruction governments were progressive or as extensive as one could hope. Republican governments in the South often did much to encourage big business investment through massive subsidies and cases of corruption were rampant. However, compared with the white-dominant governments that came after Reconstruction, it seems hard to argue that the trajectory of state politics in the South would have been as conservative with continued African-American enfranchisement. Remember the strength African-Americans as a voting bloc had in the South at this time; where they represented either major minorities or majorities in most of the former Confederacy (South Carolina during part of Reconstruction had a majority African-American state legislature, reflecting the state's demographics). At the national level, Reconstruction saw the election of a number of African-American congressman, as well as one Senator.

The massive step forward Reconstruction represented would never be fully reversed and to push affairs backward required a multifaceted effort. Examinations of the Civil War sometimes raise the question of why the Confederates did not adopt a guerrilla warfare approach near the conflict's end. Yet, in the late 1860s they did, only targeted specifically at African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic insurgent group, in some ways like a U.S. version of al-Qaeda in Iraq. KKK violence was often quite targeted, for example intensifying around election time to scare African-American voters from the polls. As reactionary elements in the South started to regain power, they moved to more "legal" means such as literacy tests and poll taxes. And thus, to this day, we still live in the shadow of a bright shining moment in our history, followed by a horrendous descent into darkness, one which took decades of struggle and blood to overcome.