Can Do Collective Krautrock: No Fuhrers

Chapter 2: No Fuhrers, 

from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs

    My music listening life can be split into three phases that probably resemble roughly the experience of many. My earliest phase when I heard whatever records my parents happened to play and I eventually discovered Top 40 and the radio. My second phase, which I’m going to call my rock snob phase, takes off somewhere between 1977 and 1979, when I discover a music press, go to college, move into the city, and begin to fancy myself a learned student of rock and pop music and its history. This phase lasted until the early ‘90s for me when I got married and started school teaching, launching a phase when music became, again, primarily a background listening experience. I remember a student once commenting that all their social studies teachers had a thing for African music, like me. I balked at the stereotype then but think now it does get at something essential about the liberal internationalist character of the last Dad Rock phase in my music listening. Retiring might mark another new phase in my music listening but I don’t have enough perspective yet to tell for sure.  

    At any rate, Chapter 2 in David Stubbs’ Future Days profiles Krautrock flag bearers Can. Can was a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968. They improvise a blend of psychedelia, progressive jazz-rock, funk, studio electronics and tape editing into these long and drawn-out and slightly robotic proto-worldmusic grooves. I don’t keep up with the rock snob press very well anymore but I gather Can’s stock has risen considerably in the 21st century and they also happen to fit perfectly several of my ‘dad rock’ music listening inclinations. Making this a great time to linger over some Can records again.  

    As I mentioned in my blurb about Chapter 1, Stubbs frames Krautrock as born out of 1968 student protest movements. But Can, like Amon Duul, weren’t hanging out with the Red Army Faction. They were a more a middle-class cultural response to the spirit of ’68, maybe akin to the drop out hippie movement in the states. Can originally setup their recording studio in a retreat-like castle outside Cologne, like Faust in an old and abandoned schoolhouse in a rural setting or Cluster in their converted German farmhouse. Amon Duul, both versions, grew out of a hippie commune. 

    Foremost, though, the US model for Can were Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Their name is a play on Warhol’s 1962 painting exhibition of 32 Campbell Soup Can flavors. Irmin Schmidt, co-founding member, visited NYC in the mid-‘60s, hanging out around La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, which included the Velvet’s John Cale and others. And the group’s first band name, and name for all their subsequent recording studios (in another nod to their affiliation with hippie psychedelia), was Inner Space. The two sides of Can from the start are Pop art pretensions and classic hippie era, 1968-1972, psychedelia. 

    What the original German musical acts we’re calling krautrockers (this is contested too, of course, and probably something I’ll take up at some point) called their own music was “Kosmische Musik,” or ‘cosmic music’ or, in other words, psychedelic music.  

    Stubbs celebrates Can’s remarkable collective achievement and then their mushrooming influence since their heyday (1968 to 1973, or 1975, or 1979, YMMV). 

    In the beginning the four or five principles get together, hang out in their Inner Space studio for long hours, days on end, jamming and improvising with studio electronics and tape editing effects. No one came to the studio with finished songs; they improvised their songs together in the studio. Schmidt brags that everyone in Can got credit for song compositions and attributes the decline of Can recordings in the mid-‘70s to this collective bond in the band cracking and beginning to break down. 

When "Mother Sky" is all you need. Can, 1970. 

    And then understandably Stubbs marvels even more at the mushrooming influence and legacy of Can since the 1970s, spreading from Joy Division/New Order to the Eurhythmics to The Orb to Radiohead to Stereolab to LCD Soundsystem to Pavement and Tame Impala and on and on. Can have evolved into a pioneering prototype of a post-punk musical intersection combining DIY rock band collaboration with electronics and ambient music and an infatuation with global beats. Again, a rock snob and dad rock marriage made in heaven, or in my mind anyway.   

    Seems relevant to note from the outset three of four of the Fab Four band members in Can were pushing or already 30 in 1968. 

    Schmidt, keyboards, and founding musical direction guy in the band, with no shortage of strong opinions, was already doing successful musical production soundtrack work for TV and movies when Can formed. His professional experience is also why Can’s first two albums are titled Monster Movies and Soundtracks (1969). A lot of their earliest recordings were originally produced for TV and movie soundtracks. For this reason, some discographies won’t include Soundtracks with Can’s other proper albums. One of Can’s earliest mission statements, articulated by Schmidt, is a sneering disdain and opposition to schlager music, with which I am no expert but understand is sentimental and sweet pop hits widely popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries at the time. I imagine Abba as an uber-ultra model of schlager music but I’m not really sure? I’ve never followed the Eurovision song contest and only know the Will Ferrell comedy. Anyway, Schmidt avowedly formed Can in opposition to schlager-ish commercial pop music, whatever exactly that was in 1968 Germany. And he also had a thing about not wanting Can associated with the British progressive groups, repeatedly emphasizing Can’s more important affinities with minimalism and James Brown and the Velvets and Andy Warhol. 

    It’s not clear how much Schmidt’s vision for Can reflects that of the other guys in the band but it brings out the art rock foundations of Can’s formation. Schmidt and co-founder, bassist and master sound experimentation and tape editor, Holger Czukay, both studied together with electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s. Stockhausen means musically, in short: musique concrete or taped found sounds or already existing passages of music chopped up, looped, and manipulated electronically. Miles Davis and an astonishing number of prog rockers cite Stockhausen’s influence on their music in the early ‘70s. Maybe above all others, a Stockhausen recording put out in 1959 called “Gesang Der Junglinge” or “Song of the Youths” was very influential. 

Significally, Schmidt insists that Can has nothing to do with British prog rock but Can shares Stockhausen’s and prog rock’s penchant for drones and minimalist repetition and soundtrack ambience and an epic and/or hypnotically indulging, shall we say, approach to song length. Again, like the Velvets, Can’s “Yoo Doo Right,” on their '69 debut, Monster Movies, lasts over 20 minutes, surpassing “Sister Ray” at 17 and a half minutes in 1968, although both will soon enough be crushed by prog rock monster track monoliths like Jethro Tull’s 43-44 minute long “Thick as a Brick” or Michael Oldfield’s 60 minutes long “Amorak.” Apparently, Stockhausen has a piece of music that lasts for almost 29 hours. Anyway, by the late ‘70s Brit prog rockers are playing on Can’s last albums, guys who formerly played with Brit prog rockers Traffic. 

    The guitarist, Michael Karoli, the youngster in the core quartet, and the only member of the quartet that fits the rock star model, reportedly introduced Czukay to the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus,” which opened Czukay up to the avant-garde collage and studio manipulation possibilities in pop music. Eventually, Karoli travels in North Africa, especially Morocco, sharpening Can’s interest in non-Western rhythms, hypnotic trance and modal repetition. His guitar style, echoed later by post-punkers like PIL's Keith Levine or Amerindie groups like the Feelies and Vampire Weekend, shares an affinity with the bright, trilling, trebly guitar sounds of North/West Africa. 

    Finally, driving the core quartet of Can musicians, is drummer Jaki Liebezeit. I’m fully behind Stubbs and Schmidt’s arguments that the key to Can’s musical achievements were the collaborative and improvisatory group setup. Can is a sum greater than its parts, this is born out in how none of the band members solo work I’ve heard compares with Can’s classics or even their post-Mooney-Suzuki records. Like the Beatles, like the Velvet Underground, like many of the greatest bands, the sum was greater than its individual parts with Can. But if I had to identify only one musician in that core Can quartet of musicians as MVP, the guy who raised their sound above just another early ‘70s jazz rock fusion band, of which there were many in that day mind you, it’s Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming. 

    His beats are always center, simple, metronomic but tricky and funky. Leading the way, Liebezeit pushes the tempo in Can music and creates the center of the band's sound around which the other guy’s riff and improv. He manages to simultaneously evoke traditional drumbeats and global rhythms with a signature clipped machine-like precision and relentlessness. Although that doesn't quite tell the whole story either. 

Liebezeit is frequently credited, along with Kraftwerk and Neu’s drummer Klaus Dinger, and I’d throw in there as well Faust’s drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, with inspiring the trademark motorik sound: a relentless, machine-like drumming style associated with the emergence of Krautrock. But Liebezeit is more than the motorik sound. The popular model of the motorik sound, Kraftwerk’s 1974 track, “Autobahn,” is literally an electronic transcription of Dinger’s exuberant drumming style, according to co-founder Ralf Hutter. Liebezeit’s signature drum sound is really a combo of that relentless tribal trance-inducing trademark machine-like motorik sound, that he shares with Dinger and Zappi and probably others, combined in Liebezeit with a big bag of global funky-jazz drummer chops. 

    Indeed, Liebezeit began on the drums as a jazzer, subbed once for Art Blakey when his Jazz Messengers played in Cologne in the early 1960s. He modeled his simple drum set after jazz great Kenny Clarke and admired the drumming of Elvin Jones. But he has some falling out with the free jazz mindset before he joins Can; “there were too many rules in free jazz,” he concludes. Foremost, it appears he burnt out on free jazz’s aversion to repetition and groove. He expresses a preference for the syncopated sounds of flamenco and afro-Cuban jazz music. This reminds me of some remarks in Miles Davis’s autobiography. In the middle of the free jazz craze Miles boasts that he tries to never repeat himself but then admits elsewhere to preferring drummers who keep a strong steady time he can play off. Liebezeit wanted to be Mile’s steady drummer but insisted that his relentless tempos or grooves would lead the way; forcing the tempo, connecting his drumming style to punk and post-punk. Liebezeit’s drumming drives Can’s sound. Like in funk and groove music styles, his drumming is almost always the center of the group’s sound. 

        I’m no expert on any musicianship, I caution the reader. The most formal music education I got was actually playing drums in my 5th and 6th grade band but quit with a buddy who played the snare drum next to me because our band instructor was, ironically in a story about Krautrock, a complete Nazi figure to us, actually German with a thick accent, and very strict and impatient, which very well could have been because we weren’t very good. Anyway, I’ve never played a drum set and cannot read a musical score. So, like I said, I’m no expert on great drumming. But I’ve always loved beats and rhythms and funky syncopating grooves and it’s hard for me to think of a more original and signature drumming style than Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. He shares the krautrock trademark motorik drum sound with Dinger and Zappi but he brings to it a virtuosic global funky groove traditionalism that is all his own. There are times when he sounds like a machine sample of Clyde Stubblefield 10 or 15 years before this sound would become a staple of hiphop music. Lots of tricky funky beats relentlessly and hypnotically stretched into marathon monster jams. His 23-minute long tour de force in "Chain Reaction" (opening the live set below) displays Liebezeit's classic rock era godhead chops. He was a brilliant drummer. His bandmates were known to describe his drum sound as “half man, half machine.” 

The impression I'm left with now is that I've only touched the surface with live Can stuff but, wow, there is some good stuff out there. This is from 1975, so late by most evaluations of Can, but it absolutely cooks with this minimalist banging energy. Not to be missed.  

    For Liebezeit alone I find nearly all Can’s albums listenable. No doubt they lose some of their signature weirdness when Czukay leaves the band in 1977. And there is definitely an dramatic edge to their sound that is lost without vocalists Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki. All their best albums, solid 'A' albums in my book, Monster Movie (’69), Soundtracks (’70), Tago Mago (’71), Ege Bamyasi (’72), and Future Days (’73), feature one or both of them. But for me the four principles, the Fab Four, jamming together are always a superlative jazz-funk rock instrumental outfit. German psychedelia’s Booker T & The MGs, only in Can's case led by the drummer. Soon Over Babaluma (’74),  still arguably an 'A' album, and Landed (’75), Flow Motion (’76), Saw Delight (’77), Out of Reach (’78), and Can (’79), all arguably 'B+' albums, with each including some strong band Can moments. No doubt the vocals pale in comparison with the Mooney and Suzuki albums. And there's more schlager in the later stuff. After Soon Over Babaluma they do sound at times like they are trying hard to sell out but the band always remains tight and good together. Or perhaps up until their 1989 comeback album, Rite Time, when it does sound like they’re all just phoning it in. The collaborative energy in Can all gone. 

   But it is the Mooney and Suzuki stories that do really take the Can thing to another level in vanguard rock music lore. Neither was a very good singer. They both appeared with Can as though hired hands, although the core quartet talks about the collaborative energy between Mooney and Liebezeit and, as I've alluded, Mooney-Suzuki are a feature of nearly all Can’s best songs: “Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “She Brings the Rain,” “Halleluwah,” “Paperhouse,” “Vitamin C,” “Spoon,” etc. It was as if Can were the Velvets led by John Cale. None of the core quartet were lead singer types, so to fulfill that role they bring in these outsider art guys off the street. 

    Mooney was artist and graduate student, an American, and a globetrotting counterculture hippie. If ever there was the case for John Ford’s quip about “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” here it was. Mooney’s vocal style was garage rock gruff. He’d obsessively repeat phrases, “Waiting for the Streetcar,” “Yoo Doo Right,” “Outside My Door,” interspersed with yelps and whoops, as sharp rhythmic counterpoints to Liebezeit. The effect was catchy but also edgy and obsessive. In band lore Mooney finally suffers some sort of nervous collapse after performing “The Empress and the Ukraine King” one night, repeating the phrase “Upstairs, downstairs” for hours, long after the rest of the band and crowd had given up and gone home. Shortly thereafter he is counseled to leave Can for his health and he moves back to the states where he went on to become a visual artist and college professor. After those remarkably productive three years with Can, 1968 to 1970, he never plays with the band again until ‘89’s Rite Time. Mooney later says the “Upstairs/downstairs” story was made up but still remarkable how fitting it was to the obsessive repetition in Mooney’s best songs with Can. Mooney was an add on but essential to giving early Can songs a dramatic rock punch that grabbed the listener's attention. 

    Damo Suzuki was an immigrant from Japan who, after Mooney had left the band, they ran into actually performing on the street, busking, in Munich in 1970. So, again, the lead singer is a hired hand, an immigrant, and sings in English, not German, even though Suzuki was Japanese. In early live performances of the band you can find on youtube it appears as though audience members have no idea what to make of Suzuki. His vocal performances appear to be intense exorcisms, like Mooney, based on a lot of repetition and rhythmic tension and build-up, but are often totally indecipherable beyond the occasional hook phrase chanted repeatedly. 

    For the longest time I heard the lyrics to “Vitamin C” as “Hey you,” a classic song opening lyric (Swamp Dogg, Pink Floyd, etc), “you’re losing your,” all consistent with a lyric sheet, but then I heard maybe ‘privacy,’ or ‘your sanity,’ anything but “Vitamin C”?! I still can’t hear “Vitamin C”? Or for another example, his crucial "da da das" or “yeah, yeah, yeahs” at the end of “Halleluwah,” where he is according to lyric sheets really singing “Halleluwah”?! No way I hear that but whatever he’s saying the way he says it is indeed exhilaratingly “Halleluwah” stuff. Suzuki’s incantatory chanting make the words, beyond a hook phrase like “Mother Sky” feel less important than the trance-like force of the repetition and Suzuki’s speaking in tongue-like cathartic gesticulations. 

    The story of Suzuki’s breakup with the band in ’73, after recording Future Days, is almost as strange as the Mooney story. Supposedly he left the band to get married and join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then the story goes he got very sick, broke up with his wife, and became a successful middle level management guy in some industry. Then he later returned to music by creating Damo Suzuki’s Network, where he’d tour without a band and do collaborative one-off concerts with local musicians around the world. In later interviews he suggests he never felt like a fully integrated member of Can in the ordinary “band family” sense. But he sure did collaborate with them to make a few great Can albums between 1970 and 1973. 

Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki pictured together in the late 1990s or 2000s. 

    

    The core band family of Can musicians are Schmidt, Czukay, Karoli, and Liebezeit, but they never sound better than they do when they play with Mooney and/or Suzuki. They’re always predominantly an instrumental proposition, with minimalist lyrics, but their playing and songs are never as intense or dramatically rock as when they play with Mooney and Suzuki. 

Two excellent retrospective Can compilations, under Schmidt’s impressive curation, came out in the 2010s, and I’m assuming have a lot to do with Can's growing rock snob legacy. 

A 3 hour/3-CD collection of outtakes and live performances known as The Lost Tapes came out in 2012.  Foremost, it’s notable, for such a studio-centric band by reputation, how many great live recordings of early Can exist. In their takeoff as a band, 1968 to 1973, Liebezeit seemingly always charging ahead, the band are scorching hot together, goading Mooney and Suzuki on. The recordings on TLT are a little crude and rough but remarkably effective for outtakes and make the case for what monsters of experimental rock and psychedelia Can were in those first five years of their existence. 

And then there is The Singles a 2017 album compiling 23 Can singles and B-sides originally released between 1969 and 1979, and then the set adds on a 1989 remix of “Hoolah Hoolah.” This is the case for Can as a pop band. It feels a little far-fetched of a claim, Can as a pop band, but still remarkable how many of Can’s singles on this compilation hold up as pop songs. “Spoon” reaches number 6 on the pop charts in Germany in 1972 (and then a semi-popular Amerindie band from Texas name their band after the song in the 1990s). Can even tried disco like everybody else at the time and produced their only chart hit, “I Want More,” in the UK, peaking at 26 in 1976. They’re so into it they then spin that song into a couple more extended play disco funk jams. Ultimately, this audacious collection proves two things: 1) Can were not above the occasional schlager music (“Silent Night," "Cascade Waltz," etc), contrary to Schmidt's original convictions, and 2) Can were remarkably deft at making pop or semi-pop songs (“Turtles Have Short Legs,” “She Brings the Rain,”  “I’m So Green,” “Mushroom,” “Moonshake,” etc) for such an anti-schlager experimental rock band. The model might be Abbey Road era Beatles studio experimentation but it’s all Can's take: an improvising German jam band, immigrant Mooney or Suzuki doing their performance art vocal things, and Liebezeit’s proto-worldmusic Motorik funk.

    Anyway, Can are now on a very short list of my favorite experimental rock bands of all time. Up there with the Velvets, various Eno collaborations, Captain Beefheart, and Sonic Youth. I think in the same way some critic might dismiss Hawkwind as a grandiose rehash of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” some critic might dismiss Can as a German jazz-funk rehash of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray" or "I Heard Her Call My Name." I recognize the associations, both band's cop to them outright, but I think both Hawkwind and Can transcend those formulations with their records. Anyway, don’t sleep on Can, seminal krautrockers, if you like any of the above experimental rock greats. What I’ve learned most getting into some Can again is that their appeal goes beyond their classic albums. They were a great live band, with way more outtakes of great long experimental stuff out there than I knew. And with more remarkably catchy would-be wannabe pop hits than I realized. It's still true Can peaked when they featured Mooney and Suzuki but they were always a great band and reward greater attention to their expansive catalog of recordings. 

    Back in the day Xgau compares Can unfavorably with electric Miles Davis. What strikes me today about that comparison is not how much more I like Miles electric albums but what an apt comparison-- long groove heavy jams with rock and funk moves-- and then why the either/or? Instead, I imagine what a great double-bill live show would Can and Miles have made circa 1972-1973. Or why not a monster triple bill of Hawkwind opening, Can, and Miles headlining, of course. Three signature variations on classic psychedelic era deep grooves. 

Can goes disco on Top of the Pops, 1976. 

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, By Michael Pillsbury (2015)

    Finishing up my round-up of books about the recent rise of China I couldn’t help but notice my glaring neglect of more Hawkish books. What are the arguments China hawks make for "decoupling" with China or for taking a tougher military position against China? This is hardly a new blind-spot for me. I’m one of those people who gets mocked for only engaging with social media at all on liberal echo-chambers like Bluesky. Back in the day I would on occasion try Bill O’Reilly or some other loud popular conservative crank straight but always bitterly choked on the stuff before watching a whole show or episode. The truth was I could only process and digest the conservative doggerel of Fox News through the mocking filter of the Daily Show or Colbert Report. And my liberal snowflake tendencies haven’t changed much, I’m afraid. But I haven’t entirely given up trying to gird myself up on occasion to reading a popular book revered by the Hawks or “conservatives” or any of the paranoid style on the right. (1) The subtexts of the books Chip War and Apple in China in my rise-of-China round-up were somewhat Hawkish on China but not militantly or stridently hostile to China. What is then the China hawks’ favorite book on China? 

In the foreign policy establishment anyway, this book appears to be one of them: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015). The author, Michael Pillsbury, is a longtime American foreign policy strategist, goes way back to the Nixon era and still has the ears of the current regime and its agents in foreign policy. Trump named Pillsbury chair of the Defense Policy Board in 2020. The Stanford and Columbia graduate has spent years in China, speaks Mandarin, and for over the last half century has worked in that strange intersection between foreign policy research and national security intelligence operations. He’s not Indiana Jones but he might like thinking of himself as something like that. He has worked for the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, think tank outfits like the RAND Corporation, served as a close advisor to Reagan, and then worked as a Senate staffer for years before ending up at the Heritage Foundation, where, yes, he contributed to the monstrously inhumanitarian Project 2025. (2) Pillsbury appears to be the indisputable senior chair of the “China-hawks” in the US government at the present time, or close enough for my purposes anyway.

The argument in the 100-Year Marathon can be summarized in a few notes about the full title of the book. The century referred to begins with the Chinese communist revolution in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China and the rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and is supposed to end in 2049, by which time the CPC and China will have overtaken the US as the global superpower. Or in the nomenclature of foreign policy strategists like Pillsbury, China will have become the “hegemon,” a dominant leader exercising overwhelming authority over others in a group; or as discussed in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (TAoW), the ancient Chinese text Pillsbury’s analysis leans on, ‘Ba,’ or lord or overlord. To Pillsbury, China, or the CPC, an aggressive nationalist cult, is plotting to overthrow the US as the world’s supreme superpower and their ambitions are revealed in the teachings of China’s ancient text TAoW. 

The “secret” part in the subtitle appears to be rooted in the galling personal experience of Pillsbury representing the US in diplomatic negotiations with China for over the last half a century. Pillsbury’s origin story in US-China foreign policy is almost too strange but true and on the nose. He is literally the guy who wrote the policy paper that began US military ties with communist China in the 1970s. The first such ties with China since the 1945-1949 civil war (when the US sided against the CPC and against communist China, we should hasten to note and underline). The culmination of this new post-Nixon in China link was the production of weapons in China that supported US counterinsurgency against Russia in Afghanistan in the ‘80s (and helped launch the terrorist group behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, al-Queda, let's also note). At the time, after decades of global cold war violence and proxy armed struggles, splitting Sino-Soviet relations felt like a foreign policy (and counterintelligence) coup and the thing to do. Pillsbury is essentially the author of the “China card” in Cold War era global geopolitics. 

But since those heady optimistic times in US-China covert military relations, Pillsbury has come to regard China’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign that began with Nixon in China in 1972 as a big ruse. A cover up of covert strategies China was pursuing against the US from the beginning. China’s real strategy all along, according to Pillsbury, has been deeply and aggressively imperialist. And we can tell this because it is rooted in a Hawkish nationalist reading of China’s ancient Warring States period and the foreign policy strategies espoused in TAoW, a book widely recognized today as a classic text in foreign policy and military history. 

A big chunk of Pillsbury’s 100-Year Marathon book is revisionist history of US-China relations since Nixon went to China in 1972. For starters, Pillsbury asserts that Nixon’s historic visit to China wasn’t on Nixon’s initiative but the launch of a Chinese scheme to lure the US into giving China all its modernizing technologies. Other historical accounts refute this take on the timing alone by noting that in known records and documents of that time Nixon was talking openly about wanting to improve relations and increase trade with mainland China several years before Mao or anybody in the CPC was saying anything about meeting up with the US. But Pillsbury, whose primary interlocutors in China were Hawkish members of the CPC’s foreign policy and military establishment, knows better. (3)  

Likewise, Deng Xioping’s visit to the US in 1978 wasn’t really about any “Reform and Opening Up” in China at all, as was propagandized in conventional accounts. Instead, in keeping with the teachings in TAoW, applying the idea of ‘Shi,’ which translates roughly as “potential born of disposition” or “strategic advantage.” Basically, "Shi" means applying vigilant analysis and awareness of the ever-changing configuration of power between combatants (or warring states) to achieve national security and/or strategic preeminence. Rather than benevolent exchanges in trade and education, Deng and China were lulling the US into sympathy for China’s benign weaknesses so as to extract from the US its strengths: Most crucially, technological and military strengths. 

According to Pillsbury, China is using the ancient Chinese strategies of TAoW, written over 2000 years ago in China’s foundational period known as the Warring States, to subdue and dominate the US. In TAoW, in any contest, you make assessments and judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents before going to war with them. In preparation for battle you attempt to acquire your enemies’ strengths and figure out how to exploit their weaknesses. In Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign, Pillsbury argues, China was trying to acquire the US’s technological and military strengths by convincing the US that China was no threat but merely wanted the US to help modernize China with education and technology in exchange for more US trade with China, which was in fact more or less Deng’s headline case when he visited the US in 1978.  

To Pillsbury, the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in 1989, resulting in the deaths of “hundreds if not thousands” of Chinese protesters (says Amnesty International), was the decisive baring of China’s savage TAoW teeth, asserting the CPC's military supremacy, in China's 100-Year Marathon strategy for world domination. For Pillsbury all pretenses and chances for real reform and/or an opening up in China are snuffed out in that violent crackdown on the world stage. Subsequent history in China is marked exclusively by the strict suppression of dissent, more crackdowns on any criticism of the CPC, and aggressive military opposition to anything perceived as an independence movement within and increasingly even outside its borders (Tibet, Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan), including extensive spy craft and espionage operations against the US.  

All true as far as it goes or from what I know anyway, and acknowledging upfront that I'm certain there's all kinds of spycraft and cyber warfare stuff going on all the time between the US and China and other states that I have no idea about. Didn't Wikileaks expose this to all the world, if nothing else? But an easy case can be made that the conservative hostility in China to any perceived threats to the CPC’s supreme authority, and especially disregard for basic human rights in China, hardly started or ended with Tiananmen. The death toll from the Cultural Revolution sweeping China still at the time of Nixon in China, 1972, was many times greater than any death toll attributable to Tiananmen Square or any other related Chinese state violence in 1989.  

Many historians attribute the paranoid extremes of the violent crackdown at Tiananmen to CPC fear and elite panic about ruling communist parties in Eastern Europe, with whom the CPC maintained close diplomatic ties, facing mass street protests and rebellions beginning in 1989. Protesting students in Tiananmen were there for a host of reasons (for one, getting rid of members of the Hawkish old guard many still associated with the violence and intolerance of the cultural revolution) but the CPC leadership under Deng became convinced that over a half million protesters in Tiananmen were a grave threat to CPC rule, like the street revolutions breaking up the Soviet Union that very same year. 

Seeing their communist comrade states go down to popular democratic street rebellions was scary and alarming to the CPC. Tiananmen was a police state crackdown, paranoid and brutal in its disregard for human rights, to be sure, but hardly any kind of decisive political verdict on China’s 1980-2020 “Reform and Opening Up” period. 

Consider just China’s foreign trade alone. Combined imports and exports with China have grown from about $38 billion in 1980 to over $4.6 trillion in 2020. Can there be any more dramatic evidence of China’s “Opening Up” in trade with other countries than that? China’s government, the CPC, are terrible human rights abusers and hostile to democratic human rights and freedoms, but the RaOU campaign in China that Pillsbury is now trying to expose as a sinister plot, let’s note, was clearly killing and ruining fewer lives, by several magnitudes, than China was before the “Reform and Opening Up” policies began. Isn't this significant evidence of reform in China brought about by the RaOU campaign?  

Let’s also note that Tiananmen, 1990-ish, also happens to be when China’s economic growth rates really begin to take off; regularly exceeding annual growth rates of over 10%. In the work of economists Isabella Weber and Yuen Yuen Ang, whose books I discussed in my round-up, we learn that the CPC asserting its sovereign power over the economy in China in the 1980s helped China avoid neoliberal shock therapy and the poverty traps of global private capital, the IMF/WB, SAP loans, all that. The evidence in these two accounts illustrate that the assertion of CPC political sovereignty over the private economy, especially this intersection of domestic Chinese businesses with foreign private capital (SEZs, SOEs, restrictions on the flows of foreign private capital in and out of the country), fundamentally and significantly contributed to China’s economic miracle between 1978 and 2020. 

So, again, China’s resistance to the economic reforms of global private capital and the conventional rules of the WTO, privatization and hostility to government regulations on business, may be associated temporally with murderous state violence of Tiananmen but China’s RaOU policies are also directly related to how China breaks with the pattern of dependency theory in international economic development and becomes the burgeoning global economic juggernaut that it has now become. Global free marketeers are embittered by this turn of events but that doesn’t make it any less so.  

For one, it’s why everyone is talking about China’s “political capitalism” now; China’s state directed capitalism, or industrial policy, a dirty phrase in mainstream economics circles in the US only a short time ago, if not still. We’re talking about this stuff because of the immensity of China’s economic growth miracle since 1978, what is called the China shock, and how the “Reform and Opening Up” campaign launched that miracle. The RaOU launched an industrial revolution in China at a scale, more than 1.4 billion people in China, the world has not experienced before; after two or three centuries of industrial revolutions. It’s by no means entirely clear yet the full impact of the China shock but the economic implications appear stunning and potentially revolutionary. 

China has now taken over the global green energy tech market, cranking out consumer friendly solar panels and batteries and super cheap EVs-- a company known as BYD (Build Your Dreams) already turning out the VW Bug’s of EVs. And China is producing this stuff at prices and scales with which the big private multinationals can’t compete. Meanwhile, Big Tech in the US is peddling AI and crypto and a techno utopia of automated AI Singularity. Private broligarchs are promising to liberate us all from labor and toil when they already can’t pay their workers living wages or get along with labor unions and refuse to pay their fair share in taxes and for essential government services. To private multinationals in the US all taxes or regulations are govt “waste, fraud, and abuse”; and every problem in govt is a spending problem. So, meanwhile, China, or the CPC dictatorship in China, launches the global green energy transition. Building the green tech innovations the world needs, technology responding to climate change and real world human demands for decarbonizing global emissions. Building green energy solutions that let’s remember were dismissed as too expensive to produce profitably in the rest of the private global economy as recently as 2010, and still now is being directly attacked by the petrostate regime running the US. It is a situation that is at the very least calling into the question the global leadership of private capital and wealth. 

But from Tiananmen onward, for Pillsbury, China’s goals are exclusively imperialistic and aggressive: stealing US intellectual property rights, taking over islands in the South China Sea, launching the “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).” Again, as far as it goes this stuff is all undeniable. But already dating Pillsbury’s account, he goes on to specifically pillory China’s opposition to environmental reforms and international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement to combat climate change and global warming. We know now, however, China has since shot far ahead in manufacturing and high-tech production for a global green energy transition, or certainly at least in the production and global distribution of solar panels, batteries, and EVs. Meanwhile, the regime Pillsbury apparently councils is trying to bring back coal.

Maybe the weirdest part of this book is that I’m pretty sure the nefarious foreign policy cold war strategizing and spy craft stuff, basically, known as counterintelligence, that Pillsbury accuses and condemns China for is in reality more or less the standard operating procedures of every national security state on the planet, or for all the ones rich enough to afford to play in the global superpower game anyway. I would assume DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and like national security organizations in and US and elsewhere are constantly gaming out perceived threats from China and Russia or whoever. Again, if nothing else, didn’t Wikileaks show us that secret intelligence work goes on extensively between even traditional allies, let alone bitter rivals? This is deterrence theory in practice: States assessing the military strength of enemies and deterring foreign aggression; using military and non-military means to deter enemies from attacking you. Global militaries and national security intelligence operations are constantly gaming out this stuff and have been engaging in aggressive counterintelligence and Hawkish operations like this since at least WW2. (4)  

At any rate, Pillsbury appears to have been really triggered by this book that came out in China in 1999 called Unrestricted Warfare. I would prefer very “restricted” warfare myself, for sure, so not a promising title, I admit. In this book, written by a couple Chinese military colonels, the authors reportedly argue China’s “inferior military” can defeat the US’s “superior military” by non-military covert means, financial manipulation, cyber warfare, terrorism, media manipulation, and international legal maneuvers. Again, all bad stuff, certainly not the conduct of friendly trade relations, and I'm hoping the US is always doing counterintelligence work to deter and/or expose and prosecute the worst nonmilitary attacks on the US or any of the US's allies. According to Pillsbury, the UW book is very influential in the CPC and most damningly exposes China’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign as a cover for their far more sinister designs against the US. 

But for all the Hawkish saber-rattling, though, the list of remedies at the end of the book is relatively anodyne or irrelevant. Pillsbury thinks we should stop assuming China will become more like the West, or we should stop believing that more trade with China will produce more democracy and human rights in China. Okay, that hope in US-China relations did not pan out, for sure. And, yeah, the US and multinationals working in China ought to protest and attempt to reform human rights abuses against minorities and prison labor conditions in China; while also more actively supporting workers and minorities better at home, let's stipulate. But I still think that old canard about more peaceful trade nurturing mutually prosperous relations between nations and states is basically right and fitting here.  

Pillsbury argues for more strategic thinking in our economic and technological relations with China. Maybe not unlike the case Chris Miller presents in his 2022 book Chip War. No doubt about it the US shouldn’t be dependent on Taiwan to produce computer chips essential to the US’s national security--up to 80% of such chips, reported Miller-- when China insists, regularly, and with increasing belligerence, that Taiwan is its sovereign territorial possession. Pillsbury is right to raise the alarm about compromising national security positions with China. And it is concerning how long it took before the Pentagon and US foreign policy establishment and a US POTUS, let's add (old man Biden strikes again!), figured this national security concern out. It seems like someone should have been calling this out some time ago. But the high-tech guys, and especially Apple, were making too much money in China and off China’s cheap factory labor conditions to worry about giving away tech secrets and national security know-how to China.  

Anyway, in retrospect Pillsbury deserves some credit for raising the issue. But Pillsbury’s biggest recommendation, ultimately, is that we should stop thinking of China as a future ally and trade partner altogether and instead treat China as a “long-term strategic competitor.” Again, okay, but why does it have to be one or the other? Why not US-China “trade partners” and “long-term strategic competitors,” with some long-term hopes that expanding peaceful trade alliances wins out over WW3!? 

Seems to me a fundamental weakness of the China hawk position is its exclusive insistence on an either/or and Us/Them conflict. For the China hawk, US-China relations are entirely zero-sum and always have to end in decisive conflict. They must. It can’t be any other way. Encouragingly, recent US-China talks, Xi Jinping and Trump, have actually moved the official diplomatic language away from only “strategic competitors” back to something like “stable” trading partners. Maybe Pillsbury contributed to this moderation in US-China diplomatic relations but he'd still probably insist that the ultimate goal of China's 100-Year Marathon remains winning world supremacy over the US.  

The weirdest part of Pillsbury’s historical analysis of the TAoW is how he seems to ignore completely the book's central thesis: ‘Shi’ as a kind of deterrence theory aimed at winning without fighting, or at the very least vigilantly minimizing violent combat. 

Pillsbury encourages readers to consider the deep history of Chinese nationalist thinking but his own reading of that history, the Warring States period, and especially TAoW, strikes me as a little narrow and one-dimensional. TAoW is in fact a widely read book and praised by numerous US military officials and appears to be almost universally recognized as a classic text by military leaders and national security professionals around the world, far beyond China. WW2 era General MacArthur, reportedly, always kept a copy of TAoW on his desk. 

The ancient book, it has only been semi-recently discovered by scholars, is almost certainly a composite of the writings of two authors and possibly more from the Warring States period in China, 5th to 3rd centuries bce. I’ve not studied the book but according to Wikipedia the overall perspective of TAoW on combat and war is simple and straight-forward: War is hell. War and combat are costly to both winners and losers and frequently devastating to bystanders and non-combatant civilians; always exacting excessive collateral damage on local populations. TAoW urges careful consideration and preparation be given to “Shi,” or the configuration of power, the arrangements of allies and adversaries, that exists prior to engaging in war or military combat. TAoW explains how to use diplomacy (including lots of psychology) and economics to keep military combat brief, affordable, and limit the terrible destruction of wars. TAoW stresses the importance of secret intelligence gathering and espionage to prevent or minimize actual military combat. The unifying theory of TAoW is essentially winning without fighting or in more practical terms, winning with the very least violent military destructive costs. 

TAoW is ancient classical era expression of deterrence theory, basically, or the civilizing mission of resolving social conflicts without violence. TAoW’s prime directive is developing military and foreign policy strategies aimed at preventing or reducing actual war and combat. It reminds me of Aristotle’s quip, "It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace." It’s a recognition, an ancient Realpolitiks of a sorts, that winning at all costs can make peace impossible; and that the aim of peaceful authority is resolving social conflicts without war and violence. I hear in TAoW echoes of Machiavelli’s discussions of republican, military deterrence and balancing forces in power; and whose ideas in return overlap with famous Warring State's era Legalist philosopher and statesman, Han Fei. TAoW’s emphasis is on winning without fighting because war is bad for everybody. Sounds civilized to me. 

By contrast, in Clausewitz’s On War, a revered Western book on war (again, bless you Wikipedia), and closer to the focus on achieving military supremacy that we find in Pillsbury, the primary directive is to dominate militarily your enemy. To win decisively: including in our own time devastating bombing campaigns, occupations, regime changes, and a long list of military domination strategies that always seem to end, or at least since WW2, in indecisive quagmires with “No End in Sight,” or am I wrong to conclude so much? And even given all these bitterly violent military stalemates in recent times, Clausewitz forcefully stipulated that military combat strategies should always remain subordinate to political authorities, who we can hope might engage in some of the non-military strategies of deterrence emphasized in TAoW.  

In Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese Hawk book that so alarmed Pillsbury, the case is made that by using non-military counterintelligence spy craft and espionage, China’s inferior military weapons buildup can defeat the US. Okay, if China is plotting to defeat the US wouldn’t we prefer that China plot against us by nonmilitary means rather than by more doomsday arm's race scenarios?! Again, all modern states spend lots of money on national security counterintelligence. States will always and probably have always engaged in secret counterintelligence operations to assess and deter the threats of other competing states, laws and enforcement against their worst human atrocities is all we got. Pillsbury’s “China card” is a legendary win in the world of cold war counterintelligence. (4) The best-case scenario for us mere civilians are laws, national and international, that limit the human rights abuses of global counterintelligence operations, the killing and ruining of noncombatant civilian lives. 

At any rate, getting more into the history, I’m also not sure TAoW or the historical context of the Warring States period in China, 475 to 221 bce, really makes a very good argument for achieving overwhelming military hegemony or ‘Ba’. I thought China’s RaOU economists finding evidence in ancient “Discourses on Salt and Iron,” from the early Han Dynasty (81 bce), establishing the essential role of the state in stabilizing prices in the economy was brilliant economic history. Crucial to China escaping neoliberal economic shock therapy in the 1980s. But this case for a great ‘Ba’ or military ruler unifying China’s Warring States, a war to end all wars, is mostly legend and not very convincing. 

There were seven warring states in the traditional heartland of China in the Warring States period; basically, the last long war-ravaged period of the Zhou dynasty that had ruled China since 1046 bce. First, valuable to rememeber, that there were in fact two more long Chinese ruling dynasties, Shang and Xia, stretching back to 2070 bce or a millennium and a half before the Warring States. The TAoW and Warring States are more a cultural hinge in Chinese history than an actual military or economic or even political turning point. 

The state that prevailed at the end of the long Warring States period, the Qin, from which China takes its name, was so brutal that its rule lasted only 15 years. Qin Shi Huang, China’s so-called first Emperor (unlike the nearly two millennia of mere ‘kings’ that preceded him), is said to have burned books and buried alive hundreds of scholars he considered opposition to his supreme authority. Qin Shi wanted to live forever and was incredibly paranoid (so paranoid he had constructed a life-size army of 8,000 soldiers to guard over him through eternity) and he likely killed himself taking “immortality elixirs” laced with mercury. This is China’s foundational model for a great “Ba” or supreme leader? To say the least, Qin She Huang was shall we say not very into TAoW’s civilizing means of winning without fighting. 

No doubt Qin Shi does take some important first steps in solidifying China’s cultural identity, however. First, he tears down walls and fortifications dividing the warring states and starts building walls and fortifications along the northern border frontier of China. The walls never do entirely keep out the horseback riding nomads and raiders to the north of China, the biggest foreign menace to China until the 19th century—for nearly 4000 years!-- but the Great Wall does start drawing the cultural boundaries of China on the map. And Qin She Huang also standardizes weights and measures, expanding commerce throughout the realms of China, increasing peaceful contacts between formerly warring states.

Nonetheless, Shi Huang’s unification of China hardly represents an end to warring states in China. His ‘Ba’ and imperial dynasty barely lasted a generation. To be sure, centralized imperial history after Qin rule is certainly long and impressive. After the Qin, the Han rule for over four centuries (202bce-220ce), Sui (581-618), Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279), Ming (1368-1644), Qing (1644-1912). The only state with any sustained centralized authority lasting anywhere near as long as China’s two (or four) thousands years was Egypt and that was more or less over before the common era and the Christian calendar even began. Still, my point, if you count all the gaps in China's imperial dynastic date ranges it adds up to over a quarter of the last two millennia in which the territorial heartland of China has been divided into warring states or multiple kingdoms; three kingdoms, sometimes five, ten, even as many as sixteen. The Qin dynasty did not end warring states division in China. (5)

And if you look a little closer even the unity of several of the big states in China’s imperial history starts to break down. Peasant rebellions seem to pop up in Chinese history every generation or two. Halfway through the truly foundational Han Dynasty a 14-15 year-long rebellion based on peasant land reform pressures takes over. Halfway through Song rule, an imperial state whose astonishing urban revolution helped launch modern globalization around the beginning of the second millennium, the capital was moved from the north to the south of China, fleeing hostility from the Jin Dynasty, another semi-nomadic horseback riding people, the Jurchen, menacing China from the northern steppes. As I’ve pointed out before, two of China’s greatest imperial states, the Yuan and the Qing, over 350 years of China’s last millennium, were under foreign control. Add this stuff to the 100-years of humiliation that preceded the CPC’s national independence victory in 1949 and the CPC’s paranoid nationalism starts to make a little more sense. But neither the Qin, or TAoW, or the classical Warring States seem to make a very strong case for achieving lasting Ba or resolving warring state conflicts militarily. 

To the contrary, what TAoW and the best high school world history accounts show instead is that China’s great centralized imperial history, its longevity, its collapse and continuing revival, owes more to winning without fighting, or winning by non-military means. Via centralized administration and a large civil service of government workers, building unifying public works and absorbing cultural differences with social organizing efficiencies. When the Mongols and Manchus take over China they make some changes, additions, but they end up mostly adopting China’s cultural traditions. The most important idea in TAoW, Shi, which Pillsbury leans on so heavily in his book, makes a weak case for achieving and sustaining military domination. TAoW’s best case as foreign policy and deterrence theory is ultimately about winning without fighting. Winning by non-military means, or via successful public administration. (6)

Pillsbury interestingly digs into the Social Darwinist-- i.e., survival of the fittest-- roots of the CPC and the ruling communist party in China. I’ve ran into this before. Social Darwinist thinking was big with Mao and his communist leadership comrades in the 1920s and 1930s. Overcoming foreign domination in China was a survival of the fittest contest to China’s communist revolutionaries. Undoubtably, this has lent a militarist top-down authoritarian style that has persisted in the CPC ever since. And which is also essentially Marxist-Lenninist, let's add, always trying to crack down on counter-revolutionary elements in society. But Pillsbury seems oblivious to the fact that Social Darwinism looms large in the perspective of American China hawks and the conservative movement and paranoid style in America. What is the China hawk position after all if not zero-sum, win/lose, everything is competition and combat and survival of the fittest Social Darwinism? I enjoyed Richard Hofstadter’s book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), but his conclusion that Social Darwinism had been largely debunked in academic circles by the 1890s (and William James), while maybe true in Ivy League, seemed to vastly undervalue the animating staying power of Social Darwinist thinking amongst business elites and local Chamber of Commerce conservatives in every local community. 

By any measure Social Darwinism remains a major force in rationalizing predatory business practices to this day. What was Zuckerberg talking about in the ’24 election season when he called for more “masculine energies” and a celebration of aggressive business practices? The whole "Vibes Shift" thing during the election was a fuck the rules and regulations, or fuck others, Lina khan, competitors, workers, even consumers, fuck "empathy," let's takeover with our Manosphere-maxxing bigotry and make money. This is Musk’s recent Makers and Takers talk as well. It’s Social Darwinist, survival of the fittest, doggerel, distilled for our times. The billionaire identifying himself as the fittest and the unfit his enemies. It really goes back to the very roots of modern capitalism in Malthus, early 19th century, showing sneering contempt for poor low wage workers or in the parlance today: NPCs (non-player characters, a gamer reference for characters that don’t matter, don’t count for anything). The unfit are unproductive, Takers, peasant idlers, Musk's "woke mind virus"-addled critics, they're all Takers. By contrast, Malthus' proto-capitalists or Captains of Industry and Musk are Makers. The broligarchs are the Makers, job creators, builders of empires, and only the Social Darwinist strong survive. (7)

I’ve no doubt China could have something like a 100-year plan to achieve global power and preeminence. Deng was always talking about big long-term plans, although the ones I’ve seen tended to be made up mostly of macroeconomic goals. Anyway, five-year plans were a staple of states in the communist world in the 20th century. The 100-Year Marathon sounds like a grand secret plan of Marxist historical materialism, a century long scheme to take over the world and deliver the scientific socialist paradise. But come on there is no paradise without some basic respect for human rights and freedoms. And better they pursue their Social Darwinist ambitions by nonmilitary rather than by military means, right? (7)

Pillsbury is right that China is a paranoid nationalist state, obsessed with the independence of China and the supremacy of the CPC as the rightful sovereign guardians of that independence. And China routinely disregards the basic human rights of its citizens with surveillance and armed force; and bullies its neighbors, etc. Deterring China from attacking the US militarily, making it too risky and costly for China to attack the US militarily, especially when China is four or five times bigger than the US in population, will remain an important preoccupation of US military defense for the foreseeable future. 

But the China hawks are always going to be fighting the Cold War with China and urging the US to get tougher with China. The better Hawk case then Pillsbury's 100-Year Marathon would have detailed more luridly some of China’s terrorism and espionage against the US. I’m sure there probably is some going on all the time. I’m just saying it might be wiser if in addition to all the saber-rattling, it might be wiser if the US gave more consideration to the actual teachings of TAoW and the principals of winning without fighting and thinking about ways soft power and win-win peaceful trade with China might improve relations and avoid the necessity or inevitability of armed conflict with China and WW3.  

 Notes:

(1) My point is that I'm very grateful for the journalists and scholars who do directly engage with the paranoid style on the right; who investigate and report on the bigot grievance ideology and propaganda machine of the rightwing. Their work are dispatches from the front in a long terrible war against the enlightenment and include many of my very favorite history books about the modern period. I really do want to know what the paranoid style on the right are thinking and doing. I’d just also rather avoid any personal contact with them. Including holiday family meals, for sure, but even crossing the street when you see a red MAGA hat coming. At this point, I view all scoffing attacks on immigrants, people of color, DEI, Muslims, socialists, and LGBTQ+, the whole anti-woke mind virus, as as a crude intellectual force field defending the violent fascist reaction in power. The ICE stuff is fascist police state violence. Trump threatens and authorizes violence against anyone that opposes him. Not okay.  

(2) Whatever exactly the Defense Policy Board is? Another secret panel in the bowels of the deep state? It’s either the liberal rule of law deep state (with its many flaws, to be sure) or the fascist dictator police-state crackdown deep state. The civil war is already on and the paranoid right’s causes, segregation, strict hierarchy, ethnic cleansing, and violently dominating other cultures or really anything or anybody that opposes their rule is war-all-the-time insanity. Humans want independence and freedom, it’s only human nature, but whatever independence and freedom we achieve will always still be in a world we share (or refuse to share) with others. 'E Pluribus Unum.' Also, Project 2025 appears to me the biggest radical experiment in neoliberal economic shock therapy of them all. Way bigger than Chile in the '70s or Russia in the '90s. I've seen little reporting about this angle so far on Trump 2. Just saying.  

(3) I don't doubt Hawkish sentiments rule the CPC or at minimum provide very close council to XiJinping. The primary source literature of China’s political history was mostly produced by officially sanctioned imperial state historians. A central task of a new dynasty was to justify the loss of the Mandate of Heaven in the fallen dynasty and to legitimize the just rule of the new emperor in the terms of the Mandate of Heaven. Many simple inventions in China’s history, silk, porcelain, mortar and pestle, wheelbarrow, inventions that almost certainly emerged from the work of peasants, are routinely attributed to the mythic benevolence of some local lord or prince. Behind the scenes, there were often bitter factional disputes between Confucian and Buddhist scholars, Confucian and Eunuch government officials, on and on. But most of China's historical scholarship was written by government officials, written by the winners, and reflects that class bias. Not to mention the language barriers that makes just tracking the names for people and things in China difficult for non-native speakers like me. Pillsbury’s fluency in Mandarin and many years in the country give his account more credibility. But his handling of the concepts in TAoW seems so shallow and manipulative. 

(4) My first reactions to books like Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) or, more recently, Vincent Bevin’s The Jarkarta Method (2020), were something like OMG, drunken untreated-PTSD combat guys doing “intelligence,” getting off on killing “communists,” who way more often than not turn out to be democratically elected socialists, or nationalist independence leaders or just poor farmers and union workers trying to scratch out a decent life. The number of grotesque humanitarian crimes in the name of Cold War anticommunism is staggering and shameful. I’m not saying there weren’t any bad communists or communist police state dictatorships out there attempting to sabotage and/or weaken the US, or that there doesn't then by necessity have to be US counterintelligence to check these efforts, but what is most striking in any review of US cold war counterintelligence history is how often they were propping up military dictatorships guilty of terrible murders and human right abuses. Another striking detail in Legacy of Ashes that stays with me is how, already by the 1950s, Eisenhower was expressing deep regrets about the way the CIA was setup after WW2, built mostly out of retired covert military operations and not more out of language and cultural intelligence professionals. The history of the CIA counterintelligence is pockmarked by savagely bungled military operations.  

(5) Some lists of China’s great centralized imperial states don’t count the Sui. I’m assuming because it’s relatively short-lived, although still over twice as long as the first imperial Qin Dynasty. My case for the Sui is that they built the grand canal, expanding connections between north and south China. Southern China would go on to become the most populous region of China. And the Sui turned the civil service system that the Han started into a meritocratic national examination system. Again, these are key developments in China’s (winning without fighting) centralizing administrative authority. Also, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a celebrated 14th century historical novel about the disunity in China at the end of the Han Dynasty, 184-280, as documented in Chinese historian and politician Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms written in the 3rd century. John Woo, director famous for Hong Kong action flicks, made an epic movie history of this period, Red Cliff, that fudges several of the historical particulars but does include a large dose of the kind of Asian philosophy you find in TAoW and, presumably, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

(6) We’ve pulled back a little from the nuclear doomsday scenarios of the Atomic Age but Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD in WMDs and weapons stockpiles still drives military defense budgets and military deterrence. The key to MAD and deterrence theory is to deter China or any other potentially hostile states from attacking the US and of course counterintelligence will always be a crucial part of this work. The US Intelligence Community “officially” consists of 18 agencies and organizations that oversee national security and intelligence operations. Heaven knows counterintelligence work gets into all kinds of humanitarian abuses and assassinations and whatever other murderous skullduggery but the basic national security task is simple enough: defend the country from foreign threats. Deter our enemies from attacking us, or make it too costly and risky in human lives for them to attack us. The goal is to prevent war, not increase the chances of war. 

(7) My principal gripe with the utopian fantasies of elites is how they're always demanding so many sacrifices from poor working people without ever delivering on their promises. Always demanding a little bit more austerity and sacrifice to reach a promised land that remains forever out of reach. The CPC is guilty of this but hardly has a monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy and disregard for the rights of common workers and everyday people, I'm afraid. Anybody that believes that the AI singularity is going to liberate us all from ever having to work again is being silly, if not worse. At the very least, that China appears to be committed to fulfilling their goal of achieving world supremacy primarily by nonmilitary means strikes me as mildly encouraging prospect for the future of geopolitics and world peace.

Jangle Pop: "Little Rage," The Mice (1987)

Cleveland based mid-'80s jangle pop and/or power pop trio. Brothers Bill (guitar/vocals) and Tommy Fox (drums/vocals) and Ken Hall (bassist/vocals) start a band, specializing in covers of The Beatles, The Who, and The Ramones. The underdog superhero vocals are key. Peak moment for the band: "Little Rage" featured on a joint single with Yo La Tengo in 1987. Another golden jangle pop moment, another non-one-hit-wonder come and gone. 

Jangle pop goes back to 1964-65, Byrds and Beatles (Jackie DeShannon and Carol Kaye), and is based on but not limited to the sound affects of a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, or according to novelist Michael Chabon anyway. I'd still vouch for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); and enjoyed his novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) about a record store always on the verge of going under. But I don't know anything beyond that and I didn't like the Wonder Boys movie. Nonetheless, after spending an evening with his 100 song playlist of jangle pop history I'm ready to thank him for a sweet tour through this sub-genre of often maligned guitar pop and conclude Chabon knows jangle pop a lot better than I do.

My introduction to the jangle pop timeline was the late-'70s, early-'80s window, Tom Petty, Shoes, REM, The Dream Syndicate, Soft Boys, like that. In 1980 I felt like Chrissie Hynde doing "Stop Your Sobbing" was the single perfect capsulization of jangle pop history as far as I'd come to know it at that time. I loved that electrified "The Bells of Rhymney" folk rock sound, and even better with some Mod max r&b new wave energy like The Pretenders underneath it. Come to think of it, I felt more or less the same about the Pretenders' Kinks cover as I did about The Records "Starry Eyes" from 1979. This was a jangle pop/power pop golden age for me; uptempo jangle pop, Punk/new wave jangle pop that pushes tempo. I loved that stuff. 

So I know most of Chabon's jangle pop playlist from its beginnings up to REM or the Smiths or The Jayhawks, even if I might have gone sometimes myself with different songs. But to be honest, the formula of jangle pop (and power pop, for that matter) did eventually wear out on me some and I began somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s to tune a lot of it out. After that when some jangle pop (or power pop) would come to my attention I was more jaded and harder to please. With old crank cliche attitudes about the most popular stuff of the day, none of whom I will waste your time by insulting again now.

Bonus then that Chabon's 100 song playlist not only includes a lot of the old classics I already knew and loved but some sweet new discoveries for me too. This gem from '87. The Mice from Cleveland. A 2003 release on Rough Trade from the Delays, the lead guy has since sadly passed, called "Hey Girl."  Heavenly vocal group jangle pop. And Warren Zevon, of all people, from 1966, Lyme & Cybelle, "Follow Me."  Chabon appears to be a serious fan and excavator of the deep jangle pop tracks. 

There are probably such playlists out there that find more contemporary 21st century jangle pop but this is a big drink of the 1960s through 1990s stuff. Check out Chabon's fun history of the genre and overview of the guitar sounds that make jangle pop on substack. 

Take Two: "Red Lights," Marbles (1976): 

"I would sell my mother for a chance to play guitar in his band

We're still playing all the old songs in the garage but it's just a mirage."

Whose band? A song about wanting to make hit records or play with the kind of guy who makes hit records. They want to play with the guy with the "Red, Red Lights in his eyes," in "his band"; not so much Joey Ramone but this mythical figure with the Red Lights of rock stardom in his eyes. This could be the singer, Eric Li, but he sounds doubtful.

The Marbles stardom constituted being regular headliners at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in NYC 1976-1977. They made a shambolic power pop garage rock sound, serviceable, running on amateurish enthusiasm and proficiency. It works but it's not the special part. The special part is the lead vocal and multi-part harmonies; the call and response between them. The contrast of the slow building and frail lead vocal lifted up by the rough multi-part vocal harmonies, including two brothers. A total knockout. 

The group harmonies are triumphant. Beatlesque in the best sense; a whole greater than its parts. "Red Lights" is a power pop, jangle pop, woulda/coulda/shoulda been smasharoo from 1976 but it came out on a small independent record label, Ork Records, and disappeared. Not that I'm blaming Ork Records. They deserve credit for documenting this fragile retro-futurist gem of a record, and nearly four dozen other punk/new wave/power pop songs orbiting around CBGB's in the late '70s.  

Also ROIR Cassettes, where I first heard "Red Lights" as a standout track on their 1982 comp called The Great New York Singles Scene. In 1976 the Marbles were pre-Knack proto-New Wave band in their ties and Beatles' haircuts. There is a whiff of Sha Na Na oldies about them but the rough uncut diamond glitter of their 4-part harmonies makes it new and eternal rock & roll. 

I can't find much else by the Marbles. Try "Computer Games" or "Fire and Smoke." The bassist, Jim Clifford, shares ten songs the Marble's made between 1975 and 1978 and might be the only guy in the world trying to keep alive their memory. The lead singer, Eric Li, the contrast of his downcast vulnerability with Howard and David Bowler's brother harmonies absolutely key to the heroic underdog Marbles sound, dies of a drug overdose in 1989. Impossible now not to hear this as his song. 

Towards Paradise: Amon Duul i, ii, or 3?

Reading David Stubb’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2017). He’s a British music journalist that goes back to the 1980s; Melody Maker, good buddy of music writer Simon Reynolds. I read Stubb's electronics book, Mars by 1980 (2018), a few years back and learned a lot from it. 

Especially appreciated the pre-1980 stuff, a history of electronic music in the 20th century. Stockhausen, etc. I knew virtually nothing outside the pop/rock electronic music that I heard on the radio in the 1970s; Kraftwerk and Moroder/Donna Summer, basically. I didn’t always entirely agree with Stubbs on the later stuff I already knew, Aphex Twin, ambient EDM, but I learned so much about the early history of electronic music in the 20th century from his book that I thought it was time to get his take on Krautrock. Or what the Germans originally called Kosmiche Musik, or "Cosmic Music," a German musical style of psychedelia, or progressive rock, that thrived for about a decade beginning in 1968. 

I'm a late-adopter to Krautrock, let it be known, and so in that sense my new found interest I must confess is at least in part an extension of my advancing geezerdom. I knew a little bit, the aforementioned ‘70s pop stuff, and I owned a few cherished Can, Faust, and Neu albums, but never started listening to a lot of Krautrock before this century. Reflecting on that now, like several other semi-recent music listening enthusiasms (minimalism, spiritual jazz, and various ambient and EDM sounds), an undoubtably big draw for me with Krautrock is that it is predominantly instrumental music. I used to listen to a lot of pop or rock music, with their wordy lead singers, singer-songwriter music, while reading magazines or whatever, but anymore my preferred music programming when I’m reading is predominantly instrumental music. Words, English words (languages I don’t understand aren’t a problem; love French rap in the background, for instance), but I find English words too distracting. But I really enjoy listening to a lot of Krautrock while I'm reading.  

Amon Duul aren't in heavy rotation in my reading listening sessions, however. Too many vocals; not enough droney Motorik tempos. But they are undeniably giants of the genre and their first album, Phallus Dei (1969), 'Erection God,' basically, and their song, "Archangels Thunderbird," hold firm positions, ahem, in my growing Krautrock pantheon. 

At any rate, the first chapter in Future Days is devoted to Amon Duul. Amon refers to the “sun” god in ancient Egypt and Duul is either a nonsense word or a derivation of a Turkish word that means “moon.” An early theme in the book is that Krautrock is a cultural outgrowth of 1968 political protests in Germany, so why not start with the Krautrock band most associated with the counter-cultural hippie communes in this period? As the story goes Amon Duul were members of a commune in Berlin in the late ‘60s (with little to no contact with the Red Army Faction or any other violent terrorist groups often associated with those communes, I'll hasten to add). A large, revolving, group of members of the commune, hippies, derided by most everybody outside their commune, get together and do these psychedelically charged drum circles and improv musical jams. Very DIY and very loose and unorganized. Amon Duul ii were a small group of the better musicians in the original AD commune who felt held back by the drum circle ethos and wanted to do something more ambitious. Make high-octane psychedelic riff-rock jams into hit records or at least this was the plan anyway. The rule of thumb I learned was that Amon Duul ii were good, sometimes great, and the original AD were always bad, and in my early samplings of the two this rule seemed to moreorless hold true. And this take is also moreorless reinforced here by Stubbs. 

But I’ve learned semi-recently that Julian Cope, singer in post-punk band Teardrop Explodes, and gonzo Krautrock expert in his own right, swears by this third original Amon Duul album called Paradieswarts Duul (1970), or ‘towards paradise’ Duul. I was hoping Stubbs might weigh in on this heretofore unknown to me original AD album but not a word. 

Pardieswarts scales down the commune drum circle of the first couple of AD albums to seven musicians, including two couples, and adds back on AD ii guitarist John Weinzierl and percussionist Chris “Shrat” Thiele. 

Krautrock toggles between an art rock formalism (minimalism, electronics) and a pastoral psychedelic ideal (ambient serenity, musique concrete). Think of Can or Faust holing up in some rural makeshift DIY studio outpost, incorporating the ambient pastoral sounds and/or tempos of nature into their electronic experimentation and cut-ups. Think of Popol Vuh’s spooky pastoralism or the spacious serenity of the album Eno makes with Cluster shacked up together somewhere in rural Germany. If I were to hazard a guess as to why Stubbs overlooks Paradieswarts I’d guess it is because it is a hippie folkie pastoral with very little artistic pretensions. No electronics. Stubbs exults about AD ii’s very Stockhausen, 18-minute-long  “The Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church,” the third side of their 1971 double-album Tanz der Lemminge (English: Dance of the Lemmings). Not much Stockhausen in Pardieswarts. It is a very traditional sounding album, actually. Stubbs might just find Paradieswarts musically conservative and a little too hippy-dippy sloppy. The vocals are definitely a weakness but even they have grown on me with repeated plays. 

Anyway, Paradieswarts is definitely on the acoustic and traditional instruments side of the Krautrock spectrum; no tape-splicing, just roll the tape and some jamming hippies trying to come together right now. Or right then. Exquisite filigrees of guitars, piano, flute, harp, and bongos, slow building, noodling, interweaving individual players and a rough chorus of singers into these beautiful sad crests of communal hippy love. Works for me, and right at home with pastoral psychedelic greats like early Pink Floyd or Neil Young.  

The Wage Standard and Class War

 

Upfront, The Wage Standard is wonkier than I usually go in books about economics. I prefer the economic history stuff; the less math the better. One thing that endeared me to Kindleberger's economic history classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes (1978), was his skepticism about the claims of econometrics. Moreover, after a decade of Norms trashing their cousin Standards do not, shall we say, inspire a lot of confidence in me.  

Neither inspires confidence. Ask me in 2010 if in the years ahead I thought I’d be angrily defending liberalism or DEI or Biden or Hilary or immigrants or LGTQB+ peoples all the time I would have guessed No. Not because I was against any of these people or values per se but to be honest because I thought they were generally accepted and supported by Norms and Standards about basic human rights. And as it turns out-- yikes!--they are not. 

But I am still super curious about the wages question-- why do wages increase by only 1/3 of the increase in labor productivity after 1980?, for one. I think I got the reference from Krugman, also a long-standing go-to source for me with economic history books. I found Thomas Piketty based on a Krugman review. 

More on the wages question for me is why wages, minimum wages, expanded in what is coming to be called the golden age of modern capitalism, 1945 to 1980, consistently and at semi-regular intervals, and and then collapsed after that. I know or know some of Sven Beckert’s account of the golden age, his name for the period, and its aftermath from his massive tome, Capitalism: A Global History (2025). And I’ve read Piketty’s books, some of my economic history favorites. But The Wage Standard gets into the historical nuts and bolts of wages since World War 2 and makes an honorable effort to revive the value of wage standards. And it turns out the guy who wrote the book, Arindrajit Dube, went to Roosevelt High School, a crosstown rival of the high school where I taught. So that’s cool; local kid made good. Fighting for a good cause. 

For Professor Dube the wage standard established after WW2 was rooted in a popular conviction that workers should earn enough to support a dignified life and living wages. Rising working class expectations back then included jobs, family-supporting wages, decent benefits, health care, and two-week’s vacation. These were widely regarded as the legitimate rewards of full-time work. The wage standard reflected a national commitment to fair compensation and economic security that grew out of the New Deal, manifesting a peak in a "Free Labor" movement going all the way back to the Civil War. Specifically, the wage standard was constructed out of the Wagner Act of 1935, which formally established the right of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. This legal backing empowered labor unions to negotiate for higher wages and better working conditions. 

Another defining moment in this movement was the 1941 “Battle for Detroit” when the United Auto Workers (UAW) led a massive strike against the Ford Motor Company. After intense strike confrontations, the union secured recognition and better labor contracts, setting a precedent that resonated throughout the manufacturing sector and beyond. And in a important sense culminated in the “Treaty of Detroit” in 1950, a breakthrough labor contract between the UAW and General Motors. GM, the largest employer in the US at the time, then set the pattern for the post-WW2 wage standard. This is one of Dube's most trenchant points: Peak labor union participation in the 1950s never exceeds 35% of the national workforce (and fallen to about 10% today, btw) but because the largest employer at the time recognized unions and raised wages their relatively large market power set a wage standard that many other industries followed.

Big historical lesson? Strict labor protections on the largest employers optimizes the macro economy. Of course if left to their own ends with rare exceptions big business will lowball and squeeze, outsource and offshore, labor down to sweatshop slavery conditions. 

Additionally, the federal minimum wage—established in 1938 and regularly increased through the 1960s and 1970s-- provided a wage floor that reinforced the new wage standards across the labor market. The purchasing power of a minimum wage peaked in 1968. 

Such victories, coupled with the postwar economic boom, investment and trade in parts of the world devastated by the world war, helped entrench the wage standard as a norm, even for many non-union workers. A rising tide raises all boats wage standard that lasted more or less until 1979.

The Collapsing Wage Standards after 1980

The erosion of The Wage Standard after 1980 can be traced to several key shifts. Union membership steadily declined, as new policies made organizing more difficult and industries began to outsource and offshore labor. Fed Chair Paul Volcker—yes, put in that position by President Carter-- was known in the early 1980s to have carried in his back pocket a list of pending union contract negotiations, plotting and celebrating union defeats. Gov't institutions in the period turned against labor unions and, in effect, wage standards. 

The Reagan administration’s crackdown on striking air traffic controllers in 1981 marked a sharp turn against union power by the government and had a devastating effect on union organization. Globalization and automation further weakened worker’s leverage, leading to offshoring, stagnant wages, and a growing precariat, with worker’s hustling multiple jobs in a growing informal economy. The results, all around us today, was widening inequality and a break from the era of broadly shared prosperity rooted in New Deal order wage standards.  

(Keeping score like Volcker, as an economic history aside, I’d say no post-Keynesian (1936) error of mainstream economics is more egregious than the macro wage-price spiral account of ‘70s stagflation, basically, blaming ‘70s inflation on labor unions and workers. Krugman likes to say economics is not a morality tale. In this instance, at the very least, I’d beg to differ. The academic ratification of this account of ‘70s inflation, Milton Friedman’s fundamentalist “free market” ideology, set-up the neoliberal order of political economy that has ruled since 1980, with all its dreary and relentless anti-tax, anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-government trappings, all in the name of "free markets" and "growth economics.") 

Remember, crucial to Dube’s golden age wage standards was the “pattern setting” role of large employers. In the 1950s "What's good for General Motors [was] good for America," or at least in terms of the wage standard. A blue collar solidly middle-class life (living wages, benefits, pensions, job security) developed around the automotive industry, and trickled down significantly from that large employer base. My dad, a truck mechanic, was a way down stream beneficiary of increasing union wages in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, by contrast, Walmart, the largest employer of the new era, begins outsourcing labor to undermine union organization, cuts worker benefits, and posts directions to local food banks on worker lunchroom bulletin boards. The collapse in wage standards indicated just by comparing these two largest employers of their eras is stunning. Adjusted for inflation, average workers at GM in the 1960s made wages that would be worth today $30-$35 per hour, while the average wages for workers at Wall Mart in the 1990s represent a purchasing power today of $9 to $10.50 an hour. 

There are multiple causes for this demoralizing collapse in wage standards but none more central than a transition in corporate leadership and management. Before the 1980s management in large companies often came from internal operations or production. Shop floor engineers or operations managers moving up the ladder. But in the 1980s, increasingly management positions were being filled by business schools. In a broad stroke: corporate management was professionalized.

The center of gravity inside big firms moved away from the older New Deal bargain regarding wage standards—good jobs, living wages and benefits, and a commitment to shared economic prosperity—and toward an internal elite business doctrine that celebrates "greed is good" business tactics and treats labor foremost as a cost center to be minimized. Business school graduates didn’t invent this logic. It is right there in free market dogma peddled by Friedman and the Chicago school of economic neoliberalism, or even all the way back to classical 19th century economic liberalism. But as MBA’s took over key roles in finance, HR, and corporate strategy in the 1980s and ‘90s they helped undermine the wage standard that had prevailed during the New Deal order, chiseling labor however and whenever possible. What had been an implicit social promise (“a full-time job should support a dignified life”) became a line item to be minimized, and “the free market” became the moral cover for decisions that were, in fact, choices that ridiculously privileged employers over workers. And, Yes, ripped workers off. 

That matters because large employers don’t just hire; as we've seen, they set the terms of employment for whole regions and sectors. Monopsony is the counterpart to a seller’s monopoly. When an employer is so big in a local labor market that they can set the pattern for wage setting and working conditions they are exercising monopsony powers. When the biggest corporate player in town normalizes subcontracting, temp work, tiered pay scales, “flexible” scheduling, and the weakening of seniority pay ladders—in short, squeezing workers-- the effect is a competitive race to the bottom and contagious. In the older New Deal union-era wage standard collective bargaining at the largest employers pushed wages up and outward; in the modern corporate playbook wage setting often pushes risk down and outward—onto subcontractors, franchisees, gig workers, and ultimately onto households trying to stitch together a life from unstable cheap labor opportunities.

Most mainstream economic accounts of this historical transition attribute it to globalization and technological progress. Labor’s losses are then the incidental consequence of the creative destruction of free market capitalism, the inescapable collateral damage of economic growth. But this is a big business gloss on what really happened. Central to the Friedman doctrine spread by the new MBA’s in corporate management in the 1980s and 1990s was maximizing profits and returns to shareholders. 

A SEC rule change in 1982 helped normalize stock buybacks as a mainstream way to “return value to shareholders.” The effect was to elevate short-term share value above living wages or any other social contract expectations of democratic government: paying taxes, not dumping your shit into the environment, etc. The new “Greed is good” ethics rationalized union busting and tax evasion and a merger mania in the towering heights of the economy. General Electric’s Jack Welch is a notorious villain in this story; see The Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022). Then an Internal Revenue Code rule change in 1993 linked executive pay to stocks and accelerated the explosion in CEO-pay. The class war trajectory in economic outcomes is, again, stunning. In 1978 CEO’s were paid 31 times more than the typical worker; by 1989 this ratio had risen to 60 times the typical worker’s pay, and by the year 2000 the ratio of CEO pay had exploded to 380 times that of the typical worker. 

Also, by the early 1990s guaranteed worker pensions are giving way to 401(k) retirement plans, tying worker retirements to the stock market, a market whose preoccupation with share value squeezes worker pay. Thereby putting workers in the awkward position of supporting stock market growth that actually works against raising wage standards. Likewise, the privatization pressures on government unleashed by the Reagan Revolution and neoliberalism and Friedman’s free market ideology works to undermine wage standards again, as government work is possibly the last big sector of the economy upholding the New Deal wage standards. 

In another point crucial to the collapse of the wage standard, Dube underscores the importance of tight labor markets. Low unemployment gives workers leverage in the labor market. If it is easy to leave a job and find another job this pressure moderates the ability of employers to lowball and squeeze workers. To promote full employment the Congressional Budget Office sets the “natural” rate of unemployment at 4.4%, another dubious metric if you ask me, but using this figure as our line between a “tight” and “slack” labor market let's consider unemployment before and after 1980 in the US. Between 1949 and 1979 unemployment exceeds 4.4% only 31% of the time; i.e., a “slack” labor market that disadvantages workers exists less than a third of the period. By contrast, between 1980 and 2023 unemployment exceeds 4.4% nearly two-thirds or 64% of the time. So slack labor market conditions that disadvantage workers more than doubles in the post-1980 period when wage standards are collapsing.  

As if this were not enough, federal minimum wages that had risen since first being set in 1938 stalled out in the 1980s and again in the 2000s, under republican administrations, and haven’t budged at all under either party since 2009, by far the longest stint without any increase in federal minimum wages since they were first instituted.

Bottom line: Between 1980 and 2019 the labor productivity of the median worker rose 79% while their wages rose only 23%, and it was even worse for the lowest wage labor. Labor productivity is another dubious macro-economic statistic in my book but these numbers illustrate in conventional mainstream economic metrics just how dramatically bad post-1980 neoliberal economic policy has been for wage workers. 

It's a devastating story for US wage workers by almost any measure, contributing to Rust Belt labor pathologies, "deaths of despair," and almost certainly a significant amount of the illiberal reaction of the non-college educated working classes in recent times. And while Dube would never call this story a conspiracy or a class war, he piles on the evidence for a massive conspiracy against wage standards and the working classes after 1980. A reactionary conspiracy that I'd trace back to Paul Volcker being named Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979 or even the infamous Powell Memorandum penned by Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell in 1971 and titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” 

Reviving The Wage Standard

All that last conspiricizing stuff, though, is mine, not Professor Dube’s. Almost miraculously, after reviewing in some meticulous detail the dismal economic collapse of the post-WW2 wage standard, the freshest part of this book is Dube’s constructive optimism about reviving the wage standard. His best-known work in Economics so far are studies showing that raising minimum wages (or up to at least 2/3's of the local median pay level) does not significantly reduce employment or trigger inflation. 

Dube’s bigger case laid out here is that reviving the wage standard requires rebuilding the institutional and legal enforcement that once enabled it. He advocates for renewed protections for collective bargaining and union organizing—pointing to the need for legislation akin to the Wagner Act to restore workers’ power; something to stop today’s oligarchs and billionaires from spending millions to defeat union organization. He takes heart in the recent labor contract resolving the Hollywood writer’s strike, protecting content creators from the takeover of AI slop. He supports raising and indexing minimum wages and strengthening enforcement of labor standards. Democratic measures in support of workers that all republicans and a big chunk of centrist Dems have ignored, if not impugned, for going on a half century. 

To a degree, all of the above ought to be Dem boilerplate positions at this point and are a little obvious. Yes, the gov’t should do more to protect workers from the worst forms of labor exploitation by large business interests. That they don’t is stupid and of course ultimately alienating to the working classes, many of whom then become prone to bigot conspiracies that blame all their problems on some scapegoats and hated others: poor immigrants, people of color, non-English speaking people, non-Christian people, LBGTQ people, women, Dems, liberals, etc. Maybe the most positive part of Dube’s account is how comparatively wage standards have fared better in other parts of the world. The neoliberal fundamentalist crusade is global but in terms of wage standards that protect lower wage workers some places outside the US have resisted better than others the “free market” assault on wage workers. 

Dube draws particular attention to the success of wage setting boards in countries like Australia and Germany and France. In Australia, wage boards—known as “industrial awards”—have established minimum standards for wages and conditions across industries, resulting in substantial improvements in pay and job quality. These boards, composed of representatives from labor, employers, and government, regularly review and update standards, ensuring that wage growth keeps pace with economic conditions. They make sure worker’s get their fair share of economic growth and aren’t made to shoulder an unfair burden for economic downturns. 

Similarly, Germany’s system of sectoral bargaining, where wage standards are negotiated for entire industries by unions and employers, has produced higher wages and reduced inequality, especially in sectors like manufacturing and services. These boards and bargaining structures have proven resilient, maintaining wage standards even amid technological and globalizing economic shifts.

Dube argues that these models could be effectively applied in key growth industries such as health care in the US. Health care, which employs millions and is projected to expand rapidly in the future, and often suffers from persistent low pay in certain roles. I’ve seen numbers suggesting over 50% of workers in health care are not paid a living wage. By establishing wage boards for health care, with representatives from employers, unions, and government, minimum pay and benefits could be standardized and regularly adjusted. This approach would not only improve compensation and working conditions but also help address labor shortages and enhance the quality of health care services—reviving the wage standard for a new era and for a critical and large sector in the 21st century US economy.

And this isn’t just a theory exercise in comparative government either. California is already running something close to these wage-board experiments in real time, in exactly the kinds of sectors Dube highlights. California created a “Fast Food Council” meant to set sector-wide standards for pay and working conditions—an Americanized version of the wage board idea—which has already raised wages in the fast-food industry significantly. And the state’s recent moves on health care compensation (setting higher minimum wages on a sector basis, with ongoing political fights over implementation and coverage, of course) point in the same direction: moving from firm-by-firm bargaining to industry-level wage setting to promote better-- i.e., closer to “living”-- wage standards. 

Additionally, Dube recounts how living wage campaigns in the 2010s raised minimum wage floors at Amazon and Wall Mart. Not enough but at least in the right direction. And in Massachusetts the minimum wage for Uber and Lyft divers is now $32.50 an hour. If Dube is right, these are the early institutional prototypes of a revived wage standard in the US—contentious and imperfect but aimed at overcoming weak labor unions and raising wages for working-classes stuck in an economy where growing credit card debt and low pay are endemic.  

Professor Dube underscores the importance of fostering a cultural climate that values fair wages and work dignity, echoing FDR’s unrealized New Deal “Second Bill of Rights” or “Worker’s Bill of Rights” (1944), and drawing inspiration from the labor victories and political commitments that defined the mid-20th-century wage standard established during the last golden age of capitalism. Dube’s book is pragmatic and constructively optimistic. If the collapse in the post-WW2 wage standard was driven by the disappearance of pattern-setting institutional supports that pulled wages up, then the answer for Dube is to rebuild mechanisms—minimum wages that actually rise, bargaining that covers the biggest sectors in the economy, and gov’t legal enforcement that makes wage standards or worker’s rights real again.

My own more cynical take always gets stuck on why the wage standard collapsed after 1980. The people running the largest employers, CEOs and upper management, agents and lieutenants to the super rich, trained in the Friedman’s fundamentalist “free market” ideology (profit maximizing, labor cost cutting, maximizing short-term stock values), beginning in the 1980s and ongoing to this day are rewarded for an anti-wage standard orientation—one that assumes wage standards are distortions or cost threats, not achievements. They are rewarded for low-balling labor and evading taxes and regulations, in the pursuit of short-term profit gains and share value. In such a business environment, it becomes easier to tell a story where stagnating wages, and "affordability" problems amongst the working classes, are just economics, modernization, technological advance, the creative destruction of capitalism, rather than the political economy of the richest capitalists and the billionaires, whose arrogance is boundless, and whose disregard for the rights of wage workers or democratic government is relentless. 

If nothing else, Dube’s book helps explain why, once unions were put on the defensive and the minimum wages stopped rising after 1980, there wasn’t an institutional counterweight inside big business to keep the old post-WW2 wage standard alive. But The Wage Standard is also a striking history, perhaps inadvertently, of what lengths the rich will go to defeat democratic institutions set-up to support the rights of wage workers. And on the most bogus grounds, and largely ratified by mainstream economics. And so the book also grimly illustrates how difficult it’s going to be to reverse this trend. 

Government capture by big business is as old as is our 250 year old republic, for sure. However, The Wage Standard history Dube tells is more detailed evidence that it is precisely the New Deal period, 1930-1980, when the power of big biz in gov't is moderately checked by democratic gov't that economic growth nearly doubles the "secular stagnation" after 1980. Over that half century heart of the 20th century economic prosperity becomes increasingly more broadly shared than the neoliberal period that has followed since or any other economic period in American history that preceded it. This is the macro econometric case, as far as I understand it. Again, thanks Piketty. This is why Beckert calls it the golden age of capitalism. 

It isn't about how the New Deal was perfect liberal gov't. It had many compromises, many racist-bigot shortcomings, FDR never actually followed through with his Second or Worker's Bill of Rights. The New Deal economic period is at its most humble a simple economic history proposition, a historical reminder, that the period, 1930-1980, when gov't checks on corporate rule and investments in workers were new and expanding, with more taxes and regulations than during any other period, this mixed economy, welfare capitalist Big Government, democratic socialist, or whatever you'd like to call it, actually proves obviously more pro economic growth and more pro shared prosperity than any other period in American history, periods when gov't capture by big business was more the rule. 

Like, sadly, now. I mean, when big business elites obviously have more power over the gov't than perhaps ever. Billionaire AI and Crypto economics are good for the stock market, or for now anyway. It's bubble economics; building out more AI data centers, blitzscaling, enshittification, more gig economy. Some people are getting crazy rich. And then add on to that Trump's economic model, his Art of the Deal, which is basically how to impress and rip people off, pardon the crooks, and everything that wasn't already crooked (come on, Trump didn't invent corruption but he is corruption at a scale the country has never seen before) is now crooked as hell. And a billionaire oligarchy that just fucked up the China shock of the 2000s and 2010s is now doubling-down on its mad comic book villain AI techno-feudalist dystopia. 

This is what Dube's The Wage Standard is up against. Class war, pure and simple. Dube wouldn't call it that but I will. Between 1980 and 2020 over 50 trillion in wealth is transferred from the bottom 90% of the income scale to the top .001 or some ridiculously small number like that. Something like 400 families own more wealth than the bottom 64% of the country. The heartening part in all this, of which Dube is a scholar and advocate, is that some hunkering down Blue cities and states, like Seattle, in particular since about 2010, have been trying to support a better deal for low wage workers and actually made some progress, if still fitfully and woefully not enough.