> And, really, are we so sure that pursuing this
> strategy - of making things worse before they get
> better - actually works? Does such a thing force
> people to revolt?
http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/newlawbooks-l/msg01239.html
Moore, Barrington Jr. INJUSTICE. The Social Bases Of Obedience And Revolt. Published by: Sharpe: 1978, ISBN: 0-87332-114-6, 540 pages. "In search of general elements behind the acceptance of injustice, Barrington Moore, Jr. discusses the Untouchables of India, Nazi concentration camps, and the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority. The great center of the book is a creative examination of German workers from 1848 - 1920. This book explores a large part of the world's experience and understanding of injustice."
[PDF] Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism BARRINGTON MOORE , JR ... Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (1972), Injustice: The Social ... http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/moore86.pdf
I. USA These lectures will be an attempt to explain the major simi-larities and differences in the systems of authority and inequality in the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. By focusing on the developing character of bureaucracies in each of the three societies we can make comparisons that bring out essential char-acteristics in each case. At the start it will be useful to give a very brief sketch of the major historical factors that have determined the shape of au-thority and social inequality in capitalist and socialist societies. One is the body of doctrines, such as Thomas JeffersonÃs synthesis of Enlightenment theories, and their intellectual successors as they crystallized in Marxism-Leninism. Such social theories present a continuing diagnosis of social ills and a remedy for them. Though the remedies seldom work, by providing a framework for under-standing human society, the theories have an enormous influence on the policies of rulers. A second set of factors is the require-ments of industrialization, that is, ( a ) how to get the resources to build machines; ( b ) how to put the machines together with men and women to turn out huge numbers of new products; and ( c ) , how to distribute these products among the general popula-tion. A third set of factors, which I shall not discuss in any detail, includes those that promote or prevent the emergence of a single ruler in a police state. T h e last one, which it will also be neces-sary to neglect, is the context of international relations. This con-text can often be the main factor that determines whether or not an historically new type of society can get started. Thus French intervention was crucial in the American Revolution, while the absence of powerful Western intervention was crucial to the suc-cess of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions. T h e [103] Page 4 104 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values main point to emerge through these brief comments is that every major country faces a very similar set of problems and issues in the course of industrialization - including whether or not to in-dustrialize. But the solutions differ. Prior traditions and social institutions together with the international context largely deter- mine the solutions. Turning now to the United States and beginning with a look at current doctrines, the first impression is likely to be the absence of any single body of ideas that could channel political or more general discussion about the character of this society. There is no agreed-upon diagnosis and remedy for our ills, not even one that could be widely attacked because it seems factually mistaken and morally wrong. (Factual and moral errors do not necessarily have anything to do with one another.) Instead one sees a rank pro-fusion of incompatible ideas. They range from the most nonsensi-cal forms of nativist or romantic anti-rationalism - which have been on the increase lately - through pragmatic realism to highly abstruse forms of rationalism and idealism. Yet this apparent con- fusion may conceal significant recurring themes. To find out we shall have to look more closely at patterns of social behavior as well as ideas. For a long time there has been a noticeable reluctance to accept any kind of authority in the United States. No individual or office is immune to criticism, sometimes quite savage criticism and abuse. In the absence of an hereditary aristocracy Americans do not have the habit of deference that has been ascribed to the British. Amer-icans have heroes, mainly figures in sports and entertainment with a scattering in space exploration and other dramatic areas of science. But they lack comparable figures of authority. Well below the level of national political leadership one finds the same reluctance to accept authority. Some thirty years ago a distin-guished anthropologist observed that bosses, politicians, teachers, and ìbig shotsî were all accepted only at a discount in American Page 5 [M OORE ] Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism 105 society insofar as their positions implied authority. 1 More recently there has appeared a substantial body of evidence from opinion polls indicating a loss of confidence in political and economic leadership since that time. T h e decline began during the war in Vietnam and has continued since the end of that war. 2 Such a loss of trust implies a further deterioration of authority, since authority implies trust in those who command. It is worthwhile to try to locate somewhat more precisely the time when this loss of authority took place and the causes of this failure. There are good reasons for holding that it derived from the disintegration during the 1960s and 1970s of the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Nearly forty years ago Hans Morgenthau remarked that if one studied this coalition in a seminar, one would conclude that it was an impossibility. T h e coalition was put together with urban workers, recently enfran-chised urban immigrants, and intellectuals - together the sources of its liberal reformist wing - a broad spectrum of the then-rural South with a substantial reactionary component, and other discon-tented farmers in the Midwest, the whole topped off with a nu-merically small but fairly influential set of business leaders who saw no other way out of the Depression. The New Deal did not put an end to the Depression. T h e boom of the Second World W a r did that. Nevertheless the coalition was successful for a long time, from 1932 to the 1960s and beyond. Its main policies were economic growth, encouragement of unions, and social welfare expenditures at home for the sake of equity and social peace. Abroad its policies emphasized the support of preferably but not necessarily liberal regimes as a bulwark against Communist ex-pansion and in order to create a favorable climate for American 1 Cora Dubois, " The Dominant Value Profile of American Culture," in Paul Hollander, ed., American and Soviet Society: A Render i n Comparative Sociology and Perception (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p . 26. 2 For a review of the evidence see Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, " The Decline of Confidence in American Institutions," Political Science Quarteri) 98, no. 3 (Fall 1 9 8 3 ) : 379-402. Page 6 106 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values interests. American efforts to promote European recovery through the Marshall Plan may have represented the high point in the suc-cess of the coalitionÃs policies. After that, difficulties set in gradually, each one intensifying the others. It became apparent that perpetual economic growth would not solve all social problems. Instead it created new ones, such as the poisoning of the water and the atmosphere. Workers rapidly became hostile to the environmentalists, whom they saw as upper-class do-gooders cutting off their opportunities for fun, money, and big cars just a t the point when workers were starting to make enough money to enter the consumer society. Welfare expenditures grew without producing peace or social order. Blacks rioted over long-standing grievances that suddenly seemed legiti-mate to many middle-class whites, especially young ones. In the cities crime increased and seemed to become more violent and vicious. T h e most serious shock to the liberal establishment, however, came from foreign affairs in the form of the war in Vietnam. Many opponents of this conflict called it the LiberalÃs W a r . By the middle 1960s there were no more dependable democratic allies for the United States to support against a military and revolu-tionary, as well as nationalist, Communist offensive. Before long the government in Washington found itself fighting a war with-out real prospect of victory and increasingly unpopular at home. After a long search for a diplomatic fig leaf to cover its with-drawal, the United States eventually just abandoned the field. Thus for the first time in its history, defeat in war came to the United States. Defeat as such, on the other hand, was not so im-portant. T h e significance of the war lay in the way it made so many Americans from all classes and occupations ask searching and painful questions about their own society and the authorities that ruled them. T h e mood of guilt has by now of course sub-sided. But questions once asked seldom vanish altogether. Instead they remain in the form of sullen psychic sore spots that may burst into inflammation under renewed pressure.
-- Michael Pugliese
There were basically three forms of totalitarianism.... One was the various kinds of Fascism, the other was Bolshevism, and a third was corporate capitalism. Two are gone." -- Noam Chomsky