ClassCrits involved in Fed. Reserve Reform Initiative

Kudos to Timothy Canova  (Chapman Univ. Law) and heterodox economist friends of ClassCrits who’ve been tapped for a committee to advise Sen. Bernie Sanders on crafting legislation to reform the Federal Reserve.  Canova will join Gerald Epstein of the U.Mass. Political Economy Research Institute, economist L. Randall Wray, and financial regulation expert Jane D’Arista, along with Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, James K. Galbraith, William Greider, William Black, Robert Johnson, Nomi Prins and others.  The group will develop a regulatory plan to respond to the Fed’s conflicts of interest and other problems found by a recent GAO report.

Remembering Joe Bageant: Class Migrant, Class Warrior

By Lisa R. Pruitt

Americans like to think they live in a society unstratified by class, a society of equal opportunity, where the American dream survives. Joe Bageant, a journalist turned cultural critic, challenged these myths with inimitable intensity, compassion, and wit.

Along the way, he reminded us of the links between the nation’s white working class and rural America. Bageant died earlier this year at the age of 64.

I first heard the name Joe Bageant in, of all places, Waarnambool, Australia. It was November, 2010, and I was there to give a lecture at the Rural and Regional Law and Justice Conference. After my talk, “Toward a Critical Legal Ruralism,” an Australian law professor approached me and recommended the book Deer Hunting with Jesus:  Dispatches from America’s Class Wars by Joe Bageant. I promptly purchased it. Who could resist such a provocative title?

I found that what the academic literature teaches about class wars, Bageant expressed in sharper, colloquial terms, and I discussed Bageant in my essay, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars.

The scholarly literature tells us that progressive elites look down on the white working class and fail to see their struggles, including the struggle within the white working class by which the “settled,” disciplined working class differentiate themselves from the “hard living.”  Bageant—consistent with his rural roots—expressed this distinction between the settled and the hard living as that between rednecks and white trash, explaining:

ClassCrits IV; Report-Back

Last weekend’s conference at American University Washington College of Law: “ClassCrits IV: Criminalizing Economic Inequality,” was a terrific success. Thanks to my fellow members of the organizing team, including Martha McCluskey (who took the lead role in assembling and re-assembling the panels), Ezra Rosser (the unflappable and always cheerful on-site go-to guy), Teri Miller (whose insights about “crimmigration” were the inspiration for our theme, and whose film about Attica and the impact of long-term imprisonment on correctional officers as well as inmates provoked one of the most thoughtful and searching discussions of the conference), and Athena Mutua, who for health reasons was unable to attend but who helped shape this conference, like the previous ClassCrits assemblies, from the very beginning.

Thanks also to our hosts: not only the law school at American, which was a fantastic venue, but also my new home school, the University of California at Davis, whose dean Kevin Johnson enthusiastically contributed funds to the conference in order to subsidize meals and make travel to the conference possible for some of the participants, and the University at Buffalo Law School and the UB Baldy Center on Law and Policy, where class-crits was born and nurtured in its infancy, and which continues to support the class-crits endeavor. These institutions made the conference possible.

Deepest thanks, of course, go to the attendees. We had participants just beginning their academic careers as well as senior scholars; experts in immigration law, poverty law, family law, criminal justice, financial institutions, and corporations, just to name a few; and panel after knockout panel that produced thoughtful, passionate interchange. It was clear to me after attending this conference that the phrase “the criminalization of poverty” is not just a rhetorical flourish; the panelists and the discussants were able to document just along how many different dimensions poor people are being subjected to ever harsher state control along with economic marginalization and exploitation. And, as several participants pointed out, new technologies of control and coercion have a tendency to spread. Criminologists call it “net-widening.” The result is that regimes and practices of governance that we imagine will only be applied to “them” are in short order going to be used on “us.”

Because ClassCrits is a relatively small and new legal community, a few people asked me to reproduce here the opening comments I made at the conference. Slightly edited, here they are:

We’ve been calling ourselves class-crits as a way of underscoring our affinity with those movements, and there are several points of similarity. First and most obviously is the “crit” part: an interest in taking apart and examining the assumptions that underlie traditional legal and policy discourse. Martha McCluskey’s work, if you haven’t read it, is a beautiful example. Quintessentially critical, her work shows how the economic status quo is conceived to be natural, normal, and necessary, and how markets are imagined to be “free” despite the obvious role of the state in creating and maintaining them.

A second point of similarity is that like critical race theorists, the folks who have been participating in class-crits gatherings take the position that inequality and subordination are central rather than peripheral to US society.  Unlike positive law and economics, we seek not only to describe economic relations, but also intervene in them; we have a normative agenda. (Some, of course, would say that conventional law and economics has a normative agenda also: to promote laissez-faire economic policymaking and upward redistribution!)

Third, like LatCrit (Latino Critical Theory), we who have been working under the name of “class-crits” share a commitment to “anti-essentialism” along with anti-subordination. In the context of class analysis, this means rejecting the old school Marxist view that economic relations are the foundation of social relations and cultural relations are only the superstructure. It also has meant a continuing interest in how racism and sexism operate through market institutions and practices, and vice versa: how economic relations operate through race and sex.

A fourth similarity between class-crits and our sister “crit” movements is a concern with law and legal institutions as central to maintaining the unjust status quo, but also as one site for resisting injustice. Rights may be meaningless without enforcement (and a focus on establishing legal rights can suck the energy out of grassroots movement), but rights are also an indispensable “hook” for organizing and for institutional action.

There are also, however, some points of difference between class-crits and other “crit” movements.

The most obvious one is that subordination along class lines works differently than subordination along lines of gender, sexuality, and race. The founding question for critical race theory, for instance, was “how is it that racial hierarchy is maintained in a society that rejects the notion of racial hierarchy?” There is no direct parallel of this founding paradox for class relations. Capitalism is not a disavowed ideology; it is a central pillar of social organization in the U.S. and the West more generally. Instead, a founding question for class-crits might be, “How is an institution that generates, requires, and even values economic inequality reconciled with ideologies of political equality?”

A related point of difference comes from political theorist Nancy Fraser’s old distinction between recognition and redistribution: Class-crits is not organized around the goal of social and political group “recognition” for poor people, although such a movement might intersect with class-crit interests. In this way, class-crits differs from feminist legal theory, critical race theory, and queer theory, all of which are founded in the struggles of women, people of color, and sexual minorities for full social citizenship. Class-crits is not a poor people’s movement, or a movement that seeks to give the beleaguered working classes or the stressed-out middle classes a political voice (laudable as those aims might be). Class-crits is interested in understanding and if necessary altering or abolishing capitalist institutions and practices as we know them in the service of a better life for all.

There is no consensus among us about how best to promote human flourishing and reach the goal of a decent life for everyone. Some of us are reconstructed Marxists, others more democratic socialists; we might even have some anarchists among us, and some capitalists who believe in regulation and balancing market power with state power. What I think we can all agree on despite our different political positions is the need to interrogate market practices and institutions – to understand them as social constructions, not natural processes like the weather; to understand their role in maintaining illegitimate hierarchies and inequalities; and to understand the systematic relations among the market, the state, and civil society including the family, the three major governance institutions of mass society in the contemporary West.

This is an urgent task given (1) the current global economic crisis and the connected crises, or malaise, or coming new recession, within the United States; (2) the collision course we are on between capitalism as we know it and environmental collapse; and (3)  our crisis of governance within the United States (and apparently world-wide) – in which entrenched economic interests have captured the political process, producing increased frustration and immiseration on the part of the people while elected governments seem less and less responsive to their needs.

A final thought: the class-crits project, thus stated, is clearly more than a legal project (and is too important to be left to lawyers, anyway!). Central to class-crits as an organizing initiative, then, is the need to reach out to other people who share our agenda. Past class-crits workshops have embraced heterodox economists; at the final feedback session of the conference, attendees suggested that we build connections with political economists here and outside the U.S. and with sociologists. We look forward to creating those networks and hope you will help us do so! As I said in that last session, there is no class-crits governance structure or bureaucracy. Class-crits is us!

Goodbye to the Best of Law & Economics: Warren Samuels 1933-2011

Martha T. McCluskey

I just now learned of the death last month of Warren J. Samuels, who in in my book was the best law and economics scholar of the last half century or so, and certainly one of the most prolific, knowledgeable and wide-ranging (see link to his cv).  How shameful that his foundational work has been virtually ignored in the mainstream Law and Economics movement, even in its purportedly more progressive and heterodox corners.

A few of Samuels’ legal classics: Maximization of Wealth as Justice:  An Essay on Posnerian Law and Economics as Policy Analysis (book review) 60 Texas Law Review 147 (1981); and The Legal-Economic Nexis, 57 George Washington Law Review, 1556 (1988-89).   And I look forward to reading his just published Erasing the Invisible Hand: Essays on an Elusive and Misused Concept in Economics (Cambridge, 2011).

Samuels’ work should be required reading in every law and economics course and by every legal scholar interested in economics.   What a different world we might live in if Samuels, rather than Henry Manne and other right-wing-funded promoters of the “free market,” had had the power and funding to educate the last few generations of legal scholars, judges, attorneys, and politicians in economic policy. Samuels was active in the 1970s critical legal studies movement, a leader in developing the field of history of economics, an expert on public utility law, and a generous mentor to several generations of heterodox economists.   Let’s belatedly give Samuels the prominence in law he deserves.

Under-educated State Legislatures? (Part II): The Public-Private Divide in Higher Education

By Lisa R. Pruitt

I wrote a post last month about data recently released by the Chronicle of Higher Education regarding education levels of state legislators.  That post considered whether the data shed any light on recent funding cuts to higher education.  The short answer:  Not really, though one thing is clear.  Being a graduate of a public university (or  having attended one) does not guarantee great support for public institutions of higher education.  This post will discuss the public-private divide in how and where state legislators were educated and speculate o the divide’s consequences.

While about 75% of state legislators have college degrees, the majority of those—nearly 80%–have attended public universities.  (Many of those also attended private universities, though data on the institutions where the legislators earned their degrees is not detailed).  One of the Chronicle stories about the data summarizes:

“Like most American students, the vast majority of state legislators went to public colleges.  And most of them stayed close to home.  In Louisiana, four out of five legislators never went to college outside the state.”

As the quote above suggests, the percentage of state legislators who attended private colleges varies significantly from state to state.  As a general rule, legislators in the northeast were more likely to attend private colleges than were legislators in other regions.  Here are the findings by state, which show that Massachusetts and Rhode Island have the lowest percentage of state lawmakers who attended a public university or college, while Mississippi, Alabama, and North Dakota  have the highest percentages of those who attended a public university or college*:      

Ain’t You Got a Right

…To the Tree of Life?  Rehearsing this refrain for a benefit concert last weekend, choir director (and educator and community organizer extraordinaire) Jane Sapp urged us to sing out against the budget cuts falling on so many life-sustaining programs across the country.

Sometimes law needs more music.  Legal theory’s familiar critique of rights sounded flat against the spirited voices of young people gathered to memorialize one of the group who died too young in a Massachusetts city struggling with underfunded schools, poverty, racism, violence, and the aftermath of a recent tornado.  A few days before, at a Buffalo public hearing on a utility energy efficiency program, I heard an activist with a low-income group break into heartfelt song to demand increased weatherization funding for low-income customers who cannot afford heat, from a gas company paying its CEO $3,550 an hour. The presiding Administrative Law Judge noted that this may have been the first musical testimony presented as part of a New York public service commission regulatory proceeding.

Even without the music, idealistic visions of equal rights often are treated as sentimental and unsophisticated in contemporary legal theory.  The standard critique from left and right is that, no, you don’t have any meaningful rights unless you have power already. 

D.C. Residents Say Class Divides Them More than Race

By Lisa R. Pruitt

The Washington Post reported a few days ago on a new poll of Washington, DC residents which found that “[m]ost District residents–black and white–see socioeconomic class, not race, as the primary source of a stark divide in the city.”  The poll further found that, in some ways, “higher-income African Americans have more in common with similarly wealthy whites than with lower-income blacks.”

But the report also notes some significant caveats to the broad similarities between upper income (over $100,000) blacks and whites:  Blacks in this group “express significantly more sour views of the District’s economy than do whites.”   Further:

Higher income African Americans also are less secure than whites about their own financial well-being, more apprehensive about the spreading effects of gentrification and somewhat more critical of the state of race relations in the District.

In short, the poll shows that African Americans’ “perspectives remain shaped by decades of economic difficulty and a sense that many blacks, including some in their own families, are still struggling.”