Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss it When its Gone : Notes

Here are my notes for Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss it When its Gone.

I got to know about Astra Taylor's work after reading this article, where Taylor reiterated the need to listen to another in order to build and inclusive and vibrant democracy. The book is based on her documentary "What is Democracy?" and goes further into the various structures and forces underpinning democracy.

Due to the nature of the book, most of the main elements are copy-pasted directly from the book so as to drive home the main points Taylor brings up.

Enjoy reading and email me at modernglitch99@gmail.com for any comments or to request any pdfs.

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Chapter 1: Freedom/Equality

>>equality recast as a threat to liberty, freedom became reduced to the right to be left alone, otherwise known as negative liberty (Isaiah Berlin), or freedom as non interference.

>>Democracy has to cope with incredible human variation, a process that can require treating people unequally in order to ensure the possibility of something approaching just outcomes. note: this reminds of this NewYorker article on how we object inequality but can't seem to find a version of equality that works for everyone. Brief notes below

>> Dworkin: equality of resources vs equality of welfare. there is a trade-off between treating people equally and treating them as equals.

>> Arendt: "nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human." if thats true, then equality may not be a self-evident fact about human beings but a human made social construction that we choose to put into practice.

>> Waldon's concept of deep equality.

>> Briefly touches on Elizabeth Anderson's essay where she addresses the fact that benefits extended to unemployed persons do not extend to those who stop working to have a child. This contradiction reveals an assumption that "the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste".

Okay now back to the book.

• Hence, freedom is not independence but interdependence, one in which our unique needs are met by the society in which we live in.

>>Athenian democracy: ensured poor people had a political voice since freedom requires political equality, which requires social equality and economic egalitarianism.

>>USA: democratic ideals gained strength and meaning through frameworks of exclusion.

• to ward off empathy between the exploited (poor white people and slaves), envy and awe of the upper classes was encouraged alongisde a vicarious experience of superiority to racialized populations; W.E.B. Du Bois called this psycholoical wage, as this helped poor white people accept their meager monetary one.

>>Pakistani refugee who was persecuted due to his sect believes that justice means rules and not the freedom to do anything/kill.

>>Anatole France: the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread. justice thus requires treating people differently: equity.

>>Orlando Patterson in Freedom in the Making

• 3 types of freedom; persona;, civic, sovereign.

• sovereign freedom is the freedom of absolute power and we contain it via the concept of rights, those equally distributed entitlements designed to prevent overzealous institutions from encroaching on our individual freedom.

>>Wendy Brown: today there is no meaning of equality and freedom other than the meaning that you see in the market, which in itself is a domain of inequality: freedom of private enterprise vs socialised liberty,

>>Milton Friedman : architect of neoliberalism: gulf between haves and have-nots is not a symptom of a broken system but rather that it is working. when freedom is nothing but the liberty to pursue your own interests and enhance your value, equality becomes the right to throw your hat into the ring and to emerge victorious or fail trying.

>>equality of opportunity/outcome has been ignored: equality is why affirmative action or progressive taxation is wrong.

>>economic eugenics due to social darwinism: americans were told that they had to choose between freedom and survival of the fittest or equality and survival of the unfittest.

>>Engels: security = equal access to the means to meet one’s needs. this is the basis of social freedom.

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Chapter 2: Conflict/Consensus

>>Jane Manbridge

two types of democracy: adversary and unity democracy

• adversary: people have conflicting interest + winner takes all election and majority rules.

• unity democracy:common interests deliberated face to face.

>> Madison:

freedom was the source of faction but constraining liberty was an unacceptable price to pay for peace, the only recourse was to mitigate damage via checks and balance and separation of powers, which together would provide a functional consensus.

>> Athenian democracy:rulers had no property: it was their task to ensure a middling distribution of resources and to prevent both wealth and poverty from destroying the city and breaking it into two. Plato proposed what Madison insists cannot be done: eliminating the primary cause of the mischiefs of faction.

• maintains that though class conflict is inherent to capitalism, does not follow that it must always and forever plague democracy.

>>example of pirate ships as one of the first examples of democracy; they permit him to be captain on condition that they may be captain over him.

>>role of consensus in juries

>>Ranciere equates democracy with dissensus= disruptive and unpredictable process through which an existing consensus is challenged so that a new consensus can be forged.

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Chapter 3: Exclusion/Inclusion

• Bhutan:despite peaceful transfer of power from monarchy to democracy, Lhotshampas from Nepal are treated as second class citizens. They are denied the right to practice their faith and culture and an ethnic cleansing ensued when they demanded these rights.

• Who is included in demos?

>>every democratic community has to define/limit itself: Self-government is a perpetual negotiation over who is included and who isn't.

>>Wendy Brown: you have to know who we the people are. previously limits are based on hierarchy, discrimination.

• ethnonationallist replace demos with ethnos: ethnos purports to be organic and eternal.

• Derrida: autoimmunity: refer to attacks on the political body by the political body in the name of the political body.democracy contains the germs of its own undoing as it maintains itself by limiting others.

• this limitation was never racialised in athenian democracy but it is in the US: Neil Irvin Painter and David Roediger have demonstrated that the concept of whiteness was perpetually in flux: Irish, Italians, Slavic, Hungarian and Jewish immigrants were not considered white.

• rights of man are expansive but rights of citizens are constrained and exclusionary. Haitian revolution abolished all distinctions of colour and elevated blackness as a political category and offered asylum to all africans and indians and those of their blood. challenged and presented an alternative to europe’s truncated conception of democracy.

• “As Barbara and Karen Fields point out in their brilliant study Racecraft, the chief business of slavery in the Caribbean and the American South was the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco for profit, not white supremacy for its own sake. The passage of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act and the “repatriation” of more than one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression provide more recent examples of racialized exclusion serving a strict economic calculus. (“In the case of the Mexican, he is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer,” the U.S. congressional Dillingham Commission reported in 1911.) And let us not forget that the Lhotshampas, invited to Bhutan as a hardworking underclass, were ousted when their land began to become more valuable than their labor. These are but a handful of examples in a seemingly endless litany of exclusions that, while devastating to some, were lucrative to others.

• Rightless people, after all, are easier to exploit, which is why companies encourage the importation of cheap foreign labor and push for immigration laws designed to create an underclass of temporary workers who have few protections and live in fear of deportation.

• “ In response, domestic workers and their unions too often respond by blaming foreigners for stealing jobs and driving down wages instead of pinning blame on employers (though empirical research shows no definitive correlation between immigrant labor and depressed earnings for native workers)

>> The old socialist dream of solidarity between the “exploited and oppressed masses of all lands,” as Eugene Debs phrased it, is hard to achieve when material insecurity pits vulnerable groups against each other, creating conditions under which the comparatively secure—who may be citizens but not particularly privileged ones—feel threatened by those who occupy the social hierarchy’s lower rungs.

• It should come as no surprise, then, that an ethno-nationalist resurgence has taken place against our current backdrop of Gilded Age inequality and neoliberal austerity. The shocking discrepancy between the obscenely affluent and the barely scraping by—the extremes of abundance and poverty—are never far from view when the question of who counts as “the people” becomes pressing. Economic extremes turn the debate over the boundaries of the demos into a struggle between winners and losers, who is on top and who on the bottom, who exploits and who is exploited.”

• Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism":

  • Citizenship as the right to have rights. we tend to think of human rights as a given, something that people possess regardless of nationality but human rights can lose their powers of protection if detached from citizenship. being excluded from the category of citizen leaves individuals profoundly exposed, despite their inclusion in the universal category of human being.

  • Hence rights are not inalienable, they are socially constructed and agreed upon. only counts when we are a part of a political entity.

• Current refugee population and how the law handles them: “Legally, there is no such thing as a climate refugee. Human rights law currently distinguishes between those fleeing war or direct persecution by oppressive regimes, who qualify as “legitimate” asylum seekers and refugees, and those seeking to escape poverty and other forms of hardship, who are deemed “economic migrants” and can be kept out.)”

• “Borders, it’s often said, enforce class apartheid at a global scale, privileging those who win the lottery of birth and keeping out those who happened to have been born somewhere poor through no fault of their own. They also happen to ensure a massive reserve of cheap and desperate labor, an arrangement that, while beneficial to industrialists and investors, makes the world poorer overall.

>>Opening the world’s borders, some economists estimate, could double global GDP. “The grossly unequal international distribution of resources between states, combined with limitations on mobility,” writes political theorist Will Kymlicka, “condemns some people to abject poverty while allowing others a life of privilege.“The principle of equality of citizens, bound to a nation in a specific territory, conflicts with the principle of the equality of persons, an equality that should hold no matter where we happen to be born.”

• Voting rights and non citizens who pay taxes and are permanent residents. New York is Home Act which failed the state senate but would have instituted state citizenship and voting rights to all who live within the state’s borders.

• “Borders opened wide for northern European newcomers while others, beginning with the Chinese, found the gates closed. The Immigration Act of 1917 barred labourers from the “Asiatic Zone” while also targeting eastern and southern Europeans, despised for spreading anarchist and communist ideas and encouraging worker militancy. In the early 1920s America’s popular papers published cartoons linking “race degeneration,” “Bolshevism,” “lower standards,” and “disease” to immigration of people who by today’s definition would qualify as white. And for most of the recent past, inclusion has meant assimilation—the policy known as “Anglo-conformity.”

• “The relatively recent invention of multiculturalism—a philosophy born of necessity—is now considered an “essential element” of Canadianness. Over the course of only a few generations, the Canadian people were invented and reinvented, mutating from British subjects to Canadian nationals to multicultural citizens.

• Still, multiculturalism is controversial—and not only to those who fear the other and resist demographic change. Sociologist Himani Bannerji and others have argued that multiculturalism exaggerates ethnic differences and tips into essentialism, as though cultures do not transform and evolve.

>>At the same time, Bannerji points out, whiteness remains central to multicultural discourse, with all other groups functioning as “cultural fragments” filling out the mosaic’s edges but not its core. But by far and away the biggest problem with multiculturalism has to do with its avoidance of class.

>>By raising a politics of recognition above a politics of redistribution, multiculturalism implies that diversity can create social cohesion, even while economic disparities go unchallenged.”

• Marginalisation: repression and colonialism addressed but meaningful redress is not given while underlying power relations go unchallenged

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Chapter 4: Coercion/Choice

>> social hierarchies and economic inequity that make equality before the law far more of an ideal than a reality. A way to circumvent this would be Finland’s progressive fines.

>>Anatole France retorts ironically: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”

Hobbes: What motivates humans to come together to form a community in the first place?

• Atomized individuals handing over power to an all-powerful entity to protect their personal safety.

• There would no possibility of a community, no justice/property if a sovereign did not have the authority to oblige his subjects to behave themselves, providing “coercive power to tie their hands from rapine and revenge”

• Utter submission and subjugation= the only way to impose order and ensure survival

Colonel Thomas Rainsborough

• Inclusive vision of the social contract that made space for the poorest man while also justifying the rebellion of those who lacked the opportunity to consent.

• Demanded equality under law, right to choose representatives, etc

• Traditionalists: this new idea of social contract would upset social hierarchies

  • Maintained that free individuals will voluntarily choose a relationship of subversive proposition: hierarchy reasserted itself as the consequence of choices freely made.

• Criticised the enclosure project: commonly held land that peasants had were locked out and made private property.

John Locke

• Concerned about arbitrary power of the state: advocated limited government and individual or natural rights

• Single most importat thing is the need to protect private property: justified taking land from indigenous people as they had failed to make improvements.

• Communal ownership had to be eliminated so that American pursuit of happiness could be achieved.

J.S. Mill

• Described the sexual contract as a farce:

• “When the law makes everything which the wife acquires, the property of the husband, while by compelling her to live with him it forces her to submit to almost any amount of moral and even physical tyranny which he may choose to inflict, there is some ground for regarding every act done by her as done under coercion”

Sheldon Wolin

• “While people have long engaged in what the economist Adam Smith famously called the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” commerce alone is not capitalism; rather, capitalism, or a “system of property,” emerges when the possibility of trade becomes the necessity of competitive production and when market opportunities become market imperatives.”

• Food: “After enclosure, when people could no longer farm common land for subsistence but had to produce in excess for the market and its profit motive, capitalism’s power was on display.”

• For liberals: “for-profit healthcare systems looks perfectly just, though it may cost some low-income people their lives, while taxation is seen as the seizure of citizens’ assets under threat of punishment for nonpayment and a form of unacceptable tyranny, even if the revenue raised goes toward providing universal medical coverage.”

Note: wage labourers were subject to coercion but this coercive power of market relations were not developed. Instead, a Puritan view that encouraged work ethic took over.

Great Depression

• New Deal: reconciling capitalist growth and democratic commitments while avoiding progressive investment and planning.

• Economist saw GD as the outgrowth of suppressed demand

  • What workers needed was enough money to afford the American dream.

Cold War

• freedom= choice + abundance

• Consumer bounty + Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev.

Ludwig von Mises + Hayek: marketplace as the paramount space of democratic freedom

• Price mechanism or the reflection of supply and demand in price= perfect way to achieve social order without coercion

• Market democracy= best form of freedom

  • Commercial transactions serve the needs and wants of every demographic niche

  • Automobiles range from luxury to inexpensive cars however there is no such catering in political democracy where the minority follow the decisions of the majority

  • Entrepreneurs are subject to the sovereignty of the buying public: customer is king

• Promoted by Thatcher and Reagan: “private enterprise epitomizes liberty, government is bad, society doesn’t exist, unions must be smashed, taxes are theft, and that “there is no alternative,” as Thatcher famously put it, to unfettered capitalism. ”

>> Corporations have more say than the public: “and insist that choosing from among multiple overpriced (and often inadequate) private insurance plans offers freedom from the coercion of a single universal system. A lack of real choice masquerades as liberty.”

>> “Meanwhile, when foreign citizenries choose other, perhaps more democratic, systems, they aren’t simply left to their own devices; they may be undermined or punished. In 1954 the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup d’état in Guatemala to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected president who supported land reform to benefit the indigenous peasantry, at the behest of private interests, including the U.S.-based and White House-connected United Fruit Company. In 1973, three years after Salvador Allende’s socialist government won a plurality of votes in Chile, the United States toppled his administration in a military coup led by his army chief, the soon-to-be dictator Augusto Pinochet”

Kenneth Arrow: building on Ccondorcet’s second theorem that majority rule is a plausible method of collective decision making but isn't a foolproof one

• “ Democracy is little more than religious dogma dependent on the fanciful notion that there existed something called “the will of the people.” They sought to prove that only individuals, not groups, are able to make coherent, legitimate decisions”

• During a time of civil unrest: attack Rousseauian concepts of a general will and popular sovereignty to undermine those who sought to increase diversity in decision making.

James Buchanan

• Funded by Koch brothers to roll back welfare state.

• public choice economics:we human beings are merely atomized individuals with private preferences.

  • Politics is a competition of private interests in a sphere of personal freedom; what we call “democracy” is in fact nothing more than citizens buying goods or politicians trading favors. In the end, legislators will always and inevitably pander to mass interests, unjustly discriminating against and coercing a wealthy minority in favor of the poorer majority (deemed “takers,” not “makers,” in the more accessible, inflammatory language of the Koch brothers). Yet Buchanan’s model contains a fascinating contradiction: self-interest performs wonders in the domain of the marketplace but causes harm when applied to the workings of government. He explains that elected officials cater to their constituencies, who of course want things such as schools, roads, and hospitals; to pay for those services, the state will unjustly seize the assets of a minority through taxation and perpetually overinvest in services. If people really want them enough, market logic insists, an intrepid entrepreneur will provide.”

• “Nowhere does this mode of thinking acknowledge that imbalances in economic power may result in the poor being dominated by the rich, or that the working class might have the right to fight back. Somehow, even as they collaborate with the opulently wealthy to ensure high returns on their investments, purveyors of public choice and neoliberal economic theories regard the notion of class-based solidarity with contempt—at least when the class in question is the working class.”

• Briefly examines a cooperative and the Mitbestimmungsgesetz in Germany.

• Final conclusion: compulsion that arises from market forces is not freedom but disguised coercion.

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Chapter 5: Spontaneity/Structure

>>Voting Rights Act of 1965: culmination of decades of struggle

• Shelby County v Holder (2013): SC reversed course. Day after the Court made its position, Republican controlled North Carolina state legislature passed the Monster Law: imposed onerous voter ID requirements and eliminated things such as early voting, same-day voter registration, out of precinct voting and pre-registration for 16-17 year olds.

>> Senate: “The principle of equal state representation, Alexander Hamilton pointed out in 1788, “contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.” A scant 2 percent of Americans, residing in the nine smallest states, hold the same power in the Senate as the 51 percent who reside in the nine largest; some votes are worth up to sixty-six times more than others, and urban migration trends mean that this problem will only become more extreme.9 This imbalance partly explains why gun control is such an intractable issue, as the majority of the minority of Americans who live in households that own lethal weapons (over one-third of the population) reside in low-population, high-value-vote states, which helps make amending or restricting the constitutional right to bear arms unreachable. In Senate elections, “one person, one vote” may hold true technically, but not all votes are equal.”

>> “If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal.” What this frequently misattributed quote (sometimes credited to the anarchist Emma Goldman, sometimes to Mark Twain, though it actually seems to have debuted in a small-town op-ed in 1976) fails to note is that, as we have seen, casting a vote is only one aspect of democratic elections. Who or what is ultimately more responsible for Donald Trump’s triumph: the people who voted (who chose Hillary Clinton by a large margin) or the structure of our political system (dominated by the outdated Electoral College, which weighs some ballots more than others and routinely hands victory to the loser of the popular vote)? ”

Electoral systems:

• “With proportional representation in place, voters no longer have to worry about third-party spoilers or the lesser of two evils. Overall competitiveness increases, as does the representation of women and racial minorities, while the problem of gerrymandering disappears.”

• “The United States purports to be a system of majority rule, but our rigged system makes a farce of that promise; a proportional system, in contrast, would disperse power among a much wider range of people, aiming to build consensus through multiparty, coalition government. (Though parliamentary, not presidential, systems, the United Kingdom and Canada would also benefit from a similar overhaul. In the 2017 election in the UK, for example, Conservatives won 42 percent of the aggregate vote but 49 percent of the parliamentary seats. One study determined that under any number of more representative voting systems, Labour would have won.”

>>Ancient Greek system of drawing lots to determine selection to juries and certain government posts: in our current age, this would encourage more investment in public education.

• “Drawing lots is not irrational, it is arational, a consciously neutral procedure whereby political opportunities can be distributed fairly and discord avoided,” David Van Reybrouck argues in his provocative book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. “The risk of corruption reduces, election fever abates, and attention to the common good increases''

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Chapter 6: Expertise/Mass Opinion

• Ideal of liberal democracy posits free subjects rationally deliberating and deciding what is best for them: Tension between educated elites and ordinary people

• Walter Lippman: manufacture of consent: top down method dependent on the small number of channels available through print, radio, television: led to social cohesion, creating an atmosphere of acquiescence and trust.

• Education has been remade in neoliberalism’s image, reconceived as an investment that might pay off in the form of a lucrative career in a competitive market, not for edification.

• “There’s a difference between appointing people based on merit and the principle of meritocracy, which means the rule of a class of educated or otherwise advantaged people while the majority of citizens is frozen out. This is what Young found morally abhorrent and undemocratic, for it serves as a justification for hierarchy and subordination.

  • Meritocracy blurs into technocracy or rule by technical experts. (note: this is akin to the "supermanagers"/hypermeritocracy that Piketty talks about in Chapter 7 of Capital)

• Elites have feared an educated multitude. Labor militants negotiated better wages as well as an increase in free time: driven by deeper craving for intellectual and cultural fulfilment. (immigrants not as hands but for their thoughts as well)

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Chapter 7: Local/Global

>>Syntagma square protests: May 2011

• Banking crisis in the US became a European debt crisis.

• Troika: EC, ECB, IMF: granted power to these authorities in return for an emergency loan of more than 100billion. Loans came with austerity measures while taxes rose and public assets privatised for sale to foreign investors.

• Athenians Taylor met described the lending program and austerity measures as a form of neocolonialism.: takeover by global financial elites who used banks to undermine popular sovereignty.

• Response: SYRIZA, left wing party. Leader Tsipras and Zoe Konstantopolou demanded an audit.

  • Much of Greece’s sovereign debt was illegal and immoral. 90% of bailout fund used to save foreign banks, straight to creditors without passing through greece. Lenders paid back with interest while greece lost sovereignty.

  • “Digging deeper, the researchers found that Greece’s debt spiraled not because of overspending on public services, as the media maintained, but because of the aftershocks of the 2008 global crisis, which led to the country being shut out of international financial markets.19 Rising interest payments produced a “snowball effect” that accounted for two-thirds of the increase of debt between 1980 and 2007 (along the way, interest-rate swap machinations by Goldman Sachs added to the country’s deficit while the investment bank raked in around $800 million for its services).20 The Truth Committee also determined that IMF officials were aware that the Greek debt was unsustainable and that vulnerable populations—the poor, pensioners, women, children, the disabled, and immigrants—would suffer the most.”

• Referendum held and banks were shut before the vote, signalling what would happen if the country defied its creditors. Voted against austerity measures but Tsipras eventually signed the memorandum. Democracy is nothing against neoliberal capitalism.

• “Regulation is needed but Papandreou sees the challenge as one of scale. “When we talk about democracy, we’re talking about human beings making decisions and so you have to have decisions at the human level. It’s a very Aristotelian idea, everything to human measure. But we have created systems that are not too big to fail—they can fail—but too big to be accountable,” Papandreou reflected. “If we’re talking about democratizing our societies, we need to democratize globalization, and that means put some limits on these financial powers.” The European Union has done exactly the opposite, placing tremendous authority in the hands of unelected central bankers and technocrats whose mandates demand they view social policy as a line item on a budget, something to be reduced or cut even when essential to people’s survival.”

>>Due to Geneva school and their aim to promote and strengthen markets: Led to the creation of WTO.

• “Ironically, the initial foundation for the WTO, the Bretton Woods system, was laid in the aftermath of World War II by a very different school of economic thinkers—economist John Maynard Keynes assisted by veteran New Dealers. The men who gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, under the leadership of the United States and Britain, had lived through not just a terrible war but also the Great Depression, and these experiences had “chastened them. A new international monetary order was born, aimed at taming capitalism; it ushered in a period of cross-border economic collaboration, one that led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, precursor to the WTO).

• The new order rested on a monetary exchange system that pegged currencies to the fixed gold value of the U.S. dollar, which provided stability while allowing national governments wide political and economic berth, used by many to provide a robust safety net and pursue policies aimed at full employment. America bolstered the economies of its former rivals not out of altruism but out of anxiety and self-interest; no one wanted to see another 1929, this time on a global scale. They succeeded: a postwar recession was averted and a period described as the “golden age of controlled capitalism” set in, albeit a golden age predicated on American dominance and exploitation of natural resources and raw materials from “peripheral” Third World countries.

• At the same time, Geneva School thinkers saw worrying signs on the horizon: between 1945 and 1960 forty countries, or a quarter of the world’s “population, gained independence, and the United Nations, under the mantle of human rights, was embracing rights to things such as housing, education, and health care for all. As decolonization spread, Geneva School advocates insisted that the rights of foreign investors should be paramount. Corporate interests had to be protected against any form of protectionism or national expropriation, even when undertaken with the democratic mandate or to provide for a nation’s citizens.

• “Unsurprisingly, the economists eventually found eager allies in bankers, businessmen, and lobbying groups including the International Chamber of Commerce. Seeking ways to dampen the democratic flame, they promoted a vision of a “Capitalist Magna Carta,” an idea first hatched in the late 1950s by a coalition led by the Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Abs, a former Nazi collaborator concerned with protecting overseas investments. Their cause was boosted by the fact that the Bretton Woods system was in trouble by 1971. The United States had shifted course when President Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and the period of stable monetary exchange collapsed, causing currency exchange rates and valuations to go wild and inflation to run rampant.

• After 1989, when the Soviet Bloc began to crumble and capitalism reigned triumphant, the remaining controls came off as the IMF, World Bank, and other trade organizations pushed for deregulatory arrangements. Finance and trade fully internationalized, with foreign money flooding into Wall Street, and multinational corporations became even bigger. “Meanwhile, the international monetary order promoted “structural adjustment programs” in the global south, anticipating the loans and accompanying austerity regime that would eventually be foisted upon Greece.”

• “The creation of the WTO in 1995 saw the principles of the Capitalist Magna Carta put into full effect. The WTO and its agreements greatly expanded the realm of the transnational market: whereas the GATT had been limited “to trade in goods, the WTO covered trade in services and intellectual property, largely due to lobbying by the American financial and entertainment sectors. The impact was immediate. By the 2000s, globalization had become an article of faith, one invoked to describe a reality, an aspiration, and an ideology. While the world was far more interconnected and entwined—economically, technologically, and culturally—globalization’s most vigorous boosters envisaged an extreme erasure of boundaries, portending a new age, a “flattened” world, in which the rising tide of unfettered trade would trickle down to lift all boats and transnational consumer habits—people everywhere watching Hollywood movies and eating fast food—would lead to cross-cultural mutual understanding. (What American proponents of this process called “globalization” other countries called “Americanization.”)”

>>Mentions Investor-State Dispute Settlements: foreign gov have rights to sue government for loss of profits including expected future profits

• “There is also no reciprocity: governments cannot sue companies for damages they cause to public health, security, or if they violate a contract (thus nations cannot win a case, they can only not lose one)”

>>Municipalist activist in European cities + participatory democracy. Aim to make Barcelona more hospitable to inhabitants, restrictions on Airbnb and other tech companies that facilitate short-term rentals.

• Democratize public space

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Chapter 8: Present/Future

>> Lawsuits against current governments on the grounds of climate change refer to the large question of democracy’s relationship with time.

• “We are all born into a world we did not make, subject to customs and conditions established by prior generations, and then we leave a legacy for others to inherit. ”

>> Jefferson posed the question of whether the dead should have the ability to rule from the grave.

• “After studying mortality statistics, Jefferson concluded that generations turn over every nineteen years. This, he believed, offered a natural limit for laws, which should have a clear expiration date. Short-lived statutes and regulations, renewed only when living citizens saw fit to keep them, would ensure relevance and vibrancy.”

>>“ Karl Marx expressed sublime horror at the persistent presence of political zombies: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

>>Burke defended inherited privilege and stability of aristocratic government

>>Paine: “There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the ‘end of time,’” he protested. Paine echoed his good friend Jefferson: “[I]t is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.”

>>Piketty: passage of assets across generations: drivers of inequality

• “Because the return on inherited capital has, in recent years, been larger than the rate of economic growth, this unearned wealth balloons faster than the money earned by those who work for a living. As Piketty shows, wealth accumulated in the past grows faster than income and output, making new money less profitable than old. No wonder that the rich have led such vehement attacks on inheritance tax.

• What American conservatives have rebranded as a “death tax” is, more accurately, a tax to prevent the emergence of undemocratic dynasties. Today, an astounding 99.8 percent of estates go untaxed by the federal government.”

>>Debt: under fair circumstances, credit on fair terms can expand possibilities. But under predatory or odious conditions, debt becomes an oppressive burden.

• How debt is an instrument of social control: World Bank and IMF issued loans allowing powerful countries to impose austerity measures known as structural adjustment on emerging nations in the wake of anticolonial struggles.

>>“The fact is, we’re up against ecological limits, not monetary shortages; we are constrained by a carbon budget not a federal one, and we need to remake our economy to reflect this reality. Ample wealth exists to be reclaimed for collective benefit, and bringing finance under democratic control will mean that money will finally serve people, instead of the other way around. Nationalization and other forms of community ownership of energy suppliers and infrastructure will be crucial but must also involve genuine public oversight and control.”

>>Ann Pettifor: pressure to increase income demands that both land and labor be exploited every more intensely.

>> A fundamental reevaluation of labor would mean assessing which work is superfluous and which essential; which processes can be automated and which should be done by hand; what activities contribute to our alienation and subjugation and which integrate and nourish us. “The kind of work that we’ll need more of in a climate-stable future is work that’s oriented toward sustaining and improving human life as well as the lives of other species who share our world,” environmental journalist and political theorist Alyssa Battistoni has written. “That means teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing: work that makes people’s lives better without consuming vast amounts of resources generating significant carbon emissions or producing huge amounts of stuff.”

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Conclusion

“While imprisoned by Fascists in 1929, the Italian Communist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci wrote a searching letter to his younger brother Carlo from his cell, unaware that a fragment of the correspondence was destined to become a well-known slogan. Gramsci offered an assertion of bold if conflicted commitment to political transformation. “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence,” he said, “and an optimist because of will.”

This resonant sentence was embedded in a paragraph grappling with war and hardship, a context more fraught and taxing than a twelve-word maxim can convey. Writing as a brother, militant, and prisoner, Gramsci confesses his hopes to “never again despair and lapse into those vulgar, banal states of mind that are called pessimism and optimism.” Instead, he aims to synthesize and overcome them, holding the two emotions in tandem instead of letting one or the other keep him back (both can lead to disengagement, imagining outcomes, good or bad, to be practically preordained). This delicate balancing act, Gramsci continues, arms him with “unlimited patience, not passive, inert, but animated by perseverance.” The tension produced is generative, helping him to endure conditions of terrible adversity.”