The price of rice

The price of internationally traded rice has roughly doubled in the past several months. There are several independent factors that seem to be contributing causes for this sudden spike in prices (New York Times story, Toronto Globe and Mail story), but the bottom line is that this is very bad news for many developing countries in Asia and Africa. Poor people everywhere spend a high percentage of their income on food. If the price of the chief staple food rises abruptly, this will predictably cause suffering and hunger among the poor. Amartya Sen's penetrating ideas on issues of hunger and famine are as relevant today as they were two decades ago (The Political Economy of Hunger, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). And, as Sen discovered, prices and incomes are critical determinants of malnutrition and famine. And recall that current estimates of the number of malnourished people in the world approach one billion!

Another important symptom of food distress for the world's poor -- the UN food program announced a few days ago that high prices have exhausted its budget (emergency appeal). It has called upon donor nations to provide immediate supplemental funds to permit it to continue its crucial programs.

This shift in international market conditions will also have the potential for creating civil unrest in several countries. There are already signs of urban unrest in the Philippines, where rice riots and disturbances have already occurred. The Times story cited above mentions food riots in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. Governments that fail to assure the availability of affordable food supplies will be reminded of the volatility of the issue of food -- from medieval Europe to revolutionary France to Poland in the 1970s.

There seems to be a similar issue percolating in North America -- a sustained rise in the prices for wheat and maize over the past year. In this case the cause seems to be the increased demand for grain created by ethanol production on a large scale. Americans spend a smaller percent of income on food, so the immediate consequences are less damaging to population welfare. But this trend suggests a similar caution that we need to heed -- we need to pay attention to the stability and sustainability of the world's food system.

Food security is an important dimension of a developing country's long-term welfare and stability. These issues haven't gotten much attention in the international press in the past decade or so. Neo-liberal doctrines, market restructuring, and the Washington Consensus have pushed these more material aspects of economic development to a lower priority and visibility. But maybe current conditions will bring the issue back to center stage.

Anonymity and civility

The topic of civility on the internet has gotten a lot of ink recently (posting, posting, posting). People flame each other online in ways they would never do in a public meeting. And this tendency is most extreme in anonymous postings on blogs and web sites.

What is it about anonymity that sometimes brings out the worst in people? Fundamentally it is the separation between speech and accountability that sometimes poisons anonymous speech. Plato speculated about the Ring of Gyges in the Republic: how would people behave if their actions were entirely untraceable? And English moralists had similar fears about the Masquerade in the eighteenth century: social functions in which men and women attended in masked costumes were bound to create moral disorder (web page). Anonymous speech on the internet seems to provide a real-world test of the proposition. And, by the evidence, there are a fair number of people who will take the cloak of anonymity as permission to express outrageous, harmful, and fundamentally disrespectful things to and about others.

And it is interesting to realize that this is not a twenty-first century development. One of E. P. Thompson's final books was a careful study of the social conflicts in rural eighteenth-century England (Whigs and Hunters), where he focuses on the "Black Act" -- a package of laws designed to squelch poachers, timber thieves, and other rural misbehavior. Two behaviors in particular were prohibited with severe penalties -- going about in a mask and conveying anonymous, often threatening, letters. Anonymity was a tool that was used by individuals and groups to threaten and coerce landlords, wardens, and gamekeepers. Thompson describes a raft of anonymous letters and their social function in "The Crime of Anonymity" (included in Albion's Fatal Tree).

Here are some examples of anonymous letters that Thompson quotes in the appendix to "The Crime of Anonymity":

Ms orpen i am informd that you and your family whent before last year and glent up what the pore should have had but if you do this year it is our desire as soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire for it is a shame you should rob the pore ...

...

this will all com true
this is to give notis that you millers and shop keeper all
kill the over Seeer
had best to take keare of youer selves and mind that you
arnt kild and if you dont sink with your folower [flour] we will make
tom Nottage is a dam Rouge
you sink for we have rob your Mill seavel [several] Times and we
kill him for one there is 4 more we will kill

...

To The Damd Eternal Fire Brands of Hell Belonging to Odiham and its Vicinity. In other Words to the Damd Villans of Farmers that with hold the Corn that please God to send for the Poeple of the Earth away from them.

...

And a response from the forces of order --

ONE HUNDRED
Guineas Reward

Whereas some wicked and evil disposed Person or
Persons, did write a Letter, addressed to Joseph Bulmer,
threatening to take his Life, and to burn his Premises, unless
he would advance the Shipwright's Wages--and did put the
same Letter under the Door of the Compting-House of
Messrs. R. Bulmer and Co. in South Shields, where the same
was found on the Morning of the 14th Inst.

Whoever will give Information so that he, she, or they,
may be convicted thereof, will be paid a Reward of ONE
HUNDRED GUINEAS by the said Messrs. Bulmer, on
the Conviction of such Offenders or any of them ...

...

So what are we to make of this curious behavior from two centuries ago and from the present? One piece of the story of anonymity is the situation of "speaking truth to power". Anonymous threats and accusations are "weapons of the weak" in James Scott's terms (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance). They are a way for powerless people and groups to express and advocate their claims without repression. And they can be a potent social instrument of power as well, constraining the power and behavior of the high and mighty. It is why the complaint box doesn't require a sign-in process. Thompson puts it this way: "The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy, in which forms of collective organized defence are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization" (Albion's Fatal Tree, 255).

But anonymity can also be a tool of oppression and intimidation. Anonymous messages and actions can be intimidating and harmful on a range of levels, from irritating and insulting to slanderous and reputation-destroying. The anonymity of the klansman's sheet and hood was deliberate: it made it all the more impossible for the people oppressed and threatened by the KKK to retaliate against the pharmacist or gas station owner who cowered within. And it permitted the threat of Klan violence to be all but irresistible.

The discussions that are occurring online about civility often invoke Jurgen Habermas and his ideas about the public sphere as a place for open and civil debate (e.g., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). (James Gordon Finlayson's Habermas: A Very Short Introduction gives a very good introduction to Habermas's thought.) The idea here is that publicity is an essential component of a democratic polity: people engage with each other in a public space, and they embody an ethic of mutual respect that permits profound disagreements to occur without the collapse of civility. And, through these public interactions the citizens develop the possibility of a deeper consensus about what is to be done.

So it seems that the categories of privacy, anonymity, civility, and public democracy are all tied together somehow. And the internet gives this mix of sometimes conflicting values a particular urgency.

William Gibson's future

All Tomorrow's Parties expressed a lot of it: William Gibson's dark but somehow humane picture of what the modern world might be heading for. First the dark part -- nation states that have fallen apart into NoCal and SoCal and the Kombinat states; whole communities of people living anarchically and precariously -- but astonishingly, harmoniously -- on the earthquake-damaged Oakland Bridge ("interstitial communities," as Gibson's observers call them); corporations that use deadly force to recruit top scientists from each other; weird new viruses that cause deadly epidemics and psychotic disorders; and, of course, the matrix of computer systems, hackers, console cowboys, and software simulations that constitute a counterpoint reality to all of it. And there is a lot more in Gibson's imagination: a trend spotter who has a visceral allergy to brand marks, a Japanese anthropologist studying the micro-communities of what has become of North America, and, most recently, an elusive Chinese-Cuban crime family in quiet war with the national security apparatus of the United States government (Spook Country). Across the whole canvas there is a feeling of what Gibson refers to as "bit-rot" in a website that's beginning to degrade: a social order that is no longer functioning.

So what is the humane part of the corpus? So many of the characters Gibson creates are decent, moral people, coping within the context of social breakdowns that they can't entirely evade but can somehow live around. There is Chevette, the taut, orphaned bicycle messenger in San Francisco, living with the aging Skinner on the Oakland Bridge, bringing hot-and-sour soup up to the tiny cubicle Skinner has created on an upper reach of the bridge. There is Rydell, the ex-cop, ex-private security guard for a post-modern convenience shop, with a generous spirit and a willingness to go to bat for his friends. (He'll go up against a team of assassins with a chain gun, if he needs to. ) And there is Fontaine, the used-stuff dealer on the bridge, friend to Skinner, and -- once again -- a morally grounded man coping in a world of nutty and irreversible breakdowns.

What the social message seems to be is something about non-sustainability. It's the opposite of utopia; it's a cool vision of what some of the most visible currents in contemporary society might lead to. (The currents that are highlighted include unfettered corporate power, accelerating breakdown of social welfare systems, states that no longer govern, cities that simply "sprawl" from Boston to Atlanta, and technologies that play an entirely ambiguous role in supporting human welfare.) Here is how things can fail to work out for us, Gibson seems to be saying. Our complex, interdependent, technologically skilled but socially inept civilizations seem to be falling apart in Gibson's worlds. And ordinary people have to find their own human solutions, locally and provisionally. There's a recurring motif of "re-use" of things -- the knife that Skinner forges from a motorcycle chain and gifts to Chevette after his decline and death, or the intricate "collage" boxes that figure into the plot of Neuromancer. And re-use maybe points the way to a greater degree of sustainability?

It's not exactly a social philosophy. It's not Hobbes, for example, offering a description of the state of nature and the war of all against all. And it's not Rousseau, expecting community to emerge from the commonality of shared interests. The category of power comes into the novels again and again -- power used capriciously, self-interestedly, corporately, and unforgivingly. But at the same time the universe that Gibson describes is not one lacking moral rules. The people involved in the novels express their own commitments, loyalties, and values. But what does not seem to be possible in Gibson's world is a polity -- an organized community establishing a system of law and assuring the basic welfare of all its citizens. "Justice" is not a part of the picture. The closest thing to a functioning society that is described in the novels is the bridge community -- the refugees from San Francisco who have taken up precarious residence on the Oakland Bridge, building ramshackle shelters, shops, gardens, and pubs out of recycled industrial materials, bits of plastic, and used motorcycle parts. And the bridge community seems to be entirely anarchic -- the only order that exists is the order that is created and enforced by the bridge dwellers themselves.

Gibson's novels are placed in the genre of science fiction. But the genre isn't quite right. Really, they could be called "futurist social fiction" in the way that Thomas More's Utopia was social fiction: a vision of what a social realm might look like. And in this description, the work is very appropriate content for ChangingSociety.

Authoritarian "democracy" in Russia

Is authoritarianism gaining a new lease on life?

Clifford Levy's coverage of Russia's politics in the New York Times makes the situation crystal-clear: Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, are determined to govern without opposition, and are fully prepared to use all the forms of intimidation and coercion that are necessary in order to succeed (article). The use of bogus charges and show trials against potential rivals is familiar from the example of Mikhail Khodorkovskii, former boss of the Yukos gas monopoly. (See the Amnesty International dossier on this case; dossier.) The arrest of Gary Kasparov prior to the recent elections is another example.

What Levy's coverage this week adds to this highly publicized willingness to use the power of the state and judiciary against rivals, is a similar heavy-handedness on the ground. Levy documents the party machine's use of its power to compel supporting votes from auto workers through threats made by the foremen; the machine's use of school children to coerce the votes of their parents and to monitor their political choices; and the use of intimidation and harassment to silence the activities of one of Russia's few opposition parties, the Union of Right Forces. Quoting Levy from this article, "Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy. He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes."

Why is this a problem?

First, it is a huge problem for the political rights of ordinary Russian citizens. Citizens cannot freely decide what candidate or party to support -- both because their own behavior as voters is supervised, and because they can't gain access to organized voices advocating for alternative policies. This silencing of opposition parties means a limitation of the agenda of discourse to the issues and candidates favored by the ruling party. And this means that the ability of ordinary citizens to have a meaningful voice in the large policy choices that the Russian government inevitably will make is reduced to a blade of grass.

But Putin's willingness to use authoritarian power to control democratic activities also means that Russian citizens are much less able to advocate for very simple local issues and needs -- environmental change, better transportation, better education. This is because every effort to organize in support of a local priority or need becomes, potentially, a sign of potential dissidence. And as such, it needs to be repressed. So activism around common local issues -- environment, transportation, education -- is also silenced.

A third harm that is created by this authoritarian rule, is the fact that it shelters the ability of powerful interests to continue their exploitation of the Russian economy. One of the social mechanisms through which corruption and criminal behavior by large companies are detected and deterred is the operation of investigative journalism and a free press. But Putin's rough treatment of the media and the press is well known; so investigating public or private corruption is a dangerous activity. (How dangerous it is, we know, when we consider the string of killings of investigative journalists on Putin's watch; see the article in Business Week on this subject.)

Some conservative observers in Russia say that the Russian people want a strong, effective government, and this requires strong measures. But this is untenable on its face. If people genuinely wanted the government and policies of Putin's party, then open and free elections would be easily won. So the behavior of the state actually expresses a deep lack of confidence in the democratic acceptability of the policies of the party.

Finally, it is hard to see how Russia can develop into the modern European state that it wants to be, without genuinely subordinating itself to meaningful democratic institutions and individual rights. Russia will be a stronger society and, in the long run, a more innovative and creative society, when it recognizes the ultimate responsibility of a state: to preserve the rights and liberties of its citizens and to respect their will through fair and free democratic processes.

We may have thought that the book has been written on authoritarian government in the twentieth century. But Vladimir Putin is writing new chapters, and they add up to a tragedy for the Russian people.

(See this link for a more theoretical blog entry on the authoritarian state.)

Ethnic violence and political entrepreneurs

We've seen horrendous instances of murderous violence among groups in a given society in the past century, often along ethnic and religious lines. Most recently there is the example of Kenya (article, article, article). But in the past twenty years we've also witnessed Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka, India, and Iraq. (This is deliberately not to include societies like El Salvador or Guatemala where organized militias or death squads have deliberately murdered thousands of innocent people; these conflicts appear to have a different social cause.)

My question here is just a small piece of this large subject. What are the circumstances that cause apparently ordinary people to attack, torture, and murder their neighbors?

Commentators sometimes try to understand these horrific outbreaks in terms of a background theory of essential ethnic or religious identities defining groups that can then explode into murderous intra-societal violence. This is what some call a primordialist theory -- the language of "tribalism" suggests the same idea. On this theory, ethnic conflict is taken as inherent in ethnic difference.

However, it is important to realize that this theory is almost always incorrect. The fact of ethnic or religious difference by itself does not create violence between groups, and often these identities don't even figure importantly in ordinary social life. Instead, there are other factors at work in specific social circumstances that bring about ethnic mobilization and violence. (Donald Horowitz goes through many specific examples of multi-ethnic societies -- some with violence and some without; Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface.) Ethnic violence appears to be almost always a political process, involving leadership and organization.

In particular, political scientists who study ethnic conflict argue that there are usually underlying processes of political mobilization underway, led by opportunistic leaders who deliberately mobilize support around ethnic identities and ethnic hatred. These instigators can be called "political entrepreneurs", and their strategies can be discerned in many of the century's worst instances of inter-group violence. Hatred and violence are simply tools of mobilization for these leaders and parties. (Atul Kohli goes through a careful analysis of Hindu nationalist mobilization leading to anti-Muslim violence in Democracy and Discontent. Ashutosh Varshney's Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India is also an important contribution.)

And it appears that evidence of just these sorts of processes of opportunistic mobilization by leaders on the ground can be found in the reporting available about the current violence in Kenya. Reportage in January about the post-election violence in Kenya provided multiple reports of messages of hatred being disseminated through cell phone networks, and of advance preparation of the organized violence that would emerge -- before the election occurred. The violence that swept across Kenya was not a primordial outburst; it was an organized political effort -- or so the reports would indicate.

These "ethnic hatred" politicians have done enormous harm in so many societies; and it must be a first order of priority to find ways of stamping out this form of politics.

(Here is a recent article from a Kenya newspaper with more information.)

Turkey's debate over the head scarf

There is a big debate going on in Turkey today over the governing party's plan to relax restrictions of women's use of the head scarf in public places such as schools and government buildings (article). Turkey declared itself as a secular state in the 1920's. Restrictions on the wearing of the scarf are defended as ways of keeping religion out of politics and the public sphere. The governing party won election in 2007 and raised questions about its attitudes towards secularism. Would it favor a gradual movement towards an Islamic state in Turkey? And is this current legislative effort a step against the secularism of the state?

The question is further clouded by the role of families and men in the woman's choice of whether to wear the scarf. Is this a free choice or a coerced choice? And if coerced, is this another independent reason for legislation -- essentially, to reinforce the ability of women and girls to make their own choices? The issue is complex and has also been debated in France as well -- for some of the same reasons of secularism and personal freedom and for the additional social goal of assimilation for France's minorities.

And some observers in Turkey maintain that the debate isn't really about individual liberties of religion and dress at all, but rather about politics: who supports the secularist elites in the military and economic leadership, versus which social groups support the more religious political parties.

There aren't many areas where the US has solved a social issue fairly well. But maybe this is one such area. There are several million Muslims in the United States. And there is a healthy degree of social harmony among almost all of the religious communities in the United States. In particular, there is no legal limitation on the right of women and girls to wear the scarf (and the burka, for that matter), and a wide public acceptance of these religious and cultural practices. Within American ideas of individual freedom of expression, questions of dress and religious symbols fall pretty much within the scope of the individual's zone of choice rather than being subject to state regulation. This reflects John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty -- the state should refrain from regulation of conduct that is self-regarding and doesn't impose concrete harms on others.

This liberal thought about freedom of choice converges with another important civic value -- that of respecting differences among citizens. And so speech and forms of conduct that are primarily related to one's private and personal choices need to be left unfettered. This is sometimes put as a principle of tolerance -- but maybe it is better to describe it as a principle of mutual respect and the acceptance of difference. If we pull these principles of a liberal society together, maybe it amounts to a policy that the Turkish people might want to support -- to be tolerant of the head scarf and to espouse a society based on equality and liberty.

Moreover, there are some positive social goods that come out of this approach -- the civility that this approach encourages among citizens of different faiths is also an important component of social harmony and secular equality.

Against these conclusions, advocates of the restrictions might argue that these are western philosophical ideas that don't reflect Turkey's complex history very well. They might argue that Millian liberalism is too simple a lens through which to view a many-sided issue such as this.

So the question here is this: whether it is useful to bring classical ideas of liberalism and the proper relationship between state and individual liberties, into this complicated and historically extended debate in Turkey over the head scarf?

Social progress in India?

How much social progress has India made since Independence sixty years ago? According to economist V. K. Ramachandran, not very much when it comes to life in the countryside. (Hear my interview with Ramachandran on iTunes and on my web page.) Ramachandran gives a profile of the social problems faced by India at the time of Independence -- depths of income poverty, illiteracy, avoidable disease, and the worst forms of caste, class and gender oppression in the world -- and then judges that, appallingly, these same problems continue in the countryside without significant change. And this failure derives from the country's failure to solve its agrarian question. Poverty, inequality, and deprivation continue to be rampant in rural society. And this persistence derives from the failure to address the fundamental relations of property and power in the countryside. Moreover, the processes of globalization and liberalization have, if anything, intensified these problems.

Professor Ramachandran is a research professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, and is the author of Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study.

What is involved in solving the agrarian question, according to Ramachandran? Ramachandran refers to these goals of agrarian transformation -- freeing the countryside of landlordism; freeing the working peasantry and agricultural workers from their current fetters; guaranteeing the means of income; redistributing agricultural land; providing rural working people with house sites and homes; creating conditions for the liberation of people of oppressed castes and tribes and women; to ensure formal education; and to achieve the general democratization of life and cultural development in India. "Without that, there is no progress."

Professor Ramachandran takes issue with the view of India that appears to be emerging in Japan and the United States -- as a country with shopping malls, hi-tech companies, and rapid economic growth. These images are true of some places in India -- but they have little relevance to conditions in rural India. (And the population of India continues to be at least 70% rural and agricultural.) The progress that has occurred in the countryside is meaningful -- agriculture has increased its productivity significantly since 1960, and India is now grain-self-sufficient. India is no longer locked into a "ship-to-mouth" existence. But these changes in the productivity of agriculture have not been associated with changes in the basic institutions present in the countryside -- what Ramachandran refers to as the "agrarian structure." And these social relations continue to create a system that entrenches inequality and deprivation for peasants and agricultural workers. Ramachandran maintains that three "new" inequalities have emerged -- inequalities between regions, inequalities between crops, and inequalities between classes. (As an expert on agricultural workers, Ramachandran is in a good position to observe what has happened for this segment of India's rural population.)

Ramachandran is an activist-scholar, and he is involved in a large collaboration with other scholars to provide a review of conditions in villages in a growing list of states in India. Ramachandran underlines the point that there is great variation across the map of India. The goal of these studies is to provide a detailed snapshot of the social conditions in the villages -- studies of the oppressed classes, tribes, and women; the state of village amenities (sewerage, clean water, roads, education). Over a number of years the goal of the research effort is to arrive at a more nuanced description of the conditions of rural life across many states in India. This research is highly valuable, since it permits disaggregation of descriptions of the countryside that are often based on aggregated data.

An interesting feature of this research project is the fact that it is deliberately linked to the activist organizations of peasants, workers, and women. The researchers consult with the agrarian activists to discover what the most important issues are -- and then to focus research effort on discovering the social details associated with these issues. And Ramachandran is emphatic in saying that the rigor of scientific investigation can and should be combined with this collaboration with the activist organizations. In fact, he indicates that the organizations themselves are insistent about this point. "Don't lose your academic rigor," the leaders of the organizations insist.

There is a lot more in the interview. But the bottom line is that Ramachandran offers a really good example of the engaged scholar. And the kind of social research that he and his colleagues are doing is well designed to help to diagnose some of the changes and public policies that are needed in India.