Another and more fundamental aspect of the crisis involves the decline of American capitalism. It is a crisis of the economic order itself. This is evident in the inability to restore prosperity on any substantial scale. The future is one of incomplete recovery: of economic decline, mass disemployment (including millions in clerical and professional occupations), lower standards of living, and war. Every depression is in a sense a crisis of capitalism. But this depression represents the development of a fundamental, permanent crisis in the economic and social relations of American capitalism. Only a deep-going crisis could force government and industry to adopt measures which were formerly condemned as opposed to economic progress. The intervention of government in industry is, of course, nothing new: the development of capitalism has been accompanied by growing government aid to industry. But such aid was limited in scope. It was, economically, an expression of the upswing of capitalism, of the necessity of government action to “regulate” the developing relations of trustified capitalism. But to-day government intervention is on an unprecedented scale. Its economics and politics are an expression of the decline of capitalism, of the necessity of government action to prop up the sagging foundations of the economic order. The avowed aim is to insure prosperity, formerly achieved by the working of “free” capitalist enterprise. The real need is for increasing use of government to manipulate economic forces, for state capitalism, because capitalist industry is unable to function as of old. The forms of state capitalism may change, but the need remains, with fascism looming ahead. As capitalism declines, the state must intervene more drastically to aid industry and suppress labor. It is the death of the old world, not the birth of the new…
Corey (Fraina…) is, of course, not talking about the current state of affairs — although you could make an honest mistake there.
Why the white working class is alienated, pessimistic strikes a relatively optimistic (but probably unfounded) note about the future — except for the traditional “middle class” (i.e. white blue-collar workers.) And the 5,169, and counting, comments are almost all from this endangered segment, and most of the rage is not against the capitalist system, but against the others: the aliens, illegal or not, the oursourcing, the black president, the socialist president, and so on, and so forth.
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109 days ago:
Unbelievable, epic greatness.
Parenting: How to talk to kids about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity. Although I am pretty certain that the original article is quite tongue-in-cheek, this comment is actually quite good: “How to talk to your kids about this? It’s easy really. You tell them that he is a jerk that can’t keep his pants zipped up. That he’s selfish and dishonest and that after a while Maria will be glad she’s without him.”
A rather busy time, this has been. And of course it is me blahging that gets to suffer. I will, however clean up a whole load of stuff I tagged as being of interest in Google Reader, and do a quick dump of the links here.
The two Americas: “As Karl Marx noted in Capital, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is… at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.” So it is in America in the second decade of the 21st Century.
A recent report from the Food Research and Action Center finds that a record 44.2 million people in the US, one in seven, relied on food stamp programs in January, up by more than 4.7 million in one year. One in five Americans struggled to find enough to eat in 2010, according to the group.”
Norm on Marxism’s unique selling point: “A crucial part of Marxism’s appeal is the view that capitalist societies are pervasively unjust. As they indeed are.”
Danske topchefer fortsætter lønfesten “Det er en stigning på knap 400 procent i forhold til 1994. I samme periode er timelønnen for almindelige lønmodtagere ifølge Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening blot steget med 80 procent.” Or in English: since 1994, workers’ pay has gone up by 80 percent; that of their bosses by 400…
what middle class?: “I certainly don’t feel middle class,” said Denise Ehren. “Sometimes I think we should just call ourselves poor and be done with it.” Aren’t we all getting there, sooner of later. Unless, of course, you are one of the lucky bosses.
- update a little later: Nah, that’ll be that. Onwards to fresher content.
Back from a most wondrous Easter week at the summer house. That was some weather, for sure.
152 days ago:
Fuhgeddaboudit…
158 days ago:
162 days ago:
An individual, a group, a party, or a class that “objectively” picks its nose while it watches men drunk with blood massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.
I have been stuck using something called Internet Explorer for the last few days. Somebody please put me out of my misery. Or pour me a stiff one.
167 days ago:
Der Mensch lebt noch überall in der Vorgeschichte, ja alles und jedes steht noch vor Erschaffung der Welt, als einer rechten. Die wirkliche Genesis ist nicht am Anfang, sondern am Ende, und sie beginnt erst anzufangen, wenn Gesellschaft und Dasein radikal werden, das heißt sich an der Wurzel fassen. Die Wurzel der Geschichte aber ist der arbeitende, schaffende, die Gegebenheiten umbildende und überholende Mensch. Hat er sich erfaßt und das Seine ohne Entäußerung und Entfremdung in realer Demokratie begründet, so entsteht in der Welt etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat.
So, just one more bout with the duster and we should be set. These two links make this the American dream edition:
Business Is Booming: “This rise in profits, however, has not been accompanied by a rise in employment, wages, or national income. Official unemployment hovers just under 10 percent, and the Federal Reserve is predicting that it will stay at around 9 percent throughout 2011. Gross domestic product increased by just 2.5 percent during the third quarter of 2010. The Wall Street Journal has calculated that as a result of this combination of high profits and stalled prosperity, after-tax second-quarter profits of American companies as a percentage of national income were the third-highest of any quarter since 1947.”
Funnily – perhaps not as in funny haha the author of the article points to Germany as an example of a different – yes, the Germany we used to love to laugh at when they muddled about with their outdated factories and unions and such, while we was all soaring into the post-industrial Shangri La of symbol interpretation and fast lanes and virtual this and that.
Workers face broad assaults: “He is worried, he says, about a lot: the future of the bankrupt supermarket chain he works for, the midcareer colleagues who feel trapped and hopeless, and anyone, really, who strives for a middle-class life anymore.
He’s been stocking shelves and moving groceries through the checkout line for the same Philadelphia-area chain since the Vietnam War. It’s how he put a child through college, bought a $28,000 rowhouse, and pays for the occasional movie when he and his wife go out for a treat.”
You see: there was a relatively long period after WWII where the Yankee dollar was so strong and the world was so young that everything was possible: get a job, any job, move to the suburbs, two car garage, maybe a boat – life was good. Then reality came knocking… But, then again, the biggest illusion, the biggest successful sale of them all was to make all those folks genuinely believe that they were now bona fide middle class and had some interests in common with the bosses in the country club over there. Not so. But at least the streets of Madison have shown that something is stirring. Perhaps belatedly, one could fear.
Inevitably, Libya must come up. Some links to comments I can only approve of:
Libya, the UN Resolution, and the Left: “Those who seek retrospective justification for backing the invasion of Iraq – to overthrow Saddam Hussain – misjudge the present resolution. It has been made within the context of a genuine popular revolution, internally rooted. It is not a recipe for external regime change, nor for a world-wide policing operation to enforce liberal democracy. Iraq remains proof of the way in which geopolitics are not dominated by ethical universalism but by military, commercial and resource interests. The political and civil society structures it has left behind remain an open wound.”
Libya – the case for intervention: “I do not know what the end game is. I accept that the campaign will result in people being killed by allied airstrikes and I presume that the intervening governments have selfish as well as altruistic motives for their actions. However, I think that the situation in Libya immediately prior to the intervention passed the threshold test that I set out above. I think that the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to protect the lives of civilians in this case.”
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect “I see there’s some naysaying about the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. Among various refrains is the claim that “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine lacks moral strength if applied selectively: the international community can’t legitimately go after Qaddafi if it won’t/can’t also go after every other dictator.”
I shall ignore the occasional soi-disant leftist who is already beginning to mumble something about Gaddafi perhaps not being so bad after all – they are few and far between, but, sadly, they do exist, and should probably be left to fester in that historical trashcan from whence they crawled out. Say Hi to Hugo on your way out…
The sometimes peculiar AWL does actually get it quite right this time:
It is not good enough for socialists to point out that Cameron, et al, are no friends of the Libyan people. Indeed they are not. But what do you propose to do, instead, then, to prevent Qaddafi crushing his enemies? Socialists either address this real, life-and-death question or they are irrelevant poseurs.
It’s not good enough to argue that the West has supported dictators in the past and will do so again. Of course it will. But how able the West is to impose its agenda on the Middle East in future depends on the self-confidence of the mass movement. A terrible defeat in Libya might sap that self-confidence much more than a temporary acceptance of Western assistance.
We need to develop a strong solidarity campaign which is independent of Western (or Arab) governments. We need, in particular, to help the new Egyptian workers’ movement to continue to grow and develop, which could have an immense, positive effect on the whole region.
Instead, some socialists have responded to this crisis by putting their hostility to America above the lives of the Libyan rebels.
And this is a shameful disgrace.
And, finally, remembering what José Ramos-Horta once said – having been at the oppressed end of the stick himself:
“If you can persuade a dictator to give up power, as did happen in Haiti, so much the better. But there are times in our humanity when the use of force is the only way to stop genocide,” he explains.
Look at what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Does anybody have the moral right to tell the Vietnamese ‘you were wrong in intervening in Cambodia in 1979’? I applauded it. Vietnam was the only country in the world with the guts to do it.
Can we tell the great African statesman, one of my favourite leaders in the world, Julius Nyrere of Tanzania, ‘Sorry, you were wrong in intervening in Uganda to get rid of Idi Amin,’ when he was the only African leader with the moral courage to do it? …
We say that the Security Council is the only source of international legitimacy for intervention. So when the Security Council said no to intervention in Rwanda even when genocide was going on, was that right? The Security Council was wrong in Cambodia, Uganda and Rwanda. I am happy that Saddam Hussein is out. The situation is far better than it was three months ago in Iraq. People are demonstrating for everything – against America, against the British, against each other. That’s great. Yes, there were casualties – but far less than anticipated and far less than the more than two million deaths caused by Saddam Hussein. …
I never accept being locked in an ideological straitjacket. I see good and bad in all sides. The left cannot claim to have all the virtues. The left has failed miserably over the decades. And the right don’t have a monopoly on virtues, or on evil.”
An installment of the spring cleaning saga that is too meta for its own good: a list of links to a number of lists of links. And without further comment:
As it becomes obvious from the above, there seems to be a certain overlap between the interests and inclinations of this blog and Poumista – not surprising, though: I was always rather on the side of Nin and Maurin myself.
So it seems as if spring might be here at long last, and you start noticing debris and cobweb all over the place – including all those things that I put into Google Reader and Evernote in the depth of winter, clearly intending to make notes of them on this here blog very, very soon – put instead I left them sitting there, quietly accumulating dust and growing stale. So, if for the benefit of no one but me, I shall sift through them and put the ones that are still marginally interesting after this passage of time up here.
Multiculti revisited
The old straw man of multiculturalism was resurrected by various politicians here and there (always nice to distract the attention of the public from more pertinent problems, eh?). I found at least these article, comments and link collections somewhat informative:
Monoculturalism is dead: multiculturalism has yet to come – with an opening pull-out quote that I totally agree with: ‘In Germany, conservatives criticize a pastiche of multiculturalism to justify authoritarian policies and deflect attention from decades of neglect, argues Claus Leggewie. Failure to recognize Muslims as part of society is to risk repeating an historical mistake.’
The point of the above links being that multiculturalism is a term that can be twisted in so many directions. The two articles linked above confirm me in my long-held conviction that the ‘left’ embrace of multiculturalism is effectively “just” a mirror of the ‘right’ attitude. The next article
has a passage towards the end that I would tend to agree with:
The problem with this version of multiculturalism is that it sees cultures as autonomous and isolated from each other in history. Our experience as migrants, Londoners and Britons tells us something different. The natural tendency of different cultures throughout history has been to interact and achieve a synthesis. Yet multiculturalism, as defined by the British left-right framework, drags us into generalised conflicts on the basis of the historically illiterate proposition that our enemies’ enemies must be our friends.
Old State Multiculturalism in New Beer Bottles: “We should also point out, without apology, that lack of integration is a far more substantial issue with the middle and upper classes, especially those who live in gated communities etc. The vast majority of the working class don’t need any help to understand how to live with people from other ethnic backgrounds. We’re already, by far, the most racially diverse class. Our neighbours, workmates, friends, lovers are far more likely to be from a different ethnic background to us and, on the whole, this causes very little problem.” Which seems a pretty good remark for now.
Of course, and as always, reading Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism cannot hurt. Brian Barry did, perhaps, get carried away at times, and some arguments are, perhaps, not as rigorous as they should have been. but he does remind us very clearly that the roots of anything remotely decent ‘left’ are in the universalism of the Enlightenment.
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In the middle of an interesting discussion about ebooks, this quote “In 2001, discs sold on shiny platters made up the vast majority of the music business. In 2011, the ‘music business’ as it existed from the days of the first records until about ten years ago is gone. You still need a big record label if you want to be Lady Gaga, but almost no one else does. Music industry profits have never recovered. This is great for people who want to listen to music but not so good for people who want to make money from music, especially if they can’t actually make music themselves.” (And it can, also, be great for those musicians who want to make a living off of what they like best — and not because they want to, uh, own a slice of Dubai World.) Why publishers are scared of ebooks.
The Decline of American Capitalism
