Henry Hale's Theory of Patronal Politics: A Marxist Perspective - COSMONAUT
|
Louis Proyect
Suppose you’re waiting at the DMV. The wait, per usual, is dragging on and the queue is long. Suddenly somebody enters the facility without checking in and walks straight up to a window. The person assures the patiently waiting crowd that the DMV employee is his niece. He proceeds to have his vehicle-related business taken care of. For most Americans, this would be utterly intolerable. However in Eurasian culture, specifically in ex-Soviet countries, this is not only considered acceptable but is expected. If for instance, the DMV employee told her uncle to wait like everybody else, onlooking strangers would sneer at her with contempt: “That’s your family, how could you do that to them?”. All throughout Eurasian culture, we find these kinds of relations being employed by the ruling class to better maintain their domination over society. https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/09/24/henry-hales-theory-of-patronal-politics-a-marxist-perspective/
|
|
|
|
Jerry Monaco
This was a very good article. Those of us who have spent time in the Mezzogiorno know the phenomena of the patron/client relationship quite well. I know from my own family, that some of these relationships date back to Roman times. (Or at least this is the family legend.) In actual fact, I do think some of them can be traced to pre-capitalist times.
What Hale describes closely fits the clientela system of ancient Rome. There are some of this in other societies across the world that I have experienced but they have a different cultural value and are closely related with "kinship-clan" identity. (South Korea for instance.) It should be made clear that such relationships are ancient. Like other pre-capitalist systems a clientela system should be analized as being with-in capitalism, as modifiers of capitalism, as being transformed by capitalism, but they are not capitalist in-themselves, anymore than a parent-child relationship is capitalist. As far as integrating such ideas into a Marxist analysis I would suggest that people first read some of the Marxist historians of ancient City-States and Northern Italian City-States who already have developed analyses of these relationships in their historical contexts. For sure it is a good and interesting project to analyze these relationships in the current context, but starting from the historical background should be a fruitful beginning.
On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 7:53 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
|
|
|