Wisconsin solidarity spreads posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: america, american working class, democratic party, gop, republicans, socialism, trade unions, us capitalism, us politics, us working class, wisconsin

The class struggle in America posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: america, capitalism, democrats, gop, hegemony, neoliberalism, republicans, socialism, trade unions, us capitalism, us politics, working class

Time for some civility in politics posted by Richard Seymour

Civil?, the Palinites sputter. But we are civil...

Labels: conservatism, deep south, gop, racism, reactionaries, republicans, ruling class, us capitalism, us ruling class

"Debatable" posted by Richard Seymour

Gary Younge nails it:

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, crime, gop, neoliberalism, poujadism, racism, reactionaries, republicans, sarah palin

How the American class struggle works posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'obamamania', bigotry, capitalism, capitalist crisis, conservatism, gop, racism, rate of profit, reactionaries, recession, republicans, tea party, the rate of exploitation, US imperialism

Conservatism and war posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: conservatism, counter-revolution, edmund burke, gop, imperialism, joseph de maistre, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity, republicans, tories, war

Conservatism and counter-revolution posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, class, conservatism, edmund burke, french revolution, gop, reactionaries, republicans, tories

Republican base lurches further to the right posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, democratic party, depression, gop, obama, reactionaries, recession, right-wing, socialism

American psychos posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'socialism', america, barack obama, gop, health care, imperialism, obama, racism, right-wing

"Why I went to Grant Park on November 4th" posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Tithi Bhattacharya:

I stood outside my hotel at midnight with my three month old daughter, Shayari, in her stroller. The wind had just picked up but the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks in front of our hotel refused to be moved by the sudden chill. We were all strangers standing shoulder to shoulder waiting. It was the night of November fourth. The hotel was a block away from Grant Park. Suddenly a cheer went up from the waiting crowd. CNN had just called the election for Barack Hussein Obama the first black president of the United States. Startled by the sudden noise Shayari woke up, looked around and then her face broke into a glorious toothless smile.

Over the past few months, I must admit I have felt like a recalcitrant hack. As a socialist I have argued furiously with friends and students about why they should not put their faith in Obama. How his servile agreement with McCain about the $700 billion bailout for the very corporations that he claims to attack was a forecasting of the economic direction of his presidency. How his repeated acquiescence to the three gods of American conservatism--nationalism, religion and family—only made him a more eloquent and more intelligent version of the republicans. How can you campaign for him, I have argued with my colleague and friend who teaches queer studies at my University, when he openly opposes gay marriage on the basis of his Christian faith? How can you campaign for him I have argued with my anti-war activist student when he plans to extend this war in to Afghanistan and Pakistan? But despite my (sometimes shrill) almost Cassandra-like hectoring, scores of friends, students, neighbours and co-workers campaigned for Barack Obama. My 53 year old Jewish friend who has never been on a picket line or anti-war march tirelessly knocked on doors to urge people to vote. My neighbour from a working class background who had never once held a banner spent hours in the campaign office making them. A student who had never voted before spent her entire month's earnings on petrol so that she could drive volunteers around. And that night as I stood on Michigan Avenue, thousands of these people across the country--somebody's friend, somebody's neighbour, somebody's student--celebrated the end of their campaign by "bending the arc of history".

When independence was declared at midnight on August 15 1947 in India, thousands of people took to the streets celebrating the end of more than 200 years of colonialism. The country had just been devastated by a bloody partition where millions had lost their lives and homes. The Indian National Congress had struck terrible deals during the transfer of power including collaborating with the British to defeat a brilliant strike by sailors. So when freedom finally came at midnight the young Communist Party, heavily influenced by Stalin, declared it to be a "false freedom" (yeh azadi jhoota hai) and refused to be a part of the festivities. How hollow and historically irrelevant their pitiful slogan must have sounded to the men and women who danced on the streets of Delhi and Calcutta that night. Men and women who had lost brothers and sisters to the freedom struggle, who had risked lives and either suffered or witnessed untold brutalities. Were the Communists right in their analysis that independence would not bring change to the lives of the majority? Absolutely. Were they right to criticize and distance themselves from the mass movement that brought that freedom? Absolutely not.

I understand that there are significant differences between the long years of political struggle that led to Indian independence and the US elections of 2008. For starters, there was no armed resistance from a powerful imperial government or its police force to prevent people from participating in the election campaign for Obama. The electoral defeat of John McCain can hardly be compared to the political defeat and ousting of the two-hundred year old British colonial government. There is however something to be said for the spirit that animated the crowds on Indian streets 60 years ago and those in Chicago that night. Every single woman, man and child came out on both occasions because they powerfully felt that a major change had been achieved. I say achieved, as opposed to a change that just happened. In both cases, as in the case of countless other political victories--in strikes, campaigns or nationalist struggle—the participants experienced a confident surge of empowerment for the gain achieved was in part because of them. This feeling so common in mass movements is however rare in electoral campaigns, as the bourgeois electoral process is by its very nature a passive exercise that requires minimal political commitment from ordinary people. And this is where the Obama electoral campaign will be remembered for its uniqueness. In an economy devastated by free market capitalism, in a society torn apart by racism, at a time when the combined cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been over $3 trillion grassroot organizers campaigned tirelessly to elect a black, anti-war man who spoke openly about corporate greed. The campaigners gave the election campaign the flavour of a grassroots social movement.

This was done in several ways. As early as October 6 the much discussed Acorn claimed to have registered 1.3 million new voters. Although the NY Times argued that these numbers were vastly exaggerated the meticulous task of organizing these registration drives on a national scale, in door-to-door campaigns and campus mobilizations can hardly be denied. This process could not but have a historical resonance with people of colour in general and the African American community in particular where memories of the right to vote are still laced with violence. The usual process of voting was thus transformed in this election from the very start into a much more politicized practice.

Obama himself did not fail to see this transformation. His speeches repeatedly alluded to past social movements and more importantly to the power of social movements. "Words on a parchment" he told us in his speech on race in Philadelphia "would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage". What would be needed instead were actual people who "through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk" narrowed the gap between ideals and reality. At a large anti-war rally in Chicago in 2002 in a sharp invocation of classical left-wing rhetoric he urged us to stop "the arms merchants in our own country" from "feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe". More explicitly, dubbing the elections merely as an agitational platform in faux-Leninist fashion he reminded us that the campaign was merely "the occasion, the vehicle, of [our] hopes, and [our] dreams". Over and over during the course of the campaign words such as community, grassroots and organizing were used in a fashion that matched the fervour and the demographic of the anti-war and anti-globalization movements of the recent past. Whole sections of people roused by this call plunged into the campaign as though it were a social movement and not merely an electoral campaign. But the most important thing to understand is that their doing so actually made it such.

In my small mid-western University town the Obama campaign included old social and labour activists, young students who had never been at a demonstration before and whole sections of people, particularly women and minorities who have been actively disenfranchised not just from the electoral process in the past but from society itself. It is also significant to remember in this context that in Indiana for instance although Obama secured a historic victory for Democrats, the first time in 44 years, none of the other local Democratic candidates fared well. Indeed only 22.2% of the votes polled in my county were straight Democratic votes. A vote for Obama was thus only nominally a vote for the democratic party. It was largely I would argue a vote for a radical new direction that the voter felt he represented. The Democratic Party label became almost incidental, Obama the man and his historic significance spilled over the ordinariness of a democratic party ticket and that is the man the ordinary woman/man voted for. There was an African-American woman at our hotel in Chicago that night who had come to the rally with her 84 year old father. My partner's friend, an African American historian told us that he was "bawling like a baby" when Obama gave his speech at Grant Park. We will always remember those truly historic images of Jesse Jackson and even Oprah Winfrey crying that cold night at Grant Park. They all worked for the "movement" and not for the election of a Democratic Party candidate. So when victory was declared on November 4 th most of them were shocked to see Democratic party bureaucrats take over the floor of the campaign office and make speeches. One of my friends there told me "I was shocked to see these people. All I wanted to do was dance". . We had all apparently forgotten that this was an electoral campaign to elect the head of the leading imperialist nation.

So as President Obama surrounds himself with big-business backers such as Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker, shapes his foreign policy in consultation with former secretaries of state and ex-CIA officials what is to become of the all the people who joined the "movement"?

There is a short answer to that question, given by a young black woman in Harlem. When asked by CNN about Obama's victory, laughing and crying she said that she had helped achieve it and she was going to stay active to make him accountable. I cannot emphasize how right she is.

Again I come back to my small college town in Indiana. The context of the Obama victory in this town and on my campus must be clearly understood. In my university a very popular white male full professor seeing a young African American colleague on his cell phone commented that he thought that his black colleague was doing a drug deal. In my department when I had organized a very tame diversity forum earlier this year I received an anonymous letter which argued that all non-western (read non-white) histories and non-western historians should be scrapped from the curriculum and the department and in the field of American history we should not obsess about race and African American History. My partner who runs the American Studies program was accused by this eloquent letter writer of only being interested in historically marginalized groups. Since November 4 th graffitis saying "fuck obama" have gone up on campus and I know of at least one incident of a white male yelling "nigger" at a black student from a passing car.

And yet Obama polled 55% of the votes in my county whose population is 97% White. Despite Hilary Clinton trying to stir up racism against Obama by claiming to represent the white working class, the majority of Obama voters from Indiana was the white working class. Obama carried 15 Indiana counties compared to John Kerry's 4 in 2004. Northwestern Indiana counties, composed largely of the industrial working class voted overwhelmingly for him in this election. Workers here have been hit hard by the economy in areas like South Bend, Portage, Anderson, and south along the Wabash and Ohio Rivers in Terre Haute and Evansville. Nationally, 67% of the AFL-CIO voted for Obama. It is not the Democratic Party but Obama riding the wave of anger and hope that secured that vote. It was the movement that achieved this not the electoral process per se. It is now up to this multiracial movement—a movement that arose from homes, schools, churches, and the factory floor—to make sure that the gains of these last few months are protected. To defend and remember the racial solidarity that was the hallmark of the campaign. To mobilize in similar large numbers not just for voter registrations but to fight against all those small incidents of racism that will no doubt happen in other conservative public spaces like my campus. To demand that Obama deliver on his promises of healthcare, jobs and education. And when the time comes, and it will, to mobilize against him.

So unlike the Indian Communists in 1947, I was glad to have been there in Chicago on the night of November 4th. I would like to tell my daughter that I celebrated the movement that threw Bush out of office and elected the first Black President. I would like to tell my daughter that on that night I looked around me at the hundreds of people, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, that had lined the streets of Chicago with a true audacity of hope.

Labels: 'obamamania', american working class, barack obama, democrats, gop, racism

Unlikely, but... posted by Richard Seymour

What to do if McCain wins by fraud:

Labels: barack obama, democrats, election rigging, gop, john mccain, voter purge

The embers of Jim Crow posted by Richard Seymour

In every country where votes are counted, even a pissant little island like this one, some votes are fraudulent. For some reason, the Liberal Democrats seem to produce people with a knack for this vocation as far as the UK goes. It is a serious problem, but hardly a defining national issue. In the US, alleged voter fraud has become the basis for a Republican attempt to deny citizens the right to vote. Predictably, these efforts overwhelmingly target black voters, and low income voters in general. Despite the fact that absolutely zero evidence of serious fraud has emerged, between 2004 and 2006 13 million people were scrubbed from the electoral rolls in 39 states and the District of Colombia. Part of this uses legislation preventing convicted felons from voting which, because of the racism structural to America's criminal justice system, and the tightening of penalties over the last thirty years (Clinton's "three strikes and you're out" laws come to mind), disproportionately effects African Americans. But, as the linked report finds, much of the purging is strictly illegal. For example: "In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary." Ten thousand voters, one week. That sort of work needs to get paid.

The recent report by Greg Palast and Robert F Kennedy Jr. for the Rolling Stone finds that in the run up to the 2004 elections, 1.1m people were denied the vote under a banned scheme known as "caging" - the local Republicans sent letters to addresses in poor neighbourhoods inviting them to confirm their address. A failure to reply for whatever reason would result in a challenge at the voting booths for providing a false address. Since then over 2.7m voters have been purged from voter rolls under new procedures signed into law by the Bush executive. In the swing-state of Colorado, the rate of scrubbing by or at the behest of GOP officials is ten times the national average. Hundreds of thousands of voters in a number of key states are affected if the details on their identification fails to match exactly those on the state's official records. Even a commonplace typo will get you purged from the rolls - and, as Gary Younge reports, in places like Wisconsin this affects one in five voters. And, of course, you have to possess a government-approved ID in the first place - a passport or a driving license, which many poor voters don't have. A number of reports separate from this now indicate that voting machines are regularly switching early votes from Democrat to Republican. So, even if you get past all the hurdles they set for you, the machines might still get you.

It is a truism among pollsters that Obama's lead, however large it is - and it has seen double figures from time to time - is misleading for the purposes of predicting the election results. Once distilled to 'likely voters' it is reduced quite dramatically, sometimes to within the margin of error. Part of the reason for this is the contempt that the US political class expresses for even the slender facade of representative democracy that the system tolerates. People complain that large numbers of working class voters abstain from elections in the US and thus guarantee disproportionate domination for right-wing politicians. In the past it might have been answered that since none of the major candidates chose to represent the working class, the working class had every reason not to vote. But there are now efforts to actively disenfranchise voters, and it isn't just a partisan process by hardened, power-hungry Republican scum. The efforts, led by the GOP but often mandated by the Democrats, are surely indicative of a desire by substantial elements of the US ruling class to force through a much more extreme programme than the population can tolerate. I am not saying that Jack Abramoff carries suitcases full of cash from the offices of Goldman Sachs to local GOP officials and tells them to get rigging. I am saying that the Republican leadership is in lockstep with some of the most powerful sectors of US capital, particularly finance capital, that they effectively express its priorities, and that when they engage in aggression against the existing legislative, judicial and executive framework, they are doing so for the purposes of fulfilling those priorities.

The vertex of this programme is the goal of privatizing social security. In most advanced capitalist states, this - the public pensions system - is the holy grail for neoliberals and privatizers. It is the largest single component of any welfare state, and the capitalist class wants it bad. The model is Chile, where - thanks to those magnificant Chicago Boys and their pet dictator - the system is entirely managed by the private sector, and funded by compulsory employee contributions. It is highly regressive and leaves those out of work without a pension scheme. It has been such a grotesque failure that the political elite is doing everything it can to shore up the system short of nationalisation - while in Argentina, nationalisation has already been effected. From the perspective of elites, however, the system was a dramatic success story, and it stands as an 'inspiration' for neoliberals everywhere. Bush has often expressed his regard for the Chilean way of slow, penurious death. Investigating the matter for New Labour, Peter Mandelson found that he too adored the system. One significant difference between Obama and McCain is that, for now, the former is committed to opposing social security privatization, while McCain is still blustering about an unfunded baby-boomer "time-bomb". Obama will, should he win by enough votes to negate the fraud, probably come under immense pressure from his backers to recant on his election pledge. But just in case he doesn't listen, it will be useful for them to have as high a representation of the GOP ultras in all branches of government as possible. A remaining mystery, albeit a superficial one, is why the Democratic leadership doesn't defend itself more aggressively against the GOP. They are not exactly wilting violets. Third Party candidates who have faced Democratic efforts to prevent them from standing and organising know how thuggish the party can be. Yet, despite flagrant fraud being exposed time and again, they have played ball. The only plausible answer, as far as I can see, is that they want to govern as centrists. They do not want to be outflanked to the left, and they don't want to mobilise a Left whom they habitually engage in aggression against. They would prefer a strong GOP, and to have a debate limited to one between moderate Republicanism and hard right Republicanism. If the rumours of a landslide victory for Obama and the Democrats are accurate, the DLC crowd actually stand to lose something from that - namely, their alibi in pursuing a centre-right programme. That is why the election of America's first black president may be marred, if not successfully obstructed, by a voting system that reproduces some of the most obnoxious features of Jim Crow.

Labels: ballot rigging, barack obama, democrats, gop, john mccain, neoliberalism, racism, social security, voter purge

Treason posted by Richard Seymour

Other billboards include one describing Obama as the 'next Benedict Arnold' (ie, in bed with foreign invaders), and another reportedly offering a sum of money to whoever kills him. Other billboards just remind voters of 9/11 and let them draw their own conclusions. This may be a sign that the reactionaries are getting desperate as the economic meltdown pushes Obama to the top of the polls. But it is also a sign that they're preparing their comeback tune: something along the lines of 'liberal betrayal', and 'stabbed in the back'. The first sign that the GOP are regaining strength in either legislative chamber will probably produce calls for impeachment.

Update:

Labels: barack obama, democrats, gop, islamophobia, racism

The Fix Is [Not] In [Yet] posted by Richard Seymour

They got the $700bn bailout, with one or two 'provisions' that, in fact, don't really deviate that much from the Paulson plan, contrary to some of the analysis. A few things to note when looking at the summary: they still get their $700bn, phased and with a bit more oversight than was planned (ie, more than zero) - but remember that the $700bn figure was just pulled out of thin air, a large enough number to allow maximum latitude to the Goldman Sachs wonderboy in helping out Wall Street; they won't cap executive remuneration, but they will tax it a bit more if it's above $500,000, so the inevitable bragging about zero tolerance for executive pay is unwarranted; there will be some taxes on golden parachutes, but the "era of golden parachutes" is far from "over", as Nancy Pelosi has been bragging. Finally, the government supposedly expects to make a small profit on the enterprise once it's returned to the private sector, which is how previous bailouts have worked. This will be the selling point. They will say that they have no intention of draining the public purse, and that every penny will be restored in due course. But this assumes that the bailout will have the effect of restoring these institutions as profit-making enterprises. There is no guarantee whatsoever that any of this money will be seen again. In fact, the markets are plummeting, supposedly because of doubts about the efficacy of the bailout. And it also raises the question of why the public shouldn't just own it, and keep all the profit. After all, private ownership and markets don't seem to have been particularly advantageous in the past.

This is not about economic competence, moral hazard, perverse incentive, or any of the other cynosures of neoliberal policy wonkery. And preserve us from the absurd claim that this is some kind of socialism. It is about class power. If they wanted to resuscitate the economy, here are some possibile uses for that $700bn. Think of households and public sector institutions that are failing largely because the system is failing them: they couldn't put $700bn to better use? How about just nationalising the healthcare system? All of that would certainly stimulate the economy, provide jobs and help people who really are in need, but it would also risk revivifying the exiguous social democratic constraints on the operations of capital. You give people the idea that the tax base should be used in their interests, to give them secure jobs with decent pay, public services, well-funded inner city schools, any of that, they might never be away from the till with their hands out. Greedy taxpayers have to learn that this money is earmarked for conscientious wealth creators and their warriors, not for sloths with their heads stuck in the bargain bucket.

Meanwhile, the Brown administration didn't waste any time this time in nationalising most of Bradford and Bingley, much to the chagrin of the Tories, who are just frantic - frantic, don't you know? - about the costs to lower income taxpayers. The Conservatives want the Bank of England to take over the company and run it down. The trouble is, of course, that the government are not nationalising to protect jobs, and therefore probably will run it down in muchy the same way as they have run down Northern Rock. The Tories know this. It's being done to protect liquidity, to keep the banks lending to one another. This is why even right-wingers like Vince Cable approve of the nationalisation. But the Tories, aside from once more positioning themselves to the left of the government, are being disinguous: this particular nationalisation cost millions rather than billions, and it isn't going to drain the public purse. It is almost as if the three main parties are playing a game of 'chicken', each urging the other to do least to ward off the crisis. What I suspect is actually happening is that the rules of the game are changing far too rapidly for them to assimilate it. The language of economic liberalism will survive the practise for a long while, for what is emerging is an increasingly interventionist state. Even the Tories, while talking about the virtues open markets, are pleding tough regulatory regimes. This is by no means a reversion to a less predatory form of capitalism, although resistance by workers can make it so in the short term, but it does open up the argument somewhat: put briefly, if the state can protect profits and stock exchanges, it can protect jobs and public services.

Labels: democrats, federal bail-out, gop, neoliberalism, new labour, ruling class, tories