[lbo-talk] Naomi Klein Goes Daft

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Tue Feb 5 15:53:29 PST 2008


On Feb 5, 2008 4:33 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> But on the redistribution front, she also needs to study some
> American history. Expropriation has rarely been popular here.
>
> Doug

I've been reading about the origins of the American Constitution, and if it isn't popular, it would seem to be because the whole reason for having the constitution was to keep it from happening. In much the same way that, in the English Civil War, the settlement (in 1660) most of the more radical elements had been contained, the little Interregnum between the Revolutionary War and the writing of the constitution seems to have also produced elements that needed to be contained. I'm saying this, in part, to get feedback on this perspective. I take this view, in part, from this quote from the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Federalist Papers. It's written by Issac Kramnick. The context is that he is looking at why the constitution was thought necessary. He opens with an anecdote about John Adams running into a man he used to defend in court over issues of debt and Adam's reflection on how disastrous it would be if this guy was making the laws.

<Blockquote> Power, where it mattered in the era of the Articles, on the periphery in the states, came increasingly into the hands of his dreaded debtor clients, and as Gouverneur Morris had predicted, the "poor reptiles" did, in fact, bite. Their bite was felt in the kind of laws passed by the state legislatures during the period of the Articles. The concern of many who repudiated the Articles at the Constitutional Convention would not simply be the immense power of state legislatures, abstractly considered, but the substantive content of the legislation passed by these all powerful legislatures as it threatened vested economic interests and private rights. It would be the redistributive nature of so much of the legislation coming out of the state legislatures in the period which enraged critics of the articles.

At the end of the war most of the states were in severe financial crises, trying to pay off war debts and to collect long overdue taxes.

There were also war damages to repair. Large numbers of individuals, especially farmers, were in debt to merchants, bankers, and storekeepers. In state after state the new men in the legislatures passed paper money acts providing cheap money, debtor relief legislation, legislation setting aside contracts, legislation confiscating property, and laws suspending the ordinary means of recovering debts. Debtors pressed state legislatures for two particular forms of legislation: "tender acts," making land or produce at fixed prices a legal discharge, and "stay laws," which postponed the collection of debts. In 1786 alone seven states issued paper money with which debtors were encouraged to pay their creditors.

Moreover, in many states the legislatures, as we have seen, had virtually taken over the administration of justice. In Vermont, for example, the legislature reversed court judgements, stayed executions and went so far as to intervene in cases involving land titles, contracts and debt, which resulted in blocking 90 percent of all court actions in that state. General Knox wrote to Washington in 1786 on such actions by state legislatures: "They are determined to annihilate all debts, public and private, and have agrarian laws which are easily effected by the means of unfunded paper money."

The state legislatures seemed to many to be tyrants in liberty's cloak. [sort of like the "purveyors of false populism" in George Bush's SOTU] In Federalist No. 48 Madison described the state legislature as "drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." For James Wilson, "the legislature is swallowing up all the other powers." Jefferson, concerned that the state legislatures were assuming executive and judicial power, as well as legislative, was prompted to observe, in what would become an often quoted phrase, that "173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one....An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."

It was the particular policies pursued by these overweening state legislatures, so threatening to the rights of property, which evoked the most outrage. Critic after critic [of the surviving record of wealthy landowners, merchants, etc.] of state legislation in the period of the Articles described them as "unjust," as "open and outrageous...violations of every principle of justice." In New Jersy the debtor relief legislation was criticized because it was "founded not upon the principles of justice, but upon the right of the sword." Madison, in the most famous Federalist, No. 10, referred to these state actions as "schemes of injustice." The linkage between the procedural and the substantive objections to the state legislatures was made clearly by Noah Webster. They were, he wrote, guilty of "so many legal infractions of sacred right, so many public invasions of private property, so many wanton abuses of legislative powers."


>From the perspective of historical hindsight it is easy enough [for
Issac Kramnick] to see the obvious defects of the Articles of Confederation which led to demands for its reform and ultimately to its replacement by the Constitution in 1787. (24-26) <End Blockquote>

These were the ideals which the Constitution was supposed to establish and it would seem that, if there isn't a great tradition of expropriation [of white male property owners] then it is because, for the most part, the constitution is supposed to prevent it. In effect, AFAIU, this is Richard Epstein's point in his 2007 book "How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution." For him (and for many at the time) FDR's programs represented a return to this kind of "injustice" of expropriation. I think the real dialectic, on the other hand, would be that the things Naomi Klein blames Reagan, Thatcher and Bush for are really the kinds of tenets of the Fordist regime of the immediate post-war period. Though there was redistribution involved, it was meant to basically incorporate everyone into the positive functioning of the US capitalist democracy. The only real change in the recent years (and it would go from late Carter all the way through Clinton to Bush II) is that the increased reliance on credit replaced any actual equity people had in the establishment. Of course since the impending wave of what Harvey might call "accumulation by dispossession" (which, for him, has everything to do with the ratio of debt to value) will largely take place amongst atomized home owners, the likelihood of them joining together in some sort of large scale squatters movement is fairly slim and, as Klein points out, there doesn't seem to be a candidate who will actually do anything but help them unite in their misery. Since this seems to be the kind of Hope and Change the remaining candidates represent, it makes it difficult to imaging that the coming expropriation will mostly just be the spectre of people getting kicked out of the houses they are living in.

The process that has finally led to this is long, but it seems reasonable to say that Bush II oversaw it. I base this not only on the circumstantial evidence, but on an earlier discussion on a GAO office report on the topic.

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-September/018397.html

In any case, I'd be interested in any thoughts on the above account of US history and, in addition, I'm a little confused as to why Naomi Klein's statement is wrong in the first place. It seems far from daft to me, but maybe that's just evidence that I'm daft.

s



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