Quantitative “Easing” and Qualitative Uneasiness

Quantitative “Easing” and Qualitative Uneasiness

Something that the current economic crisis has shown are the systemic contradictions, the un-sustainability of the new "products" of the financial sectors, and sometimes the hypocrisy of economic experts and the proponents of free market and neoliberal reforms who preached throughout the world deregulation, a reduced role of the government in “the economy”, independence of the central banks, and inflation control at the expense of unemployment but now are engaged in the opposite. These experts were especially against the irresponsible printing of money which they saw as dangerous as it could produce inflation and corruption, even when some world leaders claimed that they needed the money to support social programs, protect national workers, and to avoid negative growth and deflation. But just when these experts had convinced almost everyone about the supposed truth of their claims which had become almost dogmatic, we see that with the current crisis the United States Federal Reserve has been engaged in “quantitative easing” i.e. printing dollars. Sure printing dollars is not the same as printing pesos or Dirhams since the dollars has actually strengthened lately in relation to the Euro and the British Pound!

The scandal around the Madoff Investment Securities has shown how bonds traded in Wall Street and other financial markets also depends on trust sometimes deserved others not.

Similar if to a different degree is regular activity in the financial sector, as see in this first person account from Michael Lewis:

"To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. "

"I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."

More from Liar’s Poker

At the same time it seems that the French authorities have let out of prison the defrauder that goes by the alias of Lionel Doyen and Ernest Koumang since people continue reporting scam attempts for fraudulent departments in Paris through Craigslist.

Are these all examples of the same phenomenon but at different scales? Who is responsible for all this? Those who play this game willing knowingly or not? How about those who watch in the sidelines? Leaving these hard questions aside there is no doubt that the State can still play a role in regulating the bounds for how much can be gambled and how. Yes, this is a global exchange but what the government of the countries where the leading financial centers are located decide to do should rein these transactions. The remaining question is how much and at what cost? Can this genie be brought back into the bottle?

Faith Based Economy

Something that has further been shown in the current economic crisis is how hard governments, economic experts, and pundits are trying hard to reassure consumers (a.k.a citizens, a.k.a voters) that things won't be that bad (except when it is time to ask for financial help from the government) with the open and deliberate goal to increase consumer confidence and investor's trust in companies and financial institutions so that indicators such as the Dow Jones (supposedly reflecting the "real economy") do not go down. Why is collective delusion so important in keeping up financial markets, "quant shops," and hedge funds? Were financial derivatives and other "products" nothing but a collective delusion? Had Wall Street and other stock exchanges been living in a Faith Based Economy FBE?

Noted scholar and social scientists Arjun Appadurai thinks so,

"we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organizing human affairs, of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from those of true good faith. We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that the early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. Not all are saved, but we must all act as if we might be saved, and by acting as if we might be among the saved, we enact our faith in capitalism, even if we might be among the doomed or damned. Such faith must be shown in our works, in our actions: we must continue to spend, to work hard, to invest, and, as George Bush long ago said, “to shop” as if our very lives depended on it. In other words, capitalism now needs our faith more than our faith needs capitalism."


"But Faith, it turns out, is not enough. Capitalism, as a master-belief system, reasonably operates on faith. But markets, especially capitalist financial markets, need something more specific: Trust. And that is the second biggest Revelation of the last few weeks. We have a trade deficit, as we all know, but much worse is our “trust deficit.” No one trusts the (financial) other anymore, we are told, and without trust no one lends and without lending the plastic ceases to work and everyday life comes to a complete halt. This news will come as a shock to all of us on “Main Street,” who trust our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our churches and our employers as much—or as little—as we did last year. No, trust is not a Main Street problem, it is a Wall Street problem. In other words, banks won’t lend to one another, and that problem in the high mountains of finance is melting down into the valleys and plains of our everyday lives."

Read the rest at "The Immanent Frame"

Financial Crisis, Breaking News?

The bubble hidden behind the housing boom, derivatives and other financial instruments has long been known to sociologists or anyone bothering to read any economic sociology.

For an insiders look of a previous crisis see: Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2003. "The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade." W. W. Norton. Where Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner, and head economic adviser during Clinton, talks about the financial crisis of the 1990's. He is not scared to use the terms "corporate theft" and "corporate welfare" to talk about the dubious accounting schemes used by CEOs to get stock options at the expense of shareholders, and other ingenious mechanisms to avoid paying taxes, along with the surprising help from the US government specially of the Treasury and the Fed under Alan Greenspan at the expense of more social programs as desired by the Clintons, Stiglitz and Robert Reich. That was a policy discussion won by economic experts, technocrats, and large economic interests. Hopefully it won't be the same this time around.

For a terrible precedent of bank bailout, and the bad deal it is for Mexican tax payers, look into the fiasco of the deceivingly called Fondo Bancario de Protección al Ahorro, commonly known as FOBAPROA.

To look at the road not taken in the current discussion which fails to acknowledge the systemic elements of this crisis hear the podcast of Craig Calhoun here.

Or for better alternatives see Saskia Sassen's and others' suggestions in "7 better uses for $700 billion" in Forbes.

Provocative quote I found at NPR's website:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. -- Attributed to Alexander Tytler (1747-1814)."

OLYMPIC WRESTLING

Henry Cejudo captures gold and a piece of the American dream

"The son of undocumented Mexican immigrants who had to work two jobs to keep food on the table, Cejudo gave the U.S. its first Olympic gold medal in freestyle wrestling in 16 years Tuesday with a stunning win over Japan's Tomohiro Matsunaga in the 55-kilogram (121 pounds) final (Baxter 2008)"

"This is what I always wanted. The frustration was let out. The hard work and everything. I set my goal, I trained hard. I had a good staff around me. I just put the pieces together and I really believed in myself." And moving from the personal to the social, Cejudo added,

"This is cool. Coming out of a Mexican American background, it feels good to represent the U.S.," said Cejudo, who was born in Los Angeles. "Not too many Mexicans get the chance to do that."

"Cejudo's parents divorced when he was 4 and he saw his father, Jorge, only one more time before he died in Mexico City. But his mother, Nelly Rico, raised a family of six children on her own, bouncing from low-paying jobs in California to New Mexico and Arizona, where the family sometimes slept four to a bed."

"A large group of family and friends -- including sister Gloria, brother Alonzo and brother Angel, his training partner in Beijing -- were in the stands for the match. And they made so much noise they were nearly ejected at one point."

"Missing, however, was Cejudo's mother, the person he has repeatedly said was most responsible for his success."

"We always moved forward. We always moved forward. My mom always taught us to suck it up and whatever you want to do, you can do," Cejudo said. "And that's what I did."

"There were conflicting stories as to why his mother remained in Colorado. According to one explanation she had passport problems. Cejudo said she stayed home to take care of her grandchildren." Others say it was because of nervousness.

Repeating some negative stereotypes his coach Terry Brands said, "He has done an unbelievable job coming from the environment that he came from. Could be in prison. Could be a drug runner. Could be this, could be that. He's done an unbelievable job of not being a victim."

"He is the American dream. Gold medals are the American dream."

"And Cejudo had one around his neck Tuesday. But he was also wearing an American flag. And he wouldn't let on which he liked better."

"I don't want to let it go," he finally said, tugging on the flag. "I might sleep with this."

Talk about successful assimilation...

Baxter Kevin, "Henry Cejudo captures gold and a piece of the American dream." Los Angeles Times. August 20, 2008. Full article at:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-spw-olywrestling20-2008aug20%2C0%2C4592238.story

Obama and McCain's commitment to immigration reform tested amongst a hard crowd

Both candidates support an eventual path to citizenship for illegals

Both McCain and Obama addressed a conference of Hispanic some 700 people attending the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Washington, DC both were looking to cater their favors but underlined different points:

Obama, "admired Mr McCain's attempt last year to get an immigration reform bill approved by Congress...But he said that Mr McCain had since walked away from that commitment." Obama said, "We must assert our values and reconcile our principles as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. That is a priority I will pursue from my very first day."

McCain said, "I know this country... would be the poorer were we deprived of the patriotism, industry and decency of those millions of Americans whose families came here from Mexico, Central and South America." But added, "that his primary focus regarding immigration reform was to secure the United States border with Mexico." BBC reports that, "Mr McCain's speech was disrupted several times by hecklers from an anti-war group."

Source: BBC. "U.S. rivals clash over immigration." BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7479651.stm Published: 2008/06/28

The National Immigrant Bond Fund

The National Immigrant Bond Fund
(Bridging Boundaries)

"Robert J. Hildreth, 57, is the public face of the National Immigrant Bond Fund, a fledgling organization that helps immigrants swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raids post bonds...Since spring 2007, the fund has paid more than $180,000 to bond out immigrants snared in ICE raids in California, Massachusetts and Maryland. Word of the fund is spreading, but not quite fast enough for some immigrants caught up in the recent crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants. In the past nine months, ICE has detained about 4,500 undocumented workers and 111 employers, according to ICE statistics."

After a raid in Houston, "on June 25, bond fund organizers struggled to find "on-the-ground support" to help mobilize the families of detained immigrants... One of the principles of the fund requires detainees' families to make matching contributions, which helps ensure they appear in court, organizers said."

"It wasn't until two weeks later that the attorneys got a notice the bond fund was available, we only had one person who was still being detained and whose family couldn't raise the bail money," Jimenez said.

"Hildreth, the son of schoolteachers, said part of his motivation to help immigrants came from his father, a historian."

"One of his big themes was that the immigration story in the United States is vital to the health and growth of our country," he said. "He drilled that into me."

"After graduating from Harvard University, Hildreth worked for the International Monetary Fund from 1975 to 1980, living in Washington, D.C., and La Paz, Bolivia. He returned to the U.S. and worked for major Wall Street firms until starting his own business in 1989, Boston-based IBS Inc., which buys and sells loans in international markets."

"I've been involved in Latin America since college," he said. "I know many, many, many Latin Americans, including many, many Mexicans, so I have a personal friendship, a personal affinity."

In all, Hildreth said he paid $130,000 to help the New Bedford workers, and detainees' families chipped in $100,000, securing the release of 40 people, he said. He said none of them skipped bond.

The fund has infuriated some advocates for stricter immigration reforms, who have called it "traitorous" on Internet message boards.

"There's one more reason — besides humanitarian — that this bond fund was created and it's just as important. It's political," he said. "We hope that if we get a lot of history helping people in raids, plus a lot of contributions, even if it's only a buck, then we can really have a voice next year in the immigration debate."

From: Carroll, Susan. "Illegal workers get help from fund." Houston Chronicle. Aug. 7, 2008. Full story at: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5929129.html

More info at:
www.immigrantbondfund.org

Charles Tilly, Mexico y el Mundo

Here is an article on the relevance of the work of Charles Tilly for Mexico and the world in English and Spanish versions.

Distinguished Social Scientist Charles Tilly Passes Away

By Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco

An expert on Latin America and on the world, Charles Tilly studied the past in order to give us tools and theories to understand the present and the future. After a long and prolific career marked by the writing of more than fifty books and around seven hundred academic articles, Charles Tilly died from lymphoma on April 29, 2008. Tilly was brave in his long battle against different types of cancer: despite submitting himself to intense chemotherapy treatments, including experimental treatments, he persevered, smiling, teaching and writing until weeks before his death. During his long and productive life, he was always a source of human and intellectual light, an example to follow, an exceptional man from whose life and work we have much to learn.

Charles Tilly was born on May 20, 1929 in a small city in Illinois, into a working class family, son of an immigrant mother. With the help of various jobs, scholarships and government assistance, he studied in the Department of Social Relations (a mix of various branches of sociology and social psychology) at Harvard. There he received his undergraduate degree in 1950, and his masters and PhD in 1958. In a department and field dominated at the time by sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), he preferred to study with the also distinguished sociologists George C. Homans (1910-1989) and Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Sorokin, a Russian immigrant, who witnessed firsthand the revolution in 1917, had a great influence on Tilly encouraging him in his interest in combining sociology and history into the systematic study of revolutions and social change. Tilly was also largely influenced by Barrington Moore (1913-2005), a political sociologist and master of the historical-comparative method from the same generation. Charles Tilly was one of the key figures in the establishment and institutionalization of the subfields of historical sociology, collective action, social movements, and contentious politics within contemporary social science.

Tilly was professor in the universities of Delaware, Princeton, Harvard, Toronto, Michigan, the New School for Social Research and Columbia, the two last ones in New York City. He was also a visiting professor in France at the Sorbonne, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris), as well as in Norway and the Netherlands. He received various honorary doctorate degrees and distinguished academic awards. Within the last few years, some standouts include the Hirschman Prize in 2008 from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. He was a member of the most prestigious scientific societies in the United States and Europe. Tilly read English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and some Chinese.

Charles Tilly, sociologist, incorporated history and politics into his work, and had a large influence in currents inside contemporary history and political science. Tilly began his career writing a thesis on the counterrevolution in France. He was an impromptu historian, a coincidence that brought him to create catalogs of contentious events in order to carry out quantitative analytic studies with strong historical and contextual information, information which lends itself to the comparison, across time and space, between phenomena such as revolutions, social movements, strikes, protests, revolts or civil wars (see his Contentious Performances 2008). After many years of maturation, Tilly and his research colleagues created what the research field called Contentious Politics, a new school that has influenced sociology, history, and political science. Many interesting works have recently emanated from this school of thought.

Before working in Contentious Politics together with his colleagues Sidney Tarrow, Doug McAdam, and many others, Tilly contributed the concept of “state-making” (or the theory of the birth of the modern state), showing how the historical formation of nation-states in western Europe was strongly linked to war and the accumulation of capital to finance them. European monarchies fought among each other for control of their colonies and global trade routes. The urgency to finance these wars created in the governments of France and England the need to develop systems to unify militias, govern territories, generate wealth, collect taxes and administrate their estates. From the tools that these governments used, today we have censuses, passports, customs, and accounting systems. These processes resulted in the creation (to a certain point accidental) of strong nation-states, with independent economies, and true governance over a certain territory. The theory of state formation reminds us that nation-states did not arise as a product of a linear evolution but from a particular historical and international context. Looking at the present, Charles Tilly wrote on the illusory nature of expecting the same types of state-society relations in countries more recently formed who copied the western European model and expected to recreate institutions top-down from one day to another by decree. Imitating laws and establishing top-down reforms would rarely mean a bottom up reconfiguration. Local knowledge, customs and traditions have to be taken into account to govern (for more on this look at James C. Scott. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press).

Given the history of state formation in Western Europe, Tilly compares state formation with the criminal activity of the mafia who engage in protection rackets through which they are paid to offer protection from a threat of violence that they themselves create (see Diego Gambetta. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press). Tilly shows how, historically, the art of governing consists of large scale coordination among local leaders, militias, powerful economic classes, and even organized crime. Using this insight one would have been able to predict the terrible consequences (i.e. the steep increase in violence and destabilization) that an open war on drugs by the Mexican military commanded by President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa would create.

Tilly reminds us that democracy represents one of many possible political regimes, reflecting a system of social, political and economic relationships and above all, a certain institutionalization of trust networks. In contrast with the literature which perceives democracy as goal unto itself with a social, linear evolution, in his book Democracy (2007), Tilly shows how democracy is a reversible process and introduces a new concept into the literature: de-democratization. Explaining how even mature liberal democracies can experience drawbacks and closing in civil rights, civil liberties, or in the treatment of immigrants.

Just four days after September 11, 2001, in a reflection that could only be Tilly’s, he predicted the political errors and terrible consequences to come of the international politics of George W. Bush. Tilly intuited how the events of those days had been derived from a decentralized network, with members who did not know each other personally but who shared a political ideology and were trying to make a political statement through non-conventional violent means. Tilly knew immediately that a discursive barrier would be constructed between the two large groups, the self-nominated “us” versus “them.” A resulting armed attack against a certain region blamed for the attacks would change the power relations within these given groups, amplifying the discontent amongst “them.” This would then intensify their attacks, therefore aggravating the situation, leading to an escalation and thus further justifying the confrontation between these two groups. This division would call for the creation of new international alliances, which would obligate the excluded ones to unite within themselves, and paradoxically make room for the creation of new routes and opportunities for drug trafficking and international organized crime. The result of a war declared against an enemy who is invisible, and at the same time categorical, would end up giving more power and outside support to dissident groups inside countries such as Algeria, Turkey, Nigeria, Sudan and Russia. As a result, the level of democracy would fall, as much as in these countries as in the West, product of a major militarization of the forces of security and the reduction in civil liberties and human rights for both citizens and foreigners. Regrettably, such predictions have become part of our current reality.

In his last books, Charles Tilly illuminated for us some of our contemporary daily behaviors. For example, why we see the need to give reasons and tell stories in our social life (Why 2006); why we assign blame and give credit to people around us (Credit and Blame 2008), and how researchers can reconcile the study of culture and the post-modern challenge with a research agenda that generates high quality and useful scientific social knowledge (The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Analysis 2008).

Professor Tilly was also a scholar of migration: he was one of the first social scientists to write on the important role that social networks play in chain migration, which resulted in the accumulation, within the same locality, of migrants in a distant labor market (Tilly, Charles and C. Harold Brown. 1967. "On Uprooting, Kinship and the Auspices of Migration." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 8:139-164). For Tilly, remittances are a way to fulfill family obligations, tangible proof of the importance of social relations despite distance (see Viviana A. Zelizer and Charles Tilly. 2007. "Relations and Categories" The Psychology of Learning and Motivation:47 pp. 225-255).

With his book Categorical Inequality (1998), Tilly demonstrated how inequality and exploitation reproduce themselves through the institutionalization of group behaviors and above all through assigning of professions to certain social categories; for example in post-colonial societies like Mexico: natives working in the fields, mestizos in the service sector, and whites working as managers; or in advanced economies like the US: women in sales, men in production, immigrants as janitors and local male citizens as bankers. The inequality between groups reproduces itself for generations once these roles and different levels of life become invisible and seem natural, spontaneous, or merited.

Despite his fame and intelligence, Charles Tilly, or Chuck as he liked everyone to call him, was above all transparent, accessible, without pretensions; he was a true cosmopolitan, democratic and egalitarian in action. He was helpful and patient with his colleagues and students (me among them). He spent a lot of time helping us develop our ideas, reading all types of drafts and giving valuable suggestions to improve the scientific content of our texts. Because of this, through his death, the hundreds of students and colleagues whom he helped throughout the last five decades remember his great human quality and intellectual generosity. His books and lessons stay with us to guide us in the difficult task of understanding society and the many relationships and mechanisms within it and that sometimes hide in front of our eyes.

Ernesto Castañeda Tinoco is a doctoral student in sociology at Columbia University. He was a student and teaching assistant of Professor Tilly.

Versions of this article will appear in Spanish in the magazine Cátedra, published by the University of Colima, Mexico 2008. And in English in the newsletter of the Institute of Latin American Studies. School of International Affairs. Columbia University.

A conference in Honor of Professor Tilly was held at Columbia on October 3^rd – 5^th. For more information visit: http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/event/2008

Fallece Charles Tilly, distinguido científico social (1929-2008)

Ernesto Castañeda Tinoco

Gran conocedor de México y el mundo, Charles Tilly estudiaba el pasado para hacernos comprender el presente e intuir posibles caminos hacia el futuro. Tras una larga y prolífica carrera marcada por la escritura de más de 50 libros y alrededor de 700 artículos académicos, Charles Tilly murió de linfoma el 29 de abril del 2008. Tilly se mostró valiente en su lucha contra diferentes tipos de cáncer: a pesar de que se sometió a fuertes sesiones de quimioterapia, incluidos nuevos tratamientos experimentales, siguió sonriendo, enseñando y escribiendo hasta semanas antes de su muerte. Durante su larga y fructífera vida fue siempre una fuente de luz humana e intelectual; un ejemplo a seguir y un hombre excepcional de cuya vida y obra todavía tenemos mucho que aprender.

Charles Tilly nació el 20 de mayo de 1929 en una pequeña ciudad de Illinois, Estados Unidos en el seno de una familia de la clase trabajadora, hijo de una madre inmigrante. Con la ayuda de diversos trabajos, becas y apoyos del gobierno, estudió en el departamento de “relaciones sociales” (unión de varias ramas de sociología y psicología social) de Harvard. Allí obtuvo su licenciatura en 1950, maestría y doctorado en 1958. En un departamento dominado por el sociólogo Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) él prefirió estudiar con los distinguidos George C. Homans (1910-1989) y Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Este último, inmigrante ruso testigo de la revolución de 1917, influyó en Tilly, contagiándolo de interés por combinar sociología e historia en el estudio sistemático de las revoluciones y los grandes cambios sociales. Fue también influido por Barrington Moore (1913-2005), sociólogo político y maestro del método histórico-comparativo de esa misma generación. Charles Tilly fue una de las piezas claves en la fundación de la sociología histórica, el estudio de la acción colectiva y los movimientos sociales.

Tilly fue profesor en las Universidades de Delaware, Princeton, Harvard, Toronto, Michigan, la New School for Social Research, y Columbia, las dos últimas en la ciudad de Nueva York. También fue profesor visitante en Francia en la Sorbonne, la Escuela de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales (EHSS) y el Instituto de Estudios Políticos de Paris (Sciences-Po), así como en Noruega y Holanda. Recibió varios doctorados honoris causa y distinguidos premios en la academia. Entre estos últimos destacan el premio Hirschman 2008 del Consejo de Investigación en Ciencia Social (SSRC) y el premio de la Asociación Americana de Sociología (ASA) en 2005 por su distinguida carrera y contribuciones a la disciplina. Fue miembro de las más prestigiosas sociedades científicas de Estados Unidos y Europa. Tilly leía en ingles, francés, español, italiano, alemán, ruso y algo de chino.

Charles Tilly, sociólogo, incorporaba en su trabajo la historia y lo político, en un sentido amplio. Su obra tuvo una gran influencia en corrientes dentro de la historia y de la ciencia política de vanguardia. Tilly empezó su carrera escribiendo una tesis sobre la contrarrevolución en Francia. Fue así que comenzó como historiador espontáneo, coincidencia que lo llevó a crear catálogos de eventos contenciosos para realizar estudios analíticos cuantitativos con una fuerte información histórica y contextual. Información que se prestaba a la comparación entre casos a través del tiempo y del espacio de fenómenos tales como revoluciones, movimientos sociales, huelgas, protestas, revueltas o guerras civiles. Después de muchos años de maduración, Tilly y sus colegas investigadores crearon lo que se ha llamado estudios de Política Contenciosa (Contentious Politics), una nueva escuela que ha influido en la sociología y ciencia política contemporánea. De dicha escuela han emanado interesantes trabajos recientes en el mundo anglosajón, que esperamos sean traducidos pronto al castellano.

Antes de trabajar en política contenciosa junto con Sidney Tarrow, Doug McAdam y muchos otros, Tilly contribuyó el concepto de "state-making" o la teoría del nacimiento del Estado, mostrando cómo la formación de los Estados-nación en Europa estaba fuertemente ligada a la guerra y la acumulación de capitales para financiarla. Las monarquías europeas peleaban entre ellas sobre el control de sus colonias y las rutas comerciales globales. La urgencia de financiar estas guerras creó en los gobiernos precursores a los Estados, como Francia o Inglaterra, la necesidad de desarrollar sistemas para unificar milicias, gobernar territorios, generar riqueza, recolectar impuestos y administrarlos. Entre las herramientas que utilizaron estos gobiernos tenemos censos, pasaportes, aduanas, sistemas de contabilidad. Esta serie de procesos dio como resultado la creación (hasta cierto punto accidental) de fuertes Estados-nación, con una economía independiente y una verdadera gobernabilidad sobre cierto territorio. El concepto de formación del Estado nos recuerda que la formación de un Estado-nación no resulta de una evolución natural o linear , s ino de una historia particular dentro de un largo contexto histórico internacional. Mirando el presente, Charles Tilly escribió sobre lo ilusorio que resultaba esperar los mismos tipos de relación entre Estado y sociedad en países creados posteriormente, copiando el modelo del oeste europeo. Los debates contemporáneos sobre la reforma fiscal en México nos recuerdan este tema.

Bajo esa misma lógica, Charles Tilly comparó la formación de Estados con la actividad criminal de mafias que cobran por ofrecer protección. Igualmente demostró cómo, históricamente, el arte de gobernar consistía en una coordinación entre líderes locales, milicias, clases económicas poderosas e incluso el crimen organizado. Por eso Tilly logró predecir las terribles consecuencias, la violencia creciente y la desestabilización que crearía la guerra contra el narcotráfico lanzada por Felipe Calderón.

Tilly nos recuerda que la democracia representa uno de tantos regímenes políticos posibles, reflejando una serie de relaciones sociales, políticas y económicas, y sobre todo, una cierta institucionalización de redes sociales de confianza (trust networks). En contraste con la literatura que percibe la democracia como una meta en sí misma, producto de una evolución social lineal, en su libro Democracy (2007) él nos muestra cómo la democracia es un proceso reversible e introduce en la literatura especializada un nuevo concepto: la desdemocratización.

Justo cuatro días después del 11 de septiembre de 2001, en una reflexión muy suya, Tilly predijo las erróneas políticas y las terribles consecuencias de las políticas internacionales de George W. Bush. Tilly intuía cómo los eventos de esos días se habían derivado de una red descentralizada, con miembros que no se conocían entre si directamente, emitiendo un enunciado político. Tilly sabía que inmediatamente se construiría una barrera discursiva entre dos grandes grupos que se autodenominarían “Nosotros” y “Ellos.” Un ataque armado a cierta región designada como culpable no haría sino cambiar las relaciones de poder dentro de dicho grupo, amplificar el descontento y los ataques por parte de algunos de “Ellos” y por ende agravar la situación, “justificando” una escalada en la confrontación entre ambos bandos. Esa división llamaría a la creación de nuevas alianzas internacionales, que obligarían a los excluidos a unirse entre sí, creando nuevas rutas y oportunidades para el tráfico y el crimen organizado internacional. El resultado de una guerra declarada contra un enemigo invisible a la vez que categórico, terminaría otorgando más poder y apoyo exterior a grupos disidentes dentro de países cómo Argelia, Turquía, Nigeria, Sudan o Rusia. Como resultado, tanto en esos países como en el Occidente, el nivel de democracia descendería, producto de una mayor militarización de las fuerzas de seguridad y la reducción de libertades civiles y derechos humanos de ciudadanos y sobre todo de extranjeros. Lamentablemente dichas predicciones se han vuelto parte de nuestra realidad actual.

En sus últimos libros Charles Tilly nos aclaró ciertos de nuestros comportamientos mas cotidianos. Por ejemplo, por qué nos vemos en la necesidad de dar razones y contar historias en nuestra vida social (Why 2006); por qué atribuimos culpa y damos crédito a las personas que nos rodean (Credit and Blame 2008) o, incluso, cómo los académicos podemos reconciliar el estudio de la cultura y el reto post-moderno con una agenda de investigación social que genera conocimiento científico de calidad y utilidad (The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Analysis 2008).

El profesor Tilly fue también un estudioso de la migración: él fue uno de los primeros científicos sociales en escribir sobre el importante papel que desempeñan las redes sociales en la migración en cadena, que resulta en la acumulación, dentro de una misma localidad, de paisanos en un mercado laboral lejano. Para Tilly las remesas confirman los compromisos familiares; prueba tangible de la importancia de las relaciones sociales a pesar de la distancia (ver su trabajo al respecto con Viviana Zelizer).

Con su libro sobre Desigualdad Categórica (1998) Tilly demostró cómo la inequidad y la explotación se reproducen a través de la institucionalización de comportamientos entre grupos y sobre todo por medio de la asignación de roles laborales en ciertas categorías sociales. Por ejemplo, indígenas trabajando en el campo, mestizos en el sector de servicios, blancos fungiendo como jefes de empresa, mujeres laborando en ventas, hombres en la producción, inmigrantes como barrenderos y ciudadanos locales como banqueros. La desigualdad entre grupos se reproduce por generaciones una vez que estos roles y diferentes niveles de vida se vuelven invisibles y parecen naturales, espontáneos o merecidos.

A pesar de su fama e inteligencia, Charles Tilly, o Chuck, como le gustaba que todo mundo lo llamara, era sumamente sencillo, accesible, sin pretensiones; él era un verdadero cosmopolita, demócrata e igualitarista en acción. Era paciente con sus estudiantes y colegas. Pasaba mucho tiempo ayudándonos a desarrollar nuestras ideas, leyendo todo tipo de borradores y dando valiosas sugerencias para mejorar el contenido científico de nuestros textos. Por ello, tras su muerte los cientos de estudiantes y colegas a los que ayudó a través de las últimas cinco décadas –yo entre ellos–, recuerdan su gran calidad humana y generosidad intelectual. Sus libros y lecciones permanecen con nosotros para guiarnos en la difícil tarea de entender la sociedad y las múltiples relaciones y mecanismos que ésta encierra y que a veces se ocultan ante nuestros ojos.

Este texto pronto aparecerá en la revista académica Cátedra publicada por la Universidad de Colima, México.

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Ernesto Castañeda Tinoco es estudiante de doctorado en sociología, por la Universidad de Columbia, en Nueva York. El autor fue estudiante y colaborador de cátedra e investigación del Professor Tilly.

Charles Tilly (1929 – 2008)

Little over a month of missing Chuck but he stays with us in our heart and mind.

In May 2008 the Press of Sciences-Po published the French translation of "Contentious Politics" as "La Politique de Conflit."

I wrote a note for his tribute page at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
"The Pedagogic Performances of Charles Tilly."

Here a copy from the posting at the SSRC website:

"The Pedagogic Performances of Charles Tilly"

As many have attested, Chuck Tilly was an extraordinary scholar and an exemplary human being. Let me briefly discuss his working style and pedagogy. Chuck was an extremely prolific writer; as colleagues often mentioned, he wrote faster than we could read (and as I will explain, he also read many times faster than we do). It has been hard to keep up with his writings and easy to misrepresent his work given the size of his oeuvre, which I would claim one needs to consider as a whole and not as single, independent pieces. I remember Chuck being disappointed when people equated him to any one of his books.

Instead of waiting until a text reached “perfection”, that unattainable goal, or thinking that he had the ultimate word on a subject, Chuck was willing to publish fast in order to be proven wrong (or only partially right), and thus rendered perfectible. Indeed, why wait for someone else to fix his models? He often came back and improved his previous ideas. This is exemplified by the story he loved to tell about how his first book was a refutation of his dissertation.

How can we explain his fecundity? Besides the long hours, his efficiency, his lucid mind, his love of writing, and the shadow of death, the reason for his productivity was the way he saw scientific endeavor. By the way and pace in which he published, it seems to me that Chuck intuited that by its very nature all scientific knowledge is temporary, and by this I do not mean that he was a postmodern writer or that the quality of his work is mediocre. To the contrary, he took his academic profession so seriously that he was never content with publishing and moving onto another issue. He saw the building of knowledge as a cumulative and collective process. Thus he constantly revisited, corrected, expanded and clarified his own work and that of his colleagues and students.

One reason he read so much, produced such great bibliographical compendiums, and gave comments back to students normally within 24 to 48 hours, was because he was a real “speed reader.” There are speed reading courses and methods, but academics tend to dismiss them in order to savor every word. Besides reading many words per minute, he also was in favor of skimming. As part of a required course on social science methodology that many of us took at Columbia University, Chuck started with a statement on how to read a book: Start by scanning it. Look at the table of contents. Read the introduction and the conclusion. Read the passages of interest. That should suffice, move onto the next book, and come back to it when work or students make the content pertinent.

How did he have the time to read and write so much while giving ample time to students and colleagues? A small seminar was organized by the History Department at Columbia in 2007 precisely to ask him about how he worked. Chuck said that the only way he could be so productive was by putting in the hours, working literally from dawn until dusk, including the weekends. Chuck mentioned how the legacy of his work meant that he went the last number of years without seeing a play, going to the movies, or spending daily time with his family. Because of the immediacy of cancer, his great knowledge and his ambition, in the last years Chuck became a master of delayed gratification; he forwent things such as going to the movies or to a classical music concert in order to do what he loved the most: read, write, mentor and be a professional academic participating in panels. Yet his frequent smile showed how he enjoyed his academic life and the small pleasures of life. He was known for working with classical music or jazz blasting from his office stereo. His social group was constituted by his academic extended family with which he would socialize in departmental functions, maybe his main socializing event in the last years became the dinners he would have with students and colleagues on Monday evenings after his Columbia Contentious Politics workshop. In these weekly dinners he would display his mastery in story telling and where he would reveal details about his private life and biography.

Teaching

Sometimes some students would complain that his graduate seminars were not very “rigorous”, “hard”, or “useful.” This misunderstanding came about because, to our chagrin, Chuck was very reluctant to lecture graduate students, post-docs, or visiting scholars for more than 20 to 30 minutes at a time. In a required seminar on Research Methods at Columbia, he would talk for 20 minutes with expertise and authority while using simple language, telling stories to explain long debates and important issues, rather than citing every other scholar having worked on the subject or using obscure references. Then the course would turn to the students, who, given each one’s ability, would then deliver the bulk of the lecture and book discussion, learning by doing to become scholars.

His optional graduate courses at Columbia (of which I took two) were always in the form of writing workshops. Students would present their work, and others would criticize it, following the model of his contentious politics seminar, thus functioning as a professional workshop for work in progress with short presentations throughout the semester by the budding scholars. As expected, the papers would start off at a level that needed improvement but Chuck would never judge someone’s potential by the contents of a first draft. And after some years, many of these papers turned out to be important pieces for the students who incorporated the comments from Chuck and the seminar participants in subsequent versions.

Even while there would be distinguished, retired lawyers, doctors, publishers, fans, translators, and visiting scholars from across the world who would audit and attend his seminars and classes, he was too democratic and self-critical to jump into the bully pulpit and deliver “the sacred word” in the French academic style of the likes of Foucault, whose lectures at the College de France would be recorded and later turned into books. Chuck Tilly preferred to interact with students and help them with their projects, and to then write the books himself, as books proper, and not as lecture notes.

Still there was anguish and disappointment for those looking for a guru or a more authoritarian patron saint, or even a colleague to hate. In many ways his large and revolutionary oeuvre did not match his simple and humble ways, which consciously betrayed his working class upbringing and his democratic and cosmopolitan convictions. While he set many research agendas and collaborative networks, he would never start a graduate seminar by discussing his work directly, and he would avoid it when possible. So while he mentored and convinced many of us of the importance of contentious politics, and the relational approach, he did not give us strict instructions on what or how to write. Chuck refused to be studied as a seminal author in life. Some colleagues and I would often implore Chuck to give a course on Tilly, the author. He would categorically refuse by saying “I will never teach a course on Tilly” referring to such a graduate course, although he later knew that Mauricio Font was offering such a course at CUNY’s Graduate Center in 2007.

Fortunately, I had the great chance to co-teach an undergraduate course on Tilly with Tilly. This was the last undergraduate class he ever taught. It was the undergraduate course on “Revolutions, Social Movements, and Contentious Politics” following the publication of his “Contentious Politics” textbook co-authored with Sidney Tarrow. This textbook culminated a long search of many years to produce a method and a research agenda that could be taught, understood, and applied for the good use and enjoyment of students of any age. A group of very brilliant Columbia undergraduates were able to reproduce and apply the CP method to very interesting projects in one semester’s time. Students looked at contentious issues in cases going across space and time from Oaxaca to Sri Lanka, from England to Israel and covering vast periods such as Imperial Japan or current protest events amongst peasants in China.

As I witnessed his work while being his research and later teaching assistant, I noted how he was always open to learn not only about new topics and countries but also about new techniques. Before we started this course, he asked me what I thought of incorporating Power Point into the course. I said I liked the idea and Chuck was fast in learning how to incorporate this technology into our lectures. But why did such a famous Professor have to bother to pick up a new technology in what would become his last undergraduate course? The reason was that he was always eager to learn more and humble enough to let others teach him while doing. He would review the slides I wrote about his work and provide helpful comments, replying to my e-mails almost immediately. Illness made him miss a number of lectures but he would often call me from the hospital to check on the class, and update me on his medical condition. A number of times, even when he was present in the class, he would let me lecture on his work, clarifying or expanding when necessary. This was not a sign of lack of energy or lucidity but another example of his democratic and egalitarian demeanor.

Chuck Tilly aimed to publish books and articles that changed the way we see history and do social science. He opposed methodological individualism and studies that locate responsibility in individual isolated consciousness; along with Harrison White and Pierre Bourdieu, he pushed for a relational understanding. In particular, Chuck was interested in social interactions, including contentious ones, and the social networks they formed. When providing new concepts and mechanisms, he always kept the historical context in mind, going beyond parochialisms or universal laws. He connected his love for history with that of social movements, which under the banner of Contentious Politics compares the common mechanisms in civil wars, riots, revolutions, international wars, terrorism, protests, and many other events. Since the theoretical changes he proposed are so ambitious and revolutionizing, publishing his new research manifesto in the form of a textbook will probably end up to be effective, but this is yet to be seen since, as he taught us, adoption and diffusion are contingent and always take time.

Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco
Columbia University

Thanks to Craig Calhoun for inviting me to write this text and to Andreas Koller for putting up the SSRC tributes and resources page: http://www.ssrc.org/essays/tilly/

US Border "Control"

US Border and Immigration (des)control

"Let's face it, part of the issue of the border is it is kind of a balloon. When you squeeze one part, another bulges," said Thomas Frost, assistant inspector general with the Homeland Security Department, commenting on the investigations of corruption by Border Patrol agents who collaborate with people smugglers (Archibold, Randal and Andrew Becker. "Border Agents, Lured by the Other Side" The New York Times. May 27, 2008).

Inland things are not going much better:

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented. It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department, commenting on the sentencing of 260 undocumented workers at meat-packing plant in Iowa (Preston, Julia. "270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push." The New York Times. May 24, 2008).

Contentious Madrid / Goya and 2 de Mayo 1808-2008

Madrid 2 de Mayo 1808-2008

Just one day after May First 2008, the 40th celebration of the 1 May 1968 in Paris, and the subsequent events in Mexico, Berkeley, Columbia, etc., and a couple of days before the 5 de Mayo festivity when Mexicans celebrate the defeat of the French army of Napoleon III invading Mexico to install Emperor Maximilian of Hapsburg in 1862; On May 2nd of 2008, the Madrileños celebrated the 200 year anniversary of the uprising against the occupying French forces of Napoleon I.

In order to celebrate this event which started what is called the Spanish War of Independence and a consolidation of Spain as a nation, the government of Madrid headed by the Mayor of Madrid Alberto Ruiz Gallardón organized a series of public events that were to represent six of the works by the famous Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

The fights and representations included a representation at the Plaza Mayor of “carga de los mamelucos” a confrontation between Spanish rebels and Egyptian fighters under Napoleon’s orders.

Goya (1814) "La Carga de los Mamelucos"

(RESTORED VERSION EL PRADO 2008)

A symbolic re-enactment at the Plaza Mayor de Madrid. May 2nd 2008. With horses like those rid by the French and Mamluk armies and with a North African band "representing" the modern day Mamluks, or modern day Arab enemies (something not that faraway from how some Spanish newspapers and politicians depict immigrant from this area today).

The Killings of May 3rd 2008

The impressive closing act was provided by the catalá group La Fura dels Baus, in a show created by Pere Pinyol, Carles Padrissa and the La Fura dels Baus. Interesting political propositions were presented by this group including repeated rhetoric claims by actors representing local Spanish against the contemporary claims of “a supposed French refinement, advance, and civilization against a Spain backwardness and ignorance” instead of a recognition of a large Spanish misery contrasted to Napoleon’s filthy richness and pomp, what the actors attacked continuously as “esa soberbia Francesa.”

A good metaphorical example of rebellion against symbolic violence, or the ultimate domination through language, is represented by the Fura in this funny rap act “No se dice REY se dice RUA [ROI].”

The Killings of May 3rd 2008

Goya (1814) "Los Fusilamientos de la montaña del Príncipe Pío."

(RESTORED VERSION EL PRADO 2008)

After the risings of May 2nd, 1808 French Mariscal Joaquim Murat takes control of Madrid and orders the death of all those presumed to have acted in the rebellion. Goya paints this painful event at the end of the war. And the following videos are a 21st century representation/commemoration of these bloody events.


Video 1: The Capture of the rebels/patriots/terrorists

Video 2: Prisoner rebels marching to face their destiny at the hands of their French executioners.

Video 3: Shot!




Video 4: The Dead, to become independence fighters and war heroes after France's withdrawal in 1814.


The horrors of war (series by Goya as represented by la Fura dels Baus.



End of war. The promise of the Cadiz Constitucion (represented bellow as a woman given birth to modern Spain!) This enlightened Constitution that gave rights to foreigners in Spain and their possibility to become citizens, and gave the colonies more independence, unfortunately the returning Spanish king Fernando VII ended up dismissing the liberal constitution and reestablished the Monarchy with sovereignty residing in his person; at the end this only accelerated the determination from the independence movements in Latin America to cut ties with Madrid.

Thank you Madrid and Fura dels Baus the show was incredible I wished I could publish more of the videos that include a performance of the Marseillaise sang in Madrid, Fernando VII in the tightrope, an operatic duo performance, peace doves, and many more delights. You had to be there to see this interactive representation that made you feel as if you were part of the rebellion on the Second of May!

Text, photos and videos (under fair use and explicit permission by the producers) by Ernesto Castaneda-Tinoco.