User:LawrenceScafuri/My Work

Since September of 2017, I've written a large collection of papers, most of which pertain to history, political theory, and economics, constituting a wealth of resources. Since I'm a Marxist-Leninist, many of these works take a "Soviet-centered" or "socialist-centered" approach to historiography and to the world. All of my Wikipedia edits have information derived from those resources and all also cite other scholars; thus, my Wikipedia edits are in themselves resources. This page includes works from May 2018 forward, with the most recent works being at the bottom (for the most part; I also put some of my less notable works at the bottom). Only the first two sections below have been completely finished :,)

Kennedy, the Media, and Genocide in East Timor

Kennedy

Vietnam

John F. Kennedy is often portrayed as a humanitarian president, led by the guiding hand of freedom and peace. Yet that interpretation is about as radically opposed to reality as one could imagine: blindly led by an ambition to eradicate communism, Kennedy had no problem committing mass atrocities around the world. For instance, during Operation Ranch Hand, Kennedy poisoned South Vietnamese crops with Agent Orange in order to starve guerrillas, leading to 3 million people suffering health problems, 1 million birth defects, and 24% of the area of Vietnam being defoliated.

Kennedy forcefully drove millions of peasants into new “hamlets” with an abuse beyond any the peasantry had previously experienced from the foreign-rooted American government; Kennedy wanted to “protect” these peasants from the Viet Cong whom he knew most of them supported. Farm folk had seen their houses torn down or burned and were forced to build new ones with their own labor and at their own expense. These peasants shared a common anger at the long days of compulsory labor they had to put in in what amounted to concentration camps.

Cuba

Kennedy depicted the problem with Cuba as one of the existence of the human species; the threat, he said, was the Soviets implanting missiles in Cuba in a crisis which could boil over into nuclear war. The real threat, however, started in 1959 (the year of the Cuban Revolution), not 1962 (the year of the Missile Crisis). The issue with the Cuban Revolution was, as one of Kennedy's top advisers (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) said, “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,” acting as a virus that could infect other Latin American peoples into believing that they too might have a decent life. When Castro and Guevara led the Cuban Revolution, they challenged U.S. domination and developed new ideas of self-management which professed that the Cuban people could govern themselves without the oppression of the United States government. Those radical ideas fueled Kennedy's mad rush to aggression against Cuba.

According to Western rhetoric, Kennedy was rescuing humanity from self-destruction and rescuing the Cuban people from Castro's tyranny. Yet Castro transformed Cuba from a backwards island into a rapidly developing nation; instituted agrarian reform, giving 200,000 peasants new land; halved rents for those making less than $100 a month; and increased low-level civil servants’ wages. Within a year, he effectively redistributed 15 percent of the nation’s wealth, declaring that “the revolution is the dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.” These were actions largely supported by Cuba's peasantry, but they interfered with the U.S. elite's interests for profit and an area of trade in the Caribbean.

The Media

When the state lacks means of coercion, there needs to be a mechanism for controlling what people think. That mechanism is the mainstream media, whose purpose is to marginalize dissent and allow elites and private interests to get their messages across to the public. In the context of obscene income and wealth inequalities, and the concomitant threat of greater influence from leftist ways of thought, the news must pass through successive filters to leave only the cleansed residue fit to print. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman analyze these filters in depth in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, but there are two especially interesting examples they point out which reify their model: while the U.S. press could not stop talking about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the legitimacy or legality of the U.S. in Vietnam was never mentioned; a similar thing occurred in regards to genocide in Kosovo as opposed to genocide in East Timor.

The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor

For twenty-four years, the Indonesian government, under the leadership of Indonesian president Suharto, subjected the East Timorese people to systematic torture, sexual slavery, extrajudicial executions, massacres, and deliberate starvation. One Timorese refugee who lived through the horrors later told of the “rape [and] cold-blooded assassinations of women and children and Chinese shop owners.” A bishop in East Timor at the time said, The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets – all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing."  A Timorese guide for a senior Indonesian official stated that during the early months of the fighting, Indonesian troops “killed most Timorese they encountered.”

As a result of the destruction of food crops that accompanied the genocide in East Timor, many civilians were forced to leave the hills and surrender to the Indonesian armed forces. Sometimes they were killed outright but sometimes they were forcefully sent to receiving centers. After a period of three months, the detainees were resettled in “strategic hamlets” where they were imprisoned and subjected to enforced starvation.  An envoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 1979 that 80 percent of one camp’s population was malnourished, in a situation that was “as bad as Biafra.”

Compounding Suharto's terror was the targeted assault on women in East Timor. In a 1995 report on violence against women in Indonesia and East Timor, Amnesty International USA wrote that enforced marriages were common and that many women were harassed daily by troops after their release. Women who lived under Indonesian control were also coerced into accepting sterilization procedures and some were forced outright to take the contraceptive Depo Provera. One woman told of being interrogated while stripped half-naked, tortured, molested, and threatened with death.

Yet as brutal as Indonesia's barbaric practices were, Suharto's genocide in East Timor was done largely under the aegis of many Western nations. Indonesia used fear of communism to garner support among western countries, including the United States and Australia, for its invasion and occupation of East Timor. After the United States completed a retreat from Vietnam, a staunchly anti-communist Indonesia was considered to be an essential counterweight, and friendly relations with the Indonesian government were considered more important than a decolonization process in East Timor. That is why on the day before the invasion, U.S. President Gerald Ford and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto and gave their approval for the invasion. Throughout the occupation, the U.S. supplied weapons to Indonesia which they used to carry out their terror; this continued through the Bush and Clinton years, ending in 1999.

Imperialism

Old Imperialism

Old imperialism, characterized by European states gaining control over newly-acquired colonies in the modern era, derived from an effort to apply, or perhaps misapply, the thinking of Charles Darwin to an understanding of human societies. The key concept behind this "social Darwinism" was the survival of the fittest, suggesting that Europeans had a paternalistic obligation to edify lesser peoples, inevitably involving the displacement or destruction of "unfit" races. "Superior races have a right, because they have a duty," declared the French politician Jules Ferry in 1883. "They have the duty to civilize inferior races." British imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed that the British "...happen to be the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better for humanity."

Such views were adopted by numerous colonial powers because they made imperialism seem progressive, for it was predicated on the notion that weeding out "weaker" peoples of the world would allow the "stronger" ones to flourish. In that way, they hid the harsher realities of imperialism: millions killed and tortured; massive famines caused directly by radical policies; human rights violated on a massive scale; countless lives uprooted and destroyed by efforts to enrich the few at the loss of the many. In 1902, a British soldier in East Africa described that process: "Every soul was either shot or bayoneted.... We burned all the huts and razed the banana plantations to the ground."

The Congo Free State

Nowhere was old imperialism more prevalent than in the Congo Free State, ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium. Private companies in the Congo, operating under the authority of the state, forced villagers to collect rubber, which was much in demand for bicycle and automobile tires, with a reign of terror and abuse that cost approximately 10 million lives. One refugee from these horrors described the process:

We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved.... When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.

Another person stated:

One of the most atrocious features of the persistent warfare of which year in year out the Congo territories are the scene, is the mutilation both of the dead and of the living which goes on under it…. Congo State troops were in the habit of cutting off the hands of men, women, and children in connection with the rubber traffic…. the State soldiers had shot some people on Lake Mantumba…, ‘cut off their hands and took them to the Commissaire.’… Among the mutilated victims was a little girl, not quite dead, who subsequently recovered.

Other Cases

While imperialism in the Congo was brutal and direct, imperialism in other regions of Africa (and indeed of the world) was much more subtle, impoverishing peasants through the free market rather than killing them through the maxim gun. In 1955, a British investigating commission described life in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, one of Britain's richest colonies:

The wages of the majority of African workers are too low to enable them to obtain accommodation which is adequate to any standard. The high cost of housing relative to wages is in itself a cause of overcrowding, because housing is shared to lighten the cost. This, with the high cost of food in towns, makes family life impossible for the majority.

Colonial rule served to integrate Asian and African economies into a global network of exchange. Some colonized groups benefited from their new access to global markets - Burmese rice farmers and West African cocoa farmers, for example. Others were devastated. In India, large-scale wheat exports to Britian continued unchecked - or even increased - despite a major drought and famine that claimed between six and ten million lives in the late 1870s. A colonial government committed to free market principles declined to interfere with those exports or to provide much by the way of relief. One senior official declared it "a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows."

New Imperialism

The new imperialism echoes the old one, given that it is justified by a belief similar to that of the aforementioned Cecil Rhodes: that of delivering peace and freedom to all. As lofty-sounding as the rhetoric is, it seeks to hide the imperial powers' exaction of tribute from the rest of the world. Still, the new imperialism differentiates itself from the old because it "...[is in] the interests of capitalists and politicians in order to prevent the rise and expansion of possible economic and political rivals from challenging America's dominance." One way to do that is to control oil supplies, an action that provides a convenient means to counter any power shifts - both economic and military - threatened within the global economy.

For many people, the United States has been the face of the new imperialism. However it might be defined, the mounting American power and influence in the world, like that of many empires, was contested at home and resisted abroad. It also required the large-scale mobilization of people and resources. By 1970, one writer observed:

... the United States had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in 30 countries, was a member of four regional defense alliances and an active participant in a fifth, had mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, was a member of 53 international organizations, and was furnishing military or economic aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe.

By the twenty-first century, the United States' international policies - such as its refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court; its doctrine of preemptive war, which was exercised in Iraq; and its use of torture - had generated widespread opposition against the oligarchic nature of U.S. politics. Critics have pointed to the tendency of the United States to act on the behalf of financial and corporate elites, as was demonstrated, for example, in the coup against the democratically-elected Salvador Allende. Allende's policies, which had brought rising standards of living for the Chilean people, outraged the bourgeoisie, who then demonstrated their anger by banging empty pots to protest against shortages which were the result of a deliberate hoarding of goods. Under the influence of an extreme right wing group, a strike against the government led by the lorry owners' organization emerged in October 1972, but failed because of the large-scale mobilization of workers, students, peasants, and their families. It is clear, then, that Allende was supported by the Chilean people, but opposed by large corporations and U.S. financial interests. At the behest of elites in Washington and Santiago, a CIA document declared, "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup." And in September 1973, he was. What followed was an extraordinarily repressive regime, headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Although repressive, Pinochet's regime made the U.S. "delighted with the turn of events [that] eliminated a socialist government [in Chile]" and replaced it with one more consonant with U.S. policy goals in Latin America. A State Department official summarized it by saying:

Our general view was, quite naturally, that this government, any non-Marxist government in Chile, in terms of immediate concrete U.S. interests was advantageous.

The overthrow of Allende did signal a heyday for U.S. imperialism: repression was directed against peasants, slum dwellers, and those groups identified with the Allende government; and the Pinochet totalitarian autocracy signaled a reversion to dependence on foreign investment, giving Chile a pro-capitalist and pro-U.S. social character.

Communism

In the Soviet Union

Stalin

From the earliest days of the Russian revolution to the present, propaganda campaigns have been conducted against the Soviet Union.... Both to undermine support of a socialist alternative at home, and to maintain a dominant position in international economic and political relationships, all manner of lies and distortions are used to cast the USSR in as negative a light as possible.... The particular issues of this psychological war are wide-ranging and are at times short-lived. The idea that the socialist revolution "nationalized children"... has long since faded into history. American allegations (in 1981) of Soviet chemical warfare in Southeast Asia - "yellow rain" - eventually collapsed...

Propaganda campaigns such as those discussed by Tottle in the above-cited excerpt have tarred Joseph Stalin with the image of a cruel tyrant and a maniacal mass-murderer. Thus for most Westerners, the fact that he strengthened the Soviet Union, transforming it from a backwards society into a world power in under three decades; advanced the world revolution; and acted as a peace-making counterweight to the hegemony of the United States is never mentioned. New archival evidence gotten since 1991 confirms that the old model of an all-powerful tyrannical state dominating a passive society is unnecessarily restrictive and one-dimensional. Rather “social groups, rather than merely being a site of regime action, are actors in their own right,” an understanding that underscores the inter-mutuality of state and society.

Stalin was not a universally-hated despot. The grand vision of the Stalinist utopia, for instance, energized countless citizens (particularly the young) and forged inclusive practices and social bonds. In this conception, the Stalinist “mass dictatorship” was the product not so much of an independent external state, but of the interplay and negotiations of regime and society. In the controversial formulation of one expert, it was a system which “in appropriating modern statecraft and egalitarian ideology… frequently secured voluntary mass participation and support [whereby] ‘dictatorship from above’ transforms itself into ‘dictatorship from below.’”

Many Soviet citizens internalized the values of the Stalinist project, or at least learned, in Stephen Kotkin's memorable aphorism, to "speak Bolshevik." According to this formulation, Stalinism's strength rested on its productive ability to create social identities in line with the broad socialist agenda. Stalinist subjects made sense of their existence by cultivating a mentality based on the emancipatory and self-actualizing effects of the Bolshevik Revolution. In that way, there was a "joint operation of the individual and the state in modes of participation and mobilization." While there was some resistance to Stalinism, that was "only one part of a wide continuum of societal responses to Stalinism that included accommodation, adaptation, acquiescence, apathy, internal emigration, opportunism, and positive support."

When resistance emerged, the Stalinist leadership often reacted to pressures from below and espoused policies that were broadly popular. The limited “neo-NEP” of spring and summer of 1932; the granting of private plots to collective farmers; the increased consumer goods production projected in the Second Five-Year Plan; Stalin’s sponsorship of “luxury” items in line with his slogan “life has become better, life has become happier;” and the growing appeals to Russocentric étatisme suggest that the Stalinist elite was not totally immune to public opinion in the search for legitimacy and effective mobilization. Stalin's government was, in this way, a “populist” or “neo-populist” dictatorship, so much so that at times, society sided with the state against local officials.

While it is important not to understate the populism of Stalin's government, it is also crucial not to whitewash its crimes. Chief among them is the Great Terror. The orthodox interpretation of the motivations of the Terror emphasizes Stalin's power lust, his utter compulsion to eliminate all opponents, in a paranoiac drive for autocratic rule. In reality, it was a large number of local and regional party bosses that were responsible for the excesses of the Terror because they were apprehensive that Soviet power was under threat from the millions of former kulaks and "counterrevolutionaries" who had been enfranchised by the Stalin Constitution. These officials helped to radicalize the thrust of central repressive policy.

Still, many applauded the targeting of "social marginals" and kulaks. While mass propaganda did play its part in deluding people into thinking "wreckers" were omnipresent, this propaganda often chimed with public perceptions and beliefs. Stalin's Terror had destroyed fifth columns and thus saved the USSR from external and internal defeat. In a highly charged international context epitomized by every-present war scares, spies could enlist the backing of ethnic diasporas in the USSR who were suspect because of their "national" ties to bordering hostile states and populations.

In Eastern Europe

In 1947 in Yugoslavia, large enterprises were nationalized immediately. The collectivization of agriculture reached its peak around 1950, but slowed down after 1953, especially from 1956. By 1952, the socialized sector of industry ranged from 100 percent in Bulgaria to 77 percent in the GDR. On the whole, nationalization was supported by the public.

"The planning system [in Eastern Europe] had achieved some success in dragging the East European economies out of their peasant backwardness..." In Czechoslovakia, the idea of abandoning planning was met with resistance. During the discussion on the State Enterprise Law in 1987, the proposals for greater marketization were given a chilly reception, not least from the shop floor. People preferred planning to the anarchy of the free market.

Rapid post-war industrialization brought about a huge increase in the size of the working class. In the 1960s, 55 percent of the population of the GDR were industrial workers, and in Bulgaria, the working class grew from 19 to 42 percent of the population between 1955-65.

Strikes as a distinct component of working-class culture were largely sporadic or non-existent. Yet wider social changes began to erode that working class identity - above all, privitization and more individualized forms of consumption and leisure. The revolutions of 1989 took place largely without the involvement of the working class, and since the fall of communism, global capitalism has reinforced the process of deindustrialization and working-class decomposition.

Shopping across the border, first in Yugoslavia and then in Hungary, opened the eyes of many consumers. Yet a desire to acquire Western consumer goods did not translate into resentment at communist rule; there was no causal relationship between this awareness and the decline of regime legitimacy. As Krisztina Fehérváry argued, "Problems like shortages, poor quality of goods and poverty, alongside perceptions of more abundant lifestyles elsewhere, can plague any nation-state, but in themselves they are incapable of producing a political logic." Standards of living in the Eastern Bloc increased rapidly over decades, and Czechs, Hungarians, and East Germans often-times compared their conditions with the past and reflected on how much better off they were.

The collapse of socialism across Eastern Europe in 1989 was not the result of workers or peasants being dissatisfied with their condition of being since standards of living varied widely among countries in the Eastern Bloc.

Other Cases

In Southeast Asia

Throughout Asia, the early communist movement used diasporic networks. The “missionaries” of communism included Vietnamese in South China; Chinese in Japan, France, and Germany; Koreans in Russia; Japanese in the USA; and Indians in Burma. In countries such as Vietnam, communism battled against new forms of Confucianism and Buddhism that were also responses to colonialism – that promised national salvation – and that also operated in the modern public sphere.

While crucial in promoting nationalism, communist networks encouraged visions of a pan-regional, pan-Asian, or global future. Such visions prepared the ground for post-1945 regional organizations such as the Pan-African Congress. They also facilitated the “division of labor” agreed between Stalin and Liu Shaoqi in 1949, in which Stalin proposed that China take responsibility for promoting revolution in the East, while the Soviet Union would remain responsible for revolution in the West.

Following the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia in 1941, many Chinese joined guerrilla groups led by the communist parties, as in Malaya, where massacres of Chinese by the Japanese army merely intensified resistance. The MCP made peace with the British who armed and trained the guerrillas, and communists became a vital component of the 3,500-strong Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. In Burma, communists played a major role in setting up the Anti-Fascist Organization, which was central to the resistance against the Japanese, although its role was downplayed by the Allies.

The Việt Minh, the communist-led coalition for national independence formed in 1941, capitalized on the famine that broke out after the Japanese overthrew French puppet emperor, Bảo Đại, in 1944. They took the lead in distributing rice from granaries and thereby helped to win the confidence of village conservatives. In Vietnam, alone of the colonies, the communists and their allies had gathered enough military force to take power in 1945.

The Soviet Union did not issue any explicit instructions to the communist insurgents in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Of all the parties, only the PKI explicitly sought advice from Moscow – and from Dutch communists – during the Madiun revolt of 1948.

In the Islamic World

The resonance of communist ideals among the rail-workers of Schalchiyyah, the Basra port workers, or the oil workers of Kirkuk during the 1940s and 50s, illustrated the potential for communism to win an audience far beyond narrow circles of intellectuals.

An internal document sent by Egyptian communists to the Communist Party of Great Britain put it like this: “The people’s democracy we want to establish in Egypt is not a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We aim to establish a democratic dictatorship of all the classes struggling against imperialism and feudalism.”

The Iranian Left faced a profound challenge in the popular revolution in 1979 which overthrew the monarchy and established an Islamic republic. Iran had a long history of left-wing organization and a sizeable pro-Soviet Communist Party, the Tudeh. During the mid-1940s, the Tudeh boasted a newspaper with a circulation of 120,000, organized rallies with up to 100,000 in attendance, and created a dense network of local party organizations and trade unions in Tehran and the provincial cities. The coup against nationalist prime minister Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953, which was supported by the CIA and turned the relatively weak constitutional monarchy into an authoritarian state, brought an end to the period of popular mobilization in which the Tudeh had flourished. Despite this repression, and the emergence of new challengers on the Left who advocated guerrilla warfare as a strategy to bring down the regime, the Tudeh remained a significant force on the Iranian Left into the 1970s.

The revolution of 1979 created opportunities for communist ideas to reach a mass audience among workers, the urban and rural poor, and wide layers of Iranians radicalize by the eruption of enormous popular protests and strikes. The combination of rapid industrialization and uneven modernization in the 1960s had created social tensions that proved impossible to contain within the authoritarian political structures of the monarchy. A brief period of liberalization by the shah in 1977 opened the door to a flowering of discontent by middle-class activists and intellectuals who began to raise demands for democracy. Yet the urban working class was the revolution’s “chief battering ram.”

Strikes over economic demands multiplied during 1978, but their intersection with the rising tide of street demonstrations against the shah “changed the dynamism of the revolutionary process.” Strikes by workers in critical economic sectors, such as oil and transport, paralyzed the state during October and November, raising explicitly political demands. At the head of the oil workers’ grievances in the strike of October 15, 1978 was the call for the cancellation of martial law, followed by demands for the release of political prisoners and the dissolution of the shah’s secret police. After the shah fled Iran in January 1979, workers in hundreds of companies formed factory committees (shuras) which began to exercise democratic control over production.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was disorienting for the remaining communist organizations in the Islamic world, and the period after 1991 was marked by the rapid decline of membership and political influence. Specters of the civil war that engulfed Algeria after the military aborted the parliamentary elections in order to prevent a victory for the FIS haunted the Arab world.

In Tunisia, the fall of Zein-al-Din Ben Ali from power on January 14, 2011 in the face of a popular revolutionary mobilization that had begun in the impoverished towns of central Tunisia at the end of 2010, triggered the greatest wave of revolutionary upheavals the Arab world had seen since the 1940s. Eleven days later, mass demonstrations in Egypt raised the Tunisian slogan: “The people want the downfall of the regime.”

The Failures of Free Markets

In Thatcher's Britain

When Thatcher was elected as the prime minister of Britain, she stood on a neoliberal platform. Thatcher sought to promote free market policies both at home and abroad under a rhetoric promising peace and prosperity. Thatcher's rule, however, brought a worsening economic condition for most Britons and exported that economic misery around the world in her crusade against communism. Britain's newspapers corroborated Thatcherism's failures: one headline read "One in Three British Babies Born in Poverty" as "child poverty has increased as much as three-fold since Margaret Thatcher was elected." "Dickensian Diseases Return to Haunt Today's Britain," read another headline, concluding that "social conditions in Britain are returning to those of a century ago." Furthermore, many services became only accessible to the rich and affluent, thereby relegating Britain's poor to the margins, and the unemployment rate soared to 10%.

In the United States

The Urban Crisis

In 1970, much of New York City was left impoverished, leading to much social unrest by those in the margins. Public employment, funded by the government, was seen as the solution. But Nixon declared the crisis to be over in the early 1970s and decreased funding to the city. At first, financial institutions filled the gap, but in 1975, a cabal of investment bankers pushed the city into bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget. They had first claim on city tax revenues in order to first pay off bondholders: whatever was left went for essential services. The effect was to curb the aspirations of the city's unions, implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision, and to impose user fees. The economics of Reagan in the 1980s (making the role of government to create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and well-being of the population at large) became "merely the New York scenario" of the 1970s "writ large."

Reagan

There has been a reversal of a 150-year trend of generational gains in income and social mobility, indicating that approximately one hundred million Americans (nearly one-third of the U.S. population) are poor or nearly poor. Those trends can be attributed to the financialization of the economy, the transnationalization of capitalism, and the deunionization of the workforce.

GE made only 8% of its profits from speculative finance in 1980 (it made 92% from manufacturing), whereas it made over half its profits from finance by 2007. The Fordist model of paying higher wages to your employees broke down when your employees were overseas, an offshoring process which began accelerating in the 1970s. Union membership decreased by 25% from 1973 to 2007, an especially tragic fact since unions represented lower-class and middle-class interests:

Unions are pillars of the moral economy in modern labor markets.... The moral economy consists of norms prescribing fair disribution that are institutionalized in the market's formal rules and customs.

Many socioeconomic indicators in the United States have declined since the 1980s; for the country's poorest and least-educated whites, life expectancy had fallen by four years since 1990, and the unemployment reached an average of 7.5%. Reagan's block grant consolidation program, a centerpiece of his administration, meant urban school districts received less money because state education agencies directed more resources to suburban areas with higher voting and higher tax-paying.

The deregulation and decreased funding in education, changes in transfer programs for the poor, and the decreases to top marginal income tax rates that characterized the Reagan era contributed to increases in poverty in the United States. This is made more shocking when remembering that poverty rates had been decreasing for both nonelderly families and families headed by females prior to Reagan's election.

Around the World

One effect of imposing the free market on the rest of the world was to permit U.S. elites to extract high rates of return from the result of the world during the 1980s and 1990s. In Latin America, where the first wave of forced neoliberalization occurred, the result was a "lost decade" filled with economic stagnation and political turmoil.

Two graphs of U.S. imperialism.

Hungry for credit, developing countries were encouraged to borrow, though at rates that were advantageous to New York bankers. Any rise in U.S. interest rates could push vulnerable countries into default; the New York investment banks would then be exposed to serious losses. When Volcker shock drove Mexico into default in 1982-4, the Reagan administration resolved the difficulty by rolling over the debt, but did so in return for neoliberal reforms. In return for debt rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement market principle. Mexico was one of the first states drawn into what was going to become a growing column of neoliberal state apparatuses worldwide.

Extracting surpluses from impoverished Third World populations to pay off international bankers is a common occurrence; the poor countries are effectively subsidizing the rich ones. This happened with Chile, the exemplar of neoliberalism after 1975, in 1982-3; as a result, the gross domestic product fell by nearly 14%, and unemployment shot up to 20%. In the Brady Plan of 1989, financial institutions wrote down 35% of their outstanding debt as a loss in exchange for discounted bonds, guaranteeing repayment of the rest. By 1994, eighteen countries agreed to the plan, forgiving them $60 billion in debt. The IMF also required these countries to neoliberalize; this caused the peso crisis in Mexico in 1995, the Brazilian crisis of 1998, and the collapse of the Argentinian economy in 2001.

The outcomes of the free market are lower wages and higher job insecurity. Given the violent assault on labor organization and labor rights and heavy reliance on disorganized labor reserves in countries such as China, Indonesia, India, Mexico, and Bangladesh, it would seem that labor control and maintenance of a high rate of labor exploitation have been central to neoliberalization all along. The restoration and formation of class power occurs, as always, at the expense of labor. Under the free market, workers were doing worse off, but CEO's gained more and more wealth.

Orientalism

What results from categorizations such as "Oriental?"

... the result is usually to polarize the distinction - the Orient becomes more Oriental, the Western more Western - and limit the human encounter between cultures, traditions, and societies.

How does identity relate to Orientalism?

Orientalism... is a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans.

Stereotyped perceptions of Arabs and Islam has created an anti-Arab and Anti-Islam prejudice in the West that served in creating a European identity:

Three things have contributed to making… the Arabs and Islam into a… raucous matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism...

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon distorted truths:

What gave the Oriental's world its identity was... the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West.... Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient...

... the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West.

What lessons can we learn from Orientalism?

If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, anywhere, at any time.

[The nineteenth century]... developed a large body of Oriental-style European literature very frequently based on personal experiences in the Orient

Miscellaneous

For workers of the laboring classes, industrial life was a "stony desert, which they had to make habitable by their own efforts." One British newspaper in 1834 described unions as "the most dangerous institutions that were ever permitted to take root, under shelter of law, in any country...'"

As communism collapsed by the end of the twentieth century, "capitalism was global and the globe was capitalist." In 1820, the ratio between the income of the top and bottom 20 percent of the world's population was three to one. By 1991, it was eighty-six to one."