tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11101158327839031042024-03-20T01:04:29.830-05:00Permanent CrisisUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-90661395541377631132016-06-11T13:43:00.001-05:002016-06-16T10:53:29.376-05:00The Great Crackup - Part I<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5VnBCBoYC58jhzixfL73JYYc1K2XoWyIn-rmNb3nQfyAQCmMG6RoIZbQ_2XD4MSDcyqvq8qmb-8O-sHSbykS3G2TwZgRP-pJpqJs9zSJrL4lEuOZPhyr9CXwYp3Z14wqg5HYvcj2r_ZI1/s1600/D%25C3%25BCrer_Melancholia_I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5VnBCBoYC58jhzixfL73JYYc1K2XoWyIn-rmNb3nQfyAQCmMG6RoIZbQ_2XD4MSDcyqvq8qmb-8O-sHSbykS3G2TwZgRP-pJpqJs9zSJrL4lEuOZPhyr9CXwYp3Z14wqg5HYvcj2r_ZI1/s640/D%25C3%25BCrer_Melancholia_I.jpg" width="503" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dürer, </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Melancholia I, </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">1514</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given that it's been about 5 years since Walker first laid out a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">basic outline</a> of the current crisis, it's time for an update. This initial post revisits that thesis while laying the groundwork for a second part, which looks at the political formations that have emerged in response to the slow, fitful death of neoliberal society. The idea is to clarify the context in which we act by understanding the present as history. Without further ado, let's get into it.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Hic Rhodus, hic salta!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recent years have not been kind to received wisdom. Orthodox economists in the government and the academy complacently assured us for decades that the twin motors of innovation and efficient markets would drive endless economic growth, benefiting everyone. These very two factors then came together through the wondrous laboratories of the derivative markets to nearly blow the global economy sky-high in the crash of 2008. The ordeal came as a total shock to the lizardly Alan Greenspan, the fallen oracle of neoliberalism, for whom the whole disaster was a kind of sentimental education in which his “</span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/steve-coll/the-whole-intellectual-edifice" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">whole intellectual edifice collapsed.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” Greenspan’s maudlin </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">mea culpa </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before an equally clueless congressional committee shortly after the crash was a perfect image of the intellectual bankruptcy of the technocratic elite, a kind of show trial whose effect was to reaffirm the established dogma through the appearance of questioning it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After that, we were informed that the recent unpleasantness, while unfortunate, was an inexplicable anomaly that sprung upon us, </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyh3C1xDT3Y" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spaghet</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-like, and that </span><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/3386353/The-Queen-asks-why-no-one-saw-the-credit-crunch-coming.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no one saw coming </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(though of course </span><a href="http://voxeu.org/article/no-one-saw-coming-or-did-they" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">quite a few</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/31/housing-bubble-crash-oped-cx_bb_0102bartlett.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">people</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> did). A swift government bailout of the imperiled banking sector was necessary to place the economy on a strong foundation of renewed growth, but once it was done things should gradually return to normal, the story went. Since then the ensuing “recovery” has been rather less than robust. Declining unemployment in the U.S. is the one stat that looks quite good at a glance, thus the mainstream media’s dutiful adherence to it as main indicator of the health of the economy. But the official estimate systematically underestimates its real level, which is </span><a href="http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">considerably higher.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In any case wages for those who are employed are </span><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">still stagnating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, with income inequality </span><a href="http://fortune.com/2014/10/31/inequality-wealth-income-us/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">skyrocketing since the crash</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and overall growth levels as measured by GDP </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/28/u-s-to-release-data-showing-gdp-growth-for-first-quarter/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">remain depressed. </span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The underwhelming recovery is all the more remarkable given the unprecedented monetary policies carried out by the world’s central banks. Once it became clear that a swift revival of the economy was not forthcoming, with productivity, investment, and inflation all remaining depressed, the need for some kind of intervention to kickstart the process became evident. Since sound macroeconomic sense ruled out of bounds from the start any major state spending program in the classical Keynesian sense, governments and central banks conjured up a different program. The idea would be for the Federal Reserve to sluice hundreds of millions of dollars of “money” into the financial markets via the purchase of bonds - particularly U.S. Treasuries - and the “toxic” (non- or underperforming) assets that still were clogging banks’ balance sheets. By driving down interest rates and flooding the markets with liquidity, “Quantitative Easing” would prime the pumps of investment, new employment, innovation, and job growth that would finally set the gears in motion for a genuine recovery. The </span><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">resulting conjuncture</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which has defined the political terrain since, is based on a strange paradox of extreme profligacy in state monetary policy, on the one hand, and equally extreme fiscal austerity on the other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The results have been at best mixed. Everywhere this program has been implemented - the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, and, in a different form, the Bank of China - the outcome has been underwhelming, with productivity, profitability, and overall growth rates remaining well below “potential.” As it became clear that this wasn’t cutting it, governments began to turn to negative interest rates on short-term deposits, meaning commercial and investment banks must now basically pay a fine to store their money at the central bank. Again, the expectation was that this would spur investment to kickstart the global economy, but - again - it hasn’t really worked. A stubbornly lukewarm recovery in the U.S. continues to puzzle mainstream observers, while Japan and Europe remain mired in stagnation. The end result is a sort of economic limbo in which the advanced economies of the Global North are always on the verge of “taking off,” but never quite reach escape velocity. In the meantime, world capital markets - the innovative, dynamic sector that supposedly powers the global economy - navigate a true </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">terra incognita, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a set of policies and conditions that capitalism has never seen before and whose ultimate result, frankly, is known to no one.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Light Fuse, Get Away</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not the first to have pointed out the ambiguous record of these monetary programs, of course. But the sheer weirdness of it all has yet to be fully appreciated. Despite nearly 5 years of pumping untold billions into global financial markets through the firehose of QE, inflation remains very low if not nonexistent in Europe and North America. “Disinflation” has been the buzzword of late, but it has become clear that this is really just a euphemism for stubbornly persistent deflationary pressures that won’t go away no matter the size of the monetary intervention. Likewise, negative interest rates have yet to put even a small dent in the problem, as overall investment levels remain depressed. It increasingly looks like the central banks are merely pushing on a string. No doubt </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bien-pensant </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thinking around the technical issues of monetary policy did not expect this to be the situation a full 7 years after the economic “recovery” began, but here we are. Basically, increasingly extreme monetary measures are yielding increasingly meager economic results. As a simple comparison, it’s getting harder to avoid the impression that the patient’s vital signs are fading despite the doctor’s ever more desperate attempts to resuscitate it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If all this sounds disconcerting, it should. While most neoclassical economists and technocrats continue to assume that a healthy combination of technological innovation and “structural reform” (fiscal austerity) will restore the productive potential of the ailing economies of the Global North, a few mavericks have broken ranks with the standard view. Former chief economic advisor to the Clinton administration, Larry Summers, is among these apostates, warning of the dangers of a long-term “</span><a href="http://larrysummers.com/category/secular-stagnation/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">secular stagnation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” of the world economy unless a different approach is adopted. In fact a handful of elites at the top of the global financial system, including Christine Lagarde of the IMF, have been vocal critics of austerity economics, urging a more “</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5qIwP6FRzs" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">inclusive capitalism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” as the wave of the future. This arguably aligns them with contemporary post-Keynesians, who continue to advocate a much stronger, </span><a href="http://jwmason.org/slackwire/can-sanders-do-it/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">larger fiscal stimulus program</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> carried out by national governments as the only solution to the current malaise. All agree that some major break with received thinking is necessary. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More recently, the critique of “financialization,” long a preoccupation of the left, has decidedly entered the mainstream discussions. In an exceptional </span><a href="http://time.com/4327419/american-capitalisms-great-crisis/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">piece of reportage</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">magazine of all places - Rana Foroohar has packaged its basic parts in an admirably clear argument: whatever the financial sector may once have been, it has now metastasized into a bloated casino of recklessness and short-termism, parasitically extracting profits from the “real economy” while contributing very little to nothing in return. As Foroohar well knows, and as some on the left have been arguing for some time, the failure of the enormous monetary stimulus programs to have any real effect on GDP or growth rates throughout the advanced economies is largely due to the way it is swallowed up by the financial sector before it can have any such effect. Tidal waves of liquidity are pumped into the banking system through the central banks’ policies with the expectation that this will kickstart lending and productive investment; instead, it simply feeds stock buybacks, big mergers and acquisition deals, larger dividend payouts, higher executive pay, and, of course, it prompts “strategic adjustments,” i.e. downsizing and layoffs. This “asset-price Keynesianism,” to use Robert Brenner’s phrase, does several things: it drives up share prices, stoking a bullish bonanza in the stock market along with all its unavoidable speculative excesses; it progressively cheapens borrowing costs, as demand for corporate bonds rises along with equities, further feeding the debt binge; it powers ever more feverish bouts of speculation, and ever more “creative” types of derivative contracts; and it drives skyrocketing levels of inequality even higher, as the paper wealth of the wealthy and corporate elite goes through the roof, while wages for the vast majority of workers don’t budge.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The desperate improvisations of the world’s central banks have kept the ship of capital afloat, but at huge cost and not without producing new structural contradictions of their own. From the beginning, central bank policies have played a key role in the </span><a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">speculation-fueled bubble dynamics</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that have powered every boom-and-bust cycle since the early 1980s. Their centrality in this financial regime, which can only reproduce itself through such cycles, is the principal source of their enormous political and social power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The introduction of the wildly inflationary monetary programs about 5 years ago has induced an even tighter integration of the central bank hubs with the world financial system - so tight, in fact, that it may no longer make sense to refer to “markets” in the financial industry, if markets are supposed to include some meaningful type of competition. Instead, since around 2012 financial networks and the central banks have seemingly fused into some new, hybrid monstrosity. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than banks and firms competing for investors, central banks now offer unlimited liquidity. Whenever they suggest that unlimited funding may not be permanent, or that interest rates may increase because the economic outlook is improving, the markets </span><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/rates-and-recession-risk-the-feds-catch-22-1444840161" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tend to swoon and begin to tank</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, threatening billions in losses; conversely, whenever they report that the economy is doing badly, and so the fount of cheap credit will continue, the markets go into a manic frenzy, </span><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/04/11/the-catch-22-thats-gripping-markets/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rallying and inflating asset values.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The "markets" now just move in unison: up if the news is bad, down if the news is good. Locked in a kind of catch-22 pattern, the central banks basically can't talk about the economy improving - and thus monetary tightening - without triggering the kind of market chaos and widespread devaluation that their own policies are meant to prevent. This wouldn’t be happening if the waves of liquidity flowing into the financial system were actually creating the large-scale capital investments, rising employment, and “job creation” the policies were meant to bring about in the first place. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It might feel natural here to bemoan the useless, outlandish excesses of finance in the name of the “real economy,” the true source of value that is being suffocated by the invidious rentierism of parasitic bankers. This would be to fall back into the delusions of the pundits who constantly fret about whether economic “fundamentals” are sound - or, conversely, of leftists who argue for “breaking up the banks” to fight the power of finance capital. As I’ve argued at length </span><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/18816/big-banks-too-big-to-fail-nationalize-democratize-finance" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">elsewhere</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, when the logic of financial mediation penetrates the very core of capital as a world-spanning mode of production, to strictly distinguish between a productive “real” economy and its superfluous, purely speculative excess is to reify their historical interconnection. Following Marx’s analysis in Volume II of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capital, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">it is to assume a one-sided perspective from either the standpoint of productive capital or money capital, but without bringing them together within what he calls the whole circuit of “industrial capital” - it is to fall into the simple, static opposition between productivism and finance. This reification is typically deployed on the left in a nostalgic bid for the lost object of Fordist manufacturing, sustaining </span><a href="http://rooseveltinstitute.org/untamed-how-check-corporate-financial-and-monopoly-power/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the fantasy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that, for example, one need only roll back financial power by downsizing and better regulating banks and corporations for an idyllic, competitive society of small businesses, productive factories, and a strong welfare state to return to the U.S. It is shared by </span><a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-failed-to-predict-the-financial-crisis/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">orthodox economists,</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who exclude finance from their macroeconomic models of national economies. And in reactionary circles, of course, tirades against the predations of finance capital from the standpoint of “productive” industry have a </span><a href="https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/moishe-postone-anti-semitism-and-national-socialism-notes-on-the-german-reaction-to-holocaust.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dark history</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which incidentally is experiencing </span><a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/anti-semitism-europe-jews-fleeing-germany-amid-rise-islamic-extremism-far-right-2272286" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">quite the revival </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of late. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The question is not whether</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">finance is absorbing an ever greater share of the social product. Nor is it the false dichotomy that says a choice must be made between national manufacturing productivity, on the one hand, and global trade on the other. The question is why a ravenous financial sector is actually integral to this social formation, and the opportunities, constraints, and dangers this presents for our politics. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mainstream discussions of the economy are almost always oblivious to the fact that a bloated, metastasizing financial system is not a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sui generis </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">phenomenon. Its economic centrality and political power in the U.S. are both expressions of a wide-ranging structural transformation in the nature of capitalism itself, a global process whose political and cultural consequences have been analyzed extensively on this blog and elsewhere. Without a full rehearsal of that analysis, its basic upshot is that the hyper-financialized, crisis-ridden form of growth that has driven <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/glossary-accumulation-of-capital.html">accumulation</a> since the early 1980s reached its historical limit in the dramatic meltdown of late 2008. In this view, the crash and ensuing slump marked the “signal crisis” of that mode of production, to use Giovanni Arrighi’s term, which spelled the beginning of its end. The </span><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/illusion-of-recovery.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conclusion then</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was that the global economy was essentially on its last legs following that disaster, and that a general crisis of capitalism was on deck. But as Marx says somewhere, no mode of production can be finally superseded until all of the productive forces within it have been exhausted. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It has become apparent, retrospectively, that the bizarre monetary experiments of the central banks have been mostly successful in maintaining a sufficiently manic level of liquidity in global markets, and preventing another system-wide seize-up, for the last half-decade. Yet in achieving increasingly meager results through increasingly drastic measures, Bernanke, Yellen, Draghi, Kuroda, and the rest of the gang are bringing the distended, dysfunctional regime of economic governance inaugurated by Paul Volcker in the late 1970s and perfected by Alan Greenspan to a fittingly absurd conclusion. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This technocratic wizardry seemed to work for a time because it expanded the supply not just of money, but of what the anthropologists </span><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Financial_Derivatives_and_the_Globalizat.html?id=az7jCUvO0CwC" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edward Lipuma and Benjamin Lee</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, among </span><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781403936455" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">others</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, call “abstract risk.” Abstract risk is the universal equivalent for exchange that is generated through financial derivatives and allows for the commensuration of any type of asset with any other, no matter how different they may be. In the absence of a metallic standard, fixed exchange rates, or economic coordination, they argue, abstract risk serves as the form of connectivity linking radically different and otherwise incommensurable currencies, commodities, and cultures together into a common network of valuation. It is essentially the source of liquidity, and is thus at the heart of globally networked, hyper-financialized capitalism. When they create money out of thin air, the central banks are essentially “manufacturing” this strange meta-commodity, pumping it into the world’s financial and banking systems like some gigantic iron lung. They pour fuel into the furnace of derivative finance, drastically cranking up the velocity of circulation and cutting down the turnover time of capital. The expansionary cycles of recent years - like those before them - have manufactured an illusion of accumulation by multiplying claims on existing assets, generating claims on those claims, and on and on in the spiraling vortex of the derivative form. They are the culminating act of the central banks as a force of production in their own right. But their success, which can only be seen as marginal at best, has come at a rather dear cost, exacerbating inequality, further chaining the fate of the global economy to the blind frenzy of the financial system, and baking in the inevitability of another huge bust sure to come at the end of the current, precarious boom. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This program, such as it is, had managed for some time to maintain a simulacrum of the general pre-2008 economic geography: mainly services, retail, and debt-fueled consumption in the G7 countries, with reduced but still significant manufacturing production, particularly in Germany and Japan; and higher rates of fixed capital investment and accumulation in the leading countries of the Global South, particularly in China, now fueled by an influx of speculative “hot money” from western banks. But despite this temporary fix, actual capital accumulation has been slowing drastically in the G7 countries, while the much celebrated BRICS, whose economic ascendancy was once thought to herald the future of global capitalism, are all struggling if not floundering in outright depression. Beneath the surface, </span><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/15223fa4-c354-11e4-8fa9-00144feab7de.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">various</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/4th-quarter-gdp-raised-to-14-but-corporate-profits-sink-2016-03-25" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">observers</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have been tracking steadily </span><a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/g7-economies-in-trouble/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slumping profits</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in international capital, while a creeping </span><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/05/08-labor-productivity-low-skills-andes-lee" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">descent in productivity </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the U.S. recently accelerated, dropping sharply even into </span><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/925d8e6c-226f-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">negative territory</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - the first contraction of productivity in the U.S. in 30 years. The U.S. economy, supposedly the sole “bright spot” in a stagnant world economic system, has - for the moment - essentially stopped growing.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="uslaborproductivitybrookings.jpg" height="256" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bsEHTsCGHI6w2s4thtvlwGZQnLZjDqsnxdr-nFsw0qd7uJ8B_AOR__pFJvHMsCJTERcpzshiM_33DTC_SWrxY1HKFxRf3sKILByH2z1IKOIjVQZoeJKN7-wMOY2aWy56UCSUvNB3" style="border: none; cursor: move; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; transform: rotate(0rad);" title="Figure 1" width="400" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="padding-top: 4px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Figure 1. Source: <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/05/08-labor-productivity-low-skills-andes-lee">Brookings Institution</a></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Figure 2. Source: <a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/the-us-rate-of-profit-revisited/">Michael Roberts</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The gradual but seemingly inexorable plunge in productivity and profitability - almost as if there were a </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">long-term tendency </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like that - augurs something very ill for capitalism in the current moment. Abysmal productivity rates confirm that profits are not low because they’re being productively reinvested, powering accumulation. They are low because the finance-centered pattern of growth pursued for the last half-decade seems to have run its course without boosting productivity in the least. It pleased the stock markets by creating some impressive quarterly earning reports for a few years, as firms plowed their surpluses back into the financial system rather than accumulating capital. And for a while runaway credit growth and the expansion of financial assets of all kinds could sort of drag other areas of the economy along with it, as it gradually seeps into services, real estate, construction, start-ups, and other low-productivity industries that tend to be attractive to speculative capital. But the magic tricks of financialized, non-productive growth can only be performed so many times before their effect wears off. And in any case it can only last as long as the glaring contradiction between financial expansion and shrinking productive investment remains obscured. Once it becomes clear that the upward movement of the markets is due not to “strong fundamentals,” but to an empty charade concealing fading productivity and dwindling profitability, the reckoning will be severe. It’s most likely only a question of time until that happens, but if and when it does, it promises to reveal what happened in 2007-2008 as a mere prologue to the real catastrophe.</span></span></div>
<br />Jamie http://www.blogger.com/profile/18363083808445009325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-25376332058649751272015-06-28T22:33:00.000-05:002015-07-06T11:58:04.489-05:00The New Prophets of Capital<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/4645091802" title="Steve Jobs painted portrait _DDC7953 by thierry ehrmann, on Flickr"><img alt="Steve Jobs painted portrait _DDC7953" height="336" src="https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3331/4645091802_58e461ec4f.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
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People who work for a living face a stark outlook. Due to the acceleration of employment practices such as subcontracting and temporary employment, as well as persistently high unemployment, it has become incredibly difficult for workers to organize and improve their conditions. Simply finding decent work can be incredibly difficult as restructuring of the global economy has created dynamics limiting growth in manufacturing in favor of service jobs. When job growth does occur, it often produces the worst kinds of jobs.<br />
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Despite it all, entrepreneurial figures tout disruption—often simply meaning techniques for further eroding the stability and remuneration of employment—and find a rapt audience. Self-help promoters encourage the distraught to take full responsibility for their problems. Advocates of “ethical” consumption tout the environmental and social benefits of buying the right products. How is it that so many buy into narratives that gloss over or even celebrate the worsening of conditions for the great majority? To put it bluntly, why aren’t there riots?<br />
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<i>The New Prophets of Capital</i> by Nicole Aschoff offers one way to approach this question by examining the popularity and influence of four “prophets” of the neoliberal capitalist system. Drawing on Weber, Aschoff describes all these prophets as offering a way to live a better life. Their persuasiveness is based in their own ability to accumulate fortunes, but they don’t merely provide a set of rules to live by, they tell a <i>story</i>, a way of making sense of a confusing and hazardous world. Setting apart their stories from those told in days of yore is their ability to find solutions to the problems of the day, such as economic precariousness, intense competition, and brutal inequality, within the capitalist, free market system itself. Could capitalism be the source of <i>and</i> the solution to all of life’s problems?<br />
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The motif of storytelling offers the reader a way to make sense of the ideological battle to shape the future. Will the future be based on derivative perspectives that “do not challenge capitalism or its destructive effects[,]” but actually “bolster capitalism”? (p. 12-13) Or can progressive forces challenge the oppressive regime of capitalism? While critically examining this clash of ideologies is vital to confronting “economic and political fatalism[,]” the challenge that Aschoff faces is to do so in a materialist way. (p. 13) In other words, one must present ideas as the creations of real, living humans, as ways in which people make sense of and attempt to change their world to bring it in line with their sense of how things ought to be. Ideas cannot exist independent of human actions or real socially-situated perspectives.<br />
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Each of the four individuals examined in this book allows Aschoff to illuminate a different corner of contemporary discourse around social problems and the agency seemingly—in Aschoff’s take, <i>illusorily</i>—offered through capitalism to combat them. In moving from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook but more importantly figurehead of a corporate feminist movement based on her book, <i>Lean In</i>, to Whole Foods CEO and “conscious capitalism” proponent John Mackey, to omnipresent media mogul Oprah, and concluding with Bill Gates, software billionaire and director of a massive charitable foundation, the book is able to take in a broader sweep than might have been expected.<br />
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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nayrb7/2176798443" title="OPRAH, ANUS. ANUS, OPRAH. by nayrb7, on Flickr"><img alt="OPRAH, ANUS. ANUS, OPRAH." height="375" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2114/2176798443_49c2b9675e.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
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All prophets are not made equal. Oprah’s popularity is dependent on an audience that is receptive to her particular message, and the chapter devoted to her takes a productive detour through the tension-ridden professional lives of freelance workers. Sandberg and Mackey offer opportunities to consider feminism and environmentally “sustainable” business, respectively, and the fortunes—and distortions—of these movements in the corporate world. Gates, on the other hand, is something more than a prophet, controlling a vast fortune and staggering donations from some of the world’s richest people. Not only does Gates lead through offering technocratic solutions to social ills, but also through the raw power afforded by the astronomical sums of money at his command.<br />
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This book’s audience will hardly be surprised by the conclusions Aschoff draws. The market-oriented solutions that these celebrity capitalists offer cannot overcome the dysfunctions, such as inequality and environmental degradation, that stem fundamentally from a system basically indifferent to all outcomes but the securing of ever greater profits. As she writes of Whole Foods’ ethical consumption ethos, “[b]uying better things is not a substitute for the hard <i>political</i> choices that societies need to make about limiting consumption and resource use, and finding a replacement for the psychological crutch of consumerism.” (p. 75) Aschoff’s assumption that sustainability can never go along with profit is, however, unsupported. One imagines that there could be a lot of money to be made under the right circumstances from green energy and infrastructure, though this would surely require intense intervention by the state.<br />
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That doesn’t mean that <i>The New Prophets…</i> is merely preaching to the choir, however. The chapters on Oprah and Gates are particularly interesting, as each takes a close look at the ideologies of self improvement and philanthropy, respectively, in their particular contemporary articulations. The chapter on Oprah explores how those subject to precarious and highly competitive forms of work may come to embrace self improvement as a solution to the problems they experience in their jobs.<br />
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The way we are told to get through it all and realize our dreams is always to adapt ourselves to the changing world, not to change the world we live in. We demand little or nothing from the system, from the collective apparatus of powerful people and institutions. We only make demands of ourselves. We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects. (p. 106)</blockquote>
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Here we get the best sense of how the stories peddled by the book’s subjects are received by their audience. Humans aren’t just passive receptors. They use self-help messages as a way to cope with difficult circumstances in their own lives, although this may amount to little more than treating the symptom. “It’s all about adapting ourselves and acquiring the necessary skills and connections to make it in the world. This is the new American Dream. Sure, there are problems in society, but we don’t need to change the world. We just need to change ourselves and the problems disappear.” (p. 99)<br />
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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gatesfoundation/6198962657" title="Bill Gates administers polio drops to a child in Chad by Gates Foundation, on Flickr"><img alt="Bill Gates administers polio drops to a child in Chad" height="333" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6154/6198962657_0925d5aa42.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
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On occasion, the reader also gets the sense that these prophets are something more than shills for a system that protects their own base interests. Interestingly, the chapter on Gates reveals that he is keenly aware of the problems caused by market irrationalities, and is able to speak to these problems with more insight and sincerity than most US politicians can muster. As Gates sees it, “[i]n a system of capitalism, as people’s wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls, until it becomes zero. Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.” (Bill Gates, Davos speech, 2008, quoted on p. 116 of <i>The New Prophets…</i>)<br />
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Needless to say, Gates is no socialist. He believes that market-based solutions are in the final analysis adequate to these problems, provided that someone with the right knowledge and resources is able to overcome irrationalities with the right fixes. But Aschoff points out how market-based solutions inevitably commoditize goods in ways that can undermine their intended benefits—such as centering education around test taking rather than cultivation of human potentialities—and subject them to the technocratic control of specialists.<br />
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But there is also an unexamined weakness in Aschoff’s overarching metaphor that prevents us from understanding clearly why so many continue to embrace stories that offer stale—if not obviously unworkable—solutions to very real and widespread problems. To frame these figures as storytellers seems to suggest that there is something seductive about their stories in and of themselves, that a well told story is able to mesmerize the listener and make them forget their true interests. This suggests that the bloody business of capitalist exploitation chugs implacably away beneath a layer of misleading ideology. "Indeed, capital's ability to periodically present a new set of legitimating principles that facilitate the willing participation of society accounts for its remarkable longevity despite periodic bouts of deep crisis." (p. 3)<br />
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Despite gestures toward a more sophisticated understanding of ideology, Aschoff’s analysis doesn’t escape from a base/superstructure model of society in which the realm of ideas floats mask-like above the real business of capitalism proper. This framework pays scant attention to the connection between the functioning of the capitalist system in its political economic dimensions on the one hand and the ideas through which people of all kinds make sense of their experiences in society on the other.<br />
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Ultimately, since society cannot exist except through the actions of human beings, no hard distinction between the two is viable. Ideas and ideologies do not just appear out of the blue and they do not autonomously control people’s actions. They are put together in response to the real, material conditions that humans encounter in the course of living their lives. Aschoff’s mechanistic model preempts a richer understanding of the relation between ideological claims about the nature of capitalist society, the way that seemingly objective economic conditions confront workers and bosses, and the way that social change actually comes about.<br />
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In highlighting the importance of storytelling to understanding political economic realities, <i>The New Prophets…</i> follows in the footsteps of influential works focused on the conservative backlash against the cultural and political upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s in the US. Thomas Frank’s <i>What’s the Matter with Kansas?</i> examines the culture war in the once progressive state of Kansas as a smokescreen, erected by unscrupulous politicians, for capitalists’ intensified exploitation of an increasingly disarmed working class. While Frank provides a rich account of the devastation wrought on Kansas by the emergence of neoliberalism as a new way of organizing economic relations, he ultimately ends up with a rather curious conception of politics in which non-economic issues are merely a ruse by which politicians serving corporate interests fool hapless Joe Sixpacks into abetting the destruction of their own families’ economic security.<br />
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Of course, <i>What’s the Matter with Kansas?</i> is more literary journalism than social theory. While Frank makes many interesting observations about the ways that conservatives have confronted social anomie in purely cultural terms, he does little to illuminate the connections between these social issues and the political economy of corporate dominance. To take one example, Frank seeks to explain the relatively recent conservative animus towards abortion as a manifestation of hatred for liberal experts. When experts like doctors widely opposed abortion, populist Kansans embraced it. Later, the elite consensus swung the other way, and conservative backlashers changed their position as well. “[W]hatever else the 1973 <i>Roe v. Wade</i> decision might have been, it was also a monument to the power of the professions.” (p. 198)<br />
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Clearly, this is a mechanistic way of approaching a complex issue like abortion, and drains the issue of any of its specific content as a means of women asserting control over their bodies and their role in reproducing the family. By assuming that cultural issues function primarily as an expression of class resentment that is ultimately a distraction from economic issues, Frank cannot provide a richer understanding of the political significance of cultural issues. While <i>What’s the Matter with Kansas?</i> raises an interesting question, namely why the working class would support political candidates whose policies speed their own impoverishment, his treatment remains only suggestive due to the rather simplistic framework he brings to the investigation.<br />
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Rick Perlstein’s <i>Nixonland</i> applied a similar approach to United States history, recounting the run up to the first election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the crumbling of the liberal consensus that had previously dominated American politics. Perlstein’s narrative is lively and documented with a wide variety of archival sources, but his explanatory approach ultimately mirrors Frank’s in many respects. In his view, Nixon was able to tap into the resentment of the “silent majority” because of his own modest origins and the resentment he had nursed from youth for the socially-well placed. It was Nixon’s genius in manipulating widespread displeasure with spendthrift entitlement policies that allowed him to bring into being a new political configuration that, as Perlstein writes in the book’s last line, “has not ended yet.” (p. 748)<br />
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<i>Nixonland</i> is a meticulously researched and closely narrated history that simultaneously manages to be an engrossing read. Yet, like <i>What’s the Matter with Kansas?</i>, it works best on a descriptive, rather than an explanatory level. Clearly, a decisive section of voters—"[m]artyrs who were not really martyrs”—abandoned the liberal consensus and opted for more divisive and conservative politics. (p. 23) But Nixon’s personality or political acumen, on their own, hardly stand as a real <i>explanation</i> for epochal changes in US politics. If Nixon convinced voters to turn away from liberalism, his skill as a salesman, while hardly immaterial, doesn’t explain what it was that those voters understood their shift in allegiance to mean and Perlstein ultimately cannot critically interrogate the historical significance of this shift. The effect of <i>Nixonland’s</i> analysis is to turn the disintegration of the post-war order into a matter of electoral politics, ignoring the role of economic contradictions, such as the appearance of limits on industrial growth and the subsequent ruination of labor's political influence, in making the status quo untenable.<br />
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Aschoff takes a much more self-consciously radical stance than Frank and Perlstein. Her vision is forward-looking, while Frank and Perlstein’s political visions seem more focused on the need to win back ground long lost to conservatives. But in many ways the argument of <i>The New Prophets…</i> shares the difficulty of these books in providing a robust historical and theoretical analysis of their subject matter. This proves to be a particular problem here, however, because Aschoff’s work is animated by a conviction of the need for radical social change.<br />
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Although Aschoff takes a socialistic position that sees capitalism as a form of social organization to be overcome altogether, and not merely ameliorated in its excesses, she doesn’t provide much in the way of political economy. As mentioned above, her chapter on Oprah is an interesting detour focusing less on storytelling and more on the way that the lived experiences of freelancers make them particularly receptive to her message. Here we glimpse what could be an important part of a more incisive analysis, namely, that there are particular reasons that certain stories are able to persuade their audience. Unfortunately, the insights offered in this chapter are not connected to a larger explanatory framework.<br />
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Taking it for granted that Oprah is very good at what she does, she nonetheless did not manufacture the appeal of self-improvement out of thin air. She has embraced this theme because it produces results, in other words, because her audience is willing to buy it—literally in the sense of purchasing Oprah’s publications and the books and other products that she recommends. The same is true of Sandberg, Mackey, and—in a different way—Gates as well. None of these figures has the power to mesmerize or force the public to forget or contradict their own interests.<br />
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Aschoff does not analyze the appeal of Sandberg’s brand of corporate feminism beyond noting that the discrimination women face at work creates receptivity towards her message. This is surely correct but doesn’t explain the embrace of a form of feminism so at ease with capitalist exploitation. But like Oprah’s message, Sandberg’s is dependent on an audience that finds it sufficiently compelling. Aschoff provides a very satisfying demolition of the false inclusiveness of <i>Lean In</i>, but this doesn’t help us understand its appeal. One imagines that conditions of intense competition for jobs in the corporate world has led many to embrace the idea that talented women in challenging professions deserve their due. One need not assume that those interested in the message of <i>Lean In</i> aren’t interested in practicing solidarity with people poorer than them. Given the current state of organized labor and extremely adverse economic conditions, however, such a progressive message may not be easy to practice or to turn into a bestseller.<br />
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All of Aschoff’s subjects are business people and no doubt keenly attuned to the immense, impersonal forces of the marketplace. It seems safe to say that their own success in amassing fortunes has instilled in them certain beliefs about the nature of “the market” and what it take to succeed in it. As Marx puts it, “[u]nder free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”<sup>1</sup> While their views may be self-serving, they are something different, if no better, than fully instrumental propaganda.<br />
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The point is not to say it’s natural for workers to take on viewpoints that mimic those of their bosses. But it would strain credibility to deny that these viewpoints do capture unavoidable elements of social reality. To form a socialist political agenda, one requires an unflinching understanding of what people believe and why, or else there is little chance of understanding the challenges of building a popular movement around robust, shared political goals.<br />
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Without taking seriously the reasons that people, rich and not-so-rich alike, might buy into these ideas, one has little basis for understanding the plausibility of an alternative political agenda to sufficiently large groups of people. Rather, one is left to oppose the righteousness of one’s cause to the manifest injustice of the status quo—assuming, in other words, that people have a critical understanding of the social system that the popularity of these prophets tends to suggest is actually lacking.<br />
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The alternative is to explain the conditions—such as unstable employment and atomization of the work force—that can lead workers to either embrace politics affirming the status quo or alternately, to challenge them. This would entail a non-deterministic presentation of political economic conditions that indicates the potentialities of political movements to intervene in and transform the status quo. Such a presentation in turn makes possible the formation of a strategic agenda for positive social change.<br />
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But Aschoff shrinks from this task just as she comes around to it, and her inability to provide a robust political agenda is linked to the failings in her analysis. In the book’s final section, she asks, “[w]hat would a radical, anticapitalist model look like? To begin with, the model won’t be a single, unified narrative of change. It will be comprised of thousands of stories, all with their own unique visions for a better world.” (p. 145) Without registering it, Aschoff has just reproduced the imaginative horizon of neoliberal society, namely that every scheme for social organization is equally imaginable, that all values are equally valid and that justice means the recognition of all of them. This is already the environment in which capitalists’ prophetic stories have been thriving. The ascendant power of storytelling in Aschoff's framework shows how deeply embedded it is within the neoliberal imaginary, where the connection between stories or cultural issues and political economy are always ambiguous and underspecified.<br />
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Accordingly, the final chapter containing three unifying points for such an agenda comes off as cursory and loosely related to the foregoing analysis. While the ideas presented—democratization of social institutions, decommodification of social goods, and redistribution—have merit, due to the form of presentation they remain items on a wish list rather than possibilities immanent within the world we inhabit. A greater understanding of progressive possibilities immanent to contemporary society is exactly what could have been provided given more focus on the political economic conditions forming the context for capitalist ideologies.<br />
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Democracy, decommodification, and redistribution can all exist to some extent alongside capitalism. Under the right conditions they may even aid its functioning. The question that should be posed is how they will help the left overcome the capitalist system and replace it with something better. Denying the need to provide a large-scale strategy for this overcoming prevents one from seriously approaching the question. A movement that declines to tell a story of how it will be successful in winning substantial improvements for the day-to-day lives of ordinary people is one that can have no reasonable expectation of victory.<br />
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Footnotes<br />
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1. Karl Marx. <u>Capital Vol. I</u>, 1976, p. 381<br />
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Photo Credits:<br />
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“Steve Jobs painted portrait” <a href="https://flic.kr/p/85tiXG" target="”_blank”">Photo</a> by thierry ehrman. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target="”_blank”">Some rights reserved</a>.<br />
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“OPRAH, ANUS. ANUS, OPRAH.” <a href="https://flic.kr/p/4jmEkD" target="”_blank”">Photo</a> by nayrb7. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target="”_blank”">Some rights reserved</a>.<br />
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“Bill Gates administers polio drops to a child in Chad” <a href="https://flic.kr/p/arMiCv" target="”_blank”">Photo</a> by Gates Foundation. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" target="”_blank”">Some rights reserved</a>.<br />
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“Nixon and Brezhnev” <a href="https://flic.kr/p/cjtsjL" target="”_blank”">Photo</a> by That Hartford Guy. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="”_blank”">Some rights reserved</a>.<br />
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“Blue Marx” <a href="https://flic.kr/p/7aKR5m" target="”_blank”">Photo</a> by Chris JL. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" target="”_blank”">Some rights reserved</a>.
Deckardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06918939582411126943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-79868603152959429872015-05-27T17:01:00.000-05:002015-06-18T14:54:10.049-05:00Universal Basic Income<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjUJezKH1HXAi4OxZrBmDxmreaiKg9rhN3DIJHWZj5njMsfeHCyEOilVx76cHkqLmYQ_lvIk2XqFQeJND2yKNd-ay8Uyik7kiS8R6ZYN-JbNz5M3i0vNuR-ILNQt4wQSG8I6zIGOMnykte/s1600/8506058779_426b197e66_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjUJezKH1HXAi4OxZrBmDxmreaiKg9rhN3DIJHWZj5njMsfeHCyEOilVx76cHkqLmYQ_lvIk2XqFQeJND2yKNd-ay8Uyik7kiS8R6ZYN-JbNz5M3i0vNuR-ILNQt4wQSG8I6zIGOMnykte/s320/8506058779_426b197e66_z.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">"Basic Income Triptych" <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/russell-higgs/8506058779/in/photolist-dXDLVR-fTApwY-fTAa7q-fTAfSV-fTzoNd-fSZg2S-fSY2wL-fSZre4-fSZzok-fSZ7mg-fSZ4jq-fSZEeT-fSYXjD-dXDMnR-dXDMAZ-dVU5bQ-pCDvJT-nthyEF-exCMHP-rLaxUL-ru8Mp2-exGbpo-rigZ3P-nw9Zop-obKxLY-fTAQWK-obKxDJ-dXKtky-nZv2HN-hCbfP1-feHakW-dZ5gHR-obU2Mn-e4xqfJ-o4jL68-dH6LPa-7GgUCb-nwbFcS-dZnmXD-pCDvJc-dZbGzK-dZghPs-dZaAip-prMXeV-nwdVxv-rw13bx-7GcL2B-scxNeC-e4ryVt-nUpGan" target="_blank">Photo</a> by Russell Shaw Higgs <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">Some Rights Reserved</a></span>
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As the struggle to break through political malaise and to find an adequate response to the 2008 economic crisis continues, the left seems to have regained a certain amount of vigor. Populism seems to offer a way forward by tapping the pervasive anger towards wide and growing inequality that most mainstream politicians still seem frightened to fully embrace. Policies aimed at national redistribution and strengthening infrastructure would be welcome, of course. But there is as yet no well articulated vision for the future beyond the near-term, leaving open questions of whether a potential populist political movement will remain compatible with the goals of the left. It is important to ask, then, whether the left possesses proposals that might give shape to a wider political vision for the future.<br />
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Among the proposals on offer, universal basic income (UBI) is <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fwonkblog%2Fwp%2F2013%2F05%2F11%2Fthinking-utopian-how-about-a-universal-basic-income%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFrz4tgGBnz05PcxSsbcts7-Os9dA" target="_blank">enjoying </a><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CC8QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fio9.com%2Fhow-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-the-robot-1653303459&ei=7_LIVO3QC4P2yQSOxYLoBA&usg=AFQjCNHwKBqGrkEN4RCE20aClh9BJAQuiA&sig2=ll7y7V0mLETenY_ITG5riA" target="_blank">renewed </a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftheweek.com%2Farticles%2F443948%2Famerica-running-jobs-time-universal-basic-income&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNH9UNJof-Kv5rmkQ-u9uF_llEd34Q" target="_blank">interest</a>, though it remains well outside of the political mainstream. UBI is generally defined as a cash payment of a certain amount made to every citizen of a nation without regard to income. One of UBI’s strengths is that it seems able to please everyone. Proponents say that it can end poverty by guaranteeing everyone a subsistence. In the USA, such guarantees—if far from perfect—already exist in the form of various entitlement programs from social security to food stamps. UBI, however, removes the burden and inefficiencies of proving need and submitting one’s family to the surveillance of the state. At the same time, UBI would benefit all (like social security without an age restriction) and therefore naturally enjoy a huge base of support.<br />
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There is also a more radical <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jacobinmag.com%2F2013%2F05%2Fcurious-utopias%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFcb3vvlCmYILN_2_psqp0IFiDg3A" target="_blank">perspective </a>that sees UBI as a way of empowering workers by decommodifying labor. In other words, by pushing back at the necessity of waged work just to get the necessities of life, a guaranteed income would allow people to be choosier about the jobs that they would accept. Why do dangerous or excessively hard work when you can use your guaranteed income to hold out for something better? Arguably, the ability to withhold one’s labor would increase the pay for undesirable jobs there is increasingly little reason to accept and increase the control of workers over their own lives. But whether or not the full radical implications of this argument would obtain, there is a solid case to be made that the UBI would increase the economic and political power of workers.<br />
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But against these progressive arguments for UBI one should weigh the libertarian and technocratic attractions to it. For some, UBI is meant to perpetuate the status quo in the worst ways. A recent <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fread%2Fsomething-for-everyone-0000546-v22n1&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEp4345SWTlxhZj_kck9Ybj6ZpyoA" target="_blank">article </a>by Nathan Schneider documents how UBI is seen by some as a technocratic fix for extreme inequality—though certainly not inequality per se—that has the virtue of reducing supposedly wasteful government services. In other words, UBI can be a substitute for other services or benefits the government provides, and might be funded by cuts to them. Noah Gordon’s <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fpolitics%2Farchive%2F2014%2F08%2Fwhy-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income%2F375600%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFhVspOLb937OHR511tWXTgDtBVkA" target="_blank">consideration </a>of the cost of the UBI assumes, “[c]utting all federal and state benefits for low-income Americans.” This perspective explains the wide-ranging <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato-unbound.org%2F2014%2F08%2F04%2Fmatt-zwolinski%2Fpragmatic-libertarian-case-basic-income-guarantee&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGccQBleoMRJe5V13eMad7Fw1PEtA" target="_blank">support </a>that UBI has received not just from libertarians, but also from neoliberal heroes like Milton Friedman, an <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FcbfGkiecl2M" target="_blank">era-damaging</a> former President, and outright cranks like Charles Murray<sup>1</sup>.<br />
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This support deserves further consideration. UBI guarantees a basic income and allows recipients to spend that income on anything they want, doing away with the patronizing aspect of a program like food stamps, which imagines that the poor will spend everything they have on liquor and cigarettes. But the conservative implications of UBI’s implicit consumer choice orientation become clearer when we consider a collective good like health care. This is a service that is best provided through a single-payer system that does away with the need for parasitic insurance companies. Yet from a libertarian perspective, the point of UBI is precisely that it would allow services like health care to be more fully marketized by defunding federal health care spending. The UBI is great news for many on the free-market right because it could act as a kind of economic trojan horse that, ironically, advances further marketization on the basis of what appears to be a major public benefit.<br />
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Along with these political goals of the libertarian and policy-oriented right, a more typically demagogic right wing response is also to be expected. The inclusion of immigrants without citizenship in a UBI scheme would certainly be opposed by the right under the threat of foreign hordes of the shiftless hoping to enjoy a free lunch. If the right were successful in excluding immigrants from the UBI, it would undercut the power of workers and create the potential for increasing tension between poor citizens and non-citizens. Such a confrontation could badly set back efforts to unite Americans under a shared progressive political agenda.<br />
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The point is that such potential consequences have to be weighed and evaluated from the standpoint of the current balance of political forces.<br />
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Left advocates of the UBI emphasize that its introduction will naturally have to be accompanied by sustained popular pressure to ensure that its results are progressive. But this is to seriously beg the question, because it presumes that the left has the strength and unity to wage this struggle. In other words, to adopt a strategy that depends on the ability of the left to outmanoeuvre not only the trenchant right wing, but also the wily and resolutely self-serving politicians of the ideological ‘middle,’ is not only ineffective but dangerous. In light of the disparity between left and right tendencies in the current political field, introducing something like the UBI in this context could very well produce unintended, retrograde consequences.<br />
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So the question, as so often, is how to strengthen the left. Right now, leftists have more than enough ideas about what’s wrong with the world, but very few programs or demands that seem like potential cornerstones of a genuine popular political movement. From this perspective, what is needed is not just good ideas, but attainable political goals that will unite and build the power of the left as they are fought for and won.<br />
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There are good reasons to think that the UBI, while certainly holding value as a long-term objective, would not build the strength of the left in the current moment. As has been <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fpermanentcrisis.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fif-we-dont-go-global-we-cant-win.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHPwFSFWmy3NpEAn9rhKhWPIpkM4g" target="_blank">argued</a>, perhaps the key structural disadvantage of the contemporary left is its fragmentation, not only in its widely varying perspectives towards society, identity, and social change, but also geographically. International solidarity may seem more like a dim memory or wishful thinking than reality, but narrowing the gap between ability of capital to pursue its objectives across national boundaries and the strength of left forms of solidarity and cooperation across them is indispensable, however difficult it may seem.<br />
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As long as the imagination of the left remains bound within the framework of the nation-state, it will remain next to impossible to think and act in a way that is capable of restoring working people’s democratic control over the political process. Yet there is still a pervasive sense on the left that the task of the moment is essentially one of reinvigorating national economies, and this is an understanding that is shared with the still somewhat inchoate discourse of populist politics in the US. UBI as a policy fits into this framework. We must seriously consider the pitfalls to this localized approach to global problems.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQb0eB8iUgGRnZiTX8KrYL-WZwDTzFdiyDZop28xwGjEmBuZQSZ89pU-RODb5f0l0fC468qrWF-lJmasy9vMQQNOKbBywnEPlNHwfz4JAfIkemZ9BqZWwyWd1VDQLPYntPY52GSwhqQ6JB/s1600/13194222244_5e425d6024_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQb0eB8iUgGRnZiTX8KrYL-WZwDTzFdiyDZop28xwGjEmBuZQSZ89pU-RODb5f0l0fC468qrWF-lJmasy9vMQQNOKbBywnEPlNHwfz4JAfIkemZ9BqZWwyWd1VDQLPYntPY52GSwhqQ6JB/s320/13194222244_5e425d6024_z.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">"Sterling Heights Assembly Plant" <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chryslergroup/13194222244/in/photolist-bvcbis-juxdqT-bs52Uo-dPuGGx-pdpBA8-cp5WgS-9NAsCc-9NFVNX-9M2DZZ-9NBBMn-9NJybd-9NEtYQ-9NGKrb-9NDZCz-9NH11D-9NGYu8-9NJKMw-9NEwpU-9NJAiA-37ddM1-6aWANQ-9NvgtE-8tf5ej-m6U6VZ-m6VQAq-9NC7mF-8EQ6EL-9NsCbe-9Nv8dj-7BUDdU-oZnCrU-oJUP1b-p2nyFS-oJVeTL-p2nurQ-fg2whi-qEqP2J-5X1iZV-aRbmaF-m6Wcdh-d6VJLf-7rjn9U-7KJkst" target="_blank">Photo</a> by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles: Corporate <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">Some Rights Reserved</a></span>
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Despite <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fjosheidelson%2Fstatus%2F552847830638133249&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEt79foubkofXGf7t8C5lMfV6rUmw" target="_blank">inflated </a><a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fohioaflcio%2Fstatus%2F556649557480583168&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFwB3ZZh2HY-GZttk8VvMcIzF5bpg" target="_blank">rhetoric</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F330243%2Fdont-kid-yourself-us-manufacturing-is-never-really-coming-back-from-china%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGmtWFrhdPqbGzuEbtHv-jLHCAJYQ" target="_blank">manufacturing jobs will not be repatriated</a> to the US. As is well known, the labor movements of the richer countries have been in stark decline since the late 1960s when workers in the poorer countries began to become their “competitors” for jobs in an increasingly global labor market. This supposed competition, best understood as a corporate strategy to hold down the power of workers worldwide, has allowed a global race-to-the-bottom to arise, depressing wages, devastating communities that relied on manufacturing jobs, and boosting corporate profits through brutal exploitation of low-paid labor. The clock can’t simply be turned back on this structural transformation of the global economy, but a politics that is equally transnational in scope could transform it for the better.<br />
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<a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fpermanentcrisis.blogspot.com%2F2014%2F02%2Fneoliberalism-is-destroying-its-last.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEnCOpgXK3HjdO3MCfdBxkb5941Fw" target="_blank">Neoliberalism as a system of accumulation</a> is gradually unraveling, constituting an ongoing crisis that is fundamentally global. In part, the system is a victim of its own success in extracting so much profit from its employees that they are increasingly unable to drive demand through consumption, and increasingly unwilling to consent to a system that seems designed only to oppress them. This economic crisis will only be resolved through a global economic reorganization, as the history of the Great Depression and the crisis of the early 1970s has demonstrated. For such a reorganization to stand any chance of being progressive will require a massive reinvestment of capital in countries that are not yet industrialized where hundreds of millions are cut off from the benefits of the modern economy. Sharing the fruits of industrial production is in any case a moral imperative for anyone who hopes for a more equal world.<br />
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The impulse behind the UBI is to shelter the nation from the ravages of a brutal, dying global economy that undermines itself by demanding more and more austerity from the majority while further concentrating wealth in the hands of the richest. However understandable this impulse is, it cannot touch the heart of the economic crisis or serve to unify a fragmented left. While the moral impulse may be entirely reversed, a similar <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/asia-migrants-thailand-idUSL3N0Y64YI20150515" target="_blank">logic of the nation as ultimate guarantor of its citizens' economic well-being</a> perpetuates the horrendous refugee crisis that is occurring in South-East Asia. Rather than withdrawing behind the borders of the nation for protection from the turmoil that rages outside, we should forge an agenda that attacks corporate control over politics and stands as a banner for all to rally beneath. If UBI were instituted today, the basic causes of the global crisis <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fpermanentcrisis.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F12%2Fredistribution-is-not-enough.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGyCixz7hITkoHJbty1JDKCAFgzZA" target="_blank">would not be resolved</a> and its egalitarian agenda could quite possibly be discredited. This in turn would exacerbate inequality and disenfranchisement.<br />
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The alternative to a nationally-based defensive strategy is taking the struggle to multinational corporations, forcing them to reinvest in the society that allows them to exist in the first place and to break their oligarchic control over the political process. This is not an easy goal and it will require international cooperation to win. In many ways, however, it is a struggle that the left has already begun to wage.<br />
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One element of this struggle is demanding that corporations make good on their responsibility to all the employees in their supply chains, including those sub-contractors and temporary workers who suffer from the worst wages and working conditions. A key feature of the global supply chain is the reduction of pay and benefits through creation of bodies of temporary or subcontracted labor. This practice is being challenged everywhere from <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F07%2F30%2Fbusiness%2Fnlrb-holds-mcdonalds-not-just-franchisees-liable-for-worker-treatment.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHcHG12ULNyY_Xd5ycTBM4DWmgBbQ" target="_blank">McDonald's restaurants in the US</a> to a huge <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.industriall-union.org%2Findustriall-signs-global-union-agreement-with-total&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGWZezRCU213Fs6XfDhOFLkmXJipg" target="_blank">French oil company </a>to auto factories in India. This is a line of attack that begins at the local level, but has the potential to reverberate through the global system of production as workers demand compensation appropriate to their efforts, not subject to arbitrary and artificial divisions.<br />
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Another priority is improving working conditions for workers from the bottom—the lowest paid and worst protected—up. Rather than looking at the conditions endured by these workers with the thought of “there but for the grace of God…”, the left needs to build the tide that will raise all boats. Factory monitoring, adequate workplace safety and health practices, and living wages are all demands that can be won through international coalitions of workers, worker advocates, students, and consumers. Bangladesh’s vigorous unions, with the support of an international coalition including European and US labor unions, have enshrined such gains through the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. The benefits of such campaigns don’t end with the poorest workers, but will spread more broadly as the bar is raised globally. The initiative for this kind of campaign begins at home and scales up from there, as shown by the work that United Students Against Sweatshops has done for years on college campuses and the anti-sweatshop bill recently passed by Chicago’s city council.<br />
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Finally, it is vital to combat corporate tax avoidance to reverse the devastating effects of austerity on collective well being and the erosion of public goods like health services and education. At the local level this means reversing massive tax breaks for corporations that come along with chummy and corrupt relationships between neoliberal politicians and the corporate elite. Community organizing campaigns have already begun <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iiron.org%2Fsb282%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGelmKVKZai8mhfvUm1TSSuBwhPMA" target="_blank">pushing </a>for these reforms. More comprehensively, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fgabriel-zucman.eu%2Ffiles%2FZucman2014JEP.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGg1FF-22OKc4gpzLdHCvADuLdpeA" target="_blank">a global system of tax enforcement</a> is needed to return some of the corporate spoils currently sitting idle in tax havens to the parts of the economy that can benefit the majority and begin to reverse our economic malaise.<br />
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By building its political power and reorienting the left towards the global roots of inequality, all of these proposals will set the stage for massive reinvestment of idle capital in the nations and communities where it is most needed. This is the sole means of ending global inequality, the foundation on which the disenfranchisement of working people around the globe is built on. It is also the only way of ending the current global economic crisis that threatens political stability and the security of people everywhere.<br />
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While there is nothing in a UBI to point towards the common interests of working people around the world, the suggestions above not only provide that common basis, but also local entry points for a comprehensive, global movement towards equality and shared prosperity. None of these battles will be easily won, but the emergence of <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inc-cap.com%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGQxUPjmyyVcqmwRvwH1FOVBb7LwA" target="_blank">“inclusive capitalism,”</a> a new trend in economic policy aimed at reducing inequality through strengthening workers, suggests that aggressive and creative popular movements could be poised to win substantial gains from elites hoping to avert further economic chaos. We should never expect policymakers to hand the left its demands—indeed that would be a sure sign that far too little was being demanded in the first place. But, to return to the domestic scene, the willingness of Obama and others in the Democratic party to invoke inclusive capitalism under the title of “middle class economics” signals a significant shift in the political common sense that may prove to be salutary to a lively and globally-oriented left.<br />
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In surveying the state of political struggles after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Marxist thinker Aijaz Ahmad <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DVr89RWtWDjoC%26lpg%3DPP1%26pg%3DPA317%23v%3Donepage%26q%26f%3Dfalse" target="_blank">argued</a> that, “[t]o the extent that the metropolitan Left has come to concentrate so entirely on improvement in the quality of life in the respective metropolitan countries, speaking of social movements within the national boundaries of imperialist countries and the perfection of democracy for the historic beneficiaries of imperialism as the immediate goal, it has abandoned the fundamental project of socialism, which is none other than the destruction of the imperialist character of modern capital.”<br />
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These words were published in 1992. Given current geopolitical upheaval it is no longer so easy to speak of imperialism as the most relevant feature of global capitalism, and we may wish to question whether this was ever a <i>fully</i> adequate way of conceptualizing the global order imposed by capitalism. Nor does “the perfection of democracy” accurately convey the struggles of the contemporary metropolitan left, who are no longer sure if they live in democracies at all. But to whatever extent time has rendered Ahmad’s diagnosis outmoded, it is surely an indication of our delinquency in addressing the parochial nature of our politics and the lateness of the hour, steadily creeping towards midnight, while so much still remains undone.<br />
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Given the urgency of the moment, why concern ourselves with UBI, an idea that even populist politicians will ignore in the foreseeable future? While there is no doubt of the importance of political strategy growing from present conditions, no matter how adverse they may seem, one must also have a firm sense of the direction such a strategy will take. There is no shortage of ideas for the improvement of society, and the chance to implement these ideas always seems to be just around the corner, after the next election, once the base is finally organized. But the truth is that near future will be just as treacherous and politically unforgiving as the present. The populist agenda, insofar as it actually exists, is lacking in ideas that can sustain it beyond tomorrow. While UBI seems to hold enormous potential as a useful strategy for reducing the necessity of repetitive and dehumanizing labor, it is an idea whose time may be long in the coming. The task of the immediate future is to embrace struggles that lay the groundwork for a united, global movement for democracy and shared prosperity.<br />
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Footnotes<br />
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1. In 1969, Richard Nixon proposed Guaranteed Annual Income legislation to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which in 1996 was replaced by the notoriously difficult-to-access Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).Deckardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06918939582411126943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-58540922761274118802015-01-12T05:17:00.000-06:002015-06-10T16:41:50.575-05:00The left flounders as reaction grows ever stronger<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>2014 in review</b></div>
As the crisis of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberal society</a> grinds on, the question is not whether the dominant social forms of the last 35 years will be overthrown, but whether it will be the left or the right that overthrows them. Beginning in 2011, there was a brief upsurge of progressive protest around the world that, despite its marked limitations, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-occupy-wall-street-progressive.html">offered some hope of confronting the crisis</a>. That moment seems to be past. Protest continues, of course, but it has moved further and further away from a solid grasp on the sources of its discontent. Increasingly, even those who understand themselves as progressives are supporting reactionary directions for resistance.<br />
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The tone for 2014 was set in the first week of January with two unapologetically reactionary assaults on the global neoliberal order: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/world/middleeast/fighting-in-falluja-and-ramadi.html">seized Fallujah</a>, its first major conquest, and Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/world/africa/nigerian-president-signs-ban-on-same-sex-relationships.html">signed into law</a> a measure prohibiting all gay relationships and all gay organizations. Shortly thereafter, in mid-January, the Egyptian “Revolution” suffered its final humiliation, as the referendum on the military’s new constitution <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/world/middleeast/vote-validates-egypts-constitution-and-military-takeover.html">passed with a vote of 98.1 percent in favor</a>.<br />
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These were symbolically potent events — direct attacks on cherished neoliberal ideals of open borders, cultural tolerance, and procedural democracy — whose practical impact was limited by their peripheral location in global society. Yet reactionary nationalism grew steadily more powerful in centrally important countries as well during 2014. China’s Xi Jinping is assembling a counterintuitive but potentially powerful amalgam of Confucian “tradition” and Maoist slogans. In India, Narendra Modi won a clear victory in the May general election and is already <a href="http://scroll.in/article/698025/2014,-the-year-India-became-a-Hindu-state">exploring a fundamental redirection of national identity</a> toward Hindu fundamentalism. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after comfortably winning Turkey’s first popular presidential election in August, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/opinion/akyol-how-turkey-sabotaged-its-future.html">has spoken repeatedly against the secular foundations of the state</a>. In Japan, Abe Shinzō <a href="http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3873">presses forward with his institutional remaking of the state and rehabilitation of Japanese militarism</a>, laying the foundations for the revival of aggressive nationalism. The European Parliament elections in May showed strong gains for anti-establishment far-right parties; the UK Independence Party shockingly won the popular vote for the UK delegation, the first time since 1906 that a party other than Labour or the Tories had won in a national poll. In France, where the far right has infiltrated most deeply into domestic politics, the nativist Front National could soon become the second strongest party in the country, and both of the establishment parties are moving steadily toward it in an attempt to stave off its rise.<br />
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Most disturbing of all is Russia’s rapid development toward a genuine neofascism. The Ukraine crisis in March and the collapse of the price of oil in December will be remembered — if we are unlucky — primarily for the way in which they accelerated Russia’s movement down this path. In contrast to China, India, Turkey, and Japan, whose leaders maintain an unstable hybrid of neoliberal and neofascist elements in their politics, economic and geopolitical forces have pushed Russia in only one direction. The most credible opposition figure is Alexei Naval’nyi, who is an even stronger and more authentic ethnic chauvinist than Putin.<br />
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These developments are extraordinarily dangerous. Yet the left has regarded them with equivocation. With a genuinely progressive alternative to late neoliberalism still beyond its imagination, the left has split between the only two current alternatives. One part is drawn, unthinkingly, toward the liberal voices warning against nationalism, nativism, and authoritarianism; the other part is drawn, unthinkingly, toward the only vigorous current position opposed to neoliberalism: the collectivism and anti-imperialism espoused by the new fascism.<br />
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I invoke the category of “neofascism” not as a term of abuse but as an analytical category. Fascism was a very particular response to the interwar crisis of classical liberal society — i.e., the free market and limited government ethos that dominated the nineteenth century and was briefly revived in the 1920s after the serious disruptions of World War I, only to collapse in the Great Depression. Fascism was a genuine negation of the specifically liberal form of capitalist society and its hegemonic forms of belief and organization: not the individual but the collective, not cosmopolitanism but nationalism, not the market but state planning, not the abstract but the concrete, not the quotidian but the heroic.<br />
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These reversals were what defined the political and cultural turmoil of the 1930s, not just in Germany but in the US, the Soviet Union, and around the world. Fascism, social democracy (the New Deal), and actually existing socialism were all variations on the search for a post-liberal capitalism — even if two of three understood themselves to be ending capitalism as such. Fascism was reactionary because it was not a viable basis for a new society, but a path of accelerating destruction and chaos. Social democracy and actually existing socialism were progressive because each represented a true alternative to liberal society under different national conditions following the collapse of the global economy in the early 1930s.<br />
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The telltale mark of fascism was its fixation on race and culture, to which it traced (depending on the people in question) liberal values and dysfunctions as well as the hope for a post-liberal society. It lodged in geopolitics and racial/cultural essence what was, in reality, a set of transnational economic relations that unevenly marked every nation. It pursued a fundamentally <i>collective</i> interest, but within the strict bounds of the nation — excluding the foreigner and seeking to eliminate the internal alien. In this sense, it was a more complete negation of liberal society’s defining universality than either social democracy or actually existing socialism, which both retained a claim on universality but demanded that it be substantive rather than merely formal. Fascism was reactionary precisely because it foreswore the progressive potential within liberal society. It was a path to catastrophe because it was a pure negation.<br />
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Today, neofascism aims to resolve the contradictions of neoliberal society in a parallel manner. Inequality and selfish individualism are defined as “Western” or “American” in nature. The global economy and US foreign policy are conflated as “imperialism” and cast in conspiratorial terms rather than understood as the abstract product of neoliberal social relations. Evidence of neoliberal beliefs and practices within these countries is denounced as external “cultural imperialism” or internal betrayal of the nation. Growing pressure is brought to bear against internal aliens who fail to conform to the putative national culture. Increasingly, allegations are made that these internal aliens are conspiring with the foreign imperialists against the nation. (For the beginnings of an explanation of the sources of reactionary nationalism: “<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-cosmopolitan-imagination-of.html">The cosmopolitan imagination of neoliberalism</a>”.)<br />
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What of a positive program? In contrast to the neoliberal sensibility, which lives solely in the present, the neofascist impulse is immersed in history. In particular, it aims to rehabilitate those figures of national history that have come into disrepute during the neoliberal period. For Japan, it is the war criminals of World War II. For China, Mao. For Turkey, the Ottomans. Teaching the revised history in the schools is a common pursuit, as is pressuring the media and intellectuals into silence on its evasions.<br />
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Neofascism defines ethnic identity and collective feeling as uniquely Russian or Chinese or Indian. The irony in this is worth emphasizing. An intellectual formation that understands itself to grow from cultural particularity must carefully obscure the universality of its form. The content of neofascism is drawn selectively from different national practices that are nonetheless parallel in substance. Though the modern nation is no more than two hundred years old, neofascism positions itself as the latter-day descendant of an ancient tradition — adapted, of course, to conditions of national competition in the present. (“<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/02/rise-and-fall-of-national-capital.html">The great secret of modern nationalism</a> has always been that its form is the same everywhere, no matter what content it is filled with. It is the logic of the commercial brand raised above the mundane realm of retail: desperate to assert a difference that doesn’t really exist.”)<br />
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Unlike the decentralized and fluid market model of society celebrated under neoliberalism, neofascism demands unity — and the expression of this demand is a new centralization of political power featuring the reemergence of the unfamiliar figure of The Leader. After just two years, Xi Jinping has gathered greater power unto himself than anyone since Deng Xiaoping. Unexpectedly, in light of the farcical conclusion to his first term in 2007, Abe Shinzō has shown himself the most vigorous Japanese prime minister in many years, pushing through <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1d7e6088-5feb-11e3-b360-00144feabdc0.html">one</a> after <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/world/asia/japan-moves-to-permit-greater-use-of-its-military.html">another</a> of his nationalist priorities alongside a robust set of Keynesian economic initiatives. Narendra Modi’s election has upended Indian politics, remaking the BJP into an organization that he personally dominates and bringing state-level BJP governments to power in a string of subsequent local elections. The centralization of power is not simply a matter of these leaders running roughshod over their societies — they are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/18/why-a-communist-dictator-may-be-the-worlds-most-popular-leader-at-home-and-abroad">genuinely popular</a> despite their authoritarian style. The structurally given possibilities for national politics in the age of neoliberal crisis are increasingly clear: either a vigorous system, centralized around a single individual, that is capable of pursuing basic social restructuring, or a pluralist system frozen in dysfunction, as in Pakistan, Italy, or the United States.<br />
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The strength of neofascism should not be exaggerated. It remains a <i>nascent</i> form of ideology and politics, incompletely realized and widely contested. As long as <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">neoliberalism’s crisis is held at bay</a>, the contradictions of the present will remain only imperfectly expressed, and neofascism will fall short of its potential as a coherent social imaginary. Perhaps most significantly, the revolutionary subject of all the 1930s projects for a post-liberal society — the masses — was liquidated by neoliberalism and has not yet been reconstituted. And though hobbled, the neoliberal global economy continues in motion. As a result, though the cultural and political claims of neofascism are now widespread, a neofascist economic program remains underdeveloped everywhere. Only in Russia has it made significant progress, and even there important divisions and reservations <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d8bf5266-89cb-11e4-9dbf-00144feabdc0.html">remain within the elite</a>.<br />
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A neofascist economic vision would aim to reconstitute the nation as a fully integrated organic unity capable of fighting for supremacy in global competition. Such an approach resonates with certain backward-looking progressive instincts, nostalgic for the days of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/02/rise-and-fall-of-national-capital.html">national capital</a>, when democracy and sovereignty were inseparable ideas and the state directed the market rather than the reverse. This is the worst possible direction for politics. Let me repeat and emphasize: the politics of economic nationalism is the worst possible political path, far worse than the indefinite persistence of neoliberalism would be.<br />
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Economic nationalism is the reactionary response to the economic dysfunction of neoliberalism. It would remake a global economy now marked by transnational flows, in which competition is primarily conducted between private companies, into a zero-sum struggle among states (and militaries) aiming to secure adequate markets and resources that they alone can exploit. That’s the short version of what led to World War II. It points not toward equality and democracy but toward disaster.<br />
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Thus the foundation stone for a progressive alternative to <i>both</i> the neoliberal status quo and the neofascist program must be: <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2014/02/neoliberalism-is-destroying-its-last.html">save the global economy</a>, but do it in the only way possible — by making it just.
Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com0Taipei, Taiwan25.0329694 121.5654177000000124.5725269 120.91997070000001 25.493411899999998 122.21086470000002tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-45607255062509809532014-02-19T12:54:00.003-06:002016-01-01T15:46:37.045-06:00Neoliberalism is destroying its last chance to save itself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the opening weeks of 2014, a huge wave of capital fled the assets of the major emerging markets. <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6fd13aca-8a63-11e3-ba54-00144feab7de.html">In January</a>, a total of $12.2 billion poured out of equities and $4.6 billion out of bonds. An additional $6.4 billion in equities and $1.95 billion in bonds <a href="http://on.ft.com/1bAgo0K">decamped</a> in the first week of February. Currency crises threatened Turkey, Argentina, and Ukraine; other key countries that rely on foreign financing — India, Brasil, Indonesia, South Africa — also seemed in danger.<br />
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Yet a few <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1f8f1b84-9316-11e3-b07c-00144feab7de.html">soothing words</a> from the new Fed chair Janet Yellen stanched the panic among investors. A few days later, emerging market stocks <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-17/emerging-stocks-rise-to-three-week-high-on-china-as-rupiah-gains.html">further recovered</a> with word that China’s banks are shrugging off the government’s efforts to rein in their creation of ever-higher levels of credit. Global investors now expect robust Chinese demand for raw materials to buoy the poor countries, drawing in their exports with the further inflation of the Chinese property bubble.<br />
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This was the second near-crisis sell-off in the emerging markets in less than half a year, but this time the outflows <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/02/07/em-equity-fund-outflows-already-outpace-2013/">eclipsed</a> the sales for all of 2013 in the space of a few weeks. Like last summer, the looming collapse was reversed on the strength of few <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a3749f20-2447-11e3-8905-00144feab7de.html">well-timed remarks by central bankers</a>, with no sign of repentance of the economic sins that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/business/international/why-emerging-markets-should-look-within.html">supposedly called down investor anger</a>.<br />
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Once again, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">last year’s claim</a> is born out: “growing volatility is not a result of external forces acting upon the economy but what has become the defining output of the global economy itself.” The flows of capital being pushed through the global economy by the world’s major central banks are artificially oxygenating the decomposing body of neoliberal society. As the connection between the investors bearing this capital and the productive economy grows more and more tenuous, economic indicators and investor behavior become increasingly erratic. Even mainstream commentators recognize that the emerging markets crisis is merely in abeyance, though their interpretation of why that is so <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6a81aa7c-97a7-11e3-949f-00144feab7de.html">remains trapped in ideology</a>.<br />
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One financial analyst <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/02/17/em-crises-get-used-to-them">counsels stoicism</a>: economic crisis is the natural state of the emerging markets, so no need for undue concern. This is too glib — if an emerging market sell-off ran out of control, it could undo the illusions that keep the entire global system running. Because neoliberalism is living on borrowed time, maintaining investor “confidence” <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/12/pensions-must-be-savaged-or-world.html">assumes an inordinately large role in forestalling global crisis</a>.<br />
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For the moment, however, turmoil in these economies is unlikely to cause a general crisis. The poor countries <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/01/dangerous-new-year.html">just aren’t very important economically</a> — despite holding two-thirds of the world’s people, they produce only one-fourth of the world’s value. US exports to the “fragile eight” countries represent <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/gavyndavies/2014/02/02/the-ems-fragile-8-must-save-themselves/">just 0.7 percent of its gdp</a>. Moreover, investors apparently still see the poor countries and rich countries (<a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/08f98726-8d65-11e3-9dbb-00144feab7de.html">except Japan</a>) as two separate destinations for investment rather than an interrelated unity, so money fleeing the emerging markets <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ab7c6464-8a8b-11e3-9c29-00144feab7de.html">might simply inflate new bubbles in the developed economies</a>. Reification to the rescue!<br />
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The risk posed by serial crises in the emerging markets is not so much the prospect of imminent collapse. The real danger is more long-term in nature: endemic uncertainty threatens our last best hope to put the global economy back on a sustainable foundation without facing some sort of catastrophe first.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The fundamental reason that economic instability and stagnation has afflicted the whole world since 2008 is that investors are leaving their capital <a href="http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/articles/?id=2314">sitting idle</a> or putting it into speculation rather than devoting it to productive investment. As I’ve <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">argued</a> in more detail for the US case, that is related to the global shortfall in consumer demand resulting from thirty years of wage repression. But just as significant is the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/dysfunctions-of-neoliberalism-1.html">declining returns on productive investment</a>: as the rate of productivity growth in the so-called real economy <a href="http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm">has tailed off</a>, the search for yield via financial bubbles has become more and more attractive.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisBPVi6Mmhx3z7dxDTFHoFPjawsNi09hwI39gmGO593TFaKcTJ21QwafoKffrF_ilDwUTp10pkOHWqQwYSzcuEIA34C4R4FhQRUs5aM4Quo00mskBQ_cQ_YidkbjWEnXN2jFGkLnEyeVw/s1600/US+productivity+growth+1947-2013.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisBPVi6Mmhx3z7dxDTFHoFPjawsNi09hwI39gmGO593TFaKcTJ21QwafoKffrF_ilDwUTp10pkOHWqQwYSzcuEIA34C4R4FhQRUs5aM4Quo00mskBQ_cQ_YidkbjWEnXN2jFGkLnEyeVw/s1600/US+productivity+growth+1947-2013.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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The two essential transformations necessary for economic recovery, then, are significant wage increases around the world (or some other redistribution of the wealth created by the global economy), and a long-term increase in the rate of productivity growth.<br />
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The mechanisms that could accomplish the first transformation are clear. The second transformation is less obvious, but it centers on the question of how to raise the productivity of people currently toiling in low-productivity occupations.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgBqqArHvpJoHipM0lFpL74Oq5wmz-XRa6janS3mVfnMGjDGybjNvFw5b2aF-i6ELRSbna0w50D06XtnLtauZAq7UiHMbkFXz6VtCMOpq8JolroFy2guwjilV2mZw71dPvD-hUclJY7K8/s1600/labor+productivity+growth+1995-2009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgBqqArHvpJoHipM0lFpL74Oq5wmz-XRa6janS3mVfnMGjDGybjNvFw5b2aF-i6ELRSbna0w50D06XtnLtauZAq7UiHMbkFXz6VtCMOpq8JolroFy2guwjilV2mZw71dPvD-hUclJY7K8/s1600/labor+productivity+growth+1995-2009.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: The Conference Board Total Economy Database via <a href="http://www.chinaglobaltrade.com/fact/labor-productivity-growth-advanced-economies-graph">here</a> and <a href="http://www.chinaglobaltrade.com/fact/labor-productivity-growth-emerging-economies-graph">here</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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As this graph indicates, most of the potential for raising productivity is concentrated in the emerging markets. Hundreds of millions of people in the Indian countryside, in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Lagos and Kolkata, spread across Java, Bengal, and North Africa, are essentially excluded from the global economy. They survive off its scraps — often literally, as the alarming number of people who live (and routinely die) in the trash heaps of the poor countries shows. Their lives are <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/01/insignificance-of-billions-of-people.html">economically worthless</a>, which is the only way to make sense of the fact that <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Mumbais-lifeline-has-claimed-36000-lives-in-10-years/articleshow/12739124.cms">over 36,000 people have died</a> in the last decade in accidents involving Mumbai’s commuter rail system (an equal number were merely injured). But for this very reason — because those who have no economic value also have the greatest potential to create new value — they are the only hope for rescuing the global economy. Only by investing in these people, turning them from the detritus of global society into its workers and consumers, could the crisis of neoliberalism be resolved before we start hitting some very unpleasant disruptions.<br />
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Up to this point, new foreign investment in the emerging markets (two-thirds of the world’s population) remains only a fraction of new investment in the United States alone (one-twentieth of the world’s population). The amount of investment in the poor countries is not the only problem — much of existing investment is transparently speculative, and even that part that is productive remains locked in neoliberal patterns that increase inequality and prevent real development. Yet turmoil in the emerging markets, even if it doesn’t spill over into the main value complexes of the global economy, threatens to sever the one lifeline we have left.Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-41758296251910960282013-12-30T07:50:00.000-06:002014-02-19T19:29:37.399-06:00Notes on Party Politics<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto;">
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The shutdown of the federal government by right-wing fanatics last October triggered a rare bout of fresh thinking among progressives. Whatever else it was, it was also an object lesson in the capability of a relatively small but tightly organized, militant political faction to effectively—if temporarily—seize control of one of the major mass parties in the United States. Throughout the first half of October establishment Republicans and bewildered liberals helplessly looked on as the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party was utterly dominated by a well-funded and—more importantly—well <i>articulated</i> form of reactionary populism. The main liberal complaint against the shutdown—“but the Affordable Care Act is already the law!”—was of course entirely trivial, because it assumed that the whole affair could be reduced to a mere question of a positive legal fact.<br />
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The ideological extremism of the Tea Party goes beyond the dissatisfaction felt by rich people about the prospect of paying higher taxes. It taps into a <a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf">deep</a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf"> </a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf">well</a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf"> </a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf">of</a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf"> </a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf">existential</a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf"> </a><a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf">dread</a> about the fate of the country that is as fiercely ingenuous as it is dangerously delusional, and it channels this energy into a seething anti-government mass politics. <br />
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Although it may seem as if the radical elements of the Republican Party lost their great battle over the “Affordable Care Act,” it has been clear for some time that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">they</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">have</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">been</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">winning</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">the</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">larger</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">war</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/opinion/krugman-the-biggest-losers.html?_r=0">.</a> With each Tea-Party-orchestrated freakout in Washington, the political center of gravity shifts further to the right, and the lesson that ideological radicalization brings home the goods is further hammered home into the torpid brains of establishment Republicans. <br />
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This dynamic is not lost on <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/15798/a_different_kind_of_shutdown">keen</a><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/15798/a_different_kind_of_shutdown"> </a><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/15798/a_different_kind_of_shutdown">observers</a> from <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html">the</a><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html"> </a><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html">left</a><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html">.</a> If the American far-right can be motivated with the numbers and the organization to take the government hostage and impose their narrative upon public discourse for the better part of a month, then it seems plausible to suggest that a similar tactic might be deployed from the political left for progressive ends. <br />
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In the wake of the Tea Party’s government shutdown there has been no shortage of debate over whether or not emulating their tactics would be effective or even desirable for progressive objectives. Within this debate, the question of just what role the Democratic Party should play, if any, has loomed large, as have questions about the viability of third party electoral alternatives. Others argue that engagement with the U.S. electoral system amounts to political suicide, since it is basically like joining a game of cards in which the rules are rigged for the house to always win. Yet just last month we witnessed the election, for the first time in almost a century, of a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">dyed</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">-</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">in</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">-</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">the</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">-</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">wool</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/us/a-rare-elected-voice-for-socialism-pledges-to-be-heard-in-seattle.html?_r=0">socialist</a> to the municipal government of a major U.S. city, along with a <a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php">nearly</a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php">-</a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php">successful</a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php"> </a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php">socialist</a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php"> </a><a href="http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2013/11/top_contenders.php">victory</a> in another major city. What might this portend?<br />
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<a name='more'></a>As has been widely recognized for some time, “socialism,” as an idea, is increasingly shedding the terrifying connotations that it carried for so long as a result of Cold-War engendered hysteria and ideological domination in the United States. In a demonstration of the ruse of history, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">Francis</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man"> </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">Fukuyama</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">’</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">s</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man"> </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">asinine</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man"> </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">notion</a> that the fall of twentieth century communism represented the “end of history” is being partially validated, but, of course, in an entirely different sense from what Fukuyama himself meant by this. How so?<br />
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An entire generation has come of age within a social universe that is in a real sense post-ideological: since 1989, the apparently uncontested reign of neoliberal capitalism has paradoxically resulted in the evaporation of ideological & affective investments in “capitalism,” as the social formation in which people live is increasingly seen as simply a natural, given economic reality, rather than as any historically specific type of social organization. In a key subjective contradiction of late neoliberalism, the very status of capitalism as an uncontested way of life subverts its own ideological hegemony: the more that the past existence of a communist alternative falls down the memory hole, the more that radical remedies for the obvious failures of the present order can be proposed without much fear of reflexive, anti-socialist hysteria. Indeed, what the previous era, recoiling in horror, would have seen as “socialistic tyranny” now simply appears as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">the</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">pragmatic</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">, </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">sensible</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">thing</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">to</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0"> </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/banks-that-are-too-big-to-regulate-should-be-nationalized.html?_r=0">do</a>. <br />
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As I mentioned before, we have already seen some practical results of this general shift in attitudes in municipal elections in two major U.S. cities, and now there are even whisperings of a potential socialist candidate for the Chicago city council as well. In addition to this, there has been much chatter about a potentially genuine shift leftward in the politics of the Democratic Party in the U.S. which, if true, would mark an abrupt halt to the party’s steady, decades-long drift rightward. These are signs of the interesting times in which we live.<br />
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If it is true that the historical disintegration of an economic system is bound to produce a major political reaction in some form, then the shifts of the last few years portend a coming, greater political reaction that will coalesce around the eventual exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism as a viable economic order. (If you need evidence that neoliberalism as a global economic order is not long for this earth, see <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">here</a>, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/dysfunctions-of-neoliberalism-1.html">here</a>, and/or <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">here</a>). If and when this happens, we will have moved from what Gramsci calls a “war of position”—which, for our purposes, could roughly be understood as movement-building and organizing - to a “war of maneuver,” or the period of open confrontation between different class forces in a situation of crisis and for which the war of position is essentially preparation. To continue the metaphor, some of the most pressing issues at the present moment could be seen as: a) what form should be taken by the “regiment,” or “regiments” in this war; and b) how will we get there?<br />
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When Gramsci was writing, the left existed in a powerful, organized form such that it made sense to speak of “the left” as a coherent concept and social force. Our conditions are different. We cannot really speak of a “war of position” in a meaningful way, or at least in the way Gramsci originally intended, since there isn’t really any well-organized, disciplined political left that could be “positioned” effectively. In this context, the impulse to see the way forward <i>either</i> in terms of the Democratic Party, <i>or</i> in terms of a fully independent left alternative is misguided and self-defeating. Rather, they must be seen as historical forces that interact with and act upon one another in a complex historical process. That is, if we see the way forward in terms of two mutually exclusive choices, then we will obscure the larger historical situation whose outcome will most likely be determined by how these forces are related to and mutually shape one another. <br />
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Assuming current trends continue, it is probable that viable alternative party campaigns will continue to emerge, and maybe at a higher level than what we’ve seen so far. Within the shrinking number of people who still take the political system seriously, the fact that self-identified independents now outnumber self-identified Democrats and Republicans indicates that large majorities are clearly sick of <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">both</a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/"> </a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">of</a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/"> </a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">the</a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/"> </a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">major</a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/"> </a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">political</a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/"> </a><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/data-trend/political-attitudes/party-identification/">parties</a>, while at the same time more people are open to new political ideas than has been the case in the U.S. for a very long while. This atmosphere could easily produce further victories by purported socialists, especially if the Democrats enthusiastically continue to embrace their primary role as the sedate administrators of austerity and economic immiseration.<br />
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Historically, the rising popularity and visibility of alternative mass parties has forced the Democrats to list sharply to the left, doubtless more so than the bulk of them would prefer, out of fear that their competitors to the left might siphon off too large a chunk of their electoral base. As Richard Hofstadter observes:<br />
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[T]hird party leaders in the United States must look for success in terms different from those that apply to the major parties, for in those terms third parties always fail...Third parties have often played an important role in our politics, but it is different in kind from the role of governing parties. Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there. Minor parties have been attached to some special idea or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions through firm and identifiable programs and principles. Their function has not been to win or govern, but to agitate, educate, generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our political life. When a third party’s demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die. (<i>The Age of Reform</i>, p. 97).</blockquote>
Though we may wish to discard the finality of Hofstadter’s tone, the insight is valuable: from a historical perspective, the major mass-parties and their third party challengers should probably not be seen as true electoral competitors, but rather as two forces that are dynamically related to one another in a definite historical context. <br />
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In the famous “Silver Campaign” of 1896, for example, the establishment parties were widely perceived to be incapable of adequately addressing the fears and needs engendered by the long, grinding industrial crisis of the late nineteenth century. This created an enormous gap between public sentiment and the existing system, which was eventually occupied by the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states=""> </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states="">People</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states="">’</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states="">s</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states=""> </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People" s_party_="" united_states="">Party</a>, the original “populists.” Their agitation catalyzed an enormous anti-establishment movement that spread over a huge part of the country during the early 1890s, culminating in the presidential election of 1896.<br />
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The fervor and reach of the People’s Party, or the “Populists” as they are usually known, was such that the Democrats basically were compelled to adopt the core of their platform in order to appear legitimate. This, in turn, forced a decision on the Populists: either continue as an independent party, thereby splitting the electorate and virtually assuring defeat; or, alternatively, opt for unity by “fusing” with the Democratic Party. They chose the latter in a decision that lead to the common ruin of both parties, as the Republicans won the election by a decisive margin. Indeed, the Republicans would control the Presidency until the election of Wilson in 1912. <br />
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However, many of the Populist’s key demands regarding industrial and financial regulation, tariff reform, and democratic participation would eventually be adopted—and made “respectable”—by Roosevelt and Wilson’s middle-class “Progressives” a couple of decades later. Despite the Populist’s electoral defeat, the circulation and availability of their ideas during the next major burst of social activism should be seen as a certain kind of victory, however belated. (There were, of course, deeply problematic aspects of the Populist movement that also should be taken into account; my next post will offer a more detailed analysis that addresses some of the most important of these).<br />
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Returning to the present, it is hard, if only from a logistical perspective, to imagine how an independent left alternative party with the scale and organization necessary to carry out a radical policy agenda at the national level could materialize in the near future. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, a hypothetical yet plausible scenario: in 2014 the anemic economic “recovery” is brought to an abrupt halt after everyone realizes that most of the so-called growth from the last couple of years is <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">basically</a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html"> </a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">just</a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html"> </a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">a</a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html"> </a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">giant</a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html"> </a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">speculative</a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html"> </a><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6824190-636c-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html">bubble</a>. This triggers a massive financial panic and market crash. The Obama administration does what it has always done and goes to bat for its primary benefactors on Wall Street, while Republicans, much as they did in 2008–2009, just run around like decapitated chickens. This could conceivably amount to a massive legitimation crisis for both parties and open the door for a major organizing campaign around an independent alternative.<br />
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Even if it would be exceedingly difficult to develop the organizing muscle, ideological unity, and technical infrastructure necessary to get on the ballot for the presidential election of 2016, a growing and increasingly visible third party movement could have a sizeable effect on its outcome and consequences. For instance, another economic meltdown in 2014 would raise the already considerable pressure on Elizabeth Warren to run for president to a fever-pitch. If she were to run, then we would have a progressive candidate who may have the resolve to carry out some truly bold domestic reforms, and who also assumes a non-negotiable connection between the national economic health of the U.S. and its capacity to globally project its military power. In the <a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics">senator</a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics">’</a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics">s</a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics"> </a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics">own</a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics"> </a><a href="http://elizabethwarren.com/issues/foreign-policy#economics">words</a>:<br />
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Our economic power at home is linked to our strength around the world. A strong economy at home enables us to have the best-trained and most advanced military in the world—and the standing in the world such that we don’t always need to use it. A strong economy at home enables us to export goods to foreign customers. A strong economy at home gives us influence over events occurring all around the world. And a strong economy at home enables us to spread the values of democracy and human rights. We are one of the most powerful countries in the history of the world precisely because we are one of the strongest economies in the history of the world.<br />
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As a Senator, I will never forget the link between our economic power and our global power, and I will fight to make sure we build a strong economy, so we can remain a powerful force for good around the world.</blockquote>
Not very specific, sure, but its implications are clear enough. The utterly obvious connection between economic and military might is washed in a moralistic mishmash sanctifying America’s unique, unquestionable, and heroic role in the world. Warren’s thoughts on foreign policy classically exhibit what C. Wright Mills calls “crackpot realism,” an unreflective fusion of idealistic moralism and pragmatic certainty that animates the typical American politician’s understanding of global affairs. In this view, it makes sense to think that a vital function of economic prosperity and equality at home would be to prop up the international military hegemony and war-making potential of the U.S. abroad. It is not very hard to imagine how dangerous it would be to have this kind of unreconstructed imperialism guiding key foreign policy decisions during a period of global instability and rising geopolitical tension.<br />
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As part of a larger movement, the existence of a well-organized, internationalist third party on the left could play a vital role in forcing the Democratic candidate to renounce or at least question the destructive nationalism of the imperial unconscious. Warren’s strident populist streak in matters of domestic economy has proven that she will take positions unpopular with elites if a sufficiently visible public consensus supports it; the looming threat of an electoral encroachment from the left, combined with a widely visible and vociferous media campaign, could be considerably helpful in compelling her to reevaluate her understanding of and attitude towards foreign affairs. <br />
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This is a rather speculative exercise, but it suffices to suggest, I think, that from a strategic perspective the exclusive opposition between the Democrats and a possible third party is a false choice. Going forward we should see these elements more like pieces on a chessboard, or as parts of a larger, dynamic whole—namely, the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the possibility of its progressive resolution. <br />
<br />Jamie http://www.blogger.com/profile/18363083808445009325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-66338452075028187322013-12-21T15:43:00.004-06:002013-12-21T15:45:09.703-06:00Our sweetly naïve financial analysts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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After some reflection, I have concluded that <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/842ed4c0-6982-11e3-89ce-00144feabdc0.html">this</a> is not satire:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The US economy has flattered to deceive several times in recent years, looking like it was set for a period of faster growth only to fall flat,” said Joseph Lake, US analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But Mr Lake says he thinks this time is different. “We expect the US to embark on a sustained economic upswing in the coming quarters.”</blockquote>
What evidence is there that it’s not satire? Nothing more than the fact it was published in the <i>Financial Times</i>. One of the most notable characteristics of the age is that the only way to differentiate between The Onion and real news is by looking at the URL.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Why would the “experts” be optimistic? Third-quarter US growth was <a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2013/pdf/gdp3q13_3rd.pdf">revised upward</a> from an annualized rate of 3.6 percent to 4.1 percent. That’s “downright impressive” <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/12/20/economists-react-third-quarter-gdp-downright-impressive/">says</a> one of these experts. “The economy gathered momentum steadily since late last year, and economists increasingly expect that momentum to continue into next year,” says another.<br />
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What’s driving this exciting growth? Well, as everyone also <a href="http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=624087">admits</a>, a big part of third-quarter growth—the biggest part, in fact, about two-fifths of it—was rising inventories. That’s nothing more than a temporal shift forward of the next quarter’s growth to the current one. Admittedly, it’s a good sign, because it means retailers expect to be able to sell the stuff they’re stockpiling. As long as you trust the judgment of retailers.<br />
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But what’s actually getting everyone excited is the rise in consumer spending, which was revised upward from 1.4 to 2 percent. It’s hardly a miracle: 2 percent is not really any better than what we’ve seen over the last three years (see the table <a href="http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2013/pdf/gdp3q13_3rd.pdf">here</a>, page 6). But the 1.4 percent figure was disappointing and suggested hidden weaknesses for the future; 2 percent is more in line with the thinking among optimists that the recovery, such as it is, will continue.<br />
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Curiously absent from the commentary was the question of whether rising consumption spending is sustainable. If people are buying more but not making more money, exactly how strong is this recovery again? Can we think of any lessons we might draw from history?<br />
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A quick look at <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm">figures</a> from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that real hourly compensation actually fell in the third quarter by 1 percent (annualized rate). In the past year, it’s increased only 0.8 percent. This needs no more commentary than to slightly edit a recent <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/encouraging-economic-report-reveals-more-americans,34814/">headline</a> from The Onion: “Encouraging Economic Report Reveals More Americans Delusional Enough To Start Purchasing Again”.<br />
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The compulsions of the labor market have limited my own ability to follow up on <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">this post</a> from the summer. But from the news of the last week—the strong numbers from the US alongside <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7a5a116a-692f-11e3-bb3e-00144feabdc0.html">China’s second near-financial crisis in six months</a>—we can see that the pattern is intact: a constant stream of new reasons for optimism paired with the steady emergence of new threats to the integrity of the entire global economy. I’ll leave this quote from that post as a placeholder and hopefully get some time in the new year to return to these questions.<br />
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It’s a little sad watching the highly paid financial analysts and economic pundits—not to mention high government officials—try to make sense of these swings. Their dumb surprise at the persistent stagnation dramatizes how <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/bewildered-by-history.html">conceptually impoverished</a> neoliberal common sense has left them. Every downward lurch they explain by appealing to external disruptions. Every uptick they project forward indefinitely and predict that the recovery is finally here—completely heedless of the last three, four, five cycles of unwarranted optimism. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To them the economy is merely a machine for growth, a completely one-dimensional, one-directional entity whose failure to act in line with its nature can only be ascribed to the unbidden interference of human beings. It never occurs to them that the nature of our society itself may have changed since the crash, because they don’t have the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/08/apprehensions-of-social-aggregate.html">conceptual tools</a> to think in that direction. Even if we allowed them their conceit that the economy is outside society (less a conceit than a first principle), they would still be incapable of realizing that growing volatility is not a result of external forces acting upon the economy but what has become the defining output of the global economy itself.</blockquote>
Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-67852512338399887162013-12-04T06:44:00.003-06:002013-12-04T10:22:15.474-06:00Pensions must be savaged or the world doesn’t make sense<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The last four years in the United States and Europe have been a long, multi-faceted struggle over a single question: who will bear the suffering of a society in disintegration? <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">Neoliberalism can no longer sustain itself</a>, and no effort is being made to create a new logic of economic growth. The only way to sustain the illusion that neoliberal society remains a going concern, then, is to plunder stored up value in different parts of the system in order to keep the engine running. It’s like eating the seed corn in the midst of a famine. And as everyone knows, it’s not the rich people who die in a famine.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Those groups that are least able to defend themselves are the ones being sacrificed so this farce can go on. This is obvious enough as the list of casualties from the turn to austerity grows longer: the poor, suffering brutal cuts to food stamps; the unemployed, cruelly cut off from relief in the midst of a job drought; public employees, robbed of their right to collective bargaining. The latest victims are retirees—Obama has been trying to cut Social Security for several years (the only thing stopping him is the ultras in the Republican Party). Private companies have been reneging on pension obligations for years. Now public employees’ pensions are increasingly under attack, from Detroit to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/us/politics/illinois-legislature-approves-benefit-cuts-in-troubled-pension-system.html?pagewanted=all">Illinois</a> to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/us/pension-ruling-in-detroit-echoes-west-to-california.html">California</a>.
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State and local governments in the US are supposedly being bankrupted by “overly generous” pension commitments. I don’t doubt that the politicians who imagine themselves to be making “tough, responsible decisions” as they tear up the sacred contract actually believe this. But only by disembedding the entire problem from history and from our political economy is such an understanding tenable (admittedly, politicians are not known for their ability to <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/bewildered-by-history.html">conceptualize history</a> or the totality).
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<br />
As long as neoliberal growth remained robust, pension commitments seemed to be sustainable. What has changed is not that we suddenly realized that all along we were spending beyond our means, but that the engine of growth has ground to a halt. The “pension crisis” is nothing more than a partial form of appearance of the crisis of neoliberalism. Reviving economic growth would immediately resolve it.
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What is at stake is not whether government budgets will balance or not. The goal of the self-defeating austerity campaigns that swept the rich world after the financial crisis was, instead, to maintain the illusion that our political economy was still viable. All mainstream politicians and corporate leaders share a broad understanding of the way the world works: markets allocate resources efficiently and produce ongoing growth, which nurtures the welfare of the people. (This explanation for politicians’ behavior is at odds with the conventional wisdom on the left—I defend it <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-2.html">here</a>.) Our leaders believe that this social logic is <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/bewildered-by-history.html">rooted in human nature</a>, so attempts to restrict it or overcome it are necessarily doomed to failure.
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<br />
As long as neoliberalism produced growth, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-2.html">this understanding corresponded to reality</a> (if only in a selective and one-sided way). But the increasingly extreme measures needed to hold things together during the financial crisis threatened to expose all of neoliberalism’s claims as false. As growth came to depend on continuous government intervention, as the value of debt increasingly diverged from any plausible claim on future revenues, as the system of incentives in the economy lost all connection to the lived experience of actual people, the entire worldview of the neoliberal elite (and not just the elite) seemed to be crumbling.
<br />
<br />
In short, and contra many on the left, the turn to austerity was not meant to simply redistribute resources from the poor and middle-income to the rich—though indirectly that has been the outcome. Rather, austerity was the policy program of the broader post-2008 project of reassembling neoliberalism. Its intent was not so much economic as it was to restore belief in the system—by imposing through policy that which once emerged organically from the logic of the economy: work incentives, the casualization of labor (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/business/economy/the-americanization-of-european-labor-policy.html?pagewanted=all">especially in Europe</a>), the elimination of the social safety net.<br />
<br />
(Which is not to deny that the state played a central role in neoliberalism’s <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">heroic period</a> of the 1980s and 1990s, when it provided the muscle to rip apart the old <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">Fordist</a> regime of benefits and protections. Instead, I’m arguing that the roles have reversed: the economy once demanded the policy; now the economy lies prone and the policy is little more than a pitiful attempt to revive the corpse.)<br />
<br />
People on the right, being <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">rigid and unsophisticated in their thinking</a> and therefore completely intolerant of the way that reality was departing from their ideology, led the charge. Mainstream neoliberals like Obama and Bernanke, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/08/apprehensions-of-social-aggregate.html">more open to ambiguity and less moralistic in their beliefs</a>, were willing to go further in bending the rules of the market. But ultimately they agreed that order had to be restored.
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<br />
Yet austerity is not simply about ideology, it also has an urgent economic impetus. Because businessmen and investors share the neoliberal worldview, their hallowed “confidence” has been perpetually in danger of collapsing now that the world has descended into epistemological chaos. Obama and Bernanke, Merkel and Draghi, and all their colleagues have converged on an ad hoc fix: an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of quantitative easing and asset bubbles underneath austerity campaigns seeking to restore the coherence of neoliberalism’s claims about reality. Only in this way can the desperate fantasies of investors be sustained. Namely, the fantasy that the world still works the way it used to.Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-13504760375393475242013-10-26T12:33:00.000-05:002013-10-26T14:53:11.512-05:00Should the left seek strategic alliances with progressive Democrats? Does it have a choice? In this post I will offer some reasons why I think it's necessary for progressives, socialists, and anti-capitalists to engage with the Democratic Party in the electoral and legislative arenas if we are to have any hope of putting alternatives to capitalist economy in the forefront of public consciousness.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkC5F_w1tYJUjmGcRz3Bw17c-aAYFhPCUb_ORA9xFjhLWPBXimQcjjKDR6Jwc6b8bfHkgup8T9F5oeJ2w25z4N5sy1coDMmDkffUYSkLf22yh1GUMzhxVF-DYQz2xlaCozGmtrJNmbNp8/s1600/democratic-party.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkC5F_w1tYJUjmGcRz3Bw17c-aAYFhPCUb_ORA9xFjhLWPBXimQcjjKDR6Jwc6b8bfHkgup8T9F5oeJ2w25z4N5sy1coDMmDkffUYSkLf22yh1GUMzhxVF-DYQz2xlaCozGmtrJNmbNp8/s320/democratic-party.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">They drink the neoliberal Kool-Aid, but maybe we could crash their party?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
My use of the word "engage" is deliberately indeterminate because the manner of this engagement is something I think ought to be debated. For now, let me stress that to <i>engage</i> with is not the same thing as to <i>collaborate</i> with. I am by no means recommending the left tow the Democratic Party leadership's line or do their bidding on the ground.<br />
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I am, however, asserting that the left should find a way to <i>use</i> the Democratic Party to force a public debate over crucial economic issues, such as <a href="http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2013/0713friedman.html">collapsing private investment</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lclark.edu/hart-landsberg/2012/04/07/the-shrinking-public-sector/">lack of public services</a>, <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/03/the-us-has-low-taxes-so-why-do-people-feel-ripped-off/">regressive taxation and corporate welfare</a>, <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/ratio-job-seekers-job-openings-slips-3-1/">mass unemployment and underemployment</a>, and <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/the-rich-get-richer-through-the-recovery/?_r=0">epoch-making wealth and income inequality</a>. Presently, the right's anti-tax rhetoric reigns supreme. Where is the mainstream left's rhetoric of jobs? Where is its full-throated defense of popular social programs such as Social Security and Medicare?<br />
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These issues have been distorted, obscured, or ignored in mainstream political debate because of modern conservatism's tremendous success over roughly the last 30-45 years at pushing the public conversation and policy agenda steadily to the right. <br />
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The extent of the rightward shift was painstakingly clear earlier this month when the Tea Party forced the Republicans to shut down the government and risk default over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.<br />
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While the Tea Party failed to achieve its stated goal of repealing Obama's signature health care law - one that was all but impossible in light of the fact that the ACA, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/">essentially the Heritage Foundation's health reform scheme</a>, was voted into law in 2010 and publicly ratified with Obama's reelection in 2012 - it did succeed in preserving the deep budget cuts Republicans secured with the same tactics in 2011. As a result,<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/02/the-shutdown-is-ridiculous-the-fight-just-below-the-surface-is-not/"> the government is being funded at levels far below those preferred by Democrats and only slightly above those proposed by Paul Ryan.</a><br />
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The anti-government right's strategy of imposing arbitrary fiscal deadlines and then using them to extort major spending concessions from the Democratic leadership and their supine colleagues in the House and Senate is obviously working. With more fiscal deadlines looming, the right will no doubt attempt to secure even deeper cuts. <br />
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Since the Nixon administration, big business has collaborated through a network of think-tanks and lobbying organizations to define the public debate on economic issues in terms of a free-market, anti-government ideology. Big business has successfully implemented a policy agenda of deregulation, privatization, wage-repression and the destruction of organized labor based on this ideology through its influence within and control over the Republican Party.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Confiscation-American-Prosperity-Right-Wing/dp/1137009373">It is this agenda and the reckless regime of private wealth accumulation it made temporarily possible</a> that is responsible for the dismal economic situation confronting American and global society today, as well as the ideological frames available for understanding them.<br />
<br />
This agenda was abetted by the complicity of the Democrats, of course, insofar as they remained essentially friendly to big business and under the illusion that the capitalist market economy could be effectively tamed and stabilized through enlightened fiscal and monetary policies. Nevertheless, the true architects and executors of the successful free-market offensive have overwhelmingly been allied with the Republicans, not the Democrats.<br />
<br />
Even now, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/the-conservative-war-on-the-gop/280637/">amidst talk of the breakdown of the modern GOP</a> and proof that its most radical elements are willing to put the global economy at risk in the name of ideological purity, big business is far from being so confident that the Democratic Party will be the faithful political servant of capital that it is ready to jump ship and cut the
GOP loose.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZg5OusRH5wCBWOwJUNi-4bXibG3zO9wBX5SEhSM5A4P-NkP69KKv6FMWyKyX-geynYSOnaSvLuShN1_RxF3GfCHFoF-p6Kh0KzkUam4ilmYIC1urijwuULojS7JTZCoi3W-H_cDdqcKI/s1600/communist-party-t-shirt.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZg5OusRH5wCBWOwJUNi-4bXibG3zO9wBX5SEhSM5A4P-NkP69KKv6FMWyKyX-geynYSOnaSvLuShN1_RxF3GfCHFoF-p6Kh0KzkUam4ilmYIC1urijwuULojS7JTZCoi3W-H_cDdqcKI/s400/communist-party-t-shirt.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
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If we can't stop austerity and the social breakdown it is precipitating, then we stand a small chance of putting alternatives to capitalism back on the public agenda. Instead, we'll be forced into a defensive fight against reactionary threats from the right that stand to gain strength in conditions of continuing social dislocation, at which point we will have already lost.<br />
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There may be many on the left who, publicly or secretly, welcome crisis as an opportunity to throw into sharp relief the deep continuities underlying both parties. Clear exposure of this fact, it is hoped, will finally lift the fog from people's eyes and lead them to the conclusion that an "authentic" alternative organized outside the corrupting influence of the electoral system is the only solution to the inevitable social contradictions created by capitalism.<br />
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But although it is tempting to see economic crisis and social breakdown as an opportunity for revolutionary transformation, a climate of crisis is rarely conducive to clear thinking and social solidarity. Crisis intensifies competition among workers and foments alienation and scapegoating, ripening the conditions for forms of mass hysteria and paranoia that are decidedly anti-social.<br />
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In order to avert the worst consequences of crisis and put socialism back on the agenda, therefore, it is first necessary to stop the onslaught of the market unleashed by the conservative offensive and create conditions in which thinking beyond the market is possible.<br />
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With <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/union-membership-rate_n_2535063.html">organized labor the weakest it's ever been</a> and in the absence of a viable third party with a mass base, the Democratic Party appears the only force on the left organized enough to counter the massive threat coming from the right.<br />
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The conclusion I draw from this is that there is simply no way to turn back the austerity agenda that is being dictated by the right-wing of the Republican Party and accepted by the leadership of the Democratic Party without somehow engaging the Democratic Party and forcing its leadership sharply to the left, thereby wresting power and control over the public debate from the far right and tilting the conversation back toward some kind of genuine center.<br />
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Elements of such a left-ward realignment already exist within the Democratic Party. For example, the <a href="http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/back-to-work-budget/">"Back to Work Budget"</a> proposed by the House Progressive Caucus would be practically revolutionary in our current climate of austerity. Moreover, the budget puts job creation front and center, a perfect antidote to the anti-tax nonsense demanded by the "Job Creators" and their political allies. A serious push from the left in support of such measures could have the same effect on Democrats as the Tea Party is having on Republicans.<br />
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It could even hasten the breakdown of the Democratic Party and encourage the emergence of a real third party alternative, something I know many on the anti-capitalist left have long dreamed of.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, the logic and rhetoric of the economic policy measures proposed by House progressives can be strengthened and radicalized by the left. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, activists in New York debated adopting a <a href="http://lbo-news.com/2011/10/20/ows-demands-working-group-jobs-for-all/">"Jobs for All" demand</a> arguably more radical in scope than the budget proposed by House progressives. An organized, grassroots movement working in support of such a demand has serious potential to resonate with the country's silent progressive majority and force the Democrats' hand.<br />
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If we are serious about wanting socialist and other non-capitalist ways of thinking to go mainstream, then we must strategically support those initiatives within the Democratic Party that have the potential of breaking down the neoliberal consensus among the leaderships of both parties. If we leave establishment Democrats unchallenged, we risk losing the whole game to the right. <br />
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John Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14736518232488394942noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-54729431093502563222013-10-17T20:38:00.000-05:002013-10-19T14:09:48.010-05:00Who really won the shutdown battle?In light of Congress' eleventh hour passage of a bill Wednesday night to avert a government default and end the shutdown that paralyzed the federal government for 16 days,<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/us/congress-budget-debate.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1382057878-Odk3cYkJ8KEVYAJv44heJw"> the New York Times is declaring victory for the Democrats.</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEP0g2iqI88jTGcifdUBJp9HyXnthKUu266uUYpBfRfWj5uWkegkfinK-ApkRFd9uoVaZ-73F1AbBGuA144hvvqnJtPSvh0YzSSAYVHBWilup_CcMv8OJyJCaqzKLdS3ChyphenhyphencH6iT5SgAU/s1600/age+of+austerity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEP0g2iqI88jTGcifdUBJp9HyXnthKUu266uUYpBfRfWj5uWkegkfinK-ApkRFd9uoVaZ-73F1AbBGuA144hvvqnJtPSvh0YzSSAYVHBWilup_CcMv8OJyJCaqzKLdS3ChyphenhyphencH6iT5SgAU/s320/age+of+austerity.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
But is it really so? Although Republicans failed to achieve their stated goal of de-funding the Affordable Care Act (<a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/mar/20/romneycare-and-obamacare-can-you-tell-difference/">Romneycare</a>) and were unable to wring further spending cuts from the Democrats, this is still <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/the-gop-might-lose-the-shutdown-battle-but-its-already-won-the-spending-war/280145/">a big win for austerity</a> and further confirmation that the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/win-first-then-go-to-war-thoughts-on.html">Tea Party strategy works</a>. The deal approved by Congress leaves in place spending cuts that Republicans won during the last major fight over the debt ceiling in 2011, and current levels of funding remain far below those preferred by Democrats, hovering a mere 2% from the funding levels proposed in Paul Ryan's 2014 budget. Moreover, the deal will only fund the government through January 15 and raise the debt ceiling through February 7, portending yet another fiscal impasse and the possibility of more spending cuts. This is <a href="http://jackrasmus.com/2013/07/09/austerity-american-style-2/">austerity, American style. </a><br />
<br />
Despite the outsized influence of the Tea Party and clear evidence that its extremist strategy to whittle away the federal government is working, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html">much of the left has persisted in demonizing the radical right</a>. While it may feel good to do so, progressives should instead learn from the Tea Party's relentless attack on the Republican Party and pursue the same strategy against establishment Democrats, thereby pulling the Democratic Party as a whole to the left and moving the political system a step closer to sanity.<br />
John Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14736518232488394942noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-67690736608499768622013-10-09T18:15:00.000-05:002013-10-10T07:12:03.000-05:00Win First, Then Go to War: Thoughts on Tea Party StrategyReactions to the government shutdown range from fear to exasperation. The market seems genuinely disturbed, while the Finance Ministers, Presidents, and Prime Ministers of dozens of countries gently remind the US that the economy is international and that our crisis is theirs. It’s also telling that though both incidents proved to be (more or less) unrelated to the shutdown, neither journalists nor the public were surprised at the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/shooting-at-capitol-debate-fatal-shooting/2013/10/04/a2b38a64-2d26-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24449600" target="_blank">deaths</a> in DC last week and both were ready to fit them into a narrative of a country and a world on the brink.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibmeORtugNYNQozJt1aive31iU_7KsJPHw1uHOLd_9Zvh0s07fOJTb-Trv564vLEbUa5sb2MMef8qTPDYNmriPq_12vCQeH4SlyVMH6qdXtvjK3HafNzqGsJ8mTrN7rscIr3Wqj9z3Gv8/s1600/tea-partier.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="125" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibmeORtugNYNQozJt1aive31iU_7KsJPHw1uHOLd_9Zvh0s07fOJTb-Trv564vLEbUa5sb2MMef8qTPDYNmriPq_12vCQeH4SlyVMH6qdXtvjK3HafNzqGsJ8mTrN7rscIr3Wqj9z3Gv8/s200/tea-partier.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
But there is at least one group of Americans that is more resilient than worried, that sees this impasse as a crucible instead of a noose: the <a href="http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf" target="_blank">20 percent of voters who identify with the Tea Party</a>. <br />
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If we seem to be dedicating a lot of posts to the Tea Party it’s because we are. Economic crises can cause massive political and economic shifts, and the Tea Party is the only big, organized group in the political mainstream responding to this one with anything other than the hope that if we ignore our problems they will go away. The Tea Party is a movement, whether we like it or not, and they have a plan for the future, disgusting and unimaginable as it may be. Their actions must be interpreted as strategy.<br />
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Let’s try that.<br />
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Most people, and most media outlets, have approached the shutdown asking “Why would anyone do such a thing?” The Tea Party is demonized in these reports. Pundits gleefully note that <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/164648/tea-party-support-dwindles-near-record-low.aspx" target="_blank">support</a> for the Tea Party is falling. Popular blame rests on it, the <a href="http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/07/20857912-polls-public-places-more-blame-for-shutdown-on-gop?lite" target="_blank">GOP</a> in general, and Speaker Boehner, for the shutdown. But people <a href="http://www.langerresearch.com/uploads/1144a29TheShutdown.pdf" target="_blank">also</a> blame <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/ap-gfk-poll-republicans-get-most-blame-for-shutdown-tea-party-is-a-big-and-divisive-factor/2013/10/09/a6631cc4-30b4-11e3-9ddd-bdd3022f66ee_story_1.html" target="_blank">Obama, Harry Reid, and the Democrats</a> for the shutdown. They also blame Congress as a whole.<br />
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There are, however, 435 people whom nobody blames—individual members of Congress.<br />
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It’s a <a href="http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/tag/congressional_approval.html" target="_blank">truism</a> that <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-own-representative.aspx" target="_blank">people hate Congress but like their Congressperson</a>, and it is unlikely that the current crisis will prove the exception—nobody blames, cares, or even knows about filibustering Senator Ted Cruz, for example. The still enormous popular support for the Tea Party among many Republicans, especially those who actually voted them into Congress, would make it difficult if not impossible for the GOP to dislodge enough of them through primary challenges with more moderate Republicans. And since incumbents have the advantage in a general election, it seems safe to say that most of the members of the so called “suicide caucus” will not die on the House floor this month and stand a good chance of returning to Congress in 2014.<br />
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I can think of three possible outcomes of the shutdown, and all of them are victories for the Tea Party:<br />
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<ol>
<li>The House passes a <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/7/schumer-boehner-will-break-tea-party-shutdown/" target="_blank">“clean”</a> federal budget (one that doesn't involve defunding Obamacare), or passes a bill that would fund the federal government during a negotiation period. Global financial crisis is averted. This scenario involves a number of recalcitrant Republican Representatives to vote with their more moderate comrades. Those who do so can appear pragmatic to their constituents. Those who don’t look like they’re holding their ground and standing up to a Socialist Obama and a wishy-washy Boehner. Boehner is blamed for taking so long, and appears weak. Obama is blamed because he is the President. The Democrats look good—better than the GOP—but this bump in the polls disappears after a few months. The Tea Party as a whole loses popularity, but succeeds in redefining the realm of political maneuvering and in moving the debate further to the right.</li>
<li>The Democrats cave and sign a bill that defunds Obamacare, paving the way for a hellish debt-ceiling debate next week. Obama loses the crown jewel of his political legacy, and the Democrats in general appear completely impotent. The Tea Party revels in its unexpected victory, while the rest of the GOP realizes that they might be on to something.</li>
<li>No deal is reached or bill signed before the debt ceiling deadline arrives. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57606522/boehners-new-government-shutdown-headache-pro-default-republicans/?pageNum=2" target="_blank">Many Republicans</a> have begun to question whether or not passing that deadline would really be that bad, claiming that it would not actually cause a default on interest payments. Most financial experts, however, agree that this would cause a serious <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/8/world-tells-us-thatadebtdefaultwouldbecatastrophic.html" target="_blank">global economic disaster</a>. In this scenario, all bets are off. If blame for this financial meltdown falls on the Tea Party and the GOP’s brinkmanship, they could tank politically as voters and financiers abandon them in favor of the Democrats—though as noted above it can be difficult to make political consequences stick to Congresspersons. If, instead, Obama is blamed, he would join the ranks of Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and James Buchanan as a President remembered for the disaster he presided over and nothing else.</li>
</ol>
Good strategists don’t start fights they can’t win, and if you ask me the Tea Party has some good strategists. This is a battle that they were ready for, at a perfect time, and with few negative consequences (other than the suffering of thousands during the shutdown).<br />
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Given this, the challenge isn't to find new ways to bemoan the Tea Party or its constituents. Instead <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-demonizing-tea-party.html">we should be trying to craft a left/progressive alternative to austerity and neoliberalism</a>, to promote that alternative nationally and internationally, and to organize people to put it into action. You lose battles in war. The enemy may have won this battle, and they might win the few too. If they’re going to be stopped, we have to get ready, and get organized.</div>
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Eugene Guesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03442711373039279215noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-66566598187787205312013-10-04T14:14:00.000-05:002013-10-04T20:21:56.314-05:00Stop demonizing the Tea Party To all those who are rightly dismayed at the government shutdown and those responsible for it: please stop demonizing the Tea Party. I say this not in their defense! To the contrary, I think the danger posed by the Tea Party is boundless. Their increasing influence threatens to <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">trigger a violent, catastrophic collapse in the global economy</a>, which would then lead to suffering and death across the planet on a scale I don’t much care to contemplate in any detail. (Something to keep you up at night: the last time a highly integrated global economy collapsed, we got WWII.) So we absolutely must stop the Tea Party.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">while arguably accurate, this is not helpful</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
But as paradoxical as it might seem, direct attacks on the Tea Party will do nothing to defuse the enormous threat they pose to us. Rather, the solution is to have some sympathy for these devils. Let us do to establishment Democrats what the Tea Party has done to establishment Republicans. But where the Tea Party movement is animated by a slash-and-burn small government vision, let our movement be animated by a contrary, progressive vision. <i>In order to stop the Tea Party, we need to build an anti-austerity, anti-establishment political movement <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-2.html">within the Democratic Party</a>.</i>
But to see why this is the solution, we need a deeper analysis of the
underlying forces that have led to the rise of the Tea Party. We have
provided much of this analysis in various posts on this blog, and I have tried to
compile them into a relatively brief overview in this post.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><b><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">Neoliberalism</a> is in crisis and has ceased to function</b><br />
<br />
The neoliberal global economy is <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">stagnant and constantly threatening to collapse into renewed crisis</a>. Meanwhile, neoliberal political and economic thought is incapable of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/bewildered-by-history.html">even understanding the crisis</a>, let alone resolving it. Popular consent is steadily eroding. And yet: <br />
<br />
<b>A neoliberal establishment </b><b>remains in power</b><br />
<br />
In the US this neoliberal establishment is found in the leadership of both parties (Boehner, McConnell, McCain, Durbin, Reid, Pelosi, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-obama-is-so-disappointing.html">Obama</a>), as well as the corporate lobbies (the US Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/krugman-brewing-up-confusion.html?_r=0">Fix the Debt</a>) who work closely with them. It is true that leading Republicans and Democrats have significant disagreements on many issues, especially social issues, but on the strategically key questions of political economy their disagreements are very minor. As a whole, the establishment is in agreement that the answer to the crisis is to be found in long-term austerity measures, namely a bipartisan <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/grand-bargaining/?_r=0">"Grand Bargain"</a> to reduce the deficit which would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As with other neoliberal ideas, the Grand Bargain (and the ideology of austerity in general) is incapable of resolving the crisis; in fact it would make things worse by <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">further suppressing income</a> and thus effective demand. So, reasonably enough:<br />
<br />
<b>The neoliberal status quo is highly unpopular</b><br />
<br />
When it was still functioning, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">the neoliberal economy was bad enough</a>: it suppressed wages, destroyed job security, and transformed the middle class into <a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/barbara-and-john-ehrenreich-real-story-behind-crash-and-burn-americas-managerial-class">an aspirational illusion</a>. But now, following the crash and the ongoing stagnation of the economy, people across the political spectrum are <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/07/long-overdue-reaction-against-being.html">truly miserable</a>.<b> </b>People know that the economy needs to change, and they also know that something has to change politically at a fairly fundamental level. The preoccupations of the bipartisan establishment seem to have nothing to do with their most pressing concerns (above all, unemployment and underemployment); at best they<a href="http://qz.com/109503/does-obama-think-amazon-fulfillment-is-the-future-of-middle-class-employment/"> make a mockery of those concerns</a>. Economically and politically, almost everyone rejects the neoliberal status quo.<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>The only significant opposition to neoliberalism in America is The Tea Party</b><br />
<br />
Nearly everyone rejects the neoliberal status quo, and for about a quarter of the population, the Tea Party is the answer. The Tea Party is a well-organized, powerful movement, highly motivated by intense hatred of the neoliberal elites. This hatred is directed not only at the Democrats, but at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/tea-party-debt-ceiling_n_903597.html">leading Republicans as well</a>. (Note well: the Tea Party is <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/resurrection-of-liberals.html">a real grassroots movement</a>. The idea that they are astroturf is an unhelpful myth.) Now, they are right that the neoliberal elites need to go. The problem is that, in replacing them, the Tea Party would not overcome neoliberalism, but rather <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/07/rand-paul-could-redefine-american.html">burn everything to the ground</a>. Unfortunately, they are the only movement against neoliberalism in America today.<br />
<br />
<b>Where this leaves us</b><br />
<br />
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We are left with a war between the neoliberal establishment and the Tea Party; between "Grand Bargain" spending cuts and small government extremism; between moderate austerity and gonzo slash and burn austerity.</div>
<br />
The government shutdown is a product of one battle in this war. No matter how it is resolved, the Tea Party, the gonzo faction, is gaining the upper hand against the establishment:<br />
<ul>
<li>The corporate lobbies are railing at them to come to a negotiated settlement with the political establishment, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/02/why-big-business-failed-to-stop-its-worst-nightmare-in-d-c/">but to no avail</a>. </li>
<li>Within the GOP, the Tea Party has brought Boehner and McConnell to heel. (This has placed Boehner in a tragic situation, <a href="http://onion.com/19ZwGNg">portrayed wonderfully by The Onion</a>.) Expect the Tea Party to continue to take over the GOP, <a href="http://www.nationalmemo.com/carville-greenberg/why-the-tea-partys-power-keeps-growing/">as the majority of Republican voters are worried that their representatives are too compromising, rather than too unreasonable</a>.</li>
<li>Finally, contrary to all the loose talk that the Tea Party is a "suicide caucus" and moving too far away from mainstream politics to remain relevant, the Tea Party is in fact beating <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/30b0295e-2466-11e3-a8f7-00144feab7de.html">the Democratic Party</a>. The Senate Democrats are currently fighting tooth and nail against the Tea Party—for <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/the-gop-might-lose-the-shutdown-battle-but-its-already-won-the-spending-war/280145/">a budget bill that places federal spending at levels equivalent to the Paul Ryan budget</a>! Not long ago this proposal would have been decried by all Democrats as small government extremism, but now it's the ground they are defending. The Tea Party has shifted the entire debate over to their side, and they have brought the Democratic leadership along for the ride. Yesterday's small government extremism has become the new normal.</li>
</ul>
The
Tea Party is winning this war, and of course that is disastrous. But even if we
could do something to make the Tea Party lose (and I don't see how we could do that, given the forces sketched above), where would that leave us? With the
neoliberal status quo and its destructive (but <i>moderately</i> destructive) austerity measures! This would also be disastrous, albeit at a
slower, gentler pace. <i>As long as the war in our
political system is between these two factions, we will lose no matter
which of them wins.</i> There is only one possible solution: a new faction needs to enter the war, from the progressive end of the spectrum, committed to rejecting austerity in any form.<br />
<br />
<b>We need a progressive anti-austerity movement</b><br />
<br />
The bad news is that this movement does not exist. The good news is that, while the Tea Party has the support of (at best) a quarter of the population, progressive anti-austerity proposals have <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/resurrection-of-liberals.html">the support of the majority of the population</a>. The only thing lacking is the organizing necessary to transform this silent majority into a political movement with real power.<br />
<br />
In order to gain control of government policy, our anti-austerity movement must take over the Democratic Party, mirroring the Tea Party takeover of the GOP. The Democratic Party already contains a number of genuine anti-austerity progressives willing to break from neoliberal orthodoxy, including the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (see e.g. their "<a href="http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/the-peoples-budget/">People's Budget</a>"), and of course <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17911-elizabeth-warren-shocked-by-obama-cpi-proposal-to-squeeze-blood-out-of-the-middle-class-when-the-wealthy-can-sustain-social-security">Elizabeth</a> <a href="http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/john-nichols-why-there-will-be-a-lot-more-elizabeth/article_5d89047f-2dfb-56ff-b01d-c67b09439693.html">Warren</a>. True, these progressives do not currently have much power within the Democratic Party as a whole. But when an anti-austerity movement starts taking out pro-austerity Democrats and threatening others in the Democratic establishment, progressive politicians will find themselves catapulted into positions of dominant influence in the party as a whole, as we have seen with the rise of the Tea Party in the GOP.<br />
<br />
Under this scenario, progressives would then have the power to start pulling the political system back from the cliff of small government extremism. This movement would also transform the dominant political conflict from one between moderate austerity and gonzo austerity, to a clear fight between gonzo austerity and the thorough rejection of austerity. And since the majority of Americans support progressive anti-austerity policies, those would win out in the populist arena. <i>This</i> is how we can and should end the threat of the Tea Party.<br />
<br />
Genuine movements transcend organizations, but strong organizations must provide the backbone of any movement. So in our case the first step is to build real grassroots (not merely "netroots") political organizations willing to take on establishment Democrats for the sake of a solid anti-austerity agenda. Personally, I would recommend <a href="http://www.thepeopleslobbyusa.org/what-we-believe/platform-preserving-social-security/">The People's Lobby</a> (<a href="https://iiron.ourpowerbase.net/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=2">join here</a>) in the Chicago area; for others the <a href="https://npa.ourpowerbase.net/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=16">National People's Action Campaign</a> is an option. I am (as you might think) involved in these organizations, but the recommendation is based on a record of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/23">boldly confronting establishment Democrats with anti-austerity demands</a>. Of course you should judge for yourself where precisely your time and money is best invested, but if the argument in this post is right, then we need to begin with organizations like these.<br />
<br />
[thanks to numerous comrades for help with this post]Shu Yundohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18307082342483487924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-64526316065682796822013-09-10T00:14:00.001-05:002013-09-10T21:14:14.022-05:00Pursuing peace in an age of crisis<br />
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If we value peace and hate war, then it is not enough to call for peace and oppose warmongers. We must go on to take action against
the root causes of war. What are they?<br />
<br />
In Syria, the major triggers of the civil war seem to include <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/08/2586811/arab-summer-drought/">economic distress, exacerbated by extended droughts caused by climate change</a>. That story is not limited to Syria. To the contrary, if the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">stagnation</a> / <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-cosmopolitan-imagination-of.html#more">breakdown</a> of
the global economy continues, and as climate change effects continue to
kick in, the conflict in Syria could soon pale in comparison to larger conflicts in more populous countries, not to mention wars that could break out between more significant world powers. We have earlier taken a look at the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/01/eyes-on-east-asia.html">rumors of war in East Asia</a>, and recently anti-American views have also been breaking out in China as the effects of the crisis intensify there (I hope we’ll return to this issue later; it deserves posts of its own).<br />
<br />
Returning to the particular case of Syria: personally, I think that it would just make things worse if the US sent bombs into Syria, and so I am opposed. At the same time, keeping America’s bombs out of the country is hardly a great victory for humanity, since people are already dying in droves without help from the US military. But be that as it may, there is a bigger picture here, and if we really care about peace and avoiding the horrific violence of war, then we need to keep that bigger picture in view and formulate a strategy to match. We need to revive the global economy, rapidly end carbon emissions globally, and institute a global system of climate change mitigation. This is the only way to end the intensification of pressures which have led to Syria’s civil war (and the use of chemical weapons which may provoke a response from the US), and threaten to increasingly lead to violent conflicts.<br />
<br />
So, to return to a familiar refrain on this blog, we need a strategy to overcome neoliberalism, because the neoliberal economy has fallen into <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-steps-in-explaining-crisis-of.html">permanent</a> <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/dysfunctions-of-neoliberalism-1.html">crisis<span id="goog_30040324"></span><span id="goog_30040325"></span></a> and neoliberal ideology is <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/neoliberalism-is-road-to-climate.html">incompatible with a serious climate change strategy</a>. And our strategy to overcome neoliberalism must be <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/if-we-dont-go-global-we-cant-win.html">global in scope</a>; among other things, this involves rejecting the reactionary isolationism that drives so much of the opposition to the plans to bomb Syria (this is of course true on the right, but it is all too common on the left as well).<br />
<br />
Of course this will be difficult. But if we refuse to tackle this larger strategic picture, then our calls for peace are at best naive.Shu Yundohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18307082342483487924noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-41302110654991262482013-08-30T15:45:00.000-05:002013-08-31T05:28:36.335-05:00You Can’t Always Get What You Want<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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Yesterday I went to the <a href="http://fightfor15.org/en">Fight for Fifteen</a>
rally in Federal Plaza, Chicago. The usual suspects were in attendance, from
labor activists from Action Now and Jobs with Justice to a few rogue
Wobblies and the inevitable Revolutionary Communist Party literature table.
Participants were color coded by shirt. Workers gave uplifting testimony,
Democratic legislators talked about how much they had learned from the workers,
and the ceremony ended shortly after musical performances by an electro-traditional
Mexican folk group and four break dancers. Media trucks with massive antennas
broadcast their <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/fast-food-protest-chicago_n_3837419.html">coverage</a>,
captured from cameras in the back. Police presence was constant but subdued
until thirty minutes before the rally’s end time, when fifteen CPD on bikes
approached on the sidewalk, stopped, turned, and waited for the event to end.</div>
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If you, like me, have been to
rallies and protests and marches before, none of the above will surprise you—but then, and as <a href="http://machete408.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/fast-food-workers-strike-what-is-and-what-isnt-the-fight-for-fifteen-campaign/">others</a> have already noted, the rally’s purpose was not to surprise or mobilize but
to publicize. The control exercised on the demonstrators by the SEIU-based
campaign made this abundantly clear. Yet though it was obviously a publicity
event, when I tried to describe the rally to friends outside the left I found
myself struggling to answer as basic a question as “Who’s the target?”<o:p></o:p><br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<a name='more'></a>The <a href="http://machete408.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/fast-food-workers-strike-what-is-and-what-isnt-the-fight-for-fifteen-campaign/">blog
post</a> noted above speculates on this, coming up with two possible targets:
state and municipal governments, hoping to make minimum wage systems more
flexible and open to local control, or the companies themselves, to
accept unions in exchange for tax breaks and other benefits from SEIU’s
political allies. While these outcomes are obviously not what the author would
hope for, he notes that they do create “places where radicals can step in,”
involve themselves in the struggle, and maybe actually organize a few workers
along the way.<br />
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Here I must confess that I
am a pessimist. This sounds like a good way for corporate unions to
pacify a handful of young radicals, overworking and discarding the soon-to-be
disillusioned majority while capturing and converting a solid few. Again, this
is nothing new, nor does it take away Fight for Fifteen’s importance as an
effort to bring something like organizing to a vast and group of American
workers, or its ability to educate the middle class on the situation of those
struggling with minimum-wage jobs. These are both good things, though they may
or may not be things that somebody worried about capitalism would do for 70 to 80
hours a week for a few years. The campaign is good, and I’ll continue to put my
body in front of the TV cameras for them, but as a candidate for the catalyst
of a major labor movement I think it is fundamentally lacking. Not because it
is a publicity campaign, but because of the nature of its publicity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The campaign’s messaging revolves
around two key points. One, that fast food and retail workers are not young
people looking for extra money but generally independent adults who may have
children of their own. And, two, that the businesses involved can afford to pay
their workers $15 an hour. Worker testimonies and well-designed graphics attest
to the first, while vitriolic stories of CEOs’ greedy salaries reveal the
latter. With the first set of messages I have no qualms—the less workers are
thought of as lazy bums and instead as responsible adults caught in a horrific
wage trap, the better—but the second message falls into the same category as
Occupy’s “99%” rhetoric. It might be energizing for some unorganized folks, but
for the cynical Americans who are desperately looking for explanations for the
crises that surround them it rings hollow.</div>
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While it is true that executives
make too much, and that workers deserve more, we know that we could not have
the economy we do if the minimum wage were $15 an hour rather than $7.25 and
up, and I suspect most Americans know that too. This point, perhaps the central
one of the whole campaign, is a simplification at best, and a lie at worst.
That might not matter if your goal is organizing workers to risk their jobs in
order to actually pressure their bosses, but remember that isn’t Fight for
Fifteen’s goal. Its goal is to gain publicity and support outside the labor
movement. The middle-class Americans they might be trying to convince seem more
likely to sympathize with the company’s “small business” woes, or to listen to
not entirely unjustified critiques of the campaign as something that’s better
for the union than the workers.</div>
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It seems to me that the only way
that one could build a labor movement that was both functional and radical,
that could work in the world today as well as advancing practical organizing
goals for coming crises, would be one that told workers that they deserve more
than they can get. That it is actually impossible for them to receive what they
need to live the lives they want in our current economy. I think that
many people already know this, whether deep down or with a skeptic’s
resignation. To give every worker a chance to “survive and thrive,” major changes would be needed for people in their position to enjoy the comfort
and security that the middle class does. Our world not only expects but needs
people to live lives no person should ever live.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps Fight for Fifteen is an
opportunity to say just that. I’m not convinced.</div>
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Eugene Guesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03442711373039279215noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-14276466326759803602013-08-19T03:27:00.000-05:002013-08-20T14:15:32.527-05:00We must go global: the case of South Korea<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/if-we-dont-go-global-we-cant-win.html">If we don’t go global, we can’t win</a>.<br />
<br />
Consider, for example, recent developments in South Korea around temporary employment
(covered <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/810c6612-e954-11e2-9f11-00144feabdc0.html">here</a> at
the <i>Financial Times</i>, behind a paywall). The rise of temp work in the US and other developed countries is symptomatic of neoliberalism. And as with other neoliberal trends, it is intensifying as the neoliberal economy breaks down. We might be familiar with hand-wringing on the subject in popular press in <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/07/temporary-jobs-becoming-permanent-fixture/2496585/">the US</a>, but it is a global phenomenon (see also <a href="http://www.randstad.com/the-world-of-work/france-witnesses-rise-in-temporary-employment">France</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/business/global/20temp.html?pagewanted=all">Germany</a>, <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/100510/japan-economy-temporary-workers">Japan</a>, etc.).<br />
<br />
South Korea has been hit especially hard by this trend, and has one of the highest rates of temp employment in the OECD, but it is now reversing the trend, thanks to some of the most militant labor unions in the world. Led by temporary workers, unions have taken up the cause of ending temp employment. Sustained
labor unrest has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for major
corporations, and tens of thousands of temp workers at Hyundai and other major corporations have been granted permanent
status (or other benefits and contract improvements in lieu of permanent
status).<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_yZeRp3fV6sJfBp0IPYXCnqvbXEqEUdgjlHBvyC8yil2yCnMdCoky_UkfsO2_emkPrwtqVPO9lynuOkkAtfTvWmxUDfzIwG-2aTglcmdIhHzjYBq06Z0LePJIDo2qNEa8ua8Jl9PIsI/s1600/Hyundai-Logo-AT-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_yZeRp3fV6sJfBp0IPYXCnqvbXEqEUdgjlHBvyC8yil2yCnMdCoky_UkfsO2_emkPrwtqVPO9lynuOkkAtfTvWmxUDfzIwG-2aTglcmdIhHzjYBq06Z0LePJIDo2qNEa8ua8Jl9PIsI/s320/Hyundai-Logo-AT-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The overall results: even as temp employment expands in other countries and takes the place of regular employment, in South Korea temp employment has fallen, and regular employment is on the rise. These
developments are remarkable, and ought to be a source of inspiration to
everyone on the left. They should certainly receive greater attention than
they have from leftists and unions in America. (It is worth considering why they have not.)<br />
<br />
But these
victories also threaten to undermine themselves.<br />
<br />
We must understand that the
rise of temp labor under neoliberalism was not orchestrated on a whim,
nor out of gratuitious greed. Rather, it is <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/dysfunctions-of-neoliberalism-1.html">a response to the fundamental forces of
the neoliberal economy</a>.
In general, when neoliberal capitalists erode wages and working standards, it
is not just because they are greedy bastards. (Typically they <i>are</i> greedy
bastards, but <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/soaring-corporate-profits-presage.html">that is a superficial phenomenon</a>.) Individual capitalists are at the
mercy of market demands which confront them with the force of compulsion. The
neoliberal market demands lower labor costs, which means means lower wages; it
demands a more flexible workforce, and this means less job security.
Capitalists must comply with these demands, or else. If (hypothetically) there
were a capitalist not so dominated by greed, who decided to resist these market
forces for the sake of worker rights, the market would respond with punishing
force, and the capitalist would be replaced. (Note that these are <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/dysfunctions-of-neoliberalism-1.html">features of neoliberalism, not
ahistorical features of capitalism</a>.
Fordist capitalists were also greedy, but under Fordism their greed was
compatible with rising wages and a much higher degree of job security, which
they provided.)
<br />
<br />
From the point of view of the market, the South Korean labor
unions’ campaign against temp employment is undermining the capitalists’
ability to maintain a competitive labor force in the country. As a result, corporate leaders and allied commentators are voicing concerns that these wins for temp workers are creating obstacles to investment and hiring in the country. Now, no doubt at least part of this
is bluster and propaganda, but we must see that there is a core of truth to the
capitalists’ pleas. It is simply a fact that as labor costs in South Korea
increase, so does the pressure to relocate South Korean manufacturing to other
countries. Even if the capitalists should harbor some desire to keep the jobs
in South Korea, the market will have its way in the end. The greater the gains
that the South Korean unions make, the more they risk capital flight, which
would result in nothing but pain for the national economy and for the workers
themselves.<br />
<br />
The South Korean labor movement thus brings us face to face with a
fundamental feature of the neoliberal economy: the global race-to-the-bottom. This is the mechanism through which the need for temporary work is inflicted upon national economies, along with so many other pernicious features of neoliberalism.
When it comes to the status of labor or anything else that can significantly impact competitiveness in the global market (corporate taxation, environmental
protection, etc.),
sufficiently deep progressive victories in any single nation will result in
capital flight from that nation, wiping out those progressive gains. The situation
in South Korean is
just one illustration of how the dynamics of the global marketplace threaten to
swallow up any advances progressive forces might make at the national level.<br />
<br />
The risk here is great, but so is the opportunity. The labor
unions must see that the struggle is only <i>apparently</i>:
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
South Korean labor vs. South
Korean capitalists</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
For the South Korean capitalists are themselves beholden to a
greater master: the global neoliberal economy and the race-to-the-bottom labor
market which is essential to it. In reality, then, the struggle is:<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
South Korean labor vs. the
global race-to-the-bottom
</div>
<br />
And if that’s where the struggle remains, then South Korean labor
is doomed. For its power is contained within the national arena, but it is
fighting a foe which transcends that realm. There is one and only one
solution (apart from retreat, if we consider that a solution), and that is for the struggles of South Korean labor to take their place in the
broader struggle:
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Global labor vs. the global race-to-the-bottom
</div>
<br />
The global race-to-the-bottom requires that workers of different countries relate to each other as competitors. If South Korean labor were to overturn this order and transform those foreign workers from competitors into comrades—if they were to take up a struggle for the wages and working conditions of others in global labor solidarity—that would mark the beginning of a struggle against the global race-to-the-bottom. This is the only way for South Korean labor to protect its own remarkable victories. And this would finally bring the left into a direct confrontation with neoliberalism itself.
<br />
<br />
Of course, this is easier said than done. In future posts I will suggest that the conditions in South Korea (which are not, in the relevant respects, unique) make the idea of a global labor struggle more than merely utopian.Shu Yundohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18307082342483487924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-21088168427416756282013-08-12T00:10:00.000-05:002013-08-13T23:28:42.226-05:00The Moral Imagination of Neoliberal Society<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
In an interesting <a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/revolutionizing-ethics/">essay</a> on the Jacobin website, David V. Johnson describes the perils of moral sentimentalism, "an excessive, even obsessional tendency to view the world through the narrow lens of the moral." As described by Johnson, moral sentimentalism is a debasement of complex social and political issues into a simple matter of proper conduct, implying that any such problem can be boiled down to personal failings. This distracts attention from the systemic nature of serious social problems and acts as a powerful block to effectively addressing them through political projects that might hold a real potential to change the world.<br />
<br />
Johnson tries to describe moral sentimentalism as something more than a ploy on the part of the rich to confuse the poor about their <i>true</i> interests. He stresses that moral sentimentalism "offers the fantasy of feeling empowered, of taking pride in their own individual conduct as all that <i>really matters</i>." Despite his gesture towards the very broad appeal of this world view, I don't think that Johnson convincingly shows that moral sentimentalism is anything other than a key stratagem in a class struggle rendered in mechanistic terms of economic interest. In other words, Johnson describes moral sentimentalism as part of the upper class's attempt to trick the poor into perpetuating their own class domination, but this does nothing to explain the way that these classes come into being in the first place.<br />
<br />
Johnson is also attempting to draw a distinction between moral sentimentalism and genuine moral claims, and cautions against moral sentimentalism "because it ultimately serves immoral ends." But I'm skeptical that this distinction can be sustained. It's hard to argue against Johnson here because apart from noting that he "take[s] moral claims seriously," he doesn't define what real morality actually is. I would like to suggest that what Johnson is describing as moral sentimentalism might best be understood as the variety of morality that is most at home in our neoliberal society. The examples of moral sentimentalism that he gives are particularly debased, but I think that even very serious contemporary moral thinking partakes of a similar logic that I will try to begin teasing out in this post.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>According to Johnson, there is a crisis of legitimacy in bourgeois society that springs from a certain contradiction between the actual functioning of our market-based economy and the ethical norms that govern interactions within the market. Without ethical norms, trust relationships cannot be maintained and common business transactions would be incredibly difficult to perform with any regularity. But losing the ability to get around inconvenient regulations would similarly hamper the business innovator.<br />
<br />
Moral sentimentalism steps in at this point to give voice to the discontent generated by the gap between the way things should work and the way that they do in fact work. The problem is that as a universal vision, morality not only applies to all individuals, but also makes claims on them <i>as</i> individuals. So rather than drawing attention to the injustices perpetuated by the ruling class on a systemic level, it encourages us to bemoan their lack of morality, and prevents us from gaining the critical consciousness necessary to making real changes in society.<br />
<br />
This is a fairly persuasive description of what has actually happened in the past years as we've moved from the tepid response to banking scandals as the result of a few rotten eggs to indictments of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden on the basis of their alleged personal failings. Johnson uses both examples to illustrate how systemic problems with the financial sector and the state's lack of respect for civil liberties are twisted into stories about corrupt individuals. These are easy examples, but I don't think they come close to the heart of moral discourse in our neoliberal society. It is far more revealing to consider the way that this moral discourse has served as a lens through which to understand, and to come to grips with, the existence of a racialized underclass in the US, one of the richest societies in the world.<br />
<br />
Problems like drug abuse, poverty, and racism are understood to be the result of personal failings that can't ultimately be attributed to factors that are properly speaking social. The narratives of "welfare queens" and "crack babies," staples of popular discourse in the 80s and 90s, described problems that inevitably resulted from intense concentrations of poverty and joblessness as the result of poor choices and a lack of proper moral sense. In the case of so-called crack babies, a <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study">recent study</a> has revealed the purely ideological nature of this assumption.<br />
<br />
It's interesting to bear in mind that these tropes found such wide acceptance just a few decades after Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, which was to the contrary premised on the widespread belief that social problems were structural, the result of larger, impersonal forces that profoundly constrain the life possibilities of certain people. It seemed natural that such problems would be confronted as a unified social effort through the democratic processes and administrative services of the federal government.<br />
<br />
Yet in a neoliberal society this political approach is ruled out, and the most that popular consensus can generally allow is charitable projects to create more moral people through instilling better values in children or granting scholarships for the "gifted few" who struggle to make the proper choices amidst a climate of lawlessness and moral anomie.<br />
<br />
Clinton's grand strategy for pulling together a deeply divided legislative branch was, of course, "the end of welfare as we know it." In other words it was workfare, an agenda proposing work as the solution to poverty that is caused by the limited availability of gainful employment in the first place. And yet such a proposal is not considered to be incoherent because of the persuasiveness of the idea that it was poor choices and laziness that actually lay at the root of supposed abuses of welfare.<br />
<br />
In a sense, the moral focus on individual choice is a circular proposition. Once you accept the premise that individual choices are the most relevant factor in shaping life outcomes, all social phenomena, whether they be the success of particular startup businesses or the high rates of impoverishment and drug abuse among a certain group, become the results of better or worse choices. The form in which we see society, including its racialized and class-identified sub-groupings, becomes the manifestation of a cosmic morality play in which good is rewarded with good and bad with bad.<br />
<br />
Once we recognize the circularity of this reasoning, we can appreciate the arbitrary way that the transcendent significance given to individual choices can lead us to "blame the victim," or in other words to ascribe the unequal status of a social group to the poor choices made by members of that group. As in the example above, if it seems that black Americans suffer from horrible social and economic inequality, this perspective suggests that this is a result of the failure to "say no to drugs," to say yes to education, and to work and study hard.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
David Brooks's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15brooks.html">opinion piece</a> on Haiti, blaming belief in Voodoo for Haiti's enduring poverty, is a classic example of this abysmal moral understanding. He even ends with an appeal for programs similar to the Harlem Children's Zone as an approach to addressing Haiti's poverty. Anyone who has passing familiarity with Haiti's political history can instantly dismiss Brooks's column as laughable, and anyone with a heart can begin to understand the depths of his depravity. Yet this writing is printed in our newspaper of record.<br />
<br />
Above I made the claim that the basic characteristic of moral sentimentalism, the ultimate importance given to the actions of individuals, is actually a more general characteristic of moral thinking in our day. So far I have only showed that moral sentimentalism is not only applicable to business or government scandals, but also a decisive factor in constituting a moralistic discourse of race and poverty. In a future post, I will discuss how similar assumptions also underlie far more sophisticated and appealing moral visions. Eventually, I will try to indicate what this reveals about the process through which society constructs and continually transforms categories of class and race.Deckardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06918939582411126943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-65176310683545625282013-08-05T01:00:00.001-05:002013-08-08T21:09:00.645-05:00Neoliberalism and the “carbon bubble”In <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/neoliberalism-is-road-to-climate.html">an earlier post</a> I argued that overcoming <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberalism</a> is the key to saving humanity from climate apocalypse, based on the thought that the necessary political actions (examples: “heavy-handed interventions by the state
into the economy, including a massive
expansion of the public sector, and coercive intervention into the financial
industry, agricultural industry, and manufacturing industry”) are incompatible with neoliberalism. In this post I want to address another consideration that leads to the same conclusion: the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/26/432617/the-20-trillion-carbon-bubble-interview-with-john-fullerton-part-one/">carbon bubble</a>.<br />
<br />
The math behind the notion of the carbon bubble is probably most familiar to climate activists from an article published a year ago by Bill McKibben in <i>Rolling Stone</i> entitled “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719">Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math</a>”. This article is a call to arms in which he declares that the the fossil fuel industry “is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization”, which means that the task of the climate movement must be to destroy the industry’s political power. The piece went viral, and subsequently led to his <a href="http://math.350.org/">Do the Math</a> tour and 350.org’s <a href="http://gofossilfree.org/">“Fossil Free” divestment campaign</a>.
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<a name='more'></a>Here is McKibben’s story: We need to keep warming under 2C degrees. This means the fossil fuel industry will have to leave roughly 80 percent of existing reserves in the ground. But this is equivalent to “$20 trillion in assets” (give or take) which the industry would have to write off. That would be devastating to the industry, which is therefore using its great political power, gained through the enormous sums it spends on lobbying and campaign contributions, to prevent climate action. This political influence is uniquely responsible for stopping political leaders from saving the climate (and humanity with it). So the enemy is the fossil fuel industry and its lobbying power, and climate strategy must focus on breaking the industry’s hold over politics.<br />
<br />
This story is easy enough to understand, and is in line with the popular thought that “money in politics” is the most fundamental problem we face. But if this were right, then climate campaigners ought to have made much more progress with Obama and the Democratic Party than they actually have. In the 2012 election, the fossil fuel industry largely turned its back on Obama, contributing $13 million for Romney and the RNC compared to under a million for Obama and the DNC (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/us/politics/fossil-fuel-industry-opens-wallet-to-defeat-obama.html">New York Times</a>). Why, then, does Obama, who clearly knows enough about the need for climate action, continue to push his “all of the above” energy strategy which includes development of “unconventional” fossil fuels, including fracking, deep sea drilling, and tarsands mining (while Obama is stalling on Keystone XL, <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/10/26/tar-sands-south-first-us-tar-sands-mine-approved-in-utah">mining in Utah</a> was given the green light), thereby flaunting the demands of his environmentalist base, and all for the sake of an industry that bet against him in the elections? This calls for an explanation which McKibben’s analysis does not provide.<br />
<br />
I think part of the answer lies in the “carbon bubble”, a term which McKibben applies to the $20 trillion worth of carbon reserves which must be forsaken. He notes that this constitutes a carbon bubble which “makes the housing bubble look small by comparison”. But let’s think through that analogy just a bit more. When the housing bubble burst, the damage wasn’t limited to the real estate industry. The entire global economy crashed and fell into <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/05/dynamic-stagnation-most-dangerous-game.html">an ongoing state of crisis</a>. Similarly, if the carbon bubble should burst in the same way as the housing bubble (as it would if the US government were to suddenly signal a willingness to keep those $20 trillion of carbon in the ground), that would threaten more than just the fossil fuel industry. As financial and economic analysts have noted, the abrupt destruction of those trillions in assets would send shock waves through the financial system and beyond, leading to another “<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/19/carbon-bubble-financial-crash-crisis">major economic crisis</a>”.
<br />
<br />
If dealing with climate change means triggering an economic crisis, then we are up against the interests of the entire capitalist economy, and not just the fossil fuel industry. And while I agree with McKibben that a sufficiently powerful climate movement could drive a wedge between the state and the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry, it is simply not possible to drive a wedge between the state and the entire economy. The overriding purpose of the state under capitalism is to ensure the health of the capitalist economy as a whole. If real climate action were a guarantee of renewed economic crisis, then the chances of achieving it under capitalism would be nil.<br />
<br />
At this point it may seem that we face a stark choice: climate apocalypse, or the end of capitalism. But the deadline for climate action will pass us by long before any minimally plausible strategy for overcoming capitalism could come to fruition. Indeed, unless we develop other alternatives, the most likely way capitalism is going to end is through the destruction of the global economy by climate change. This would unfortunately also involve the destruction of most of humanity. If overcoming capitalism were the only route to climate survival, then we would be left with inescapable political despair.<br />
<br />
So we are left with the task of dealing with climate change under capitalism. This requires a strategy for deflating the carbon bubble without violently popping it, which would allow a transition to a green economy without thereby throwing the economy into crisis. The task of executing this strategy must fall to the state.
<br />
<br />
Some serious thought on this topic can already be seen in some of the less hidebound regions of the policy world. For example, via the <a href="http://newamerica.net/">New America Foundation</a>, here is one attempt to face the economic danger posed by the multitrillion dollar carbon bubble <a href="http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2013/a_new_us_grand_strategy_77134">head on</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The resulting shock to hydrocarbon energy companies, which make up
roughly 11 percent of the S&P 500 index, would pose a systemic risk
to domestic and global markets. ... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is imperative, therefore, for the United States to convene domestic and global stakeholders to manage this market transition [to a green economy] to avoid such an unacceptable disruption in global markets, index funds, and Americans’ retirement security. Washington should work with industry, scientific leaders, and other key stakeholders to negotiate a framework and predictable timetable to minimize the downside risk, to find non-emitting uses for hydrocarbons, and to turn the transition into another driver of innovation while redirecting investment flows into other market segments. </blockquote>
When these suggestions are held up against the status quo of current climate policy, some key elements stand out: a serious industrial policy; the large-scale redirection of capital coordinated by the state; a reconfiguration of the fossil fuel industry coordinated by the state. These measures would have the effect of providing a gentle landing to the fossil fuel industry, and carefully transitioning capital out of the carbon bubble and into stable (and climate-friendly) investments.<br />
<br />
However, here we are once again confronted with the need for government
intervention into private industry and the marketplace which would (as I wrote in that <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/neoliberalism-is-road-to-climate.html">earlier post</a>) “shock the
neoliberal conscience”. The <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-2.html">neoliberal mind</a> (for example, Obama’s mind) has a strong commitment to deregulation, and can hardly contemplate being so bold as to impose the necessary strategies on private industry and investors. This commitment has only intensified as the crisis has dragged on. But this is not an ahistorical feature of the capitalist state (<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">for example</a>). In our quest to avoid climate apocalypse, then, the real enemy is not the fossil fuel industry (not systemic enough), nor capitalism in general (not specific enough). Rather, as I argued in that earlier post, <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/neoliberalism-is-road-to-climate.html">the real enemy is neoliberalism</a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">. Our only realistic hope is to force its transformation into a new kind of capitalism in which the state has a renewed capacity to intervene in the market, to discipline industry and investors and to direct their activities. Only then will real climate action become possible.<br />
<br />
Now, although I’ve been critiquing McKibben’s analysis here, that should not be construed as a rejection of his leadership of climate activists and organizers. The critique is on the level of strategy, and not on the level of tactics or campaigns. Those working to curtail the fossil fuel industry, including McKibben and his followers, should continue to do so as they are able. And they should certainly continue to develop new leaders willing to engage in a serious political struggle against the dire threat of climate change. But ultimately all of this will need to be placed in the context of a broader strategy that takes on the real enemy: neoliberalism. It is our task to develop that strategy and build a movement around it.</span>Shu Yundohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18307082342483487924noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-57833458480798901632013-07-29T14:13:00.000-05:002013-07-29T21:35:31.125-05:00Only A Pawn in Their GameWhite alienation is on the rise. “Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures,” according to <a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/exclusive-4-5-us-face-near-poverty-no-work-0">a recent article</a> about increasing economic insecurity published by the Associated Press. “Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.”<br />
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Such pessimism corresponds, of course, to the objective economic situation facing the majority of white Americans. As the AP explains, “While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.”<br />
<br />
While decreasing racial disparities in the poverty rate hold out the possibility that whites and non-whites will come together in the face of shared economic immiseration to challenge the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberal policy regime</a> responsible for their increasing insecurity, it is overly sanguine to believe that the collective experience of acute economic anxiety will lead inexorably to proletarian racial harmony. Indeed, the perverse racial equality promoted by neoliberalism’s program of universal dispossession is haunted by the specter of a racialized politics in which the objective social antagonisms of capitalism’s bio-polar class structure become increasingly displaced into threatening forms of populist chauvinism that could radically transform the American political landscape. As Walker has discussed at length in two <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/rand-pauls-route-to-victory-and.html">recent</a> <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/07/rand-paul-could-redefine-american.html">posts</a>, the unleashing of such reactionary forces could eventuate in a Rand Paul presidency, a scenario that harbors the possibility of accelerating national and international disintegration and hostility.<br />
<br />
Our chances of averting such a catastrophe depend on our ability to articulate a narrative that will place the subjective experience of economic distress in an objective perspective that discloses the class-bound economic mechanisms driving contemporary inequality. As William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, tells the AP, “It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.” He goes on to caution, “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front.”<br />
<br />
Unless progressives, socialists, and leftists can forge such a narrative and present it alongside a political program based on the regulation of financial corporations in the public interest and the creation of jobs through large-scale investment in infrastructure, transportation, and education, rising white alienation will continue to portend reaction.John Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14736518232488394942noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-22732454268946200622013-07-19T16:43:00.001-05:002013-07-20T00:19:07.333-05:00(Un)Education in America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-Pl4Oo9fH1HeWxiv48fRSrwz0b_v5cPlgGtUSHsQyONfKUTSHVyxNIBKprcwS_Cmv88HKT4pdOfiYkY9spLC7emGPw__aRwQip2g2toDREuPn7kVNUynGKwCJxhl5V9I3ZwWvBV1VHY/s1600/overcrowding.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-Pl4Oo9fH1HeWxiv48fRSrwz0b_v5cPlgGtUSHsQyONfKUTSHVyxNIBKprcwS_Cmv88HKT4pdOfiYkY9spLC7emGPw__aRwQip2g2toDREuPn7kVNUynGKwCJxhl5V9I3ZwWvBV1VHY/s1600/overcrowding.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tomorrow's schools, today</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/training-rebranded-internships-and.html">June</a> I wrote a post about the internship and its role in the redefinition of labor and training. Widespread divestment from training, in which the cost of training is transferred from the employer onto workers, is manifesting itself as a demand for prior experience. Workers are to have been trained elsewhere, and are expected to hit the ground running. Paired with a general job shortage, these demands for experience can only be met at the workers’ expense, by paying for training programs or by working for free. The internship is a perfect example of this trend.<br />
<br />
But there is another, arguably more important aspect of divestment from training—the turn toward cutting and streamlining public education. Primary and secondary schooling is intended to foster good citizenship, to provide care for children while their parents work, and to train productive future employees, among other things. Today, we are seeing a redefinition of the government’s role as educator and trainer that could prove vital to any future economy.<br />
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Universal education is one of the quintessential features of a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=jfI8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=french+revolution+universal+education&source=bl&ots=phj_SiY9yO&sig=s87U13a0UHPzxzLquO1KGQY-I4M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZkfoUeCrJMjXyAHkuYFY&ved=0CFIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=french%20revolution%20universal%20education&f=false">modern state</a>. It seeks to educate every child with the same skills and information, to prepare them to be functioning citizens. This model of state-sponsored education originated in the early modern era and grew in importance through the 19th century. Truly universal coverage began in Western countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making education an integral part of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">Fordist</a> and pre-Fordist state system. Totalitarian states blatantly employed it as a means of <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1020438?uid=3739656&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102471673781">indoctrination and military training</a>, while in social democratic states the education system was a manifestation of <a href="http://www.citized.info/pdf/ejournal/vol%202%20number%201/013.pdf">modern values</a>.<br />
<br />
Yet, modernist goals aside, education has always been subordinated to the economy. Child laborers were often taught only <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_of_Children,_etc.,_in_Factories_Act_1833#Labour_of_Children.2C_etc..2C_in_Factories_Act_1833">after their shifts</a>, for example, and the school year itself was based on the assumption that it should not interfere with <a href="http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/06/28/summer-vacation-rural-roots-wrong/">work</a>. Rural school years were divided in two to allow students to help sow in the spring and harvest in the fall. In the 20th century, education patterns played a major role in globalization, helping to ensure that highly skilled jobs gravitated toward Western states while unskilled labor rolled ever outward toward capitalism’s periphery.<br />
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<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEittkXhKqOIYZ_spt3jyGRyEWiZzA1pFjwkSw0CJOFpIoJ8UGn0WkYyDPwMgUgeIllgOqu4a7zTHVyQckRLY-j28AX7TEuLasDwqlEwzpT2mngADrs-YR3C8GOSmfRRQ1FYjYHpL3kay8Q/s1600/charters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEittkXhKqOIYZ_spt3jyGRyEWiZzA1pFjwkSw0CJOFpIoJ8UGn0WkYyDPwMgUgeIllgOqu4a7zTHVyQckRLY-j28AX7TEuLasDwqlEwzpT2mngADrs-YR3C8GOSmfRRQ1FYjYHpL3kay8Q/s200/charters.jpg" width="143" /></a>This modernist model has prevailed for over a century, but in the United States and elsewhere we may now be witnessing the birth of a new model, an educational system run outside the state, sometimes for profit, and often with <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/charter-school-funding-balloons-article-1.1398190">public money</a>. Charter schools are the most obvious evidence of this trend. Run by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school">private institutions</a> with public money, they represent the retreat of the state from the preparation of new generations as citizens and workers. The growth of the <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/phoenix/history-of-for-profit-higher-education.html">for-profit college</a> and university system is another equally important part of this shift. In these institutions education has been fully commodified, and is marketed, bought, and rendered in the same manner as other services.<br />
<br />
As <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/11/europe-deficit-crisis-austerity-budgets">austerity</a> further strips all but the most definitional functions from the state, education, too, is on the chopping block. Even in countries that developed not only universal secondary but fully funded and guaranteed higher education, the logic of austerity is rendering these guarantees not only obsolete but actual <a href="http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-261_en.htm">threats</a> to the countries’ political and economic stability. <br />
<br />
In some ways, this move toward the privatization of education is analogous to any other expansion of capitalism into a new market. And, like all under-explored markets, education has witnessed some incredible changes due to capital <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/phoenix/story-of-university-of-phoenix.html">investment</a>. More than ever before, education is increasingly seen and understood not merely by businesses but <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/05/diminishing-ourselves-to-suit-crisis.html">by people themselves as an unfortunate and costly necessity</a>, nothing more than the means of production of labor power—debates about whether high school graduates would be better off paying for college or seeking work immediately go around and around. Like other production processes, different firms compete over how to be as <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/07/05/the-problem-with-standardized-tests-in-education">efficient</a> as possible in adding value to the product—educated children and youth. <a href="http://www.ourfuture.org/files/documents/starving-schools-report.pdf">Language, history, music, art</a>, and other subjects not directly related to the jobs students might one day hold are to be cut and potentially replaced with more <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9729383/Catcher-in-the-Rye-dropped-from-US-school-curriculum.html">productive</a> subjects such as <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/04/22/obama-science-fair-math-education/2103879/">math and science</a>. This reflects a near total abandonment of the modernist, citizen-constructing goals of the education system. Only knowledge and skills which would produce profit in today’s markets are given any importance or funding.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKQ-zBTHQcEPetf8Ntdx2DfZJf9EeqMn4FbAUW2AgK0hyphenhyphenPXQXEy_j6CnmEoZNbh10aTXF8nlicUALPjsIuQKdbBt6JHSeREfNr8cimdRsZcI9sBszXrB-dfxpud-7XuMVGy4rHIY9b8hU/s1600/forProfitEducation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKQ-zBTHQcEPetf8Ntdx2DfZJf9EeqMn4FbAUW2AgK0hyphenhyphenPXQXEy_j6CnmEoZNbh10aTXF8nlicUALPjsIuQKdbBt6JHSeREfNr8cimdRsZcI9sBszXrB-dfxpud-7XuMVGy4rHIY9b8hU/s200/forProfitEducation.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Education is to be profitable, both for the educator and the student’s future employer. It is to be cheap and efficient. And it is to be quantifiable—measured for evaluation and comparison, perfect fodder for PowerPoint presentations or news show infographics. Contemporary institutional obsession with standardized <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174925/john-nichols-standardized-testing-mess">testing</a> should be understood as the latest attempt to take control of the very definition of education from educators and put it in the hands of business consultants and bureaucrats.<br />
<br />
Education is being revalued in a way that is favorable to businesses and the state but unfavorable to many citizens. As mechanization and globalization undermine the middle ground between the highly skilled and unskilled, a middle ground we once called the <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/who-counts-as-middle-class/">middle class</a>, the value in educating every citizen is more and more economically dubious. The city of Chicago plans to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/chicago-school-closings">close 50 public schools</a>, citing budget restrictions, and overwhelming affecting <a href="http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/22519-city-school-closures-put-black-and-low-income-students-at-risk-infographic.html">black students</a>. <a href="http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=9112114">Similar plans</a> have been proposed or carried out in other American cities. <br />
<br />
The racist and discriminatory nature of these plans is so obvious that it seems absurd that anyone would deny it. These cities are sending a clear message—they are no longer willing to support the education of racial minorities that society has already largely consigned to a marginal economic position. The investments in personnel and infrastructure needed to rebuild crumbling school buildings and educational systems are no longer vital to the economy, and have been all but abandoned politically. Industrial blue-collar jobs, with their mixture of acquired skills and manual labor, have all but disappeared, and the economy no longer needs children to be prepared for them. Educational resources are allocated for privileged communities and cut for oppressed ones, both reflecting and serving to uphold the social distinctions that the modernist education sought to destroy.<br />
<br />
As neoliberalism gives way to its successor or successors, our societies and economies will shift and change in ways we would never have expected. As a manifestation of that, the redefinition of the state’s relationship to its citizens is not more unusual or surprising than the changes that occurred after World War I or in the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism. Though this is no reassurance to those of us who have to live through it, these moments of renegotiation can sometimes be opportunities as well as trials. The future of education is far from decided, and the trends and strategies laid out here are already being challenged by those who believe education should do something more than prepare a child to make a profit for somebody else. I will turn to consider some of these struggles, and their potential consequences, in a future post.</div>
Eugene Guesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03442711373039279215noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-82853093240793552562013-07-14T16:11:00.000-05:002013-07-16T11:22:21.641-05:00Culture as a Historical Problem, Part II: Rock and Roll as Mass Social Critique<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKSZdAVLacL_XCpw9XeFaQSQNex42GtIJJglybMdllbISilxcnN9WuAactVCpZ7KNVCp_xPVPHuNKX0fO7QqcQv3SJUaOuiWQXF_4kESdTJ0nO3b6Q5ekxkl5sSntqfGa5ej1helNDTmOL/s1600/hendrix+burning+guitar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKSZdAVLacL_XCpw9XeFaQSQNex42GtIJJglybMdllbISilxcnN9WuAactVCpZ7KNVCp_xPVPHuNKX0fO7QqcQv3SJUaOuiWQXF_4kESdTJ0nO3b6Q5ekxkl5sSntqfGa5ej1helNDTmOL/s320/hendrix+burning+guitar.jpg" width="312" /></a>“I
got my own world to live through, and I ain’t gonna copy you... I’m
the one who’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let
me live my life the way I want to.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>—Jimi Hendrix</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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The
sixties and the rise of rock provide another interesting case in the
study of culture as a historical problem. As the student-led new
left, civil rights, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, and feminist
movements all gathered momentum in the great counter-cultural wave
that swept across the U.S. during the 1960s, commercially produced
“popular” music worked as a common affective and thematic canvas
for the different people involved in them. Rock was the
quintessential musical genre of the decade; its coalescence and mass
dissemination through analog media was financed by the culture
industry, but it cannot be denied that it played a major role in
channeling and expressing the basic rejection of “the
establishment,” which was something shared by all the major
movements of the era. What about rock music as a cultural form
allowed it to have this kind of effect within the historical
conjuncture in which it emerged? What allowed it to function as a
vehicle for mediating a massively widespread rejection of the status
quo?<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Towards
the end of the 1960s the global system of production we call
“<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">Fordism</a>,”
or Fordist state-capitalism, was approaching its historical limits as
a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/glossary-accumulation-of-capital.html">regime
of accumulation</a>. As the complex result of a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/keynesian-fordism-global-political.html">protracted
and global passive revolution</a>, a form of economic growth based on
the incorporation of greater and greater numbers of people into a
consumer economy of mass-produced goods could only maintain itself as
long as people could continue to buy those goods. Barred, to an
important extent, from high volume international trade – a key
legacy of the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/02/rise-and-fall-of-national-capital.html">economic
nationalism</a> of Fordism – market saturation at home translated
into an existential crisis for U.S. corporate capital, as an economy
based upon the mass production and consumption of TVs,
refrigerators, cars, and so on could only remain viable if there were
people within the nation-state willing or able to buy those goods.
The shrinking “return on investment” in the national economy
combined with the steadily increasing wage demands of the recently
empowered, bureaucratized trade unions to place a sharp squeeze on
profits. And thus, though it had seemed to many that the
contradictions of the capitalist political economy had been contained
and that the era of destructive, systemic crises was over, this
system entered a sharp crisis of profitability by the end of the 60s
and had reached the status of a full-blown general crisis of
capitalism by 1973.</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This
blog <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/p/glossary.html">has
already touched upon the fact</a> that the Fordist system gave rise
to forms of subjectivity or cultural tendencies that subverted it
from within and that, further, would themselves eventually become the
defining aspects of social subjectivity under <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberalism</a>.
Thus the reaction against what was experienced as the stultifying
homogenization of post-War society, its bureaucratic alienation, its
valorization of patriarchy and its elision of racial and gender
differences took the form of an assertion of excluded identities
against the established order. More generally, the massive wave of
youth and student-led rebellion that swept the advanced capitalist
world from roughly the mid-60s to ’69 was motivated by a rejection of
the culture and institutions of mass-society and a reciprocal
expression of individualism. What hasn’t been discussed on this blog
as of yet is what it meant that these momentous rebellions had a
deeply and specifically cultural aspect. In relative opposition to
the revolutionary currents of the liberal period preceding it, the
rebellions of the Fordist period were not so much focused upon
overthrowing and replacing the existing order as much as simply
<i>rejecting </i>it, withdrawing or turning away from it <i>tout
court</i>. So, for example, the proliferation of hippie and
anarcho-primitivist “back-to-the-earth” movements, the separatism
of Black Nationalism, and the widespread embrace of far-out
hallucinogenic drugs all in different ways point to a profound
rupture with the norms and institutions of the existing society.
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At the
level of lived subjectivity, the crisis of Fordism manifested itself
as a profound “opening up” of possibilities, of apparently new
ways of coexisting and of organizing social life. This was what
terrified conservatives and mainstream liberals of the time: the
rebellion against and rejection of the established order was not
solely based upon an inability to “deliver the goods,” though of
course in an important way it was so in the case of the civil rights
and feminist movements, which directed themselves to the constitutive
exclusions of the establishment. It was also, plainly, a rejection of
a whole way of life, of “everything that has been achieved by
Western Society,” as contemporary reactionaries probably put it.
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Part of
the force of this rejection is illustrated by the critique of
economic life in “<a href="http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html">The Port Huron Statement</a>.”According to its authors in the SDS:<span style="font-family: inherit;">
“<span style="color: black;">The
economic sphere would have as its basis the principles: that work
should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should
be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical;
selfdirected, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect
for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social
responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial
influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics; that the
economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual
must share in its full determination; that the economy itself is of
such social importance that its major resources and means of
production should be open to democratic participation and subject to
democratic social regulation.”</span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
is not a critique directed mainly at the availability of benefits or
the distribution of existing wealth, but rather at the character of
the work itself, its relatively humanizing or dehumanizing qualities
with respect to the people who carry it out. It is not a call to
seize the apparatus of work in the name of the people, but a call for
a total break with the actually existing organization of production.
This critique of one-sided work, already quite radical by any
standard, is combined with an affirmative yet equally radical
conception of human nature: </span></span>
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Men
have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction,
self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we
regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human
potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The
goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not
with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is
personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a
sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status
values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one
which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences,
one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one
which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one
with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of
curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.</span></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This
kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism — the
object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that
is one’s own. Nor do we deify man — we merely have faith in his
potential.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Human
relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human
interdependence is a contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be
willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most
appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and
man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary
bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to
employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.</span></span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
statement outlines a sense of lived experience and social life that,
while basically affirmative and rooted in an image of human nature,
is nevertheless presented as the direct negation of the prevailing
order. Life in Fordist state-capitalism is “inauthentic,”
“submissive,” “violent,” “fragmented,” “impersonal”: these are but various names of the general feeling of alienation
produced by the social system as a whole, elsewhere described in the
“Statement” as the “American malaise.” The overall picture is
of the possibility of a qualitatively different form of life, one in
which merely mechanical, functional, and dessicated ways of relating
to one another are replaced by something more immediate, more
personal, and more genuinely human. </span></span>
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJddf55a6r4pof5MVmwfL_YgWN8BylZ6cdZjR1oa9tVPxoQphaHRKFQq0tiJ8zq1c3Wo-8CpkMbW5lsJo79HiUgpBJ45oVzvfJKYdFs_VYUTANNLhqZAwC7nv36xKj13iJgIs-FaDBow2/s1600/dude.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJddf55a6r4pof5MVmwfL_YgWN8BylZ6cdZjR1oa9tVPxoQphaHRKFQq0tiJ8zq1c3Wo-8CpkMbW5lsJo79HiUgpBJ45oVzvfJKYdFs_VYUTANNLhqZAwC7nv36xKj13iJgIs-FaDBow2/s320/dude.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">One of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.</span></td></tr>
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<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">These
are some of the most salient ideological elements forming the
sociohistorical background of the 1960s counterculture. Drugs, sexual
liberation, “hippiedom” in general – far from somehow emerging
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ex
nihilo</span></i></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
</span></i></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">such
phenomena articulated, for better or for worse, partial aspects of
the social vision and the form of life that seemed to be fitfully
coming into view for millions of people, especially during the middle
and later part of the decade. This vision was premised on the idea
that true freedom for the individual was to be found in a new kind of
collectivity that rejected the form and content of the status quo,
and it is in this sort of light that the rise of rock music as a
distinct artistic genre should be considered.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Rock
and roll in its classic form, from the late 1950s through the 60s, was a curious amalgam of pre-existing musical traditions whose
historical roots run very deep. I already discussed one of these
influences in </span></span></span></span><a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/culture-as-historical-problem-part-i.html">my
previous post</a><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Like folk, rock was from the beginning a genre that emerged from and
addressed a mass, popular base whose identity as a social subject was
in turn indelibly shaped by it. Stylistically, it took from folk an
emphasis on easy-to-remember choruses and more-or-less steady
rhythmic patterns that can make the act of listening to music a
profoundly social and collective experience. What is generally
referred to as “the blues,” which like much else in U.S. popular
culture has its roots in very old African American oral traditions,
forms another pillar of this heritage. The unmistakable tonal
patterns of the blues – the twelve-bar structure, the emphasis on
simple pentatonic scales – still makes up the basic DNA of rock’s
most distinctive melodic features today. Another element that the
blues unquestionably contributed to classic rock and roll is the
specific cultural form of the guitar solo, but more on that in a
moment. </span></span></span></span>
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
economic and technological development of what contemporary
commentators referred to as the “affluent society” is also key to
understanding what rock is and how it came about. Economies of scale
and the industrialized mass production of consumer goods meant that
musical instruments, most notably the new electric guitar and the
amplifier, were relatively affordable for a great number of people
for the first time. After Chuck Berry at the latest, that is, roughly
the mid- to late-1950s, youth across the country were forming what
eventually became the stereotype of the “garage band” by playing
bad music really loudly and generally pissing off the “Greatest
Generation,” i.e. their parents. Probably most importantly, it was
undoubtedly a blast, as the exhilaration of artistic creation –
however amateur – combines with the disapproval of established
authority, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a really heady mix
in the following decade and a half. </span></span>
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: normal;">As
a musical genre, during the 1960s rock became increasingly
aggressive, as its audience grew, the concerts got bigger, and its
apparent dissociation from the establishment became more pronounced.
One feature of the genre that is indispensable to understanding its
social, historical, and cultural relevance is its sheer loudness. The
introduction of electrical instruments and amplification devices
combined with the rhythmic and tonal characteristics of the style
itself to produce a musical genre unprecedented in its volume and
energy. The Organization Man of the stuffy, bureaucratized world of
the post-war consensus did not know what to make of this strange new
mass phenomenon, other than the fact that, whatever it was, he was
not part of it. Squares need not apply. Rather, rock was the unique
possession of a generation raised in relative affluence that had come
to reject the terms of that very affluence as stultifying,
inauthentic, and somehow not fully human. Rock, insofar as it
appeared as the pure negation of that order, was consequently a
powerful vehicle for transmitting this basic desire for an
alternative way of living, for opening up an experience of immediacy
that seemed to be frustrated by the alienation of Fordist society.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"> </span>
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">A
brief analysis of the solo as a form can further illustrate the
organic historical connection between rock music and 1960s
radicalism. Today the solo often gets a bad rap as something
superfluous to the song as a whole, as a mere onanistic exercise that
only serves to gratify the soloist’s ego. After all, it does not go
without saying that someone should “take the spotlight” by
stepping out in front of the group and seemingly overshadowing them.
But the solo as a popular art had been a major element in jazz for
some decades prior to the emergence of rock, wherein it was
understood not as a superfluous exercise, but as a means by which
each individual member of the ensemble could step out and express his
or her interpretation of the song, to accentuate it in his or her own
way, before returning to ensemble play. Rock and roll basically took
this democratizing aspect of the jazz solo, attached dynamite to it,
and blew it the hell up, making it into a true mass medium in a way
that jazz did not. In the period of its emergence it was far from
irrelevant, as it was an integral element in whatever ideological and
cultural force rock had as a medium. </span></span>
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
rock solo is a virtuoso performance of a particular kind. Volume and
technical skill combine to transfix the audience’s attention on an
unfolding dialogue between the soloist and her instrument, while the
pulsing rhythms of a steady backbeat also compel bodily participation
on the part of the audience. For a generation in search of a sense of
individual freedom that could go beyond the one-dimensional social
forms of Fordism, the rock solo blasted an extremely loud, inchoate
negation of those forms that could, further, be collectively
experienced both at the concert and with the mass-produced, vinyl LP.
As such it was a technologically mediated artistic practice that
bespoke the possibility of a fundamentally different form of society,
one grounded in less destructive, more immediate, and more authentic
forms of collective being-together. The mangled, tortured howls of
Hendrix’s guitar in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in which you can
almost hear the bombs dropping on North Vietnam, remains the
high-water mark for rock as a politicized art: the political message
is inextricable from the wildly dissonant, abrasive noise emanating
from the amplifier and distorting the traditional patriotic meaning
of the song beyond recognition, if not outright inverting it. The
musical form and its political content are fused into one at this
point. </span></span>
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/wt3cYpFLJiM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">As
with my previous post, this post only scratches the surface of a rich
tradition of cultural practice. And obviously I cannot get into a
full discussion of the fate of the 1960s counterculture, the complex
subsequent development of rock by and through the culture industry,
or the historical limits of the critical consciousness that emerged
alongside it. But my aims have been broadly the same: to suggest the
ways in which the emergence of forms of consciousness that point
beyond the present might emerge from the confluence of particular
media technologies, aesthetic practices, and forms of alienation
unique to the present. To better understand what was truly
revolutionary about the 1960s, it is important to grasp how a
potentially revolutionary critique entered the domain of practice
through the mediation of mass-cultural phenomena in the realm of
music and the arts.</span></span></div>
Jamie http://www.blogger.com/profile/18363083808445009325noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-61256815624777786942013-07-03T02:25:00.002-05:002013-07-03T02:57:11.984-05:00Rand Paul could redefine American politics, straight into disaster<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>A path to the triumph of American reaction </b><br />
Part 2 of 2 | <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/rand-pauls-route-to-victory-and.html">Part 1</a><br />
<br />
When a capitalist regime of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/03/glossary-accumulation-of-capital.html">accumulation</a> breaks down, the <i>only</i> impractical path forward is to maintain the status quo. Fundamental change becomes necessary, but the direction of that change is not foreordained. Progressive change is that which opens a path to overcoming the crisis. Reactionary change, on the other hand, can only intensify the disorder and leads ultimately to disaster.<br />
<br />
If the scenario sketched out in the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/rand-pauls-route-to-victory-and.html">last post</a> came to pass and Rand Paul rode to election in 2016 on the back of a populist coalition of fundamentalists, libertarians, and anti-authoritarian progressives, he would have to choose one of several different paths upon inauguration. He could pander to the social conservatives while the entrenched House Republican majority (probably joined by a new Senate majority) continued to push an anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-abortion agenda; in that case, the Republicans would quickly lose the new constituencies the election had brought into play. Alternatively or alongside the fundamentalist path, Paul could give in to the power of his corporate backers, basically continuing the economic policies of the Obama administration with a harsher edge, and soon find himself on the defensive against a progressive challenge from the Democrats.<br />
<br />
These options are straight out of the long-established Republican playbook, and they had <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-2.html">real efficacy</a> as long as <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberalism</a> remained healthy. Now that neoliberalism is disintegrating, however, they <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">no longer represent a viable politics</a>, and would gradually deepen the crisis while extinguishing the Paul administration’s legitimacy. The outcome would be an increasingly progressive and post-neoliberal Democratic Party in line with the popular progressive majority. It’s the best we could hope for in the event of a Paul victory.<br />
<br />
The really frightening prospect is that Rand Paul actually means what he says and seeks to make good on the hopes of his anti-authoritarian supporters on both the left and the right. Because in that case, he might be able to remake the Republican Party as a populist force capable of confronting and destroying the corporate-state elite. In the process, the only hope for overcoming the crisis of neoliberalism in a progressive direction would be extinguished, and the world would move ever-closer to real disaster.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>How might a transformational Rand Paul administration come into being? The 2016 post-election analysis would show that young white progressives and libertarians both went overwhelmingly for Paul. (As Paul has already <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/us/politics/republicans-paint-clinton-as-old-news-for-2016-presidential-election.html?pagewanted=all">pointed out</a>, with much justification, “The youth are attracted to people who don’t want to lock them up and throw away the key for marijuana. In some ways, the older Democrats have become more staid and status-quo-like than some of us Republicans.”) Blacks and Latinos would still give a comfortable majority of their votes to Clinton, but Paul would improve greatly on Romney’s lamentable numbers: his criticism of the drug laws and the crisis of unjust incarceration in minority communities would sound a note of hope against Clinton’s lame platitudes. Clinton’s big advantage among women would keep the election close, but the patterns among the young—voting in record numbers—would signal a shift underway.<br />
<br />
The election of 2016, like those of 1932 and 1980, would come to mark an epochal realignment of the American political landscape. In the politics of late neoliberalism, divisions were drawn <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2010/12/no-way-out-of-crisis.html">along lines of lifestyle</a>: the <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-cosmopolitan-imagination-of.html">worldly and diverse coastal elite</a>, fancying themselves compassionate and thereby drawing the support of those increasingly superfluous to the economy (organized labor and the underclass), were pitted against the intolerant, evangelical, and free market fundamentalists of the South and the rural areas. In this politics, the state and the big corporations—large, entrepreneurial, and market-mediated bureaucracies, which formed the structural foundation of neoliberalism—were the very grounds of politics, and so disappeared from view.<br />
<br />
As the Tea Party and Occupy demonstrate (not to mention rising populist currents from Brasil to Europe to Russia to China), the crisis has already thoroughly decomposed that system, which survives only in the anachronistic refusal of political leaders all over the world to forge ahead in different directions. The emerging fault line of politics is not lifestyle but power and privilege: elites in the state and large corporations and those with access to them on one side, arrayed against the marginalized, the excluded, the hopeless, the superfluous. The ranks of the latter, fairly stable and easily contained as long as neoliberalism produced growth, are now steadily expanding, drawing in more and more former members of the decaying middle class and their educated, debt-burdened children who see nothing but a bleak future ahead.<br />
<br />
Existing populisms of both left and right are focused not on some vision of a new society but solely on the negation of neoliberalism in all its forms. As <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/01/dangers-of-populism.html">I wrote</a> last year:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
against the free movement of labor, populism poses anti-immigrant bile; against the free flow of capital it demands capital controls, financial transaction taxes, currency manipulation; against the free trade agenda it looks to protectionism and state retaliation against “cheaters”; against the rootless cosmopolitanism born of globalization it celebrates the local, the particular; against the abstract placelessness of financial flows it asserts the concrete immediacy of life in a particular city or nation; against the experience of the atomized consumer it hungers for a feeling of community and transcendent meaning.</blockquote>
Increasingly, however, populists from both the left and right may be converging on a single agenda: that of destroying the corporate-state elite. The political program for such a goal looks very similar to Rand Paul’s agenda, namely, restrictions on militarism and the security state, decriminalization of drugs and roll-back of the incarceration state, breaking up the banks and other large corporations, ending state subsidies for corporations and other state-granted advantages to big business.<br />
<br />
(The left and right increasingly share this agenda. The difference is that the right understands that such a program would substitute the tyranny of the market for the tyranny of big bureaucracies, while the left imagines that some sort of democratic community-based decision-making would fill the void. This is one of the few issues on which the right is far more in touch with reality than the left.)<br />
<br />
If Rand Paul means what he says, and if he’s willing to risk destabilizing the entire society in pursuit of his principles—principles that may seem all the more compelling by 2017 as existing social arrangements show themselves to be ever-more untenable—then he could channel the roiling discontent all over the country into a frontal assault on the corporate and state bureaucracies. His success in such an endeavor would very much depend on his own skills as a politician and a leader, as well as the evolution of the Republicans in Congress, who would be more cautious if not hostile to Paul’s transformational agenda. To make the transition, Paul would have to repudiate the dying social conservative contingent, cultivating in their stead the young anti-authoritarian activists produced by his campaign as the Republican base while elevating more experienced libertarians and populist progressives into leadership positions, and at the same time bringing to bear popular pressure on the traditionalists in Congress. It would be a difficult path, but he would have a population more engaged in politics than at any time in the last three decades on his side.<br />
<br />
I can imagine many progressives reading this post who might be thinking, “Sure, Rand Paul is no one’s idea of a good liberal. But I’ll take an anti-authoritarian who wants to rally people behind an attack on corporate power and the imperialist state any day of the week. If at the same time he gets rid of the troglodytes in the Republican Party, that would be even better. What’s so bad about this scenario?” Even such a mainstream progressive as Paul Krugman has started down this path, arguing that the key economic problem we face is the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/opinion/krugman-profits-without-production.html">over-concentration of market power</a>.<br />
<br />
The answer is that Rand Paul’s populism is a quintessentially reactionary approach to the crisis. His brand of reaction is, in one sense, substantive: he is hostile to Medicare and Social Security, he favors deregulation and the supremacy of the market over human life, he is a nationalist who sets American interests ahead of the global common good. But more significantly, Paul is reactionary in the sense that he offers a robust response to the crisis, but this response is incapable of founding a viable alternative system. It is an illusion whose pursuit can only end in disaster, and there could be no greater tragedy than to channel the surging demand for change toward the dead end of reaction.<br />
<br />
The big bureaucracies that have produced the corporate-state elite remain the foundation of our socio-economic system; destroying them would also destroy that system. In concrete terms that means the disintegration of the world economy and a catastrophic disruption to the existing global networks of production and supply, a vertiginous drop in productivity around the world alongside surging unemployment and destitution, a sharp increase in international tension and nationalist politics, new forms of imperialist conflict, and ultimately the prospect of war among the great powers. Such a future may be hard to imagine today, but we have a clear precedent: this is exactly what happened with the Great Depression and World War II.<br />
<br />
The only progressive route out of the crisis is a populist mobilization aimed not at destroying the institutional foundations of neoliberalism but at transforming them—from exclusionary to inclusionary, from sharply unequal to egalitarian, from focused on speculative ventures among the elite to investing in the public good. We must not destroy the great corporate and state bureaucracies but impose our will on them; the global economy is not our enemy but our only hope of salvation. In future posts we will fill out these claims with greater detail and explore the implications of a genuinely progressive populist politics.<br />
<br />
Part 1: <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/rand-pauls-route-to-victory-and.html">Rand Paul’s route to victory and the transformation of the Republican Party</a> Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com3Shanghai, China31.230393 121.47370429.493424 118.89191699999999 32.967362 124.055491tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-8855397743434094162013-06-24T14:38:00.001-05:002013-07-01T04:47:26.788-05:00Keynesian Fordism: global political economy of a passive revolution<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Antonio Gramsci</span></div>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; direction: ltr; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); }P.western { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }P.cjk { font-family: "Droid Sans"; font-size: 12pt; }P.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Hindi"; font-size: 12pt; </style>This is
the second in a series of three texts retracing the historical roots
of present-day economic institutions and class relations. The
previous post examined <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-is-institutional-crisis-of.html">the institutional crisis of American society in the Thirties</a>. It characterized the New Deal as an arrested
transformation of monopoly capitalism, in which attempts at
egalitarian reform were blocked by interest groups operating through
both major parties.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This text
explores the rise of state capitalism during WWII. It shows how the
redoubled technological and organizational capacity of the corporate
state was able to generate a global political economy maintained by
force of both money and arms, but also based on the new social
compact that emerged from the depression and the war. To analyze this
global political economy I’m going to use the concept of <span style="font-style: normal;">hegemony,
as </span>developed by Antonio Gramsci. I’ll extend that concept to
international relations, following the lead of Robert Cox in his book
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=c8qn0iyer8UC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span style="font-style: normal;">Production, Power and World Order</span></a>.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>As a
communist seeking change through the development of productive
forces, Gramsci was fascinated with the rationalization of labor
proposed by Frederick Taylor, and with its ideological expression in
the pronouncements and industrial policies of Henry Ford. <span style="font-style: normal;">“In
America rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new
type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process,”
he wrote in <a href="http://messhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Gramsci_Americanism-and-Fordism.pdf">Americanism and Fordism</a>. A characteristic kind of
leadership arose at the point of production: “Hegemony here is born
in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity
of professional political and ideological intermediaries.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Gramsci defines hegemony as “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by
the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed
on social life by the dominant fundamental group” – a consent
which, he remarks, is “historically caused by the prestige (and
consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its
position and function in the world of production.” A productive
hegemony can extend from the national to the international scale.
Gramsci asks: “Do international relations precede or logically follow fundamental social relations?” His answer: “There can
be no doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social
structure, through its technical-military expressions, modifies relations in the international
field too.”
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Gramsci
saw assembly-line manufacturing as an attempt to achieve a higher and
more disciplined order of society. Ford himself – representing a
populist strain in the US industrial elite – would be no more than
a passing phase. It was up to the working classes to “find for
themselves an original, and not Americanized, system of living,
to turn into freedom what today is necessity.” </span>Yet
it was clear that the new productive potentials could easily fail to
produce a revolution with an explosive character like that of France
in 1789. Instead they could merely update the existing distribution
of power, or at best, open up a drawn-out process of passive
revolution in which progressive vanguards and reactionary forces
would vie for hegemony. The first two Roosevelt administrations were
marked by exactly such a struggle. It was resolved to meet the
urgencies of World War II. Keynesian Fordism was the technical and
military response to the challenge of the Great Depression. Its
international expression gave rise to the world order of the postwar
period.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-right: 0.43in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Warp
Speed</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In July
of 1940 Keynes declared: “It seems politically impossible for a
capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary
to make the grand experiment which would prove my case – except in
war conditions.” For a decade, Keynes had been arguing for a purely
monetary strategy: massive counter-cyclical expenditure on employment
would serve to fuel “effective demand” for industrial products,
creating multiplier effects for every dollar spent and thereby
priming the economic pump. Planning was not an issue for him. In
wartime practice, however, planning took a technocratic form that
allowed the corporations to meet national priorities while setting
the conditions for their own spectacular postwar growth.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd8t4JhMzgcndxNO4DvyDJ39Mn6Q1iHqyB4P00buobaamKzCve4GDGsOiYPInQBk1m7Fe0A9Fr6J5BW9OgfCRZk6zmTJmAj68SJFLYxR_mYfTTDdYxrDKP8Ykw6i7RZlmUK7UuO9v1urWZ/s1600/Willow-Run_6000th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd8t4JhMzgcndxNO4DvyDJ39Mn6Q1iHqyB4P00buobaamKzCve4GDGsOiYPInQBk1m7Fe0A9Fr6J5BW9OgfCRZk6zmTJmAj68SJFLYxR_mYfTTDdYxrDKP8Ykw6i7RZlmUK7UuO9v1urWZ/s320/Willow-Run_6000th.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Even
before the declaration of hostilities, Detroit began retooling with
astounding speed into the “Arsenal of Democracy” that Roosevelt
called for in a radio address. Gramsci did not live to see it, but
the practical and ideological importance of the Ford Motor Co. within
US society now became obvious. Its single Willow Run plant produced
8,685 B-24 bombers in the course of wartime operations. On one hand,
Ford stood for the entrepreneurial innovations of the 1910s-20s: the
assembly-line process, scientific management, high wages, the
education of the workforce and the stimulation of effective demand
for industrial products via advertising, public relations and
consumer credit. On the other, he represented national production
capital with global reach: the company’s technological advances had
pushed it toward massive exportation, then to the establishment of
foreign subsidiaries across the planet. Under the imperatives of
multi-theater warfare these strengths were channeled into a
corporate/military order, which included rationing of materials,
control of strategic supply chains, cost-plus contracts and no-strike
pledges by labor unions. The independence of the maverick
entrepreneur was subsumed by what J.K. Galbraith later analyzed as
“<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8l2G-C8H8IoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">the technostructure</a>.”</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
central planning of the economy that Roosevelt’s National Recovery
Administration had failed to achieve would now be carried out by
“dollar-a-year men” dispatched by the corporations to Washington
and the Pentagon. The characteristic figure is Charles Wilson
(“Electric Charlie”), a CEO of General Electric who served on the
War Production Board from 1942-1944. He undercut the policies of his
boss, a New Dealer named Donald Nelson, who from 1943 onward had
begun trying to reorient production to civilian ends. Instead, Wilson
forged closer ties with the military. He was later appointed to head
the Office of Defense Mobilization during the Korean War. The
“permanent war economy” (a concept attributed to Wilson himself)
became a major component of what we now conceive as Fordism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As part
of the same process, the innovation system of American industry took
a quantitative and qualitative leap forward. Historians of
technology, focusing on forty-to-fifty-year “long waves” of
economic development, have shown that major crises of capitalism
produce large backlogs of inventions which cannot be industrialized
during the years of economic contraction, but which subsequently
provide the technological basis for a new wave of investment. In
the case of the US during WWII, this accumulation of inventions was
intensified by the drafting of pure scientists into the war effort
under the banner of “operations research,” which has been defined
as “the effective use of scarce resources under dynamic and
uncertain conditions.” Unprecedented sums of federal money were
funneled to laboratories, which initially tended to be under direct
government control. However, as David Noble shows in his book <i>Forces of Production</i>, professional groups quite rapidly secured the “autonomy
of science” for corporations and major universities, while keeping the military contracts. In this way,
“big science” was born.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3vIxFqGFDo05SaOFxqZ8R_ETCmE08vxuUmG7nqADlKfQhk5TTLP5J-DWrKnhUsv2yIflpK1eCJEcClcAuGYrflS83hdtTdRY3riEtYZ21agzHgTnHVZAuYb-OfBvRApvtfYQjtfkhggAk/s1600/The+Telstar+I+satellite+in+1962.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3vIxFqGFDo05SaOFxqZ8R_ETCmE08vxuUmG7nqADlKfQhk5TTLP5J-DWrKnhUsv2yIflpK1eCJEcClcAuGYrflS83hdtTdRY3riEtYZ21agzHgTnHVZAuYb-OfBvRApvtfYQjtfkhggAk/s320/The+Telstar+I+satellite+in+1962.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bell Labs - Telestar 1 - 1962</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
results were prodigious: radar, nuclear fission and thermonuclear
weapons, as well as the experiments in coding, information transfer
and feedback that gave rise to computers and the unified
socio-technical theory of cybernetics. The science-fiction of the
postwar period – right up to the prime-time image of “Federation Starship
Enterprise” – expresses the magnitude of this transformation. Far
from merely perfecting the assembly-line process, the US version of
Fordism would be characterized by continuous revolutions in
production technology, extending to fields such as plastics and
synthetic fabrics, electronic communications, jet propulsion, space
exploration, etc. From the Manhattan Project in wartime to the
civilian research of Bell Labs – the scientific arm of AT&T, a
giant corporation recognized by the state as a "natural monopoly" –
US society would become technological to the core, with a consequent
rise in levels of education and a continuous expansion of the
application of science (including social science) to industry,
administration, civil life and consumption. Here, and not in simple
manufacturing, lay the sources of that prestige which, as Gramsci
understood, stems directly from the forces of production.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>New
World</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Given the
US economic position at the close of the war – with 65% of global
gold reserves at Fort Knox – it was inevitable that American policy
imperatives would trump those of Keynes at the global economic conference of Bretton
Woods in 1944. Keynes sought a neutral, collectively managed world
monetary standard and a financial architecture to curb the power of
creditor nations. The Americans wanted to collect their due from
wartime debtors like Britain, whose imperial financial system would
soon be dismembered through the negotiations over the payback
requirements of the US Lend-Lease program. More broadly, the State
Department aimed to dissolve the rival trading blocs that had emerged
after the collapse of the British gold standard, and to create a vast
free-trade zone or “Grand Area” in order to secure not only
supplies of raw materials, but also markets large enough to absorb
the surplus product of American industry (including industrialized
agriculture). The IMF and the World Bank, both created at Bretton
Woods, were needed to circulate the capital for this free-trade
regime. Negotiated exchange rates between all participating
currencies and the dollar, itself backed by gold, would lend
stability to the new monetary order centered on the US.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Yet the
international financial institutions were only part of a larger
project, which had engaged American civic ambition in a whole range
of more-or-less feasible attempts to create a global government. In
1943, the liberal Republican Wendell Willikie published a bestseller,
<i>One World</i>, which urged the foundation of a transnational
democracy as the most effective response to communism – an idea
taken up from 1945 onward by the World Federalist Movement. And in a book
called <i>And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at
America</i>, also published in 1943, Margaret Mead penned the
following, entirely characteristic phrase: “We must see this war as
a prelude to a greater job – the restructuring of the culture of
the world.” Exactly this idea was expressed by an extraordinary map
of the “New World Moral Order” (1942) which rationalized all the major
land masses into coherent continental blocs structured according to
the US federal model.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUT2oWQvupM9EpWfSllzFvd9JyWZooE2BNU0kHWPh4CxCPb4e59bsUPkOxHSNpE7G72G9O7Gm1YoRbiiaPh2DGtgUfEgK9fyAHRvLTHvD-9A2FHY8mLf7TyKnWfffoU4EKf7z62p_IRYZ/s1600/new_world_order_map_w-detail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUT2oWQvupM9EpWfSllzFvd9JyWZooE2BNU0kHWPh4CxCPb4e59bsUPkOxHSNpE7G72G9O7Gm1YoRbiiaPh2DGtgUfEgK9fyAHRvLTHvD-9A2FHY8mLf7TyKnWfffoU4EKf7z62p_IRYZ/s400/new_world_order_map_w-detail.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For a larger version click <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Gomberg_map.jpg">here</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
unification and rationalization of geographical space was not the
wild fancy of an obscure cartographer, nor the right-wing conspiracy
theory that it appears to be today. Instead it was the object of
deliberate wartime planning. In a study of the State Department
archives entitled <a href="http://goodtimesweb.org/overseas-war/0595324266_ImperialBrain.pdf">Imperial Brain Trust</a><i>,</i> Laurence Shoup and
William Minter detail the recommendations of high-ranking members of
the private-sector Council of Foreign Relations, who had been
directly inducted into the Roosevelt Administration to carry out
postwar economic planning. One passage is worth quoting at length<span style="font-size: x-small;">:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">A July 24, 1941, memorandum to
the President and Department of State outlined the Council's view of
the national interest, describing the role of the Grand Area in
American economic, political, and military policy. The memorandum,
numbered E-B34, summarized the Grand Area concept, its “meaning for
American policy, its function in the present war, and its possible
role in the postwar period.” It began by stressing the basic fact
that the “economy of the United States is geared to the export of
certain manufactured and agricultural products, and the import of
numerous raw materials and foodstuffs.” The Economic and Financial
Group had found a self-contained United States-Western hemisphere
economy impossible without great changes in the American economic
system. To prevent alterations in the United States economy, the
Council had, in the words of group member Winfield W. Riefler, “gone
on to discover what 'elbow room' the American economy needed in order
to survive without major readjustments.” This living space had to
have the basic raw materials needed for the nation's industry as well
as the “fewest possible stresses making for its own disintegration,
such as unwieldy export surpluses or severe shortages of consumer
goods.” The extensive studies and discussions of the Council groups
determined that, as a minimum, most of the non-German world, the
“Grand Area,” was needed for “elbow room.” In its final form,
it consisted of the Western hemisphere, the United Kingdom, the
remainder of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the Dutch East
Indies, China, and Japan itself.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-right: -0.01in;">
The
German world was added to this geographic calculation when it became
apparent that the US would win the war. By the same calculation,
China, North Korea and other countries would be considered “lost”
to free trade when they adopted the communist system. Thus the
hegemonic struggle was carried out by force of both money and arms.
But how could this global economic and military system be
internalized by common people? What were the ideals and emotional
appeals of the “New World Moral Order”?</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Its key
institutional expression was the United Nations, a classically
Rooseveltian creation. Indeed, the UN Declaration of Universal Human
Rights is directly inspired by the “Four Freedoms” speech that
justified aid to the Allies in the period before Pearl Harbor.
Freedom is the perfect ideal for a free-trade regime – however
unequal that free trade may be. But UN idealism could be taken
seriously because of the presence of US occupation troops across the
world, and because of postwar investment programs, particularly the
Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. At stake was what
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, called a “Fair Deal” for
the non-Soviet world. In <i>The Logic of World Power</i>, Franz
Schurmann describes the transformative effect the Fair Deal was
intended to produce:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;">The essence of the New Deal was
the notion that big government must spend liberally in order to
achieve security and progress. Thus postwar security would require
liberal outlays by the United States in order to overcome the chaos
created by the war. Aid to... poor nations would have the same effect
as social welfare programs within the United States – it would give
them the security to overcome chaos and prevent them from turning
into violent revolutionaries. Meanwhile, they would be drawn
inextricably into the revived world market system. By being brought
into the general system, they would become responsible, just as
American unions had during the war... America had spent enormous sums
running up huge deficits in order to sustain the war effort. The
result had been astounding and unexpected economic growth. Postwar
spending would produce the same effect on a worldwide scale.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Truman
was not a charismatic politician like Roosevelt, but a classic
tool of corporate interest groups. His role was to functionalize the
New Deal for the needs of the Cold War political economy. This meant
fusing UN idealism with George Kennan’s grand strategy for the
containment of Soviet communism. The result, in Schurmann’s
interpretation, was an <i>operational ideology</i>, which was
concrete, trustworthy and predictable for all free-world subjects to
the extent that it was indistinguishable from the tremendous built
environment of the Cold War security state. Every Arctic radar
station, every nuclear carrier in the Pacific, every academic
contract signed with what Eisenhower would later call the
“military-industrial complex” was necessary to make the Cold War
ideology tangible, workable, successful.<br />
<br />
In fact the industrial economy of Japan was rebuilt, not with a large-scale aid program like the Marshall Plan, but with a flood of heavy-equipment orders to Japanese industrialists for the needs of the Korean War. NATO contracts served a similar function for European heavy industry. US planning, containment of the Soviet Union, and Grand-Area economic growth were one and the same. The restructured world order
gave corporate monopoly capitalism its full technological and
military expression. The passive revolution of Keynesian Fordism had
been extended to the global scale. The US had created a new,
historically unique version of Britain’s former free-trade system
or “liberal empire.”</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Home
Front</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
passive revolution succeeded internationally because it had first
succeeded in the US. The existence of New Deal institutions like
Social Security and unemployment insurance, as well as the underlying
principle of expanded government intervention in the economy, gave
legitimacy to the social democratic welfare states that were created
in Western Europe, Japan and other industrialized countries. Social
democracy implies the withdrawal of certain fundamental human
relationships from the pressure of competitive markets. This was done,
initially, under the protective umbrella of the GATT negotiations
(General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which held off the
pressures of free trade during reconstruction, up to the complete
liberalization of Western European currency exchanges in 1958. Thanks
to the social democracies, welfare – and not warfare – is usually
taken as the hallmark of Keynesian Fordism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
welfare states were not everywhere the same, however, as
Esping-Andersen has shown in his classic study, <a href="http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1134169.files/Readings%20on%20Social%20Democracy/Esping%20Anderson%20-%20THe%20Three%20Worlds%20of%20Welfare%20Capitalism.pdf">The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism</a>. The Scandinavian countries developed a model of
universal welfare provision, while Austria, France, Germany and Italy
worked out a complicated state-corporatist approach that administers
benefits according to the individual’s specific sector of
employment. The US, like Britain, exemplifies the “liberal” or
“residual” approach, where most of the programs are “means
tested,” ie reserved for the impoverished and indigent. The
implicit claim is that the citizens of a prosperous society do not
need state assistance. Once collective bargaining had been instituted
in the US by the Wagner Act of 1935, both health care and retirement
pay were mainly provided by the corporations themselves. They
resisted universal coverage schemes and sought to keep keep control
over the large financial flows implied by such programs. Until
Kennedy and Johnson sought to revive the New Deal coalition by a
massive expansion of welfare, the administration of effective demand
– and the pacification of labor struggles – was left largely to
the major employers. Their approach must be analyzed in the realms of
both production and consumption.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First,
how did the manufacturing corporations respond to the challenges that
industrial unionism posed to the drive system of the 1930s, which
tended to reduce all workers to homogeneous semi-skilled labor placed
beneath the control of machines on the assembly line? On the one
hand, it is well known that from WWII onward, collective bargaining
was gradually focused on wage/productivity trade-offs, where workers
abandoned any input into the organization processes in exchange for a
share in productivity increases. This gave management a free hand to
restructure the workplace in ways that reduced conflict. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=G4CSQnPVhtwC&lpg=PA62&dq=Segmented%20Work%2C%20Divided%20Workers&pg=PA46#v=onepage&q&f=false">Segmented labor in a dual economy</a> replaced the drive system.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Within
the “core” or “monopoly” sector – which included defense
industries as well as sophisticated consumer manufacturing,
engineering firms and raw-materials processing – tasks were
organized into a hierarchical career ladder that advanced toward
greater degrees of labor autonomy. The very forms of the technologies
used in the factories were calculated to serve this managerial
strategy, which satisfied workers’ ambitions by dividing them from each other. A
split emerged in the core sector itself, between high-paying jobs with employment stability and
full benefits, and relatively stable, but lower paying jobs with less
benefits. Competition between firms was limited
by the cost-plus contracts of the state or by the classic barriers to
entry erected by oligopolies. So-called “administered prices”
(fixed by tacit or explicit accord between the major players) gave
the corporations enough financial leeway to plan over five to
ten-year periods, and to retain employees despite the short-term
fluctuations of the business cycle.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The other
half of the dual economy can be seen (ironically, in the context of
free-market ideology) as the “competitive sector,” consisting of
basic manufacturing, parts suppliers, distributors, light
construction, food processing, etc. Here, salaries were thin,
benefits and stability were negligible and the prospects for any kind
of labor autonomy were non-existent. The disciplinary function of the
industrial reserve army – ie, unemployed masses striking fear into
workers’ hearts – was replaced in the full-employment society by
the undesirability of work in the competitive sector, which was also
heavily racialized and gendered. The clear status difference of these
“shit jobs” gave yet more encouragement to the loyalty of the
well-paid white male Anglo-Saxon workers of the monopoly sector.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvVEruLEfZfLjBvZ9kK0R05NNuSoEffMnJvdr8f_OVO_5QkU-lk0JfWT5kofLjL08Gxg_c5IVdfzbw6_iO31tBH1OOZZ6vhacBIlYlaKcKVwPRreA4tip_NNcSricvfbwS4DPKE0JZnd3/s1600/Production-consumption.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvVEruLEfZfLjBvZ9kK0R05NNuSoEffMnJvdr8f_OVO_5QkU-lk0JfWT5kofLjL08Gxg_c5IVdfzbw6_iO31tBH1OOZZ6vhacBIlYlaKcKVwPRreA4tip_NNcSricvfbwS4DPKE0JZnd3/s320/Production-consumption.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For
mass-manufacturing companies such as the automobile makers, however,
it wasn’t enough to plan production. Consumption too had to be
rendered predictable. The innovations of GM under Alfred P. Sloan in the Twenties
and Thirties were now extended to all the major branches of industry.
Yearly styling, consumer credit furnished by the corporation itself
and planned obsolescence were the norms. The suburban home emerged as the
ideal site of consumption, where automobile ownership was strictly
necessary. The invention of the television, another major consumer
product, allowed for a perfect fit between the stimulation of a
generalized Hollywood-style romantic desire and continuous exposure
to finely calculated product lines. The Neilsen ratings provided
feedback information on consumer preferences, complemented by
sociological motivation surveys. The Freudian advertising consultant,
Ernst Dichter, developed his <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=-u4Jh2DqCMAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Strategy of Desire</a>, based on the
presumably universal urge to move upwards through the status
hierarchy via the acquisition of symbolic attributes. The Keynesian
goal of escaping underconsumption through the stimulation of
effective demand took on a libidinal meaning for the corporate
marketing departments, which attempted to bring their messages to the
very core of the human psyche through the use of depth psychology.
Thus the passive revolution culminated in a society of intense
behavioral conditioning on the job and massively organized seduction
on the weekend. Strict labor discipline found its recompense in the
proliferating fantasy worlds of the commodity.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Social-democratic
theory conceived the provision of <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/marshall-citizenship-and-social-class.pdf">social rights</a> (or what the French
sociologist Robert Castel calls “social property”) as
state-supported means of access to fundamental use-values: child
care, education, health services, intellectual debates, cultural
experiences, recreation and the attentions required for a dignified old age. What this did,
institutionally and not anarchically, was to open up heterogeneous
temporalities, or if you prefer, distinct life moments, in which
human potentials could be explored and enjoyed in their own right. In
more thoroughly capitalist societies, industrial and financial
planning reaches deeply into all these areas of human experience,
commodifying them for profit. In the postwar US only one sector,
education, was organized in a broadly social-democratic fashion. Is
it any wonder that education became a major source of the revolt
against the Keynesian-Fordist organization of society?</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Hegemony’s
Ruins</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
argument is often made that American radicalism in the Sixties was
defined by LSD: a psychoactive molecule produced by a European
multinational, initially distributed in the US by the CIA, and
massively used, particularly in universities, to take apart
behavioral norms and explore alternative forms of consciousness. I’d
place that unlikely love triangle second to another, more important
one: the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Power Movement
and the Tricontinental alliance of Third-World liberation parties and governments.
The social contradictions that brought these formations together and
simultaneously ripped them apart began advancing toward a climax in
the year 1966. But those contradictions were precipitated, from 1960
onward, by the Democratic Party’s attempts to combine the welfare
and warfare models of Keynesian Fordism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The 1960
election, between John F. Kennedy and the Republican Cold Warrior
Richard Nixon, was very close, with the former winning by only 0.17%
of the popular vote. Kennedy, who was in some respects an idealist,
saw the black civil rights movement as an invitation to revive the
New Deal coalition, not through activism on the streets, but through
formal democratic and administrative processes. The result was the
largest expansion of the social budget since Roosevelt, redefining
what we now call “liberalism.” It began under Kennedy in the
areas of unemployment insurance, Social Security, urban renewal and
tax breaks for home ownership. Johnson’s election in 1964 along
with landslide Democratic victories in Congress gave rise to the
“Great Society,” including the War on Poverty, Medicare and
Medicaid, Pell grants and low-interest loans for education, the
National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, public
broadcasting programs and still more spending for transportation and
urban renewal. Legislation was passed in favor of women and
minorities, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, plus labor and environmental laws.
Attempts were also made to “fine tune” the economy through
carefully timed injections of Keynesian counter-cyclical funding,
which were calculated to smooth out the ups and downs of business
cycles. All that paralleled the deepening involvement in Vietnam. A
generation of young people were being asked to dream of a better
world and to wake up in a military nightmare.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
<a href="http://www.sds-1960s.org/documents.htm">history of SDS</a> is fascinating, but let’s go quicker. In 1966 the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a southern civil-rights
organization then led by Stokely Carmichael, broke ranks with its
white allies from the north (mainly SDS) and began a push for Black Power. SDS
affiliates, many of whom were directly threatened by the draft, took
that as an invitation to radicalize themselves along the lines of the
nearby Black Panthers and distant Third World movements, from the
Viet-Cong to the Palestinians and Che Guevara. The hypocrisy of
Johnson’s Great Society became unbearable to large numbers of
people. The New Left historians Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein and
William Appleman Williams constructed a genealogy of “corporate
liberalism” going back to the very origins of monopoly capitalism
in the 1890s. A New Left fellow traveler, the libertarian Murray
Rothbard, coined the phrase “<a href="http://mises.org/daily/3232">the welfare-warfare state</a>.” By
1966, draft cards had already begun burning in earnest.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
libertarians would go on to attack the New Deal coalition from the
right, eventually contributing (with a little help from the Koch
brothers) to the rise of neoliberalism. But they could never have
been so successful if traditional Democratic liberalism had not first
been discredited from within, both by the blacks whom it claimed to
be rescuing from discrimination and poverty, and by its future cadres
who had joined SDS. The New Left and the Black Power movement now saw
the US free trade regime as a contemporary form of imperialism. Minorities in the US began referring to themselves as “Third World peoples.” Che
Guevara might as well have been speaking directly to them, as well as the white radicals, when he
declared in his message to the 1966 Tricontinental conference: “Not
for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever
seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his
people – to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each
day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements
announced under the pompous title of the ‘Great Society’ have
dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="178" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/5337314?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=83a30f" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe>
</div>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(if the video doesn't work check it out on Vimeo by hitting the logo)</span></div>
<br />
The
Fordist hegemony ended where it began, in Detroit, in the summer of
1967. Two black soldiers, just back from their tours of duty, were
celebrating their return with a group of revelers in a
clandestine after-hours bar, known as a “blind pig.” The cops
raided the joint and roughed up the vets and their friends. A typical
racist incident turned into one of the largest and most destructive
riots in American history. Enraged blacks became snipers, firing
hunting rifles from the roofs of apartment buildings. It went on for
three days while the city burned. Johnson sent in Army troops. More
soldiers just back from Vietnam were faced with a guerrilla uprising in
the cradle of the American auto industry. Similar scenes were
repeated later that summer in Newark, then in over a hundred cities
around the country in 1968 after the murder of Martin Luther King.
The US was changed forever. New Deal liberalism had taken a decisive
blow. The passive revolution was finally over. Few people under sixty
are able to imagine the atmosphere of looming civil war that brought
Richard Nixon to power and made him the most reactionary president in
US history. Yet hegemony’s ruins can still be seen, with your own
eyes, in the city of Detroit, which in 2013 has fallen under the
control of an Emergency Financial Manager appointed by a neoliberal
governor.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Science
fiction was the characteristic literary genre of the American postwar
period, marked by the invention of the computer, the atom bomb, the
moon lander and color TV. In 1966, the state-capitalist version of
science-fiction came to the little screen, in the form of <i>Star
Trek</i>. Later on it would provide the imaginary figure for a new US
military program, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, known as
“<span style="font-style: normal;">Star Wars</span>.” But 1966 was
also the year that Philip K. Dick wrote his great sci-fi novel, <i>Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i> More intimately than Debord’s
<i>Society of the Spectacle</i>, this novel asked what psychic
life was becoming under the pressure of relentless efforts to turn
citizens into the human vectors of an industrial need to generate
both disciplined labor and the desiring energies of effective demand.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At the
close of the Keynesian Fordist era, a dystopian vein opened up at the
heart of technocratic modernism. Gramsci’s “<span style="font-style: normal;">new
type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process”
had turned out very differently than hoped, over the forty-year
course of a passive revolution unfolding at global scale.</span>
Today, if we want to redefine what “progressive” could mean in
the context of the present crisis,<span style="font-style: normal;">
w</span>e have to remember not just full employment and the most
positive aspects of social democracy, but all these legacies of
Fordism.
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06093526631127908569noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-16029789805921487362013-06-19T07:01:00.005-05:002013-11-30T05:49:31.858-06:00Rand Paul’s route to victory and the transformation of the Republican Party<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVV4tu69wj9Nh4OAN_Gp3DbpObXib-FhLK4rmfbEYdhymJovQQ0fYm99G7Dzeib_1qfHUTlkdQ0S5l7MfMBNJBQ_LmRkId9PDsfj4y2ON4G0rmNTDmJqy_Yuk4vAK55MNZd__xaWg_40I/s1600/Rand+Paul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVV4tu69wj9Nh4OAN_Gp3DbpObXib-FhLK4rmfbEYdhymJovQQ0fYm99G7Dzeib_1qfHUTlkdQ0S5l7MfMBNJBQ_LmRkId9PDsfj4y2ON4G0rmNTDmJqy_Yuk4vAK55MNZd__xaWg_40I/s400/Rand+Paul.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>A path to the triumph of American reaction </b><br />
Part 1 of 2 | <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/07/rand-paul-could-redefine-american.html">Part 2</a><br />
<br />
This is disturbing: <br />
<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113494/president-rand-paul-hes-becoming-better-politician-every-day">President Rand Paul: Watch out, he’s becoming a better politician every day</a><br />
<br />
If Rand Paul were able to assemble an unlikely coalition of reactionaries and discontented youth, he would be in a position to win the presidency in 2016, fundamentally transform electoral politics in the United States, and bring down the corporate-state elite. There’s a lot of assumptions in that scenario, but it’s hard to imagine a bigger disaster for the country or the world if those assumptions prove well-founded.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>The 2012 election confirmed that the United States has a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/resurrection-of-liberals.html">progressive majority</a>, and that both parties are to the right of it. Obama did very little to bring these people to the polls—he would have won a much larger victory and would have had a much friendlier House if he had run a real progressive-populist campaign.<br />
<br />
Polling shows a large progressive majority on economic issues. Support for gay rights is slightly lower than the two-thirds to three-fourth that shows up on many economic questions, but what’s significant is the trajectory: it’s just mopping up operations of the antigay forces now. Marijuana looks to be following a similar course. Large majorities believe in global warming and think something should be done about it. &c.<br />
<br />
Until I read the <i>New Republic</i> article above, I was certain that the Republicans had rendered themselves unelectable in national politics for at least a decade (except in the House of Representatives, where they have <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all">rigged the vote</a>), precisely because they could never convincingly flank the Democrats from the left. Yet politics is not a game of reason. Voters don’t make their decisions based on a rational calculus of how closely a given candidate reflects their preferred policy positions. Far more important is whether the candidate is in line with the voters in terms of a broad system of values, if the candidate can spell out a compelling vision for the future, and—especially in moments of crisis—whether the candidate is demonizing the people who voters blame for their problems. This is why it’s crucial to understand that the silent majority is not simply progressive but—more important—it’s <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2012/01/dangers-of-populism.html"><i>populist</i></a>.<br />
<br />
Poll after poll has shown that most Americans are deeply disturbed by the skyrocketing inequality of the neoliberal period. Moreover, when they are exposed to the facts around rising inequality (facts rarely introduced into political debate or media coverage), their opposition to it redoubles. But <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/our-feelings-about-inequality-its-complicated/">this</a> important research indicates one key reason why it has proven so difficult to translate that consensus into political action: the more people know about inequality, the more they distrust the only agency capable of doing something about it—the state.<br />
<br />
During <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberalism</a>’s heroic period, confidence in the state was shattered by the belief that interference in the “natural” operations of the market was both inefficient and tantamount to theft. The attack on the government was driven by a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">revolutionary zeal</a> to purify the new society of the decomposing remnants of <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">Fordist</a> life. But over the last decade, the sources of anti-government feeling have shifted. Neoliberalism fell far short of the precapitalist market utopia of libertarian imagination or the paradise of personal freedom <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2010/12/no-way-out-of-crisis.html">championed by the left and right alike</a>. Instead, it has revealed itself as merely another form of capitalism, in which the alienated force of capital is expressed through the power of big corporations and their servants in the state, while personal “freedom” is manufactured in line with the needs of marketing departments. Today people have no faith in the state <i>not</i> because it obstructs the advance of neoliberalism, but because it is identified as an<i> integral part of neoliberalism</i>.<br />
<br />
Increasingly both sides of the political spectrum have traced their woes to the corporate-state elite, as seen clearly in both the popular elements of the Tea Party and in Occupy. Yet the establishment within both parties, as an intrinsic part of that corporate-state elite, has <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/11/facing-democrats-in-age-of-occupy-pt-1.html">shrunk from rallying</a> this volatile public feeling. The <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/07/tea-party-marching-toward-oblivion.html">Tea Party phenomenon</a> was an only partial, but very instructive, exception. Although the Tea Party’s policy program was <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/resurrection-of-liberals.html">roundly unpopular</a> (registering support only among one-fifth to one-fourth of the population), it managed to make an outsized impact on national politics. In part, as the polemics from the left always emphasize, this is because moneyed interests in the Republican Party found it convenient to exploit the grassroots movement. But this is hardly the whole story. The Tea Party was the first organized expression of the universal popular animus against the corporate-state elite, and it was this as much as the increasingly ineffectual money in politics that vaulted it to national prominence.<br />
<br />
To mobilize this omnipresent latent populist anger, a presidential candidate would have to either be a progressive (in line with the popular majority), or a reactionary who can plausibly present his or her campaign as transcending the parochial social conservatism of the main Tea Party constituency. The first candidate who achieves that will become the most powerful leader in the United States in decades, capable of fundamentally reshaping the political landscape and unleashing the massive pressure for change in whatever direction he or she chooses.<br />
<br />
This potential, opened up by the crisis of neoliberalism, is what makes Rand Paul different from other Republican presidential candidates. Some of them, like Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, are superficially similar to Paul in their attempts to <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/rand-paul-cuts-own-path-wooing-blacks-backing-gay-rights.html">cultivate electoral constituencies</a> outside the dying evangelical white base of the party. But these appeals are fundamentally hollow because they offer nothing but trite gestures toward inclusion. When the social system can no longer sustain itself, social relations must be revolutionized. The other Republicans offer pandering in form with no new content; only Rand Paul offers the possibility of a fundamentally new politics in both form and content.<br />
<br />
Consider this scenario: Paul establishes himself as a legitimate candidate in the primary race by emphasizing his populist bona fides and by winning large donations from libertarian-minded billionaires like the Koch brothers. The social conservatives that populate the base of the Republican Party are nervous about some of Paul’s positions (decriminalizing drugs and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-exactly-is-rand-pauls-position-on-immigration-reform/274195/">tolerance of immigrants</a> come to mind), but his opposition to abortion rights and his church-going background soothe them, while the prospect of retaking the White House encourages them to tolerate his heterodoxy. The other side of the Republican base, the anti-tax, anti-deficit zealots (and there is considerable overlap here with the social conservatives) throw themselves into the Paul campaign. Meanwhile, his genuinely novel positions, like decriminalizing drugs and a robust critique of militarism, start to generate enthusiasm among the disaffected youth who have stayed away from politics for decades—enthusiasm that rises in direct proportion to the mounting attacks from the conventional politicians of both parties. As Paul’s momentum builds, the establishment politicians and corporate funders of the Republican Party convince themselves that he is their ticket back to power, and that once he holds the presidency they’ll be able to manipulate him into pursuing their agenda. The Paul campaign encourages this conclusion with discreet missions to the major funders.<br />
<br />
With money, conservative activists, and energized independents behind him, Paul rides this strange coalition to victory in the primaries. Now imagine that the Democrats have been fighting their own battle with populism in the primaries. A progressive insurgent like Elizabeth Warren has made a spirited run against the neoliberal establishment led by, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton. For whatever combination of reasons, Clinton vanquishes Warren and the progressive base goes into the election deeply demoralized.<br />
<br />
In the general election Paul (with ample justification) savages Clinton as the candidate of the internationalist corporate-state elite and presents himself as the champion of small business, individual rights, and American values. Paul—calling attention to the appalling series of banking scandals that the Obama administration refused to prosecute—demands that the big banks be broken up; Clinton equivocates. Paul, pushing to end the American role as policeman of the world, points to some foreign crisis or other, say the killing of a dozen American soldiers stationed in Syria; Clinton finds it difficult to distance herself from her own support for intervention. Paul vilifies China’s “stealing” of “American” jobs and global capital’s pronounced lack of loyalty to America; Clinton sputters something about free trade being a win-win policy, which no one believes after eight years of stagnation in the global economy.<br />
<br />
Of course, any number of trivial missteps or strategic errors could prevent Paul from making it to this point. Certainly if the Democrats chose a populist of their own they would have the clear advantage. And given how fragile the global economy already is, it’s by no means a safe bet to assume that things will basically continue for the next three years as they have the last three. But if Paul did make it to this point, he would win the election. And that’s when the real danger would present itself.<br />
<br />
Part 2: <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/07/rand-paul-could-redefine-american.html">Rand Paul could redefine American politics, straight into disaster</a>Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com14Shanghai, China31.230393 121.47370429.493424 118.89191699999999 32.967362 124.055491tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-37737028933462831102013-06-09T21:31:00.002-05:002013-06-11T04:03:58.365-05:00Culture as a Historical Problem, Part I: The Folk Tradition of the Classical Workers’ Movement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokp1RlpMjOdFhzMRCGHMhoStCotkOg8e-Sy8E1d7Ar6-2fShl4dpocjCRoNnX2TScKr80nocLb2vooK4q8UOVLFi3Xjk322diYYP9ituYyxYFvbEPWumh913DqnhdyvErYRjo3ALU-MyG/s1600/WoodyGuthrie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokp1RlpMjOdFhzMRCGHMhoStCotkOg8e-Sy8E1d7Ar6-2fShl4dpocjCRoNnX2TScKr80nocLb2vooK4q8UOVLFi3Xjk322diYYP9ituYyxYFvbEPWumh913DqnhdyvErYRjo3ALU-MyG/s400/WoodyGuthrie.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“<span style="font-size: small;">Solidarity
forever, the union makes us strong!” </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Ralph
Chaplin/Traditional </i></span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">We
all shall die.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>Metallica</i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
once heard a prominent leftist academic suggest that “the problem
with the left today is that it has no soundtrack.” For whatever
reason, that has stuck with me over the years, and this post is an
initial attempt to understand why that might be so. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Skepticism
is warranted. Of course it would be absurd to reduce the whole
complex problem of the left’s dysfunctionality to the question of a
shared culture. That’s certainly not the idea here. Instead, I’d like
to pose a few questions that have to do with culture and radical
politics, and hopefully set the stage for further reflection on the
relationship between them in a way that throws light on our current
predicament. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">That
predicament will have been evident to anyone who participated in the
Occupy movement during late 2011 and early 2012. While it was in many
ways a <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy.html">remarkable
moment</a>, it had some considerable <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-occupy-wall-street-progressive.html">problems</a>.
One such problem was its inability to successfully articulate its
fragmentary, disjointed social basis into an enduring political
force. Radicalized or left-liberal students, radical journalists,
various disaffected youth, pseudo-hippies, baby-boomers who had lost
their jobs and were indignant about it, a smattering of unionized
workers, and many people who had just been politicized or radicalized
for the first time and were looking for their political voice: the
movement was very much a patchwork of different groups who didn’t
always see eye-to-eye about short-term goals, much less overarching,
long-term strategies. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTOcHkg61LNdVvR4t_PtYnmW_8mc0mG9NcrukpgsBmTuYb7kocjetap6PoCowWawaOSqDt-5fanLuvno3ZbJW_D634O9oAlqxc0GyY_udVt-Ql2LZoDecXwTvfn6c6rTwwUSRWiQW40138/s1600/occupyoakland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTOcHkg61LNdVvR4t_PtYnmW_8mc0mG9NcrukpgsBmTuYb7kocjetap6PoCowWawaOSqDt-5fanLuvno3ZbJW_D634O9oAlqxc0GyY_udVt-Ql2LZoDecXwTvfn6c6rTwwUSRWiQW40138/s320/occupyoakland.jpg" width="240" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Any
social movement worthy of the name will necessarily represent a
diverse cross-section of the social body, and Occupy was no
exception. But its various parts, which occupiers went to great
lengths to hold together through strict dedication to the general
assembly form, never really seemed to blend into an organic whole. A
shared ideological substance was conspicuously lacking, as was the
most basic requirement of agreement on a shared enemy. Without a
clear conception of a common enemy, such as was provided by the
hatred of the bosses and the brutality of the industrial factory
floor during the labor struggles of the liberal period, or by a state
that endorsed the vicious racism of Jim Crow and the genocidal
imperialism of Vietnam during late <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/06/glossary-fordism.html">Fordism</a>, it is extremely difficult
for a movement to orient and impart to itself a sense of direction. This
is partially due to the specific sociohistorical conditions wrought
by <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/glossary-neoliberalism.html">neoliberal capitalism</a>, as Occupy emerged from a social and
ideological terrain uniquely shaped by a slick phenomenological
veneer of gee-whiz technological sophistication and individual
empowerment. Ideological characteristics like these make it<span style="font-style: normal;">
more difficult to concretize social domination than it was during
past periods, much less <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/08/apprehensions-of-social-aggregate.html">bring the structural whole itself into focus</a>.
</span></span>
</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
further than this, the current moment also lacks another crucial
dimension relative to earlier periods of mass struggle. It lacks the
considerable binding power of a shared milieu of creative practices
and expressive forms that, for a lack of a better term, we can call
“culture.” The historical work of cultural expression as a part
of left politics has been to synthesize the diverse backgrounds and
attitudes of its participants into a common experiential context, to
provisionally submerge ethnic, generational, religious, and other
differences in a collective identity through participation in a
shared aesthetic medium. What would something like this look like for
the neoliberal age, and what conditions would have to be met for its
emergence? </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
following comments reflect on the classical industrial workers’
movement and the role of music and song within it, while the next
part will discuss the same question within the context of the
revolutionary 1960s. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">During
the whole period of classical liberalism leading up to the massive
meltdown of global capitalism that was the Great Depression,
revolutionary anti-capitalism was, at its core, defined by the
consciousness that one was a member of a collective body of
industrial laborers who had nothing in common with the capitalist
class. Consequently it made sense to oppose them and, at the most
intense periods of struggle, to conclude that the capitalist class
was superfluous, and that by simply removing them the working class
could accede to its rightful position at the helm of industry. In the
classical liberal period the decision that one could and should
struggle against industrial capitalism as such was always taken on
the basis of a powerful shared experience, namely the organization of
industrial production itself. The spatial fixity and temporal
regularity of the process, along with the requirement that the
capitalist bring together, under the roof of one factory, what was
often a numerically massive workforce virtually guaranteed that
working people would eventually reflect on their individual
circumstances from the perspective of a large and powerful collective
subject. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">However,
the class consciousness, such as it was, of the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century industrial working class was not a mechanical
reflex of its historical conditions. It was also partly, but
importantly, mediated through a rich <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_folk_music#cite_ref-4">folk
tradition </a>of song. During meetings at the union hall, at lunch
breaks, and especially when workers marched out together to the
picket line to confront company guards or the ordered bayonets of the
state, work and protest songs were frequently a major aspect of
working class life. Both of the major early models of industrial
unionism that emerged in the United States, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Labor#Ideology">Knights
of Labor</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World#Folk_music_and_protest_songs">I.W.W</a>.,
were singing unions who drew on music to bring workers together in a
shared sense of struggle and to clarify their class position in
society. The Wobblies were particularly renowned for using the oral
media of speech and song to steel the resolve of nervous strikers,
e.g. the<a href="http://zinnedproject.org/2012/02/one-hundred-years-after-the-singing-strike/">
Lawrence textile strike</a> of 1912. (check out this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6os8BRJxvI4">superb
documentary</a>, available—for the moment—online). They were
also pretty resourceful: because bosses kept calling in the Salvation
Army band to play Christian hymns or patriotic tunes to drown out
their songs, Wobbly organizers simply adapted their songs to the
band’s melodies. Incidentally, this is why all of the Wobblies’ songs
satirize traditional Christian hymns, e.g. “There’ll Be Pie in the
Sky When You Die” is sung to the tune of “In the Sweet By and
By.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiBguJ-2hf2vMqVaQoVVIfEQHKHpKkL51OoksygtEJ0JaeNX5qWAO5BSa0txHLvFDq-gl7w493kg8ihWpjUgJ0aOzW3nvCP-6FlIon2lKweVuAo0Z7yIme9SFrhzoLW_l_IFvZgVfJATWi/s1600/singingstrike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiBguJ-2hf2vMqVaQoVVIfEQHKHpKkL51OoksygtEJ0JaeNX5qWAO5BSa0txHLvFDq-gl7w493kg8ihWpjUgJ0aOzW3nvCP-6FlIon2lKweVuAo0Z7yIme9SFrhzoLW_l_IFvZgVfJATWi/s400/singingstrike.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Striking textile workers, Lawrence, MA, 1912.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
specifically oral medium of the working-class folk tradition was both
a reflection of and an adaptation to its historical circumstances.
Almost always lacking musical instruments of its own, much less a
full band, the collective voice enunciated by the working-class
through its culture of song was available to any laborer with working
vocal chords. Regardless of language barriers, religious affiliation,
ethnicity, or any other source of difference, shared participation in
rhythm and tone can create a sense of common purpose and situation
even if one doesn’t understand the lyrical theme. Such group
practices persuade in a manner that is different from written speech
or straightforward verbal argument, though this is not to say that
they themselves are not argumentative. The oral folk tradition
mediated the very experience of work itself by helping to define it
as a political space, as a space that is constituted not through
merely “material relations between people,” but one that is
profoundly social and thus open to transformation by human action. In
short, the singing union and the singing strike were forms of
cultural expression that worked simultaneously to politically
articulate a collective subject and to mediate a historical formation
of the relations of production. </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Now
obviously it would be absurd to see the fortunes of the labor
movement in this period entirely as a result of its folk culture. The
workers attempting to organize industry during the liberal period
were entangled within a globalized system of production that remained
opaque for the vast majority of people within it, and organized
labor’s decisive victory would not come until <a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2013/04/if-we-dont-go-global-we-cant-win.html">an
organizing strategy based upon an adequate understanding of its
historical context</a> came into focus. Under these circumstances the
bonds of culture only play a limited role, but they do play a role,
one that has less to do with causality than with <i>functionality.
</i>The oral culture of song <i>worked </i>in a particular way for
the industrial working class, bolstering its sense of collective
identity and common cause despite differences in location, craft,
language, and skill. Like virtually all working-class consciousness
of the era, it was conceptually limited by its valorization of labor
as the ontological source of all wealth, and by its tendency to
understand labor as an identity category, rather than as an integral
moment in the reproduction of the capitalist system. But it also
worked to remove the fog from the battlefield of the industrial class
war, clarifying its stakes and removing all ambiguity as to the
identity of the enemy. In that sense the classical folk culture
played an important part in “filling out” or constituting the
collective identity of the working class.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In
reviewing this history, I’m trying to throw into relief what seems to
me to be an acute absence felt within the present and open up a
certain problematic. The texture of everyday experience within
neoliberal society, while varying widely depending on one’s social
position within it, is ineluctably shaped by an internationalized and
highly financialized structure of capital accumulation that colors
the experience of social domination even as it veils its own form as
a historical totality. Under such conditions, what cultural medium or
set of practices are in a position to “fill out” the
self-understanding of a radical left collective subject capable of
successfully opposing neoliberal capitalism? Put differently: what
forms of cultural production could work in the present to synthesize
a mass subject in a way analogous to the function of the folk
tradition in the classical workers’ movement, but adequate to
neoliberal society? It may be the case that it no longer makes sense
to pose the question in this way, but if that is true then we need to
consider alternative formulations that could capture the complexities
and contradictions of cultural production today, as well as its
relationship—both possible and actual—to radical political
consciousness.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Jamie http://www.blogger.com/profile/18363083808445009325noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-17318840637012614192013-06-04T17:48:00.000-05:002013-06-06T23:42:53.865-05:00What is an Institutional Crisis of Capitalism?<style type="text/css">P.sdfootnote { margin-left: 0.24in; text-indent: -0.24in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-size: 10pt; }P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }A:link { }A.sdfootnoteanc { font-size: 57%; }</style>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-size: large;"><b>Lessons
from the Thirties</b></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXbZrG-WaeoEnDzEWtBAwmbvSZCuShPB7kJXk9zCA2hWJMhXBw7lOKfEJFOrQFBhy8V1PfKtQBKIauzxfPxzTyZ5_7PPtsTD90ChdX9fbiREFlVhh1zW5JP-71c2BbEo6Z5zOHFxpzyTQd/s1600/M_Bourke-White.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXbZrG-WaeoEnDzEWtBAwmbvSZCuShPB7kJXk9zCA2hWJMhXBw7lOKfEJFOrQFBhy8V1PfKtQBKIauzxfPxzTyZ5_7PPtsTD90ChdX9fbiREFlVhh1zW5JP-71c2BbEo6Z5zOHFxpzyTQd/s320/M_Bourke-White.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">How
do corporations fit into society? And what happens when they don’t?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">The answer to the second question is “an institutional crisis of
capitalism” – like the one we’re currently experiencing.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">An
institutional crisis can be defined as a break in the continuity of
social reproduction, which is never fulfilled by commercial relations
alone, but always requires public intervention into the daily lives
of citizens, through schooling, health care, policing, urban
amenities and retirement provisions as well as multiple forms of
regulation conditioning the activities of businesses. Every major
crisis (of the kind that come around once every forty to fifty years)
is marked by institutional breakdowns at various scales, whether
local, national or international. Their severity interrupts capital
accumulation itself: thus the crisis, including today's. Yet to understand the causes
and outcomes of these breakdowns we also need to answer the first
question, about the institutional “fit” that prevailed – for
better or worse – in the decades preceding the turmoil. And that,
in turn, entails gaining some understanding of the forces and social
relations of production as they have evolved to maturity in each
successive era of capitalist development.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;">In
this post I’m going to look back on the development of the American
corporation in the early 20th century and characterize the type of
society that formed around the economic engine of mass manufacturing.
Then I’ll point to some of social reproduction problems that caused
the Great Depression, and to the initial solutions that were tried in
the Thirties.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1110115832783903104#1" name="top1"></a>
In subsequent posts I intend to pursue this analysis through the
Keynesian-Fordist and Neoliberal periods. I'm not going to get into footnotes, but the ideas on institutional crisis are based on the "Social Structures of Accumulation" school and the French "Regulation Approach." Check out David Gordon, <i>Segmented Work, Divided Workers</i> and Michel Aglietta, <i>A Theory of Capitalist Regulation</i>.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Why
do all this history? Because it's impossible to understand the complex and
contradictory structure of today’s society without retracing at
least some of the pathways that have brought contemporary class
dynamics into being. </span><span style="color: black;">The hope is that the arguments on this blog could become
sharper and more robust with reference to a more detailed historical
account. An account whose broad lines and particulars you’re invited
to reject, amend or improve, by the way.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><b>The
Drive System</b></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The
expansion of the US railroad industry in the period 1850-70 achieved
two things: it established the distribution infrastructure of a
continental market and it fixed the norms of corporate concentration,
hierarchy and discipline that would later structure the monopoly
sector of American business enterprise. From that point forward many
other sectors such as oil, tobacco, steel, farm equipment, etc, all
experimented with the practice of <i>vertical integration</i>, which
meant taking over both supply and distribution chains for any given
product line. Vertical integration allowed the corporations to manage
an entire business process under a single hierarchy and thereby
shrink the transaction costs that were previously incurred by
multiple firms coordinating their activities through the marketplace.
Significant economies of scale were achieved, unleashing price wars
that contributed to the worldwide deflation of the 1870s and ‘80s.
When profitability returned from 1897 on, conditions were ripe for
the major banking houses (Morgan and Rockefeller) to oversee an
immense merger wave which used national and international capital to
assemble continental-sized firms, constituting the American monopoly
sector in one financial swoop. US Steel, General Electric,
International Harvester, Du Pont, Anaconda Copper, American Telephone
and Telegraph, International Paper, National Biscuit Company, United
Fruit, etc – all these and many others were founded almost
simultaneously, in a single four-year period, from 1898-1902.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglLKEA9_XWTFzvhNQUyyLqSKHSeCLyxToMmWyqpTLo5u3Ax_hRAFXtV3Mr5Urgqva8FTBrz0nMXZibolIcL42dpG-I504LqWNMQf9ozWG9fdTQ7EQ8-pWbiZZLO7gMMOE4xkzPe74XgL9o/s1600/IntegratedAssemLine_1913_HR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglLKEA9_XWTFzvhNQUyyLqSKHSeCLyxToMmWyqpTLo5u3Ax_hRAFXtV3Mr5Urgqva8FTBrz0nMXZibolIcL42dpG-I504LqWNMQf9ozWG9fdTQ7EQ8-pWbiZZLO7gMMOE4xkzPe74XgL9o/s320/IntegratedAssemLine_1913_HR.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">This
was the backdrop against which the Detroit automobile industry
emerged. As everyone remembers, assembly-line mass manufacturing was
pioneered by the Ford Motor Co. from 1908 onward. Vertical
integration was completed by a revolution in the technological
organization of production. With its endlessly rolling conveyor belts
and drop chutes moving product from upper to lower floors, the
Highland Park factory that opened in 1913 realized Marx's uncanny
vision of the capitalist factory as an integral function beyond human
use or will: “an automatic system of machinery, set in motion by an
automaton, a moving power that moves itself... so that the workers
themselves are cast merely as its conscious in linkages” (Marx, <i>Grundrisse</i>).</span><sup><span style="color: black;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1110115832783903104#sdfootnote2sym" name="sdfootnote2anc"></a></span></sup><span style="color: black;">
Both the role of the worker and the structure of command changed radically with the introduction of the assembly line. Ford’s essential contribution to American industry</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> – portrayed so brilliantly in Chaplin's <i>Modern Times</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> – </span></span> was known to
contemporary observers as </span><span style="color: black;"><i>the
drive system</i></span><span style="color: black;">: a radically new form
of labor control where the machines set the pace. Under this this new
arrangement, the foreman’s heavy-handed authority
over individual workers gave way to the disciplinary function of engineers maintaining the optimal (and gradually increasing) speed of highly rationalized production sequences. The rate
of exploitation, and therefore of profit, rose dramatically with the
drive system.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">In
1914 Ford proclaimed the five-dollar day, effectively doubling wages
for a shift reduced to eight hours. At the same time the corporation
introduced the highly invasive Sociology Department whose attempts at
educating and moralizing the workforce would catch the attention of a
faraway observer, Antonio Gramsci, to whom we owe the concept of
Fordism. As Gramsci wrote in the <i>Prison Notebooks</i>: "The enquiries conducted by the industrialists into the workers' private lives and the inspection services created by some firms to control the 'morality' of their workers are necessities of the new methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives... thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding... the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man." Yet the Sociology Department failed to achieve its aims and
even the relatively high wages of Detroit industry were never enough
to allow workers to buy the products they were producing. World War I
gave a much more significant boost to the manufacturing economy,
through the expansion of export markets and then institution of the
War Industries Board for US military production in 1917. A second
merger wave ensued, including the takeover of General Motors by
Pierre Du Pont, who installed Alfred P. Sloan as corporate manager.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjphmmhc6cC15Od9jxLzr0VgjDUH2O-Ws8Yxp0UEnybQcutYUp9KVCTe8plJzc-XMEC5egtzsN7zhVu2l3Gba_eic4LkSgSjS-brWze2PAdsFu4uNJC-mVTESlyRqKygiFDtznVM2GEeTK/s1600/General_Motors_building_089833pv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjphmmhc6cC15Od9jxLzr0VgjDUH2O-Ws8Yxp0UEnybQcutYUp9KVCTe8plJzc-XMEC5egtzsN7zhVu2l3Gba_eic4LkSgSjS-brWze2PAdsFu4uNJC-mVTESlyRqKygiFDtznVM2GEeTK/s320/General_Motors_building_089833pv.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> </span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Sloan
perfected the flow-chart of the multidivisional corporation. A
central office under a single president took care of strategy,
coordination, advertising and basic research, while separate
divisions were established for vertically integrated product lines as
well as regional distribution networks, all of which enjoyed a degree
of relative autonomy. During the same period GM proposed two major
innovations that would be adopted by all consumer-oriented
mass-manufacturing corporations. The first was an expanded range of
styling options and accessories changing year by year and inciting
consumers to buy new models for status reasons, long before the previous purchase had exhausted
its use value (this was the beginning of planned obsolescence). The
second was a financing arm, GMAC (General Motors Acceptance
Corporation) which provided the credit that made mass consumption a
reality. The Twenties roared with the twin engines of assembly-line
manufacturing and corporate-funded credit: Detroit and other US
manufacturing centers exported their products around the world and
the stock market entered what seemed to be an endless boom.</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The
growth of mass production and particularly of the automobile industry
transformed American life, installing the vertically integrated multidivisional corporation
at the center of the national economy, establishing a new middle
class of college-educated engineers and managers, inaugurating mass
consumption, introducing credit into the household economy, kicking
off the beginnings of the suburban migration, and last but not least,
elevating New York to the position of global financial center.
Looking back on the period, the economist Joseph Schumpeter took it
as the very example of a “long wave” of capital expansion. Long
waves are not simple ten-year business cycles, but instead, forty- to
fifty-year periods of development. At the outset of these periods,
key technological inventions are transformed by innovative
entrepreneurs into business organizations that become the leading
sources of economic growth, restructuring an entire society in their
image. As Schumpeter wrote in his book <i>Business Cycles</i> (1939):</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.51in; margin-right: 0.33in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.51in; margin-right: 0.33in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
motorcar would never have acquired its present importance and become
so potent a reformer of life if it had remained</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">what
it was thirty years ago and if it had failed to shape the
environmental conditions – roads, among them – for its own
further development. In such cases, innovation is carried out in
steps each of which</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">constitutes
a cycle. But these cycles may display a family likeness and</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">a
relation to one another which tends to weld them into a higher unit</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">that
will stand out as a historical individual.</span></span><sup><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1110115832783903104#sdfootnote3sym" name="sdfootnote3anc"></a></span></span></sup></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.51in; margin-right: 0.33in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Schumpeter’s
point is clear: the automobile industry lay at the center of US
economic development in the early twentieth century. The question is,
what happened in the Thirties to provoke the crisis of the
mass-manufacturing era that began in the Tens and Twenties? And why
do we call the following period “Fordism,” when the expansion of
the industrial drive system and the accompanying forms of social
reproduction had clearly occurred, in the US at least, in the period
from 1898 to 1929?</span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><b>Institutional
Calamity</b></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The
answers to those questions cannot be simple. On the national level,
the social structures of agricultural towns, urban immigrant
neighborhoods, craft unions and single-proprietor businesses were all
radically undermined by the scale, productivity and standardizing
rationality of the vertically integrated multidivisional corporation
and the drive system, whose relentless pace exhausted workers and
whose tremendous efficiency soon led to problems of both
overproduction and technological unemployment. On the international
level, patterns of trade, finance, war-making and diplomacy were
disrupted and transformed by the decline of the British empire after
1914 and the shift of hegemony toward the US as both world banker and
global entrepôt of raw materials, machine tools and manufactured
goods. The inability of New York fully to take over from London and
provide credit to the rest of the world after 1929 led to the
definitive collapse of the British gold standard, the failure of the
export markets on which Detroit and other manufacturing centers
depended for their superabundant production, and the ensuing
employment crisis in all sectors of the US economy. The timid
beginnings of employee welfare programs advanced by the monopoly
sectors in the Twenties proved totally inadequate in the face of this
widespread distress. And needless to say, the US banking sector was
in no position to provide any further consumer credit, nor were
households in any position to expand their already threatening burden
of debt. The engineer and businessman Herbert Hoover, who was in
office from 1929 to 1933, could do nothing more than exhort Americans
to greater levels of motivation and self-organization. The last weeks
of his presidency saw an uncontrollable run on the banks in which
hundreds of thousands of individuals lost their savings, setting the
stage for the social-democratic policies of the Roosevelt
administration.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">We
think of Roosevelt as a miracle-maker who transformed the United
States single-handed, through the generosity of the New Deal. In fact
his administration used the bank run (which followed on the collapse
of Kreditanstalt bank in Austria and the beginnings of the
full-fledged European depression) as the pretext for quite draconian emergency
measures, principally the Glass-Steagall Act that broke the power of
the Wall Street investment banks and Executive Order 6102 that forced
citizens to surrender their gold in exchange for paper dollars at the
rate of $20.67 per troy ounce. Thus the New Deal began with
powerful acts of repression and outright expropriation affecting the owners of money capital.
Once that had been done, the government unilaterally raised the price
of gold to $35 an ounce, generating an expansion of the money supply
that could be used to vastly extend federal operations – at the
price of withdrawing from the gold standard, abandoning the world
market and thereby contributing to the rise of fascist war machines
in both Europe and Asia.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jXfD8oM2evyLuNirHTUM7ecuENX5YBs7eqgQbhPKuylSgBBG7E_N1YCD4Wnl2aF_l2RCN3_OE4PvyDS9zldRjOLFNiX2LxzAQrPJATyNHvQzX-y1zuR74Mrfjg8anb5s9uU4CWk3e-O3/s1600/FDR_Signs_Social_Security_Act-1935.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jXfD8oM2evyLuNirHTUM7ecuENX5YBs7eqgQbhPKuylSgBBG7E_N1YCD4Wnl2aF_l2RCN3_OE4PvyDS9zldRjOLFNiX2LxzAQrPJATyNHvQzX-y1zuR74Mrfjg8anb5s9uU4CWk3e-O3/s320/FDR_Signs_Social_Security_Act-1935.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">FDR signs Social Security Act, 1935<br />
Frances Perkins and Robert LaFollette directly behind, Robert Wagner to his right</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The
centerpiece of the Hundred Days, the National Recovery Act, was an ambitious central-planning effort that aimed to curb industrial and
agricultural overproduction by the imposition of detailed regulatory
“codes,” backed in some cases by subsidies. The goal was to eliminate the mountains of unsalable commodities and the vicious price-wars whose frequent consequences were bankruptcy and unemployment. However, the NRA was declared
unconstitutional in 1935, by which point it had proven ineffective.
Yet in parallel the New Dealers launched the Works Progress
Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corp, which put masses
of unemployed people back to work. They tried out an original form of
regional industrial planning with the Tennessee Valley Administration
for flood control, rural electrification and agricultural
development. And in bold moves of still more lasting significance,
they created the Federal Housing Administration, the Social Security
Administration and finally the National Labor Relations Board, a
product of the Wagner Act guaranteeing the right of workers to form
unions. All of these projects allowed civil-society reformers of the
Progressive Era to take up paying jobs for the public good.</span></div>
</div>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Through
this kind of legislation the role of the federal government expanded
to include entirely new public-service sectors that complemented the
process of middle-class formation initially launched by the monopoly
corporations. The rise of industrial unionism, which began with
the great wave of sit-down strikes in 1937, added yet another category to
this process of middle-class formation, through the creation of labor
bureaucracies and associated federal experts. The institutional
response to the crisis laid the groundwork for a durable
transformation of the US class structure. Politically, it also
created the so-called “New Deal Coalition” that would dominate US
politics for almost forty years, on the basis of multi-ethnic and cross-class alliances around the projects of collective bargaining, welfare provision and urban renewal.</span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDsaPuQ1RC8r7jP8A86li_6EA7zPa6Gr_UWHFENjKEm7Sg6pMrg6VgBdaFbHrqfaIWUZngKf59dheRBbOLpin7KVhn_OCp351pf-n7L7oZphx4-z2_s-PCXvI-mqeYUJ5IkKN8bvSTyfl/s1600/01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRDsaPuQ1RC8r7jP8A86li_6EA7zPa6Gr_UWHFENjKEm7Sg6pMrg6VgBdaFbHrqfaIWUZngKf59dheRBbOLpin7KVhn_OCp351pf-n7L7oZphx4-z2_s-PCXvI-mqeYUJ5IkKN8bvSTyfl/s320/01.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Download <a href="http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/t_magazine.pdf">here</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Yet
despite all this, the underlying problems had not been solved.
Another serious contraction, known as the “second depression,”
struck the US economy in 1937. Many feared that progress in machine
manufacturing would lead to permanent technological unemployment for
broad swathes of the population, including not only craft workers but
also poor sharecroppers replaced by giant new tilling and harvesting
combines (as in a memorable scene from the film version of Steinbeck's <i>Grapes of Wrath</i>).<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1110115832783903104#sdfootnote4sym" name="sdfootnote4anc"></a>
Yet by the winter of 1937, shortly after Roosevelt was reelected with a tremendous majority of the popular vote, </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;">his administration's
legislative initiatives were already paralyzed by a coalition of
Republicans and Southern Democrats protecting both regional and capital interests. </span>The difficulty of achieving a consensus on the need for radical
change seems to be a characteristic of severe institutional crises. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">After a decade-long voyage to the brink of despair, the country’s
definitive return to economic growth was only achieved by still
greater outlays of the federal budget, legitimated by WWII and
directly administrated by corporate executives acting in concert with
military planners. The flip side of the careful limitation of industrial and agricultural production attempted under the National Recovery Administration was this relatively indiscriminate "Keynesian" spending, which pumped money into a runaway growth economy oriented to military rivalry, with its dramatic exaggeration of ordinary capitalist competition. The postwar social order would arise from
government debt financing, corporate planning and military
discipline, expanded through emergency measures to an economic space
far beyond US borders. It would be based on a new wave of
technological and organizational innovation precipitated directly by
the conditions of multi-theater combat. And it would result, as I’ll
show later on, in the formation of an unequal global trading regime
that can be defined as Liberal Empire. The sobering lesson of the
Great Depression is that economic growth could only be recovered
through the response to an even greater calamity, namely all-out
global warfare.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">After all that, it's time for some conclusions. In
an important post to this blog, one of our authors remarks on
<a href="http://permanentcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/08/apprehensions-of-social-aggregate.html">the “heroic” nature of the Fordist collectivity</a>, as opposed to
the cold and disjointed statistical aggregates that currently
represent the social whole. Should we not understand this heroic
collectivity quite literally, as the democratic expression of a
military ardor that appeared as the only sure escape route from the
economic disaster of the Great Depression? And yet by the very same
token, should we not recognize how well-founded is the post-1968
resistance to the re-imposition of any such national unity? It seems
to me that in order to draw inspiration from the social forms of the
New Deal, with their undeniably positive egalitarian characteristics,
one must also assess the geopolitical underpinnings of the postwar
social compact. The difficulty lies in separating out the aspirations
and achievements of the New Deal social democrats from the
expansionary drive of Cold War capital accumulation. The fusion of
these two dynamics is what is indicated – and in many ways, covered
over – by the notion of a hegemonic postwar Fordism.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipu5ZzmcS3YIrVuiKTmcGDTF3MBeKthlm2auJx4R_5cPLMADb20p6fbe-b5HQdXKxj2XZm-zDD_M67qnj39MemUvYTHTX2VZF-FTvH2ZB7BOINGNHQ6q4NAmYbq5dpTNdTtFTjG6HiRpAf/s1600/Willow-Run_6000th.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipu5ZzmcS3YIrVuiKTmcGDTF3MBeKthlm2auJx4R_5cPLMADb20p6fbe-b5HQdXKxj2XZm-zDD_M67qnj39MemUvYTHTX2VZF-FTvH2ZB7BOINGNHQ6q4NAmYbq5dpTNdTtFTjG6HiRpAf/s320/Willow-Run_6000th.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ford B-24 bomber plant, Willow Run, Michigan, ca. 1944</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The
abject failure of the Bush-Cheney administration’s attempt to
restart the military-industrial engines of economic growth shows just
how important it is not to confuse the two trends – because the
same formula can always be tried once again, with even worse
consequences. Symmetrically, the failure of the Obama administration
to propose any major policy change whatsoever to the financialized
status quo reveals the fundamental need to generate a new collective
project. Doing so requires overcoming deep divides. This can only be
done if we understand the needs and desires that are generated by the
class contradictions of American society. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">In
this post I’ve tried to tease out some of the bases on which the
contemporary class composition was forged, in the course of a major
institutional crisis of capitalism. In the next post I’ll examine
the consolidated social structure of the Cold War economic order, and
also look at its breakdown (roughly 1968-79)</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> – </span>a story that still
haunts us today.</span></div>
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