an article by Barbara J. Falk (Canadian Foreces College Toronto) published in Eurozine
What are the legacies of dissent, thirty years after 1989?
Two places to look are the 2011 Arab Spring and Armenia’s revolts in 2018. They both teach different lessons about establishing the interpersonal conditions for successful non-violent rebellions and restoring social trust in an illiberal age when authoritarians use ‘hybrid warfare’ tactics to disrupt democracies from the inside.
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Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts
Monday, 18 November 2019
Friday, 13 April 2018
Is catastrophe the only cure for inequality?
an article by George Eaton published in the New Statesman
Inequality, authors of the left usually argue, is not inevitable. The gap between the rich and the poor was made by man and can be undone by man. But Walter Scheidel’s recent book on the subject, The Great Leveller, ends on a sobering note: “All of us who prize economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow.”
In his 528-page study of inequality “from the Stone Age to the 21st century”, the Stanford historian finds that significant equalisation has only ever been achieved by what he calls the “Four Horsemen of Levelling”: mass warfare, violent revolution, state collapse and lethal pandemics. The two world wars, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the fall of the Roman empire and the Black Death are among the most notable examples. Outside of such tumultuous upheavals, governments have struggled to constrain inequality.
When we spoke recently by phone, I asked Scheidel what inspired his epic undertaking. “Thomas Piketty reached further back into the past than people usually do [in his book Capital] and, for him, that was a couple of centuries,” the 51-year-old Austrian told me. “Since I primarily work on ancient history, I thought I should look at the full run of history. I discovered that no one had tried to do it before, which isn’t very surprising because you have to be so eclectic in your approach.”
In 1999, when Scheidel moved to the United States from Vienna, inequality was rarely discussed in the media or in academia. After the financial crisis, however, “It really flared up. There has been a significant shift.”
Continue reading
Inequality, authors of the left usually argue, is not inevitable. The gap between the rich and the poor was made by man and can be undone by man. But Walter Scheidel’s recent book on the subject, The Great Leveller, ends on a sobering note: “All of us who prize economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow.”
In his 528-page study of inequality “from the Stone Age to the 21st century”, the Stanford historian finds that significant equalisation has only ever been achieved by what he calls the “Four Horsemen of Levelling”: mass warfare, violent revolution, state collapse and lethal pandemics. The two world wars, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the fall of the Roman empire and the Black Death are among the most notable examples. Outside of such tumultuous upheavals, governments have struggled to constrain inequality.
When we spoke recently by phone, I asked Scheidel what inspired his epic undertaking. “Thomas Piketty reached further back into the past than people usually do [in his book Capital] and, for him, that was a couple of centuries,” the 51-year-old Austrian told me. “Since I primarily work on ancient history, I thought I should look at the full run of history. I discovered that no one had tried to do it before, which isn’t very surprising because you have to be so eclectic in your approach.”
In 1999, when Scheidel moved to the United States from Vienna, inequality was rarely discussed in the media or in academia. After the financial crisis, however, “It really flared up. There has been a significant shift.”
Continue reading
Friday, 3 November 2017
Throughout history, plagues and wars have left greater equality in their wake. Can we get there again without violence?
via 3 Quarks Daily: Walter Scheidel in Aeon
The principal sources of inequality have changed over time. Whereas feudal lords exploited downtrodden peasants by force and fiat, the entrepreneurs of early modern Europe relied on capital investment and market exchange to reap profits from commerce and finance. Yet overall outcomes remained the same: from Pharaonic Egypt to the Industrial Revolution, both state power and economic development generally served to widen the gap between rich and poor: both archaic forms of predation and coercion and modern market economies yielded unequal gains.
Figure 3: Wealth inequality in Piedmont, 1300-1800: the richest 5 per cent and the Gini coefficient of wealth concentration
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I can’t believe that I have just sat and read the whole of Walter Sceidel’s essay in Aeon and been really involved in his hypothesis. It seems to have taken me about 20 minutes! And now I need to hunt down the book, hopefully in the library because I could not hope to actually purchase it.
The future looks bleak for my grandchildren’s generation.
The principal sources of inequality have changed over time. Whereas feudal lords exploited downtrodden peasants by force and fiat, the entrepreneurs of early modern Europe relied on capital investment and market exchange to reap profits from commerce and finance. Yet overall outcomes remained the same: from Pharaonic Egypt to the Industrial Revolution, both state power and economic development generally served to widen the gap between rich and poor: both archaic forms of predation and coercion and modern market economies yielded unequal gains.
Figure 3: Wealth inequality in Piedmont, 1300-1800: the richest 5 per cent and the Gini coefficient of wealth concentration
Continue reading
I can’t believe that I have just sat and read the whole of Walter Sceidel’s essay in Aeon and been really involved in his hypothesis. It seems to have taken me about 20 minutes! And now I need to hunt down the book, hopefully in the library because I could not hope to actually purchase it.
The future looks bleak for my grandchildren’s generation.
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