-- (New York Times Magazine, 6 June 1999, 6, 80:1)

2/2 Keywords
Afro-American "Spiritual-Blues Impulse"
Chattel
"The Life of Gustavus Vassa"
Property

2/7 keywords
"The Collision of Worlds" / "Colliding States in East Asia"
The Manchus The Sword as "The Soul of the Samurai"
Sinocentrism vs. Japan's Self-pace
Self-initiated "Westernization"

2/7 Quotes
You, O King, are so inclined toward our civilization that you have sent a special envoy across the seas to bring to our Court your memorial of congratulations on the occasion of my birthday and to present your native products as an expression of your thoughtfulness. . . . The various articles presented by you, O King, this time are accepted by my special order to the office in charge of such functions in consideration of the offerings having come from a long distance with sincere good wishes. As a matter of fact, the virtue and prestige of the Celestial Dynasty having spread far and wide, the Kings of the myriad nations come by land and sea with all sorts of precious things. Consequently there is nothing we lack, as your principal envoy and others have themselves observed. We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country's manufactures . . .
In Ssu-yu and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the West (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979).

When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive.

A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of bygone warriors

natsukusa ya
tsuwamono domo ga
yume no seki

Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987) 118.

2/9 Keywords
Isolation and "Stability"
New Urban Readership
Samurai/Farmer/Artisan/Merchant

2/9 Quotes
In the city
What a heavy smell of things!
The summer moon
(Bonchô)

How hot it is! How hot it is!
Voices call gate after gate
(Bashô)

The second weeding
Is not even finished yet
But the rice is ripe
(Kyorai)

Tapping off the ashes
A single smoked sardine
(Bonchô)

In this neighborhood
They don't recognize money!
How inconvenient!
(Bashô)

Keywords for 2/14

Ethnic and religious "tolerance"

Sunnis and Shiites

Muslims, Hindus (and Sihks)

Taj Mahal

Quote for 2/14

The Devshirme System

• To sustain the quality of the slave troops, the Ottomans developed . .. a unique institution:the provincial slave levy, or devshirme. This institution selected young Christian (and some Jewish) boys from the provincial peasantry to be raised as Muslims; most came from the Balkan peasantry. They were trained to serve in both army and bureaucracy at all levels. How high slave soldiers could rise is exemplified by the famous imperial architect, Sinan (d. 1578), who as a devshirme recruit rose through the military organization by virtue of his excellence. The most famous slave corps was the Janissaries, the elite infantry troops of the empire. Muslim boys were not allowed into the slave corps, although some parents tried to buy them a place in what offered the most promising careers in the empire.

The Heritage of World Civilizations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentis-Hall, 1997)

Quotes for Monday 2/21

From Professor Henry Sussman's Lecture (For help with writing assignment on Protestant Reformation; not on any Quiz)

"Major Concepts in World Civilizations" cities Cities may not define civilization, but urbanity, with its array of goods and diverse people and activities, epitomizes civilized achievement. Ne could argue that fully-developed cities, when and wherever, offer "instant modernity" - that classical Athens and Rome, Chang-An during the Han and Tang dynasties (China) and Kyoto during the Heian period (Japan) already provided the senses of personal freedom and experimental richness which did not become established until the European late Middle Ages. the relationship between Church and State One way of gaining an overview on World Civilization is to look at the evolving relationships between church and state. The Muslim theocracy is an intensification of a partnership between politics and religion that Hesus initiates in the New Testament. After the year 1000 C.E., in many parts of the world, there is a progessive split between the interests of government and the dictates of organized religion. Cities, which may be thought of as free-trade zones, governed more by the laws of supply and demand than canonical texts, are the primary sites for the removal of Church from the operations of State.

Keywords for Monday 2/28

From Absolutism to Revolution
Declaration of the Rights of Man
Textbook definition of "Modernity"
 
 

Keywords for Wednesday 3/1

"natural" law
The Enlightenment
Invisible Hand

Long Quotes for Wednesday 3/1
 

Adam Smith's  "Invisible Hand"

[The Individual] . . . Neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.  By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.  (179)
 

John Locke's "Social Contract"

"Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be putout of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent."

"Reason . . . Teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."

"Every man has a property in his own person:this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his."

Keywords for Monday 3/13

Marxist Dialectic
Industrial Revolution as Progress: Natural, Paradoxical, or Dialectical?
Nationalism and the Global Market

Long Quotes for Monday 3/31

Definition of "dialectic"

** Development through the stages of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (Webster's)
** Process of change in which a concept passes over into and is preserved or realized by its opposite (Webster's)
** The theory that history is a series of struggles between opposing forces, with each successive struggle occurring on a higher level than the one preceding (packet, 254)

Example of "dialectic" (Marx)
- T) bourgeoisie oppressed and used by absolute monarchy
- A) modern industry and the world market empower bourgeoisie; they demand the "modern representative state" (257)
- S) in power, the bourgeoisie "leaves remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'" (257)

Smith and Marx on Global Capitalism

Smith: "By restraining (high duties, prohibitions) the importation of foreign goods, the monopoly of the home-market is secured. . . . Whether [this monopoly of the home-market] tends either to increase the general industry of the society, or to give it the most advantageous direction, is not, perhaps, altogether so evident. (178)

Marx: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." (258) (also 256)

Smith on Nationalism

Every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would . . . Assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. (179)

Marx on Nationalism I

Marx: "the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst . . . it creates a world after its own image. (258)

Marx on Nationalism II

The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices . . . (263)

Keywords for Wednesday 3/15

Proletariat and Bourgeoisie
Alienation
Marxism as Moral Critique
Materialism

Long Quotes for Wednesday 3/15

Smith on "the Proletariat"

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. (178)

Marx on "the Proletariat" as Defined by Smith:

This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general . . .have no meaning. . . . You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population. (266)

Marx on "the Proletariat"

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into factories, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrialized army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

Dialectic: Example of Property

"We Communists have been reproached [for wanting to abolish] the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence." (265)

John Locke's "Civil Government" (1685)

** Reason . . . Teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions

** "Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his."

This is classic Enlightenment thinking; THESIS

Bourgeoisie "Property Relations" (1848)

"Does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, I.e. that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation." (265)

This is the current reality: ANTITHESIS

Communist "Property Relations" (Future)

"We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, and appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others." (265)

This is what it will be like after the Revolution! SYNTHESIS

Dialectic: Example of Family

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists." (267) This is classic (Christian? Confucian?) thinking: THESIS

Bourgeoisie Family Relations

[Yet] on what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. (267)
All family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. (267)
This is the current reality: ANTITHESIS

Communist Family Relations

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. (267)

The real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. (267)

This is how things will be after the Communist Revolution: SYNTHESIS

Dialectic: Example of Religion

Religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas may be recent, but they always evolve toward fundamental right. (268)

There are eternal truths such as Freedom, Justice, etc that are common to all states of society.

This is classic Enlightenment thinking: THESIS

Bourgeoisie Religion

One fact is common to all past ages: the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within common forms. (269)

This is the current (and in fact eternal) reality: ANTITHESIS

Communist Religion

** Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis. (269)

** it therefore acts as a contradiction to all past historical experience. (269)

** This is how things will be after the Communist revolution: SYNTHESIS

** History after Communism will effectively stop

Materialism: The Idea that History is Driven by "Property Relations"

Man's consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence.

Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. (268)

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that it . . . involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. (269)

Marxist Feminism

The bourgeoisie sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He heard that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. (267)

Our bourgeoisie, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeoisie marriage is in reality a system of wives in common. (267)

Keywords for Monday 3/27

The Nation as Imagined Community
Nationalism for Liberation, Militarism or Racism?
Garibaldi, Bismarck, Herzl, Ataturk
Does Nationalism supersede Empire?
 

Quotes for Monday 3/27

Members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
            --Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) 6.
 

[The nation] is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation
that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.  Ultimately
it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people not
so much to kill, as willingly to die for their country.
             -- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) 7.
 

[Romantic poetry] can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal.
It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can t
olerate no law above itself. (809)
            -- Friedrich Schlegel

Only folk poetry is perfect because God himself wrote it . . . ; it is not put together from pieces like human work. (808)
            -- Wilhelm Grimm
 

Manifest Destiny
Comprador Class
Imperialism in Asia: Europe/Japan/America pattern
The "Progress" of Imperialism in Africa

Long Quotes for Monday 4/10

Manifest Destiny

The very shape and character of the United States in the 20th century -- specifically in the imaginings of modern American development in the global system -- is inseparable from historical occasions of real contact between . . .  Asia and America, in and across the Pacific Ocean.  The defining mythos of America, its Ågmanifest destiny,Åh was, after all, to form a bridge westward from the Old World, not just to the western coast of the North American continent, but from there to the trans-Pacific regions of Asia.
        -- David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 2.

Definition: "Comprador"

(Originally, 1840) A Chinese agent engaged by a foreign establishment in China to have charge of its Chinese employees and to act as an intermediary in business affairs
(current usage)  A business intermediary from a country of lesser economic stature, in the employ of a country of greater (WebsterÅfs 3rd)

On the "Comprador Class"

Despite the claims to internationalism on the part of established multinationals and networks of new communications technology industries, such circulations as there are are caught in the vicious circuits of surplus value that link First World capital to Third World labor markets through the chains of the international division of labor, and national comprador classes.
        -- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London:Routledge, 1994) 20.

Keywords for Wednesday 4/12

Scientism
Progress
Marxism
Darwinism
Freudian Psychoanalysis

Long Quotes for Wednesday 4/12

Definition of "Scientism" (874)

The faith that the world was predictable, that it operated according to rules and principles that could be discovered.  Whether considering natural or human phenomena, these thinkers argued for patterning; this patterning, they argued, reflected processes that inexorably produced predictable results.  Accident, serendipity, the unknowable -- these were replaced with a confident expectation that all would eventually be understood by science.

Is Marxism scientism?

Historical change takes place in regular patterns determined by economics
Under capitalism there is a division into antagonistic classes based on wealth
The state serves as an instrument of class domination and will therefore wither away after the formation of an international communist system
The overthrow of capitalism will have to happen by revolution (nearness of French and American revolutions)

Materialism: The Idea that History is Driven by "Property Relations"

Man's consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence.
Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. (268)
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that it . . . involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. (269)

Is Darwinism Scientism?  Progressivism?

Reliance on Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population (rules and principles that can be discovered)
Natural selection as a form of "patterning"?
Adaptive traits change as conditions change; the fittest now will not be the fittest later: "Darwin carefully avoided linking evolution to progress; this was atypical of scientists of that day" (861)
Mutation (accident, serendipity, the unknowable); also: fossils

Did Freud Practice Scientism?

"There are hidden forces in the mind" (873)
The true nature of hysteria (mania, phobia, schizophrenia, etc.) is not visible
Nevertheless, the "hidden" cause of the physical symptom can be interpreted according to rules and principles
At the same time, interpretation must be based on language and the patient's own personal history (serendipity, accident) ([psycho] -logy vs. -analysis)

Did Freud Practice Scientism? (II)

"The forces of the mind can work against one another" (874)
Rules and Principles: id, ego, superego (three main divisions, each contradicting)
Id (unruly, unconscious) ego (mediator between id and real world) super-ego (conscience: punishes and gives ideal)
The example of dreams: all serendipity? "dream day" "dreamwork" "condensation"
 

Keywords for Monday 4/17

 Lenin and the Bolsheviks as Marxists
 Stalin as Marxist (Wednesday's video)
 The Long March
 Mao as Marxist
 The Cultural Revolution

Long Quotes for Monday 4/17

Mao as Marxist I: History

The broad peasant masses have risen to fill their historic mission, [and] the democratic forces in the rural areas have risen to overthrow the rural feudal power.  The patriarchal-feudal class of local bullies, bad gentry and lawless landlords has formed the basis of autocratic government for thousands of years, the cornerstone of imperialism, warlordism and corrupt officialdom.  To overthrow this feudal power is the real objective of the national revolution.  What Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted to do in the forty years he devoted to the national revolution but failed to accomplish, the peasants have accomplished in a few months. (371)
"Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan," 1926

The Cultural Revolution: "Necessary Violence"

Young students attack Anti-Mao officials and elite groups: 1966-1976
Schools closed, government offices taken over by Red Guards (photo 934)
"A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows another.  . . . to put it bluntly, it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area; otherwise one could never suppress the activities of the counter-revolutionaries" ("Report," 372)

The Cultural Revolution: Deconstruction of Family

All power to the peasant association:  "Even such a trifle as a quarrel between man and wife has to be settled at the peasant association" ("Report," 369)
"thought reform:" painful self-examination in small groups, with "confession," self-criticism, and rehabilitation

The Cultural Revolution: Suspicion of Intellectuals

"Report of an Investigation:" journalistic, not intellectual like Marx's writing
"Marx and his theories [were] attractive both to the worker, feeling oppressed and resentful of the economic elite, and to the intellectual, attracted to the idealistic philosophy [and systematic historical theory] they embodied." Global Past 866
"Although an intellectual, Mao distrusted his educated peers and identified more closely with peasantry, which he believed harbored much wisdom" (Global Past 930)
 
 
 
 
 
 

National Socialism as Socialism
Anti-Keywords (penalty for use) Nazi, Fascist
Imagined Communities and the Media
Chiang Kai-shek / Jiang Jie-shi

Long Quotes for Monday 24 April

Triumph of the Will


Perhaps the most significant Nazi movie was Triumph of the Will (1934).  . . .
The movie focused on a massive Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and used it to convey the message of Nazism.
. . . To create an overall effect [the director] chose to capture a mood rather than present a story chronologically.
The impressionistic effect has a symphonic quality in which the different parts merged into a whole of
sight and sound without a distracting narrative commentary.  The movie received critical acclaim, even by enemies of the
Nazi regime, and showed Nazi mastery of the media. (Global Past 962)


Keywords for Wednesday 26 Apri

First World, Second World, Third World
Proxy Wars
Che Guevara, Cold Warrior?
Whittaker Chambers, Cold Warrior?

Long Quotes for Wednesday 26 April

Cold War Proxy Wars: Korea 1950-1953

Soviet-backed Communist N. Korea (Kim Il-Sung) invades S. Korea 25 June 1950
American General MacArthur counterattacks 15 September 1950; Japanese "aid"
Mao Zedong commits China to communist side; counterattacks to save Manchuria October 1950
Armistice line established July 1953: international prestige; economic integration for both sides

Cold War Proxy Wars: Vietnam 1961-1975

1954:             Ho Chi Minh -led nationalist/communists defeat colonial French powers with Chinese aid
1954:             Geneva conference divides country into noncommunist south and communist north; USA refuses to recognize division
                        Eisenhower renounces elections that Ho Chi Minh would have won
1965-1975      US airplanes heavily bomb N. Vietnam but do not invade, fearing Chinese involvement
1975 April     Saigon falls to communists April 1975
1978             Vietnamese invade communist Cambodia in 1978

 Cold War Proxy Wars: Cuba 1959-present (?)

1959: Revolutionaries overthrow U.S. backed Cuban regime
1959: Marxist state headed by Fidel Castro
1962: U.S. supported invasion of Cuba fails
1962: Soviet Union builds a missile base in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida:
Kennedy and Kruschev / "Cuban Missile Crisis" narrowly averts nuclear war

Cold War Proxy Wars: Nicaragua 1970s and 1980s

1970s: the US backs a corrupt dictatorship to prevent communism
Marxist revolutionary Sandanistas over throw dictator
New Sandanista state recognized by Soviet Union (and several W. European countries)
U.S. Congress prohibits further intervention but Reagan / CIA deem covert aid necessary to combat "evil empire"

Che Guevara (1927 - 1967) and the Third World

By the mid-1960s, Guevara became disenchanted with the direction of the Cuban Revolution, leaving Cuba for new revolutionary pastures in Latin America.  Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, wanted to build communism in Cuba by relying heavily on the Soviet Union . . . Guevara criticized the subordination of Cuba to a great power.  He believed that revolution within any one country had to take place in the context of revolutionary struggles and revolutions within the entire Third World. (Global Past, 1030)

Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)

At that moment in history, I was one of the few men on this side of the battle who could perform this service.  I had joined the Communist Party in 1924.  No one recruited me.  I had become convinced that the society in which we live . . . Had reached a crisis . . . And that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism.  In 1937, I repudiated Marx's doctrines and Lenin's tactics.  Experience and the record had convinced me that Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway (quoted in The Global Past, 1019)