I need to study Havel! I had no idea he said this, and what you make of it seems both insightful and true. Your analysis reminds me of that of Sheldon Wolin in his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. “Totalitarian consumerism” seems to be Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism, in which, he says, “the corporate world is both the principal supplier of political leadership and the main source of political corruption; and when small investors occupy a position of powerlessness comparable to that of the average voter. ‘Shareholder democracy’ belongs on the same list of oxymorons as ‘Superpower democracy.’”
I love your remarks on this week’s Lost Prophets podcast about the missing economic incentives for a more robust civic life today. Your example of Stokey Carmichael and his linking of economic self-sufficiency in Black neighborhoods and Black power really struck me as Tocqueville with economic teeth. (I think I’ve tended to read Tocqueville without economics, but he does discuss associations as meeting economic needs and as a consequence keeping the government from getting larger in order to meet them.)
I'm fascinated by parallel polis movements, and the example of Poland surely puts the economic piece front and center with the political. Historian David Ost calls this strategy in Poland, developed mostly by Michnik and Jacek Kuroń, "anticipatory democracy." Of course, a lot of what are called prefigurative movements (OWS and last year's pro-Palestinian encampments) establish this on a smaller scale. I even think the New Testament's book of Acts accounts for a parallel polis against that of Rome and its local client rulers. (These churches had a counter-imperial economic model, too.) I’m reading James C. Scott, too, and wondering whether the barbarians he describes in “The Art of Not Being Governed” create similar parallel poleis in the hills . . . Gotta get these sociologists, economists, theologians, historians, and political theorists talking to one another!
Would love your thoughts @Russell Arben Fox @Celeste Marcus @Connective Tissue @Michael Shuman @Nils Gilman @Elias Crim @Pete Davis @Douglas Rushkoff @Sam Adler-Bell @Timothy Snyder @Addison Del Mastro @Matt Stoller @damonlinker
I think the comparison is quite right on several levels. Have you read Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse? It’s dated in a variety of ways (the obsession with Peak Oil), but I think it captures well the sense of the parallel political bankruptcies of the two systems — and also the way things can come apart quickly and totally once the process of reform gets kicked off.
Also: to understand how people cope with living inside a society that is “post-totalitarian” in Havel’s sense, I warmly recommend Yurchak’s Everything was Forever Until It Was No More. Brilliant book about the language games people play to preserve small autonomies while keeping themselves out of trouble.
Helpful and interesting thank you. It’s lining up with where my thinking is going in term of what it looks like to remake the relationship between citizen and state. I’m in Australia so we’re a few steps behind (but gee we love to follow the US over the cliffs) and every bit of research I do here indicates the need to rebalance power at the citizen level.
@Jonathan Parkes Allen
I need to study Havel! I had no idea he said this, and what you make of it seems both insightful and true. Your analysis reminds me of that of Sheldon Wolin in his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. “Totalitarian consumerism” seems to be Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism, in which, he says, “the corporate world is both the principal supplier of political leadership and the main source of political corruption; and when small investors occupy a position of powerlessness comparable to that of the average voter. ‘Shareholder democracy’ belongs on the same list of oxymorons as ‘Superpower democracy.’”
I love your remarks on this week’s Lost Prophets podcast about the missing economic incentives for a more robust civic life today. Your example of Stokey Carmichael and his linking of economic self-sufficiency in Black neighborhoods and Black power really struck me as Tocqueville with economic teeth. (I think I’ve tended to read Tocqueville without economics, but he does discuss associations as meeting economic needs and as a consequence keeping the government from getting larger in order to meet them.)
I'm fascinated by parallel polis movements, and the example of Poland surely puts the economic piece front and center with the political. Historian David Ost calls this strategy in Poland, developed mostly by Michnik and Jacek Kuroń, "anticipatory democracy." Of course, a lot of what are called prefigurative movements (OWS and last year's pro-Palestinian encampments) establish this on a smaller scale. I even think the New Testament's book of Acts accounts for a parallel polis against that of Rome and its local client rulers. (These churches had a counter-imperial economic model, too.) I’m reading James C. Scott, too, and wondering whether the barbarians he describes in “The Art of Not Being Governed” create similar parallel poleis in the hills . . . Gotta get these sociologists, economists, theologians, historians, and political theorists talking to one another!
Would love your thoughts @Russell Arben Fox @Celeste Marcus @Connective Tissue @Michael Shuman @Nils Gilman @Elias Crim @Pete Davis @Douglas Rushkoff @Sam Adler-Bell @Timothy Snyder @Addison Del Mastro @Matt Stoller @damonlinker
I think the comparison is quite right on several levels. Have you read Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse? It’s dated in a variety of ways (the obsession with Peak Oil), but I think it captures well the sense of the parallel political bankruptcies of the two systems — and also the way things can come apart quickly and totally once the process of reform gets kicked off.
Also: to understand how people cope with living inside a society that is “post-totalitarian” in Havel’s sense, I warmly recommend Yurchak’s Everything was Forever Until It Was No More. Brilliant book about the language games people play to preserve small autonomies while keeping themselves out of trouble.
I’ll read it later today—thanks for the heads-up!
Helpful and interesting thank you. It’s lining up with where my thinking is going in term of what it looks like to remake the relationship between citizen and state. I’m in Australia so we’re a few steps behind (but gee we love to follow the US over the cliffs) and every bit of research I do here indicates the need to rebalance power at the citizen level.