The Sources of Social Power

Sometime last month-ish, I finished the last volume of Mann's tetralogy. Want to write at more length about it. Interesting to see that the decline of the US as the global superpower was absolutely clear to Mann by 2012, following Bush-era imperial overreach and the Great Recession (which he aptly calls "The Great Neoliberal Recession"). Now I think no one is in any doubt about that. Mann's bleak assessment of the prospects for moderating climate change--as he says, a product of ALL the sources of social power, economic, political, military, and ideological--is compelling, and, of course, the prognosis has only worsened with the last decade.

Perhaps most useful for The Times We Live In is Mann's emphasis on "politicized capitalism" ("access to the state confer[s] possession of private corporations") as the typical outcome of neoliberal reforms in Latin America, East Asia, and Russia. And now also, we can add, the USA as well. A Marxist would say, "Politicized capitalism? Is there any other kind?" but the point is not to deny the always-political nature of capitalism but to emphasize that this particular entanglement of political and economic networks, with states and parties losing their partial autonomy, is distinctive to the post-postcolonial and neoliberal era. "Policized capitalism" seems to me a more revealing label than "authoritarianism" for what we now have locally. As Mann's account of the postwar "Golden Age" emphasizes, capitalism's beneficial effects depended on caging it politically with strong labor movements and their parties. Today we have not simply an unrestrained, lawless state but the mechanisms of the state unleashed for the benefit of individual capitalists—to the detriment of capitalism itself.

Anyway sometime I'll blog my "but what about CULTURE" thoughts. Reading Mann was a really moving experience, almost comparable to what I got from reading Bourdieu, or Proust.

Continuing on with Mann's history of it all. He seems to have finished vols. 3 and 4 simultaneously but divided up the resulting Monster Fun Book into two, sort of like Brendan Sanderson partitioning the last Wheel of Time, except the patriarchal authoritarians with the messianic ideology don't win in Mann's 1890–1945 story. Ha ha! I am funny!

Mann continues to be lovely to read, though in going through this volume I kept finding myself saying "ruh-roh" as some element of the fascist ascent that had an obvious parallel in our time fell into place. Mann is darkly convincing about fascism as a distinctive, and distinctively effective, modern phenomenon, which came with a compelling ideology of renewal, dealt ruthlessly and successfully with its political opponents (including the old-regime conservatives who thought they could manipulate the fascists), and used militarism effectively both in war and as an economic policy. In Mann's account, without Hitler's maniacal overreach into Russia, Germany might well have succeeded in dominating the continent. On the flipside of this is Mann's remarkable suggestion that the rapid end of the European empires and the rise of US power (as well as the stability of the Soviet regime) were in a sense contingent results of World War II.

Mann is a "grand theorist" with his "four sources of power" and his totalizing history, but in a way the best part of his account is his determination to root out contingency. He is very good on the causes of the Great Depression as a set of "overlapping causal chains" rather than a single process. Likewise on the contingencies that allowed the labor movement and Roosevelt to make the New Deal happen in the US—and limited its eventual reach. Meanwhile, if you want Swedish Social Democracy, your labor movement needs to have agrarian allies.

Amazing. Civilization as a "caging" process. The histories of some hitherto existing societies are histories of class struggle, which ones, and why. Organizational outflanking.