Government Strike-Breaking as "Anti-Terrorism"?

From WSWS.org:

On Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an agency of Obama's Justice Department, announced that it was investigating as a “national security” issue unsubstantiated charges of sabotage leveled by Verizon against striking workers. FBI Special Agent Bryan Travers issued a provocative email connecting the alleged incidents to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“Because critical infrastructure has been affected, namely the telecommunications of both a hospital and a police department, the FBI is looking into this matter from a security standpoint as part of our security efforts leading up to the 9/11 anniversary,” the email stated.

A day later, the New York Post reported that New York City has begun deploying police officers, including members of an anti-terror unit, to escort strike-breakers across picket lines and monitor picketers.

According to the Post, police officers are “monitoring Verizon garages and following its trucks with cops from all over the city, including members of the Critical Response anti-terrorism units.” The newspaper quoted one police officer complaining, “We have to follow Verizon trucks all day.”

The government and police are seizing on the charges of sabotage to increase pressure on the workers, even as they ignore numerous instances of picketing workers being injured by managers or strike-breakers.

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Reports from the Picketlines

SW.org has the story here, from the front lines of the Verizon Strike:

The company's overall workforce now majority nonunion, CWA and IBEW members need to see workers at VZW as potential allies and future union brothers and sisters. We need to turn the tide back toward a majority union company. Many (if not all) in-store technical workers will lose their jobs at the end of the month when the company reorganizes tech support, so there has never been a better time to demonstrate the benefits a union can provide.

Unions also need to go back to the tactics from 1989 and encourage customers not to pay their bills in solidarity with the strike. Now, with online billing, the company has a rock-solid income--but a campaign of de-enrolling in Easy Pay by the union could make waves. The 45,000 union members themselves are customers, with connections to literally hundreds of thousands of other households.

In addition, we need to highlight the toll Verizon's greed is taking on our families. Not only are strikers losing pay, but on August 30, we lose our health care. Rallies with children and dependant family members could expose the blatant greed of a profitable company depriving thousands of people of necessary care.

Besides reaching out to VZW and the public, we need to focus on the kind of aggressive, disruptive tactics that can win this strike. The outcome of this strike is unwritten, but the pieces are there for an important victory for labor.

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Unsystematic remarks about how to theorize oppression in a Marxist framework

What does solidarity mean for socialist politics? Take the example of the oppression of women. We've all encountered self-styled progressive men who seem to think that the fight against sexism is merely of interest to women. The liberation of women isn't their own responsibility; it's only the job of women to fight sexism and gender oppression. Because they're men, they might even think that they just won't be able to ever understand the oppression of women. So these men think it's OK to stand on the sidelines.

That's not a socialist position. To be a socialist and a man is to be absolutely committed to ending the oppression of women. It is think that you have a responsibility to learn everything there is to know about how women are oppressed by listening and immersing yourself in the history of struggle. To be a socialist and a man is to believe, first of all, that you have a responsibility to refuse participate in the oppression of women. Second of all it is to believe that you have a responsibility to be an active participant in the struggle for women's liberation. You have to think that the fight for women's liberation is your fight too. The same goes for straight people and the fight against lgbt oppression, for white lgbt people in the fight against racism, and so on. To be a socialist is to think that you have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with all groups fighting against oppression, to see their struggle as your own struggle. That's the core meaning of the politics of solidarity, of uniting and fighting.

***

A major way that racism functions in contemporary societies is that many white people feel indifferent to the suffering of people of color. Their default position is to think that black suffering is their problem, but someone else's problem. This was obvious during the aftermath of Katrina. What this makes clear is that many whites don't see racial oppression and inequality as a problem which they have a responsibility to struggle against. We can imagine them telling themselves things like "well, that's not my problem, that's just a problem for the black community to solve." You see this same thing in the conservative victim-blaming ideologies of "self help".

Socialists completely reject this way of thinking. Solidarity requires that we care about the pain and suffering of other human beings. It means that we take the oppression of any one particular group to be an injury to all. We don't carve up society into different racial groups and say that injustices faced by one group are only of concern to members of that group. The politics of solidarity requires that you see the struggles of the oppressed as your struggle as well. It requires that you make it your business to learn about the history of resistance to all forms of oppression, even those that don't affect you directly. The more people that are enlisted in the fight against oppression the better.

***

Modern racism emerges out of European colonialism and the slave trade. It grows out of a need to justify the enslavement, domination and subordination of non-white peoples to the ruling classes of Europe. Thus, racism and capitalism co-originate and make each other possible. Modern capitalism comes of age in the context of expropriations of indigenous populations, colonial extraction of natural resources, and the enslavement of human beings. It is for this reason, that race and class are deeply intertwined. The class system has always depended upon racial oppression, and racial oppression has always occurred in the context of class divisions. Thus, to think that you can overthrow one without the other is naive. For example, the Latino and Black liberation struggles in the US, in periods of heightened struggle and radicalization, have always concluded that fully abolishing racism means doing away with capitalism. Read the 13 point program of the Young Lords Party, or the program of the Black Panthers. They are uncompromising anti-capitalists. I think that's the kind of perspective the Left needs today.

***

Black oppression is not entirely reducible to class oppression, but it is inextricably bound up with it. Capitalism comes into existence "dripping", as Marx vividly put it, "from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt". That is to say, Marx's theory of primitive accumulation had it that capitalism only comes to exist on the back of the dispossession of peasants, the expropriation of indigenous populations, colonialism and slavery. Racism and capitalism are linked from the very beginning.

This view, that racial oppression is not wholly reducible to class exploitation is basically the position defended by Trotsky in debates with Afro-Trinidadian Marxist CLR James within the SWP in the 30s and 40s. Trotsky's position was to reject the nationalist approach staked out by the CP as mechanical and inflexible. Whether socialists should support the self-determination line is a question of whether the masses of black people are demanding it. But Trotsky wanted to walk a fine line here, he did not want to simply reject the call for self-determination out of hand. On the contrary, Trotsky sensed some latent racism amongst leftists who decried self-determination because it "distracted from class". Trotsky said of this phenomenon that "the argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation of the ideology of the white workers". "The Negro", Trotsky argued in 1939, "can be developed to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement. For Trotsky, however, the black struggle against racism should not wait for white workers to be won over to anti-racism, it had to begin immediately, and the job of all socialists was to support such struggles in whatever form they took. He thus argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever".

***

What is the relationship between race and class? In order to answer this question, we have to talk about social relations, the level of development of the productive forces, the mode of production, distributions of power, geography, culture, the basic structure of political institutions, in short all the things that make up the bread and butter of the Marxist analysis of society and history. That is to say, race must be understood materially and historically, i.e. in terms of the material conditions of society in its historical context.

The material character of racism makes clear why we can't disentangle race and class. This is why we cannot say that race is a mere epiphenomenon that is only to be found in our language, culture and discourse. Race isn't just an idea or concept which we can critically analyze by solely examining the genealogy of its movement in thought and language. Neither is racism a merely individual or ethical problem that happens to afflict certain individuals. Racial domination is materially inscribed in the basic social institutions that constitute modern capitalist societies. It is a structural feature of the system. We therefore can't properly understand contemporary capitalism without understanding the function that race plays within it. Capitalism has always been racialized from the very beginning. But if we can't understand capitalism without understanding racism, neither can we properly understand race without understanding how racism has always been entangled in other social relations of power, in the economic structure of society, etc. That is, we can't understand what the roots of racism are unless we understand the historical development of contemporary capitalist societies (including their imperialist and colonialist projects). No critique of capitalism without the critique of racism; no critique of racism without the critique of capitalism.

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Verizon Workers Out On Strike

Over 45,000 Verizon workers, from Massachusetts to Virginia, are out on strike, marking one of largest labor actions in the US in quite some time. SW.org has the story:

Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) walked out August 7 after voting overwhelmingly--including 91 percent of CWA members--to authorize a strike. The workers are technicians and customer support employees in Verizon's wire lines division, which provides Internet and land phone lines to homes and businesses in the Northeast. The telecommunications giant is attempting to strip its employees of benefits the union workforce has successfully fought for over the years, including the imposition of 25 percent of health care costs onto workers who have paid nothing until now; the elimination of traditional pensions; and the weakening of job security.

Read more about the strike here and here. There are clearly challenges ahead, as the SW piece makes clear, but the willingness of workers to take on a powerful corporation speaks to a growing discontent with the crisis, austerity and the broadside attack on working class living standards being waged by both of the major political parties.

Here's what readers can do to get involved if you're based in the Northeast where most of the activity is happening:

1. Contact the IBEW and/or CWA locals in your area to find out where picket lines and/or rallies are taking place. Explain that you are trying to build support and ask how you can help.
   
2. Visit picket lines regularly. Bring workers water, coffee, refreshments, and whatever you can to help show support.
3. Be part of pickets outside of Verizon Wireless stores in your area. The IBEW has said that it's already organizing these in the Boston area.
   

If you're not in the Northeast, here's what you can do:

1. You might consider contacting the CWA and IBEW local in your area and ask if they plan any action in your area.
   
2. Keep your eyes peeled for solidarity events. Perhaps there will be solidarity protests outside of local Verizon stores. Get in touch with local left-wing organizations to see whether or not your local Left is involved solidarity efforts.
   
3. Pass resolutions of support in your union or community organization and communicate them to the CWA and IBEW. Monetary donations, even small ones, will be appreciated. If you're a union member, consider taking an organized delegation from your workplace to the picket line.
4. Fill out the online petition against Verizon and send it to friends.
   

This has the potential to be very politicizing in the context of the crisis and the recent debt "deal". If this fight starts to gain national attention it could open up space to articulate a critique of the politics of austerity. Of course, the Right will cite this as an attempt by "greedy" workers to ruin the poor helpless capitalists at Verizon who, let it be noted, are not only fabulously wealthy, but are also recipients of a massive federal bailout as well as huge tax rebates (see the SW.org article for details). Steve Early at In These Times describes the situation as follows:

Like General Electric, which just won givebacks from CWA and other unions, Verizon “isn’t under any financial stress,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The company reported $10.2 billion in profits in 2010 and its net income for the first half of this year was $6.9 billion. Over the past four years, Verizon earned nearly $20 billion for its shareholders (a record of profitably used to justify the $258 million spent on salaries, bonuses and stock options for just five of its top executives, including new CEO Lowell McAdam, during the same period).

And like GE, Verizon has pursued a systematic and long-term strategy of de-unionization. It has thwarted organizing at its fast-growing and hugely-profitable cellular subsidiary, Verizon Wireless, while steadily eliminating unionized jobs on the traditional landline side of its business.

Still, the anti-worker rhetoric from the Right is sure to continue in spite of the facts. But such nonsense about the "persecution" of wealthy capitalists is to be expected from the ruling class and its lackeys. The reality is that this fightback has the potential to inspire other workers to confront their employers as well:

A victory by Verizon would send a powerful message of encouragement to every other unionized employer seeking “contract relief,’’ based on balance sheets far less impressive than Verizon’s. In the majority of workplaces, where pay, benefits, and personnel policies can be changed unilaterally by management - without any prior discussion with affected employees - non-union employers would be similarly emboldened to lower their employment standards. On the other hand, if widespread labor and community support helps Verizon strikers maintain a model contract, all Massachusetts workers would have something to celebrate on Labor Day, for the first time in a long while.

It also has the capacity to open up a discussion about alternative means of resistance that aren't shackled to two-party straightjacket. As Steve Early and

The CWA has organized successful strikes against Verizon in 1983, 1986, 1989, 1998 and 2000. In 2000, Verizon workers struck for 18 days, costing the company about $40 million. Clearly this action has the ability to inflict damage. But Verizon has been slowly whittling away at its unionzed workforce for some time. The unionized workforce has shrunk from 75,000 to 45,000 since the last walkout. The non-unionzed workforce at Verizon is over 150,000, which could make it easier for Verizon to weather the storm this time around. We'll have to see how things turn out, but this much is certain: nothing will be gained without strong networks of solidarity within and without the union.

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What is Standard and Poor's?

Standard and Poor's (S&P) is a private company, which is a division of the McGraw Hill Company. Among other things, S&P is one of the "big three" credit rating companies, which also includes Moody's and the Fitch Group (who have not downgraded US credit). Ostensibly, credit rating companies assess the "credit worthiness" of a particular borrower by determining her ability to pay back a loan.

Like many other features of contemporary capitalism, S&P is an unelected, democratically unaccountable entity that has, as recent events have shown, a large amount of influence over political and economic matters. And, like other democratically unelected entities with enormous influence over political and economic matters, S&P is often draped in the apolitical language of "technical expertise". This is a key cornerstone of neoliberal ideology. S&P, just like the IMF and the WTO, are legitimated by reference to technocratic expertise, not to a democratic will. According to their official self-image, such institutions are neutral bodies filled with smart technocratic experts who have administrative power over purely non-political matters. In the case of S&P, the self-image is one of a neutral, impartial bystander who merely deals in "information services".

But is S&P really just a neutral assemblage of impartial experts and wonks who have no political or economic interests or power of their own? Of course not. As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, "it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?". S&P, like other elements of the financial sector, was a substantial player in the 2007 economic meltdown, fomented in part by labyrinthine non-sense like "collateralized debt obligations". As Krugman puts it, "S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste." Worse still, "S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong."

Now Krugman mainly intends to impugn the credibility of S&P's self-image as a competent body of experts, but in impugning their credibility he unintentionally sheds light on S&P's tendentious political/economic leanings. S&P wasn't merely making poor judgments in giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, it was fulfilling a determinate function in a financial system hell-bent on massive, short-run profits. This evinces an alleigance to a particular sector of the ruling class, the financial sector (or, if you like, "finance capital"). That's anything but neutral. It is no exaggeration to say that S&P is an instrument for finance capital (e.g. to assess risks from its own narrow perspective, to exert pressure to push for its interests in political and economic contexts, etc.).

So what is the reasoning behind S&P's decision to downgrade the US government's credit-worthiness?

First, let's look at their own words. S&P's report said that "The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." What the hell does "fiscal consolidation" mean? Who knows, but I think it's just short hand for austerity. In the view of S&P, the brutal regime of budget cuts soon to be imposed was not enough to "stabilize the Government's debt dynamics". In other words, S&P is arguing that more cuts were needed to enable to the US to better pay off its debt.

Again, this is extremely tendentious, as Krugman points out. In order to make that claim, S&P has to commit itself to controversial and politically conservative neoliberal theories which, if recent history is any guide, have little grounding in fact. As is well known, massive cuts (to the tune of several trillons) in social spending stand to further cripple the economy, thus reducing government revenue and, hence, its ability to pay down its debt. This completely contradicts the "cut, cut, cut" line pushed by S&P and others on the Right. As Richard Seymour explains:

As we've already seen in Ireland, Greece and Spain, the attempt to pay [government debt] off by cutting spending only further weakens economies that depend significantly on such investment, thus reducing the revenues needed to pay any deficit. It can only contribute to pressures toward a 'double dip', as the Eurozone crisis brings us back to 2007/8. Corporate investment is weak, job growth is terrible, wage growth ditto, and consumer spending is fragile because households are still up to their ears in debt. It would take very little to tip the economy back into crisis. What's more, Wall Street traders appear to be perfectly well aware of this weakness, as they have been panic selling stocks since the debt deal was reached.

This is basically another phony crisis manufactured by a specific sector of the ruling class in order to create the conditions in which massive austerity for ordinary Americans can be passed off as legitimate. In Seymour's words, it is a "raw exertion of class power", a threat leveled at society meant to push hard for deeper cuts to working-class living standards.

Just ask yourself: how on earth is it legitimate for an unelected, democratically unaccountable body to have such leverage over the conditions of life for the vast majority? This is the reality of capitalism: a small, unelected body of elites enjoy concentrated economic power owing to their ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy. A radically democratic social order, a socialist society, would mean an end to all of this. It would mean bringing every basic social institution that affects the life prospects of citizens under the democratic control of the community. It would mean subordinating the workings of the economy to human development, rather than the other way around. No more technocratic experts lording over us, no more ruling elites enjoying private ownership of the basic structure of society.

So this downgrade is, as we've noted, a massive exertion of class power. But what is its goal from the perspective of finance capital? Pabhat Patnaik's view is as follows:

While many progressive economists have been rightly emphasising that in the midst of a recession a large fiscal deficit is necessary for stimulating the economy, and that it cannot possibly do any harm, not even on the inflation front (since the inflation in the US, not alarmingly high in any case, is not caused by excess demand), the financial interests and the media controlled by them have been systematically wanting a cut in the fiscal deficit. This is hardly surprising: finance capital is always opposed to any form of State activism except that which promotes its own interests. It propagates not just the view that what is good for finance is good for the economy, but an even stronger version of it: only what is good for finance is good for the economy.

I think this is key. Finance capital loves government intervention and spending when it serves its own interests, i.e. when it involves mobilizing billions to bail out dysfunctional banks and insurance companies. But when it doesn't serve their short-term interests, spending and government activism are bad. Here threats are in order (even if it means leveraging the debt incurred by bank bailouts to force through cuts to the standard of living for the many). We have to interpret the downgrade, I think, as a maneuver by finance capital to secure short-term gains at the expense of long-term stability. In Seymour's terms, "Of course the hedge funds, ratings agencies, banks etc are less than concerned about the effect of underfunded infrastructures such as health and higher education. As far as they're concerned, spending is too high and they don't much care how it comes down. Theirs is a very narrow perspective." It's obvious that they do not even know how to solve the economic crisis from their own perspective. It's as if they are only interested in gathering what they can in the short term, only to "raise the flood barriers, hoard their capital, let others take the pain, and allow governments to police the inevitable fall out."

What are the solutions to this mess? Krugman blames everything on the Republicans and the Tea Party. In his world, were it not for the simple ignorance of these groups, the progressive soul of the Democratic Party could finally shine through and an era of Keynesian reformism would be upon us. Krugman's world, however, has little in common with the real one on this score. Krugman asks why we don't raise taxes on the wealthy and implement a single-payer heath system, and then answers his question by citing "death panels" and Republicans as the culprits. This is non-sense. The Democrats had super-majorities in the Senate as well as crushing majorities in the House, a popular President and political capital to boot. The subsequent health care shit show that followed was almost entirely the Democrats' fault. Democratic Senator Max Baucus, we do well not to forget, received the most campaign contributions from the insurance industry of any member of the Senate. He was, of course, the chair person who oversaw the writing of the bill that subsequently passed. Moreover, Obama started off in the campaign with a right-wing position on health care. He defended RomneyCare from the get go, nothing more. Moreover, he and other leading Democrats loudly announced at the beginning of the health care "debate" that "single payer is absolutely off the table". It wasn't even discussed as an option. We weren't even to utter the words in the halls of power. Why not? Because the Democrats are not a progressive party. They defend the interests of the rich. Most of the party's big wigs are more in favor of cutting existing social programs than in expanding them. Obama's advisers are almost entirely ruling class alumni, who are sure to find a niche back in the private sector after their role as a "public servant" is finished. Bill Clinton, let us not forget, is a long-time advocate of Social Security privatization. Are you kidding me with all this "blame the Republicans for everything" nonsense? Take a candid look at the Democratic Party's actions and tell me what you see. It's not pretty.

Progressives should divest from the Democrats and discontinue verbal support, financial donations and volunteering. Join a USUncut chapter instead. Participate in a grassroots social movement. Join a Left organization that has a genuine oppositional perspective. It is clear that the Democrats are a political dead end. You give them the biggest majorities anyone has enjoyed in a generation, and they shit the bed. It's time to rebuild the Left in this country.

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Message from "Communist" China

Beijing, which did not release any other official statement on the downgrade, called on Washington to make substantial cuts to its “gigantic military expenditure” and its “bloated social welfare” programs.

Read the rest here (via Jacobin).

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Habermas on Materialism

Right from my earliest publications I understood "materialism" in the Marxist sense, as a theoretical approach which does not simply affirm the dependence of the superstructure on the base, the lifeworld on the imperatives of the accumulation process, as an ontological constant, so to speak, but which simultaneously denounces this dependence as the latent function of a particular, historically transitory social formation. The transition from a production to a communication paradigm, which I advocate, does of course mean that the critical theory of society must no longer rely on the normative contents of the expressivist model of alienation and the reappropriation of essential powers. The young Marx borrowed this model from the production aesthetics of Kant, Schiller and Hegel. The paradigm-shift from purposive activity to communicative action does not mean, however, that I am willing or bound to abandon the material reproduction of the lifeworld as the privileged point of reference for analysis. I continue to explain the selective model of capitalist modernization, and the corresponding pathologies of a one-sidedly rationalized lifeworld, in terms of a capitalist accumulation process which is largely disconnected from orientations toward use-value.

-Jürgen Habermas (1984 interview with Peter Dews and Perry Anderson for New Left Review)

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It's impossible to deny the obvious...

"...which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." That's what Krugman is saying in his most recent Op/Ed.

Now, he's certainly right that "we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." That's true. But is it impossible to deny this obvious fact? Of course not. Obama and the Democrats will continue to do it right up until election day in 2012. And large portions of the liberal left will be prodded into plugging fallacious narratives about "green shoots" and "recovery" and the like in order to advertise Obama's "accomplishments" during the campaign.

Readers of Krugman's column will by now have noticed a couple of frustrating trends. First of all, the guy repeats himself quite a lot. Part of that's not his fault. The economy really does suck, Washington really is worsening the crisis by holding tightly to neoliberal orthodoxy, austerity really is awful, etc. He's right that Washington cares about all the wrong things. That's not changing, so neither should critical commentary. I can't blame him for being repetitious in this sense.

But there are other repetitious features of Krugman's work that are less excusable. His perpetual surprise at the "excessive compromise" and "betrayals" of the Democrats (and Obama in particular) lacks rational grounding. Didn't Einstein say something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results... The fact is that Krugman, while his solidly liberal critique of existing policy is commendable, has nothing to say about how we can get out of this mess. He doesn't appear to have any views about how social change happens. He doesn't have a critical analysis of the electoral mechanism in our society and how it forecloses the possibility of real change. He doesn't have any perspectives on the role of social movements. Although his work sometimes shows brief glimpses of an analysis of class power, he doesn't follow through on these questions enough to understand why it is that the Democrats are flipping the bird at liberals. For the most part, he just seems perplexed that the Democrats aren't listening to his good ideas.

But the problem isn't that Obama and the Democrats are simply ensnared by "bad ideas". Neither is the problem that they are "cowards" or poor bargaining strategists. The certainly aren't cowardly when it comes to ridiculing and chastising the Left. They certainly weren't timid when it came to saying at onset of the health care "debates" that single-payer was absolutely off the table.

In order to understand the Demcorats' political trajectory as a party, one needs both a historical analysis of role of the Democrats have played at different points in time, as well as an analysis of the role that corporate-backed political parties play in a capitalist system. We get neither from Krugman.

For an excellent historical analysis of the role the Democrats have played, their relation to left-wing social movements, and so on, I highly recommend Robert Brenner's New Left Review article "Structure or Conjuncture?". Lee Sustar's The Democrats: A Critical History is also worth noting. But any critical study of a progressive social movement in relation to the DP will suffice, because the pattern is always the same. The Democrats (or Republicans, as the case may be, historically speaking), pressured by unrest and militancy from below, enact policies meant to quell social unrest and co-opt militant forces into the "official" political realm. The following co-optation typically leads to the terminal decline and passification of the movement in question and, with it, the hopes for deepening the process of reform. It's for this reason that many on the Left refer to the Democratic Party as the "graveyard of social movements".

For an excellent analysis of the role of the state in capitalist society, there are several sources of good, quick information. The basic point is this: regardless of which party is in power, the state is structurally dependent on the capitalist class. What that means is that the state relies upon capitalists to invest, employ people, grow the economy, produce necessary goods, and, importantly, to accumulate profits which can then be taxed to fund the state's activities. When the capitalist class isn't accumulating profits, they don't invest, jobs are lost, tax revenues plummet, and a political and economic crisis ensues. For this reason, state officials are compelled to do what they can to make sure the capitalist class is happy. Making the ruling class happy means creating a "good business climate", or putting in place "pro growth" policies aimed at creating the conditions for the maximal accumulation of profits. Call this the imperative of accumulation. Left to it's own devices, the system tends to encourage state officials to fulfill this function to the detriment of other functions (e.g. looking after the well-being of citizens).

But, as history makes clear, sometimes the imperative of accumulation comes into conflict with what we might call the imperative of legitimation. No society can reproduce itself over time unless it manages to convince a large portion of its citizens that it is legitimate. But when the imperatives of accumulation compel governments to, say, slash social spending and bail out banks, this creates legitimation problems. A contradiction between accumulation and legitimation arises. Governments will attempt to solve this in any number of ways. The main strategies we've seen thus far as "budget cut fatalism" and "deficit fear mongering". Both of these arguments aim to convince citizens, against their better judgment, that the policies meant to re-establish the accumulation process are, in fact, legitimate (in the interests of society as a whole).

Notice that I haven't even mentioned the problems raised by the colonization of state officials by big business. That is a serious problem, and, of course, public financing of elections would be a small step toward reducing the efficacy of some of the more common ways that politicians are bought off. But the problems go deeper than campaign financing and lobbying. There are fundamental problems here that have to do with the ways in which large amounts of social/economic power are concentrated in the hands of a small class that has a monopoly on the control and ownership of the means of production. A truly democratic society wouldn't be one in which democratic bodies were subordinated to a powerful economic class that owns the basic structure of society. Nor would a truly democratic society be one in which citizens are subordinated to the inhuman systemic imperatives of accumulation for accumulation's sake. A genuinely democratic society -that is, a socialist society- would be one in which the basic structure of society was under the democratic control of citizens. It would be one in which the operations of the economic system were subordinated to the needs of human beings, rather than the other way around.

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What Class Isn't

Class, rigorously defined, cannot be cashed out in terms of the following concepts: "underprivileged groups", "socioeconomic status", "low income", "poor", "needy", and the like. Neither is class a matter of one's identity, self-understanding, beliefs, cultural affiliations, consumer preferences, or political consciousness.

Class is a structural concept that picks out the role that an individual occupies in the economic structure of society. A person's class specifies their relationship to the means of production in their society. Class relations are, accordingly, relations of production. They describe where an individual fits into the process whereby a society produces the necessities of life. A class that owns and controls the means of production is in a dominant position vis-a-vis other non-owning classes and is thus a ruling class. The means of production (which includes all of the technology, factory equipment, tools, technically exploitable knowledge, raw materials, etc. needed to produce socially-necessary goods) is a dominant good because the survival of everyone in a society depends on it. This places capitalists, who exclusively own and control the means of production, in a position of considerable power.

Accordingly, in capitalist societies non-owning individuals depend on the capitalist class in two primary ways. First, the society's means of production are needed to produce all the goods (food, clothing, shelter, and so on) that are needed to subsist. So if individuals are to acquire most of the goods they need to survive, they have to purchase them from capitalists. If capitalists aren't selling, or if they're selling at prohibitive prices, these individuals cannot acquire the basic necessities of life. Second, individuals who possess no means of production are dependent on capitalists for employment. In order to earn an income, these individuals must sell their ability to work to those who own the means of production, i.e. to capitalists. If capitalists aren't hiring, these individuals find no work and hence earn no income.

This is the foundation of the social power of the capitalist class. If we didn't need them to acquire the necessities of life or employment, their social power would largely dissolve. They of course have other sources of power (e.g. the state is structurally dependent on capitalist profits in order to fund its activities via taxation, politicians are often drawn from the ranks of the ruling class themselves or are financially connected to the class, if politicians aren't owned outright by capitalists the basic media organizations are, etc.). But their basic power lies in the fact that they own and control something we all need to survive- the means of production.

Notice that I've said nothing about income inequality, "socio economic status", opportunity hoarding, class identity, or the like. What we've been talking about is relations of domination- social relations in which there is an asymmetrical distribution of power. Once we have a view about how power is diffused through these social relations, only then are we in a position to understand how various disparities (in income, or opportunities, say) come about. It also stands to reason that conception of class would shed some light on how identities and self-understandings form among the members of certain classes, how they are able to procure or hoard certain opportunities, and so forth. Of course, a full analysis of these matters would have to also take into account certain sorts of oppression (e.g. racial oppression) that some, and not others, suffer. But let us just focus on class for the moment. Take the example of income.

If we want to understand income inequality, we shouldn't start from premises about an individual's intelligence, their productivity, their individual ambition, or their deservingness. We look at where they are situated in the economic structure of society; income levels mostly reflect institutionalized roles/offices rather than individual productivity or effort. If you own and control sizable amounts of productive capital, you are in a position of social power and, hence, are able to acquire a rather large portion of the overall social product. As C.B. MacPherson puts it, ownership and control of productive capital equips one with extractive power over non-owners. This is the power to exploit the labor of others and thereby extract value from their efforts.

Those who own no land or capital (no means of production) have no extractive power. As MacPherson puts it, "in a full capitalist society, with its substantial concentration of ownership of capital and productive land, a few men have extractive power over many; hence each of the few has extractive power equivalent to the whole power of several other men. The greater the concentration of ownership of capital, the greater the proportion of each owner's entire power consists in his extractive power."

So class isn't in the first instance about different levels of consumption among individuals. Nor is it primarily about the distribution of wealth, which (as is often noted), is far more unequally distributed than income. Nor is class, at rock bottom, about one person having expensive, fancy clothes and another lacking such "nice things". Class doesn't track whether isolated individuals are off in their respective corners consuming unequal amounts of stuff. Class tracks social relations between individuals by examining the diffusion of power through the economic structure of society. Class analysis aims to show us how relations of power enable some individuals to extract benefits from others, thereby amassing large amounts of wealth and so forth. Wealth represents the spoils, not the primary source of domination.

What this makes clear is that the ire of left-liberals (i.e. income and wealth inequality) is not sui generis. It is the result of a oppressive social relations built into the economic structure of society. It is, in short, the result of capitalism. As Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Program:

Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself.

Similar analyses would be required for gender domination and racial oppression as well. Neither are directly caused by income or wealth inequality (though they are both reinforced and consolidated by such inequality). Causation mainly goes the other way around: racial oppression is what explains the wealth gap between, say, white and black people in the US. And of course, we shall not be able to explain or understand this racial disparity without the concept of class, for it is not the case that the resulting distribution of wealth and income is uniform throughout the black population (just as it is not the case that the distribution of black people throughout the class structure is even or uniform).

What this suggests is that the concrete functioning of racial oppression requires a structural, not merely individual experience or identity-based, analysis. Given that racism is inscribed in the basic structure of social institutions, and given that we live in a capitalist society, it follows that racial oppression and class are inextricably bound up with one another. Racial oppression must therefore be given a materialist analysis, i.e. an analysis and critique that focuses on the material conditions of social life. The critique of cultural racism, micro-oppressions, whiteness, and so forth are all crucial to understanding and uprooting racist oppression. But these critical enterprises must, at the end of the day, be related back to the material conditions of social life if we are ever to have any viable political practices for collectively challenging the institutional and structural oppression. We don't need more "tolerance" or "recognition" from dominant groups, we need movements from below that can successfully challenge the social relations of domination themselves.

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"We" Can't Tax The Rich

Because "we're" broke.

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The Biggest Threat to "Western Values"? Neoliberalism

See here.

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Deficit "Hawks"

I'm sure you've also been appalled by the media barrages of language like "fiscal hawks", "deficit hawks", and notions like "fiscal discipline", etc. I know this has been with us for some time. But the fact that this shit has caught on is amazing.

Years of ideological conditioning have made it seem reasonable to assess a government in terms of whether or not it "balances its budget". If we take the media at face value (which we shouldn't), the main question that we, as citizens, should always ask is: "does this particular government have its books in order?"

This is crazy. It's the equivalent of single-mindedly obsessing over the fertilizer levels of your garden while not giving a damn about the well-being every single plant growing in it. The only reason we have fertilizer at all (OK, comrades who know more about ecology and the politics of agrobusiness should feel free to correct me here) is for the sake of flourishing plants. Fertilizer, as such, has no intrinsic worth.

Fetishizing the "balanced budget" is similarly irrational. Look, I can give you a balanced budget in which the government collects only $2 a year in total tax revenue and spends only $2 a year. Our society would crumble, people would die, children would starve, unemployment would sky-rocket, vital public agencies would collapse, and pandemonium would ensue. But, you know, the budget would be balanced. Isn't that all that matters?

Rather than talking about such nonsense as "fiscal discipline" and "deficit hawks", let's adopt some different evaluative criteria. How about the following: does this society meet my basic needs? Is it responsive to my well-being and the well-being of others? Does it enable me to develop and cultivate my talents and powers?

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Does "Obamacare" Cut $500 billion from Medicare?

Yes, it does. And this was noted by the Left during the health care bill debates, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Of course, the GOP is seizing on the $500 billion number to try to make themselves look good. The fact that they can even credibly posture as a defender of Medicare speaks to the disorienting, confused nonsense that passes for political discourse in the corporate media. But this much is clear: Medicare is an extremely popular program, so much so that even the Right has to posture as a fan of it. Of course, the Democrats too want to posture as fans of Medicare. Neither party wants to take the blame for slashing it, but, in the end, both of them would like to do it. Apologists for Obama seem to have forgotten the recommendations put forward by the bipartisan committee appointed by the President to draft up a plan to make punishing cuts to social programs.

One other thing- check out the WaPo link provided above. In the "facts" section (loaded with Democrat apologetics), after some waffling on whether not the it's true that $500 billion will be cut, we read the following: "These spending reductions presumably would be a good thing, since virtually everyone agrees that Medicare spending is out of control." Really? That's funny, I don't remember agreeing to that. I would, however, say that health insurance profits are out of control. I would say that the premiums charged by the profit-driven insurance agencies are out of control. I'd also add the number of uninsured Americans as well as the number of unnecessary deaths caused by our system are out of control as well. I don't even know what it means to say that Medicare spending is "out of control".

Sooner or later, re-election obsessed Democrat apologists will begin to trot out putative accomplishments of Obama. They will claim that the health care bill is one of them, and they'll surely want to set aside uncomfortable facts (like the above). Don't buy it. The health care bill was written by the very industry who is the source of the health care crisis in this country. It doesn't even include the meager, inadequate "public option". It expands and consolidates the role that profiteers play in our health care system. It isn't a small step toward single-payer, it is a newly minted roadblock to further progressive reform.

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The Ideological Function of Bogeymen

We're resting on the edge of total Armageddon. Everything of value hangs in the balance. In order to "protect the American way of life", we have to do something, anything, quickly. This is no time for politics. No, we need to set all of that aside for "higher ends". We need "effective" solutions that will enable us to swiftly do what's "best for America". Hurry! Time is running out! Don't think, don't talk. Just act!

Now just reflect on the character of this absurd narrative. How many times since you've been alive have you been subjected to it in one form or another? What function does it serve? I can count at least three obvious examples, which I'll discuss in turn.

There is, first of all, the hurried run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a post-9/11 media landscape absolutely saturated with images of nuclear destruction, weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare and the like, we were forcefully prodded into hastily, unreflectively endorsing a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. If you so much as stopped to ask questions regarding feasibility, you were branded as naive or, worse, as seeking to aid the "dark forces" working to obliterate us any moment. Importantly, the fear-mongering had a strongly anti-political streak running through it. If you so much as suggested that politics had anything to do with what was going on, you were excoriated for having done something vulgar and "divisive". This, we were constantly told, was supposed to a "time to set politics aside and do what's best for the 'Nation'". In other words: stop thinking critically, don't pay any attention to politics, economic interests, relations of power, or the like. Just buy into a bunch of meaningless jingoistic group-think. Of course, it is supposed to be the case that we know better these days. This whole debacle has been widely commented on, and it is now more or less commonplace, even within the ranks of the still bellicose Democratic Party, to say that the arguments for invasion were more or less groundless fear-mongering.

The second example that comes to mind is more recent and has been less widely commented upon. It is the financial meltdown in 2007-08 and the bailout that quickly followed. As Slavoj Zizek has astutely noted, the refrain at the time was "don't just talk- do something!", but, in fact, we should have done precisely the opposite: stopped to reflect and talk about how we got into this mess in the first place. Given that any sober answer to that question reflects rather poorly on capitalism and, accordingly, on the ruling classes who have a firm stake in its continued existence, this discussion was never had within the halls of power nor within the corporate media. So instead we were subjected to a scare campaign that reeked of same fear-mongering that characterized the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. We were told, just as before, that civilization would collapse if we didn't something quick. And, most importantly, we were constantly lectured about why this was "not a time for politics". Rather than living in a society divided along class lines, we were suddenly all living in a harmonious, egalitarian community known as the "the Nation". Within the confines of "the Nation", all of us, from Donald Rumsfeld to high-school janitors, supposedly had the same basic interests. Thus, any appeal to "politics" was nothing more than an attempt to divide "the Nation" and to give in to "partisan bickering". And, of course, such "bickering" did nothing more than block the noble efforts of the heads of both corporate parties to do "what's best for America". It was in this context that the massive bailout, the largest of its kind in the history of the world, was pushed through by way of back-room, midnight deals. We now know that it was a massive conversion of private losses into public losses, thus priming the pumps for record-breaking profits. The terms of the deal were so lopsided in favor of industry that it even upset the likes of the Economist and the Financial Times. Although I have my issues with his work, Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story does a remarkably good job of chronicling this whole process by stringing together news clips.

Well, now we have a third example of a noble "defensive struggle" against a bloodthirsty Bogeyman. Holding the threat of a default over our heads, we were made to think that the coming historic assault on US living standards was unavoidable. Even worse, the Bogeyman of the national debt has even led left-liberals to celebrate the arrival of the harsh, punishing axe of austerity.

We do well not to forget that the US is already undergoing structural adjustment at the municipal, county and state levels, as millions continue to endure deep cuts to education, infrastructure, health care, social services, public transit and the like. But although austerity has been all the rage -among Republican and Democrats alike- at the city and state level, it has yet to make it's definitive debut at the Federal level. That is what this "debt debate" was really all about. It is about finding a way to push through and legitimate Federal-level austerity, or, if you like, Federal-level structural adjustment that will exacerbate the state-level crises considerably.

As we know from countless historical examples, structural adjustment is never popular with the masses. It always provokes resistance from ordinary people, for the simple reason that it means unemployment, wage cuts, elimination of vital social services, axing public transit, privatization of public wealth, and the destruction of public social institutions (e.g. schools, libraries, arts organizations, and the like). In short, "structural adjustment" means taking an axe to the living standards of ordinary people in order to create a "good business climate", i.e. conditions maximally favorable to the highest possible accumulation of short-term profits. For this reason, structural adjustment, in every single case, had to be imposed from above on an unwilling populace.

Given the unpopular nature of cuts to popular social programs, the overlapping milieu of ruling class and political elite was in the position of having to find some way to make these policies appear to be legitimate. This was especially pressing for the Democrats who, on the face of it at least, are supposed to be a political formation that stands up for the interests of ordinary Americans.

Enter here the language of impending crisis and Armageddon. Enter the anti-political distortions that purge all discussions of substance. Enter the vapid, apolitical discourse of "bipartisanship", "consensus", and the like. The result: we now supposed to celebrate the axe coming down on us as a historic example of "compromise", of "putting politics aside for the greater good of all". What should have been a disaster is now a triumph. It's not just that criticism of austerity is silence in the short-term: now we are supposed to enjoy and celebrate our own oppression. As a fellow left blogger put it: "they want you scared so you'll back down".

This may have staved off discontent in the short-run (or, maybe it hasn't... still too early to tell). But this is no long-term legitimation strategy for a policy cocktail that will devastate the lives of millions of Americans by eroding our living standards for years to come. Public transit is facing huge cuts amidst an environmental and energy crisis. Foreclosures continue amidst massive mortgage bank profits, public sector layoffs, furloughs, and wage-cuts continue as the rich enjoy obscenely low levels of taxation. Schools are being closed, university departments decimated, teachers harassed, tuition increased, and scholarships cut. Our domestic infrastructure continues to crumble at the very same time that the US continues to spend billions blowing up buildings and people in foreign countries. This is no recipe for long-term stability. People will stand up and resist this at some point- Wisconsin was only a warning shot in what is likely to be a protracted period of political and economic struggle. The burning questions for the Left (not the faux-Left apologists for the Democrats, but the real Left, the independent, grassroots Left of Debs and Hampton) then become: How can we prepare ourselves for these struggles? How can we participate in existing struggles at the same time that we initiate new ones? How can our side win? How can we learn from recent and past defeats? What kinds of organization do we need?

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Wait for it

Neither of the two pro-business parties, Republican or Democrat, will allow the US to default. They are playing a game of chicken. But, from the sounds of it, they are close to arriving at some sort of "deal". The present "deal" includes a punishing, cruel $3 trillion cut (of historic proportions) to the living standard of the majority of Americans. That means cuts to education, cuts to scholarships, cuts to health care, cuts to pensions, massive cuts to public transportation, cuts to unemployment insurance, cuts to the arts, cuts to cutting edge scientific research. It will mean worse infrastructure, canceling desperately needed maintenance on our country's bridges and roads, massive layoffs and severe pay-cuts for public sector workers, worse sanitation services, worse libraries, worse public parks. It means that Obama and the Democrats will sign off on all of this as their own. (The beauty of it for Obama and friends, of course, is that they can push through austerity while externalizing culpability by claiming that "Republicans made us do it", thus pacifying liberal discontent with the slashing and burning of the very policies and programs for which the Democrats have any "progressive" credentials at all).

But I'm telling you: just wait for it. When the "deal" is struck, we will be barraged by a celebratory chorus about how the Republicans and Democrats "put partisanship aside" and "did what was best for the whole country". We will hear endless praise for the "reaching across the aisle" to "compromise", to "come together as one", etc. etc.

We won't hear a word, however, about what the two parties came together to do. We won't hear a word about how this will represent the largest cut to public services in the history of the world. We won't hear a word about the fallout of this harsh plan of austerity for the majority of ordinary Americans. We won't hear a word about all of the consequences of the two parties' long-standing, unchallenged, stable agreement on the "need" for austerity, on the "need" to continue funding wars and occupations, on the "need" to extend to the Bush tax breaks for the richest of the rich.

But, you know, hip hip hooray that they "came together" and "put partisan bickering" aside or whatever. That warms my fucking heart.

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"An Elaborate Charade"

I love it. Read this Al-Jazeera article re: the innane, puke-worthy debt-ceiling pissing match being waged between ruling class politicians over marginalia. The headline is great: "The nonsense battle over the debt ceiling". And the sub-headline hits the nail on the head: this "debate" presupposes a deep bi-partisan commitment to austerity. To be honest, I haven't been reading any of the articles about this whole mess. I glance at headlines, but that's it. I can't be bothered to wade that deeply into shit that isn't about me. Austerity, which both Obama and Boehner strongly support, does affect me. But this quibbling over marginalia, against a backdrop of massive consensus, has nothing to do with me. It is not a substantive disagreement, nor is it a serious clash between left and right. It is a game of chicken played between the rich and powerful; I, and the vast majority of Americans, stand to gain nothing no matter how the chips fall. It is a ruling class tiff over issues internal to right-wing politics (e.g. how much should we cut the living standards of average Americans? how badly should we destroy education and public transit infrastructure?). Neither of them will allow the US to default- that is the train approaching that will crush them both. The "debate" is over who will jump out of the way first. Frankly, I would rather boycott the whole rotten business than join in the media-manufactured chorus about how "we" all should just try to "get along" and "do the right thing for America." I'm more interested in grass-roots struggle than the life and times of the rich and powerful.

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