LENIN'S TOMB

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Wisconsin solidarity spreads posted by Richard Seymour

There were fifty pro-union rallies in fifty state capitols today, outnumbering their right-wing Tea Party opponents when the latter bothered to show up. This is what one would expect. The Right can bring out numbers, but it can't usually match the Left in this terrain - its real power is in the support it gets from the state and the ruling class. But more surprising perhaps is the way in which two crucial aspects of the state in Wisconsin have swung behind the protesters. First of all, the local Democratic Party has actually demonstrated more spine than I've seen in the Labour Party of late. Second of all, the police - yes, the poh-leece - refused to evacuate protesters from the capitol building on orders from the governor today, and instead joined them.

This is raising questions which I don't fully know how to answer at the moment. It's surely unprecedented for major components of local power structures to swing behind labour in such a major way. And this is all happening in the much maligned mid-West: the strikes have been breaking not only in Wisconsin, but in Iowa and Ohio where similar measures are threatened. The scale of the protests and strikes, with 70,000 marching in Madison last weekend, the degree of organisation and rank-and-file militancy that has been unleashed, and the speedy way in which the campaign has taken the elements of popular discontent, articulated them and polarised them to the Left, may have shocked the political establishment. It may also be that this has raised doubts among sectors of the ruling class who previously accepted the direction of the Koch Brothers/Tea Party wing of the Republicans purely for the material benefit of tax breaks and weaker unions, without having invested in the wider strategy of outright conflict. After all, if strikes spread, these employers could stand to lose tens of millions for every day of action, perhaps more than they gain in any tax breaks. And the risk of energising and rebuilding a national left-wing movement after the Obama administration had successfully coopted the elements of leftist, working class dissent, rearticulated and neutralised them, is one that they may be wary of. But the Wisconsin campaign shouldn't just be looked at in terms of the crisis of capitalism, the divisions among the ruling class and the crisis of the state apparatus, as important as these are. The initiative is very much on the side of the workers at the moment, and the way it has energised the Left across the US suggests that it might in the near future demand study as an example of a successful left-wing, labour-based political intervention.

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

Thursday, February 17, 2011

The class struggle in America posted by Richard Seymour

The key class battle in the United States today is in Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker is a Tea Party reptile. He's used his position to launch an attack on local union rights. The public sector unions are being treated as pampered spoilsports, refusing to make 'sacrifices' that others Americans have to make. The capitalist media rarely forgets to shove that theme down the US gullett. And it often seems difficult for unions, who represent a small minority of workers, to fight back. Especially given the model of business unionism that has dominated in the US labour movement for generations. But when Walker cited a budget deficit to justify severe public sector cuts, he threw in an attack on union bargaining rights on a whole series of fronts, including on pensions and benefits. (Details here). As it happens, there isn't even a budget crisis. The whole thing has been contrived, it seems, at least according to data from the state fiscal office, which expects to end the year with a surplus. Nonetheless, there are real crises breaking out across a number of US states, where vital infrastructure is being sold off or left to rot. Budget cuts are being rolled out across the country, driven by Obama with only marginal resistance from Democrats. The Republicans are pushing for more. GOP House leader John Boehner, asked about the inevitable job losses that would result from the attacks, said: "If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We're broke."

But the unions in Madison, Wisconsin were not buying it, and when it became clear that unions might strike over these measures, Scott Walker threatened to bring in the National Guard. And then? "I am fully prepared for whatever may happen." The protests against Walker's plans have been tremendous. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets. Teachers and students have walked out of school to join the protests. Protesters referenced Tahrir Square. If Egypt can have democracy, some said, why can't we? So they forced their way into the Capitol building and embarked on an amazing occupation:

Now, one doesn't make comparisons thoughtlessly. It would seem hubristic to reference the revolutionary struggles in the Middle East in connection with this. Those struggles, continuing in Egypt and Tunisia, emerging nascently in Saudi Arabia, and manifest in Bahrain, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran too, are taking place in very different circumstances. But the global crisis that links them is raising the same questions everywhere. It's turning what was a chronic dilapidation and slide in popular living standards into an acute, unbearable crisis for millions. The Right's response to this is to try to rebuild their hegemony by racialising the question - it's all the immigrants and uppity black people and Muslims trying to take over. The litany goes that immigrants take American jobs, black Americans make endless claims on the Treasury and borrow irresponsibly, while Muslims threaten America's core values. And if enough people believe it, they can be incorporated into a neo-nativist, anti-socialist, counter-subversive bloc. That's what the Glenn Becks of this world are for. But sometimes it doesn't work. The attack on Christians in Egypt, countered by immediate Muslim solidarity, didn't stop the revolution. Racism and sectarianism doesn't always work. And sometimes a local struggle resonates far beyond it's immediate boundaries and becomes the stimulus for a wave of wider revolts, especially when it taps into something that is popularly perceived as intolerable and for which the ruling class is held responsible. And given what's happening in US states, I'd suggest keeping an eye on Wisconsin, because this could be the trigger for something beautiful.

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

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Democracy posted by Richard Seymour

In the spoke-too-soon category:

“Does anyone imagine that Democracy, which has destroyed the feudal system and vanquished kings, will fall back before the middle classes and the rich?”

—	Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Labels: america, bourgeoisie, capitalism, class struggle, democracy, feudalism, rich

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Commie speaks posted by Richard Seymour

Red Russian exile predicts US world dominance! (Eat Snacky Smores.)

Labels: america, imperialism, leon trotsky, russian revolution

Monday, August 24, 2009

Racism and the American class system posted by Richard Seymour

The US class system has always expressed itself through the fiction of 'race'. Race is a vital means by which labour markets are stratified and managed. Ellen Wood has argued that capitalism's use of racism and other modes of oppression reflects its "systemic opportunism", but I am increasingly inclined to disagree. David Roediger's account suggests that capital accumulation requires means of stratifying labour markets. It is not only efficient, but evidently necessary, to have a labour system in which different functions and rewards are allocated according to some supposedly 'natural' (but actually arbitrary) distinctions. With this conviction in mind, I encountered a piece by Walter Benn Michaels for the London Review of Books, in which he argues that "even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality". Further, "Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them [the working class] any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good." (Just to point out - Michaels is wrong. A significant component of, say, the Great Society and 'affirmative action' programmes were designed to alleviate white poverty and unemployment.)

Having encountered his writing before, I gather that Michaels is a bit of an intellectual tough guy and provocateur. There's a niche for this kind of writing, and within the confines of a kind of liberal ideology his case makes sense. If it was possible to have a non-racist capitalism, the kind that some Sixties activists and civil rights workers hoped might emerge, then one might cynically conclude that a focus on race is counterproductive for the left. Maybe, as Michaels argues, focusing on racism actually lets the class system off the hook. But if capitalism needs 'race' or some analogue function to operate efficiently, then even that cynical attitude is self-defeating.

One way to look at this argument is consider the case that Michaels does - that of the arrest of a relatively wealthy (Michaels says 'rich', suggesting that despite his focus on class, he doesn't have a particularly rigorous conception of it) African American academic, named Henry Louis Gates. Michaels pretends that Gates' status shows that the elite has been 'diversified'. In furthering his case, which is that only the invisibility of Gates' class status led to his harrassment, he also omits to mention that the officer was perfectly well aware of Gates' position, having viewed his ID, and therefore wasn't cowed by it. He also doesn't mention that the reactions of the officer, the national police bodies, the media and the political class, were not cowed by Gates' being 'rich' either. In fact, what the case showed was that even the expanding black middle class and professional layers are also subject to police violence and harrassment. It also showed that most of the established media, police and political class will defend the officer involved in such instances. It showed that racism remains a crucial part of the way the capitalist system in the US operates. No doubt Gates' class position made it more of an issue for debate, stoking up a little bit of that legendary 'white liberal guilt'. But it didn't stop the system from being racist.

The sequel is important. Shortly after the arrest took place a colleague of the officer concerned named Justin Barrett wrote to a newspaper columnist complaining of unfair coverage. He described Gates as a "banana-eating jungle monkey". He said that if he had "been the officer he [Gates] verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance." (Coverage here). The phrase "banana-eating jungle monkey" was apparently repeated four times in the missive. Now, there are two interesting points about this. My argument at the time was that the officer who carried out the arrest refused to apologise largely because his colleagues told him he didn't have a thing to apologise for. I think they told him not to put his tail between his legs, to remember that if he said sorry he was dropping every one of his friends and colleagues in the dirt. 'If one of them can accuse us of this and get away with it,' one can imagine them saying, 'they'll all be doing it - and we won't be able to move for law suits and the bosses breathing down our necks.' Barrett's words, if you ask me, confirm that this is exactly how his colleagues in the Boston Police Department felt and still feel about this. So, that's the first point - that a major centre of state power was implicated in a defence of white supremacy in this case. The second point that arises is that when Barrett was interviewed by Larry King on CNN, King not only 'accepted' his patently insincere apology on the nation's behalf, but suggested that 'we all' might have to apologise with him. That suggests to me that there's a certain amount of unofficial affirmative action on behalf of white racists going on. There's a preemptive forgiveness for such bestial sentiments that would never be extended to the much less offensive comments of, say, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. So, in the case that Michaels chooses to highlight as an instance in which there is some competition between class and race (as opposed to contiguity), and some sense in which the proof of class seniority might vitiate the effects of racism, the evidence points to precisely the opposite conclusion: even when it is proven that Gates has rock solid, gold standard, upper middle class respectability, he's still suspect, still treated as the villain when a cop smacks him down. There is more to say about this, but I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I'm too angry at the moment to say it.

Labels: 'race', america, capitalism, obama, racism, us politics

Thursday, August 20, 2009

American psychos posted by Richard Seymour

Glen Greenwald is, as usual, on the money in this dissection of Obama's politicking around healthcare reform. Two key points: 1) the GOP don't want any healthcare reform, at all; 2) Obama is using the excuse of 'bipartisanship' - not needing GOP support, but desiring it in the interests of some specious national unity - to negotiate away the 'public option'. The knuckle-crunchers in the Democratic party, led by Rahm Emmanuel - who was appointed chief-of-staff for a reason - are cracking down hard on internal dissenters who favour a public health insurance system, but allowing the 'centrists' and 'Blue Dogs' (Dixiecrats as they would once have been called) to set the agenda. Tom Daschle doesn't get Emmanuel's stick for being the insurance industry's well-paid front-man, despite the administration's animadversions about that trade and its perverse incentives. The plan that is being arrived at, without the 'public option', has to be more or less what was sought.

This being the depressingly typical way in which politics is done in America, it has been rather odd to watch America's unusually large number of cranks get to work attacking Obama and his socialistic Nazi communist Muslim death panels. It has been pointed out that the last attempt at healthcare reform was defeated by the pharmaceutical-healthcare industry, with relatively little mass involvement. This reform process is being conducted with the industry on the inside, as it were - which is one reason why the potential for reform is being progressively eroded. The industry is working very hard to manage and contain reform from within, which it evidently saw coming a mile away (hence astro-turfing PR operations like this). This time, the major public attack is coming from people incited by Palin's claim that health reform would lead to 'death panels' in which bureaucrats get to inflict some foreign eugenics or euthanasia programme in all but name. It has been pointed out that those 'death panels' already exist, and they're all about the stars n stripes. But nonetheless, Palin is being defended by others on the Republican right such as Newt Gingrich, and continues to double down on her assertion when asked. At this one point one recalls the kind of race-baiting hysteria that Palin and the McCain campaign indulged in during the election campaign last year, and the mass audience that clearly existed for it - a minority, but a truculent minority with altogether too many guns. This is yet another expression of exactly the same derangement.

What accounts for it? Clearly, it is only incidentally about Obama's tepid healthcare proposals. The undercurrents of racism being reported at these rallies, and the appearance of heavily armed crowds, clearly indicates that something far greater is at stake. There are some good analyses out there, such as this piece on Al Jazeera, which - despite basically resting on Hofstadter's analysis of the 'paranoid style in American politics' - hits the nail on the head with this:

But the sheer manic intensity of the foam-flecked tirades bursting out in the town halls, so out of proportion to their proximate cause, bespeaks much deeper roots of rage.
These are some of the same people who howled "traitor!" and "kill him!" at Sarah Palin's rallies last year.

They are the ones convinced Obama is a Muslim "sleeper agent" who will destroy American values and hand the country over to Osama bin Laden.

The flip side of their rage is fear. They scream: "We want our country back!" Their country is one where white, Christian conservatives rule.

Right-wing Americans are said to believe in small government. Certainly, where that government is doing something to look after poor people, they are opposed to it. But historically, the state's legitimacy has always been unquestioned when it functioned as the racial state. When it functions in a racial capacity, either through its capacity to imprison, police, blockade immigration, or make war, its legitimacy is assured. I am not saying that these functions of the state can be reduced to racism - far from it. If you really want to get to grips with the reasons behind, eg, the rise America's authoritarian prison state, you should consult Ruth Wilson Gilmore. But if you think of America's astonishingly high prison population, the severity of its policing, the regularity and expense of its wars, the byzantine bureaucracies devoted to policing immigration, and the trashing of civil liberties - all of these are accepted by a sufficient number of people because of America's unique racial dynamics. In a similar way, the de-legitimising of the welfare state took the form of barely coded racial slurs about black 'welfare queens'.

The interesting thing is that most of those protesting stand to gain from these reforms, especially if there's a public option with any meaning. It would reduce insurance costs and reduce the incidence of people being denied treatment on the basis of previously existing conditions. But this is channelling an existential crisis for white conservatives, who think of the country as belonging to them. That crisis arises not because of who or what Obama is. All of the crazy stuff about Obama being born in Kenya, or being a secret Muslim, is merely symptomatic. It is because of what the potential new electoral coalitions, flagged up by the 2008 election, might mean for politics in the future. Look at the way protester Katy Abrams put it to Senator Arlen Specter a while ago:

"I don't believe this is just about healthcare. It's not about TARP. It's not about left and right. This is about the systematic dismantling of this country. I'm only thirty-five years old, I've never been interested in politics. You have awakened a sleeping giant. We are tired of this. This is why everybody in this room is so ticked off. I don't want this country turning into... Russia, turning into a socialised country. [applause, cheers, idiotic hooting] My question for you is, what are you going to do to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution."

Well, there you are. It's not just about healthcare or any other particular issue. Nothing less than America's survival as the original invention of the founding fathers is at stake. Abrams sounds nuts, but she compares rather favourably to some of her compatriots in the lunacy stakes. The militant rightists who put on such an ugly show last year, particularly those given to prominently bearing arms, are in the tradition of racial 'counter-conspiracy'. From the KKK to the gangs who ethnically cleansed Chinese workers from the Pacific coastal towns, there is a long tradition of reactionaries taking matters into their own hands when the state appears to them to be neglecting its proper role. They argued that they were countering a malicious conspiracy on the part of their victims to destroy the country from within. And of course, since racism defined (and still defines) labour markets, state practises, political communities, etc., it was usually contiguous with other issues - class rebellion or conscientious objection - so that this kind of 'counter-conspiracy' could shade easily into anti-Bolshevism, pogroms against Mexican workers, union-busting, etc. The language now being deployed, about having to resist tyranny, about having to restore the Constitution, about having to resist the systematic dismantling of the country itself, clearly evokes this tradition and its martial tenor.

At base, this racist hysteria and paranoia isn't about 'status anxieties', nor is it a peculiar cultural tic. It is really about the possible threat of class dislocation and downward social mobility for relatively well-to-do whites, a threat that is being amplified by the recession. For such people, whose privileges have always been expressed through private property (however modest their actual possessions may be), the idea of any trend toward 'socialisation' really does seem menacing, weird, alien, threatening. They really want to believe that they can return to conspicuous consumption, even with the impossible debt levels and high working hours that has sustained such consumption. And they really do believe that this lifestyle, based on some spurious 'free market' values, is mandated in the Constitution, somehow part of the country's genetic make-up, stitched into the blueprints. They really do believe that this crisis for their way of life is a crisis being wrought by nefarious, treasonous others. And there is a ready-made militia movement, with tens of thousands of members already signed up, should they decide they have to take matters into their own hands. And if these people get serious, they'll make Timothy McVeigh look like Eddie Haskell.

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

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Notice. posted by Richard Seymour

"Sooner or later, black, Iraqi, Mexican, Indigenous, and Palestinian children will emerge from dank hotel rooms, sweatshops, bunkers, and colonial prions. They will link arms and compose the following letter:

'Dear Concerned Liberals: We are humans who do not want to be props in ungenerous moral formulations. We are margin-dwellers. We are the dispossessed. We are your familiar strangers. We carry silent histories on our shoulders. We have tons of behalfs that you would like to speak on. We are entrapped in gruesome oxymora. We eagerly await the day when the powerless cease to be indispensably expendable.'" (Steven Salaita, The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought, Zed Books, 2008)

Labels: america, islamophobia, liberalism, racism

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Hard rain posted by Richard Seymour

So, the stock markets turned up their noses at $700bn. Too little too late, apparently - all the stress and the bullying and arm-twisting and bribing and threats of 'martial law' were to no avail, at least if the idea was to avert catastrophe. According to Nouriel Roubini, the bail-out may either be inadequate or make matters worse, or both. After all: "When a nuclear option of a monster $700 billion rescue plan is not even able to rally stock markets, you know this is a global crisis of confidence in the financial system." So: "The next step of this panic could be the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar-plus of the cross-border short-term interbank liabilities of the U.S. banking and financial system, as foreign banks start to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to U.S. financial institutions. A silent cross-border bank run has already started...". Aside from which, European governments are already behaving as if a run on the banks across the Eurozone and beyond is approaching. (I could swear that the German finance minister who announced that savings would be protected insisted only a few days ago that the problem was an American one and that no decisive intervention in the banking system was required).

But let's get this straight: it isn't that $700bn is too little, or even $810bn if you include the pork barrel measures included in the final bill. As mentioned before, the total cost of bail-outs so far in the US alone totals $1.7 trillion. This raises the US federal debt to $10.1 trillion. One of the measures of the bail-out bill was to raise the borrowing limit to $11.3 trillion, so they evidently expect it will soar again. Given that the US stock markets can lose over a trillion dollars in a single day (29/9), this may not seem like much. It's a ten hour working day for a decent broker who, as you know, conjures up the wealth in sort of Rumplestiltskin operation before deciding to invest it in ways that are selflessly designed to benefit the working class. But someone will eventually have to start paying this back, and the Rumplestiltskin machine is on the blink. Either McCain or Obama are going to break some hearts once they get in - unless they seriously expect the US to continue to be able to sell unlimited debt securities at a time when its major financial institutions are imploding, they will probably make big cuts in public spending and increase taxes for everyone but the 'donor community' (a lovely phrase to describe ruling class political bribery).

The trouble is, who's going to have the money to pay it back if you can't touch the real wealth? Arguably, the US working class can work it off, as they worked off the deficit from the Reagan/Bush years under Clinton's "belt-tightening" regimen. However. If Joseph Stiglitz is right, and we're facing the prospect of an L-shaped growth trend, with mass foreclosures, soaring unemployment and GDP contraction (while "C.E.O.’s, investors, and creditors are walking away with billions"), where will the money come from? This is where the global struggles over domination of energy, as well as land, labour and resource markets sharpen and become dangerous. We have seen a short preview in Georgia, and that is very much 'To be continued'. On top of that, and very much related, we have the war that is still expanding into Pakistan, and the prospect - put on hold for the time being - of a military attack on Iran by either the US or its regional proxies. But these will look like pretty small beer indeed if the US is in need of loot and goes hunting, on whatever pretext. Moreover, there is the problem of managing Americans who get ideas above their station. The largest recent spate of US working class struggle was the massive migrant labour mobilisations, and the subsequent rounds of state repression have broken that up for the time being. But this doesn't mean that the beast is dead. As I pointed out the other day, if it had been up to much of corporate America, there would have been goose steps by the Potomac during the last Great Depression, rather than New Deal liberalism. Their coup failed in part because General Butler ratted them out, but who needs a coup these days? They don't have to rely on a private army now (not even one as illustrious as Blackwater), because:

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

But what would the legal scope for such operations be? Thanks to the act known to its acquaintances as HR 5122, passed unanimously by the Senate in 2006, these troops can be stationed anywhere in the United States. The executive can order that the troops take control of any National Guard units, without state consent, and implement martial law in the event of a serious public disorder. I suspect they brought this law in with the intention of using it at some point. They can even hire Blackwater, as I believe they did during the 'little Somalia' which, you may recall, did serve as a testing ground both for the implementation of martial law and for disaster capitalism. And, well, speaking of those Mexican labourers? During the Great Depression, and later in the mid-1970s, Mexican workers who had been invited during boom time were ethnically cleansed ('repatriated', legally and illegally) in the hundreds of thousands. Not that race matters in America any more. Oh, these are just a few of the many possibilities for an even more bunkered authoritarian state in an era of intractable capitalist crisis.

Labels: america, american working class, coup, economy, financial sector, martial law, new orleans, US imperialism

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Race doesn't matter in America any more. posted by Richard Seymour

Race doesn't matter in America any more. All that stuff you heard about black people dying younger, getting the worst jobs, getting poverty and neglect, being thrown into jail disproportionately, suffering from police brutality - apparently, it's all bullshit, and people are going to vote for Obama and prove that race doesn't matter in America any more. Yes, we can! On the other hand. A while ago, McCain's campaign accused Obama of playing 'the race card' when Obama suggested that there might be a bit of racism in some of the GOP machine's lines of attack. I had to stop and think about this for a moment. Then, I heard that Rush Limbaugh had aired a sketch of sorts describing Barack Obama as "The Magic Negro". I had to think about that for a second too. Then, the New Yorker recently produced a front page that 'ironically' depicted Obama and his wife as Arab terrorists. And CNN ran a spot asking 'What's In a Name?' which compared Obama to Osama, and juxtaposed images of the two (presumably, CNN could then point out that the obvious answer was 'nothing' and then congratulate itself for a program that actually contributed to the race-baiting). One of Hillary Clinton's many touching little gestures during her race-baiting campaign was to 'darken' an image of Obama, so that white voters remembered that they were dealing with one of them. One could go on at some length about the proliferating images and statements on the theme that, just a reminder, he's one of them.

Consider the first two instances that I mentioned above. Obama vaguely hints that some right-wing propaganda about him is a little bit racist, and McCain's campaign is rapidly on the phones, blitzing the media with the news that Obama is playing the 'race card'. Normally the 'race card' is something played by racists not by the victims of racism - but here, we are supposed to conclude that Obama is one of those over-sensitive, prickly whiners who 'reads things into things' and uses his, er, 'background' to victimise well-meaning white people. You know the type I mean - Mr Angry in work, who always thinks you're being racist just for telling harmless jokes. Yeah, that guy. Vote against that bastard. Affronted by Obama's popular edge over McCain, even when the latter is being wildly misrepresented as a normal human being, Limbaugh's show dubs him 'The Magical Negro'. A pathetic Paul Shanklin 'imitates' Al Sharpton singing a bitter little ditty about how "Barack the Magic Negro" is taking away his popularity and not being a real black man like Farrakhan and Snoop Dogg. If you want to familiarise yourself with the traditions of racial denigration involved here, here are some examples from the archives:

While the racist tirade from Limbaugh's program makes light of the gap between those depicted as illiterate demagogues and crooks and the 'eloquent' Obama, it is also designed to remind viewers that he is indeed one of them, and that they are all essentially the same, and that guilty white liberals are going to sell out the country to them. You might argue that all of this is the last refulgence of an ideology of white supremacy that is about to perish, even if the material conditions which such doctrines defend are in rude health. You'd be a sap, but you might argue that.

Yet, Obama has not been particularly admirable in his responses to this kind of thing, except for one occasion when he was cornered by the reactionaries. As Gary Younge pointed out, 'race' is the one thing Obama is never going to be any good on. So, he has duly told reporters that if he loses, it will not be anything to do with 'race'. Rather, it will be because of mistakes he has made. He has backed the killers of Sean Bell, repudiated demands for reparation, cooperated with the prevailing racist ideology by helping blame black people for the problems they experience in a racist society, and has generally done as much as he can possibly do to separate himself from those 'angry' types that you see on the news. As Paul Street argues, he is also doing everything he can to bore, frustrate and alienate the base, because his campaign is a centrist one hitched to the interests of Wall Street. Distilled to its essence, and denuded of its sonorous slogans, Obama's message is that real change is both impossible and unnecessary. No, we can't. And the result may be that racial block voting kills the Obama campaign, puts a crazy old cracker in the White House and leaves Obama's supporters miserable and dejected, wondering how race can still matter so much to so many people.

Labels: america, barack obama, elections, john mccain, racism

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Islamophobia in the US posted by Richard Seymour

I just found this very interesting video from ABC News, in which the programme sets up an experiment to detect Islamophobia among random Americans. An actor portrays a shop clerk refusing to serve a Muslim woman and humiliating her with vile racist rhetoric (she is also an actress, but it's still quite distressing to watch). The reactions from the customers vary wildly. A large number side with the clerk explicitly, and the largest number of people are silent bystanders. But a good number of them respond with brilliant outrage. Unfortunately, the whole thing is couched in terms of 'what does it mean to be an American' and that whole narcissistic melodrama, but it's still quite a telling piece.

Labels: america, islam, islamophobia, racism

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Waiting in the Food Line posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: america, american working class, economy, poverty, recession

Saturday, June 07, 2008

What's the matter with West Virginia? posted by Richard Seymour

Clinton is now down and out, and if Barack Obama has any sense he will not consider her for the VP. This isn't because she's vicious and ruthless and would probably undermine him in office - actually I would quite enjoy that. It isn't because of her race-baiting either - Obama doesn't really mind all that, and can adapt. It is because she will probably cost more votes than she will draw. However, one of the claims she successfully established for herself was that she had a critical appeal among white working class voters and Hispanics. I do not mean to say that this claim is accurate, but many commentators believe it. In fact, there is some limited truth to the claim. For although Obama did make some surprising breakthroughs in white working class areas, it was Hillary who commanded this vote in the main. Look at some of the states where Hillary won: Indiana, an overwhelmingly white, manufacturing state; West Virginia, an overwhelmingly white, manufacturing state; Ohio, overwhelmingly white with - like London - a poor urban core and a rich right-wing belt around it; Kentucky, a southern/mid-west state, overwhelmingly white, with a strong history of car manufacturing; Pennsylvania, an industrial heartland, overwhelmingly white. You may wonder what Hillary had to offer those people apart from fear of the 'black peril'.

It's very simple, and it doesn't take long to explain. Barack Obama is a neoliberal candidate who has hitched his wagon completely to Wall Street. He can provide a faintly progressive veneer to the accumulation practises of the uber-rich. Clinton, while I don't for a second she would have proved more progressive in office, placed herself to the left of Obama on the economy. She knew something quite important, and that is that Bush had won these areas strongly in 2004 after years of Democratic hegemony by posing as an economic nationalist and a defender of jobs. West Virginia, for example, used to be a hardcore Democratic state. Yet it went Republic big time in 2004. This is what Mike Davis had to say at the time:

A bastion of the powerful steel and mine workers' unions, West Virginia was famously loyal to the national Democrats in such dismal elections as 1956, 1968 and 1988. Yet last week Kerry lost West Virginia by a shockingly large margin (13 percent) ... The great achievement of the Clinton era was to realign the Democrats as the party of 'new economy', of the bicoastal knowledge industries and high-tech exporters. Instead of an economic rescue package for the heartland as demanded by the industrial unions, Clinton rammed through the job-exporting North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Kerry campaigned on that legacy. Like Gore, he was heavily funded by the entertainment, software and venture capital industries. And, also like Gore, he campaigned without a compelling economic message or serious proposals to stem further loss of industrial jobs. At the most, he promised modest tax breaks for corporations that kept jobs at home. Bush, on the other hand, had imposed temporary tariffs on imported steel in 2001. The tariff was undoubtedly a cynical Rove-inspired tactic to capture blue collar Democrats, but it worked. From a West Virginia standpoint, the Texas cowboy had the guts to stand up to European competitors, while Kerry offered little more than aspirin for terminal cancer. Bush was perceived (however incorrectly) as an economic nationalist while Kerry was tarred as an untrustworthy Europhile.

So, this is what Hillary Clinton did: she talked up 'bread and butter' issues; attacked Obama on NAFTA; pledged to cut taxes on exorbitantly high 'gas' prices; proposed tax cuts for 'middle class' (working class) Americans and tax rises for the rich; and stressed the importance of defending manufacturing jobs. It doesn't do to puff Hillary as the Bull Moose reformer, even if she looks like a testosterone-fuelled white supremacist at times. And Obama did make some similar pledges on tax and the minimum wage. In fact, Obama got into trouble for raising the issue of class at one point - but it was in such a fashion that he was accused of "elitism". And it is worth remembering that Clinton is to the right of Obama on the single biggest economic issue facing America, the trillion-dollar 'war on terror'. Nonetheless, Clinton was relentless on the 'bread and butter' issues, the manufacturing job issues, and particularly pushed a version of the economic nationalism that Bush did: 'get tough with China, bring jobs back home', was one of her themes. She also attacked 'corporate America' for union-busting, and was far more successful in getting union money than Obama, who was more successful with Wall Street. Clinton was explicitly appealling to the constituency that would once have been called 'Reagan Democrats' - those who are right-wing on social issues, but tended to vote Democrat for the sake of their material well-being. To repeat a theme of Chomsky's, asking whether Clinton's proposals amount to anything is like asking whether the promises in a Colgate commercial amount to anything. Of course they don't. But she successfully segmented and targeted an audience that is furious over the Bush economy and in all probability developing a long-term allergy to the Republicans.

In truth, what's the matter with West Virginia is what's the matter with the rest of America. The Democrats ditched the New Deal about thirty years ago, and now the only apparent repository of statist Keynesianism is the GOP, which is mainly in the business of defending business. And there isn't a serious organised alternative. Davis is right: the Frank thesis, that poverty-stricken 'red state' voters are voting against their economic interest, contains an unstated and insupportable premiss, which is that people have a real chance to express their economic interests at elections. They do not. They have something equivalent to a market research survey: what policy flavour do you prefer, on a scale of 1 to 5...?

Labels: america, barack obama, democratic party, george w bush, hillary clinton, john kerry

Thursday, February 28, 2008

America is full of terrorists. posted by Richard Seymour

According to the US government, there are 900,000 terrorists in America and that's set to rise to over 1 million in the next few months.

Labels: america, terrorism

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Love Letter to America posted by Richard Seymour

You know, Lenin's Tomb is sometimes unfairly accused of being anti-American. Describe Americans in conventionally misanthropic terms (fat lazy greedy pie-eating bastards, that sort of thing), and you're liable to be accused of anti-Americanism. But, and if I may be delicate for a second, the Tomb does not subscribe to this fashionable contempt for America. We fly the stars n stripes proudly and boldly at every opportunity. True, we generally add a few flames beforehand, but it's only a little joke. We enjoy your Seinfeld and your animated shows with racist humour as much as anyone. And so, as a gesture of appreciation, I give you 'America':

Labels: america, special relationship

Monday, February 18, 2008

Hegemony Begins At Home posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by B Dewhirst:

Recently, our host was surprised that the Tomb’s American readership now equalled that of the UK. As an American, I'm not entirely surprised. Perspective is a bitter medicine, but once you realize you're living in a nation which doesn't admit its hegemonic relationship towards other States, but still expects to be obeyed by them without question, a fresh point of view is the only thing which convinces us that we're still the sane ones.

This slow creep to Empire began a long time ago. It now spans the globe, but its first victims are still at our doorstep. Before our 'special relationship' with Britain, before we were propping up and knocking down dictators to keep the sources of our energy reserves divided, there was the small matter of the people who were already living on this continent before we arrived. The most deplorable men of the 20th century looked to the American Reservation system as an example of how to deal with 'inconvenient' groups. With this history, and with the sorts of attitudes underscoring its design, it is no wonder that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is among the worst-managed branches of the American government. Since those subject to it have no say in how it operates, the BIA is run with the same 'genius' that decided to disband the entire Iraqi armed forces, from General to Private, so as to work from a 'clean slate.' Thanks to a court order in 2001, the BIA is cut off from the Internet to prevent them from losing any more of the Indians' funds in their care. As related in John Anderson's Follow the Money, the wholesale looting of everything the Bush Regime has their fingers in extended to the Department of the Interior and BIA. The infamous Jack Abramoff was involved in taking money from one tribe to lobby against another, then taking money from the party being lobbied against to lobby in the opposite direction, and while his days as a lobbyist with the scruples of an arms dealer are over, many reservations are still in ruinous condition.

Should someone be under the mistaken apprehension that the US moved smoothly from a conquest-driven, genocidal model to a faultless if bumbling bureaucracy, they may wish to reflect on the career of Dillion Meyers, who was placed in charge of the BIA from 1950 to 1952, and his successor, who followed many of his policies. One of the most interesting things about Meyers, apart from his conscious effort to abolish Indian hopes for autonomy by forcing the residents of the reservations to assimilate rather than renovating the reservations, was the job he had held previously. He was in charge of the Japanese interment camps during WWII, as Richard Drinnon relates in Keeper of the Concentration Camps.

Indigenous peoples across the world won a victory in September of 2007, when the U.N. general assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 143 to 4. (The reason that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States voted against it should be obvious.) A constant theme on Lenin's Tomb has been the Palestinians' right to, and need for, sovereignty. This is a need shared by the Lakota Indians in the United States. Unlike many of the tribes in the eastern US, the US government clearly treated the Sioux Nation as a sovereign entity prior to an expansionist campaign which left the Lakota without control over their own borders. In light of this recent UN Declaration, and the inability of the United States to comply with a succession of treaties it signed with these Indians' ancestors, prominent delegates reasserted the sovereignty of their nation in December of 2007. They argue that their recognized representatives are illegitimate patsies for the BIA, and have invited American citizens to join them in their new nation.

Their legal case, referencing national and international law, is laid out on the website of The Republic of Lakotah, an advocacy group working to promote a peaceful separation from the United States. They've also collected a sizable list of grievances against the US government.

Some have suggested that independence won't aid them in redressing their problems; however, it is difficult to see how exchanging an inept, corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs for a sovereign entity with control over its own borders wouldn't be preferable. As with the Palestinians, hopelessness is among the chief problems plaguing the reservation system. Alcoholism is also prevalent, and without the ability to control borders, activists have been arrested for preventing the flow of alcohol into the reservations.

Many have questioned the legitimacy of the activists. In response, I wonder who elected Nehru, Gandhi, Jomo Kenyatta, or Mandela, or any of the other anti-colonial champions of the 20th century. Many of those leaders were subsequently democratically elected by grateful citizens of newly reborn states. The process of independence for the Republic of Lakotah continues with Russell Means, an AIM co-founder and Republic of Lakotah spokesperson, visiting the Mohawk Indians to relate in his own words what they are trying to accomplish and to answer questions. They continue to seek the support of other nations, and considering the number of post-colonial nations in the world, have some reason to hope they'll be recognized. Bolivia's President is an Indian peasant by birth, and there are any number of governments outside of the American Hegemony (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran) who might recognize the young nation out of solidarity.

Means is, however, a problematic figure. He has had his differences with the rest of AIM in the past, notably when he travelled to Nicaragua to help organise Miskito rebels against the Sandinistas. The 19th century American capitalist ideology he appeals to was once championed by the same men who advocated extermination of his people. That the colonial powers were capitalist was not simply some accident of history, but rather this expansion is central to capitalism. Means is a libertarian, but past libertarian experiments have not fared well, to put it mildly. Should this enterprise succeed, it will do so because it is not, in fact, a libertarian experiment. Though damaged by centuries of abuse, there remains a core social structure, a central idea, of how the Sioux people relate to one another. Should this new nation be recognized by by Bolivia, by Cuba, by Venezuela, it is likely these groups will have as much impact on the new nation as Russell's libertarianism, and the culture which is to be preserved by this separation will have a stronger impact still.

It is my hope that the base Means is attracting is better than his faults and as good as his most worthy ideals, as this may well take decades to fully resolve and it will be those who are attracted to this cause now who see it through. Further, while Means is certainly the most visible activist promoting this cause, he is certainly not the only one. At this stage, calling attention to their legitimate right to secede from the United States, as well as present and past abuses, is much more important than whether or not they immediately are recognized as a country or the specific details of the form of that nation. Surely, there is a better answer than casinos for some and abject poverty for others. I, for one, wish the whole movement the best of luck. Hegemony ends one revolution at a time.

Labels: aim, america, colonialism, genocide, native americans

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Arguments for slavery. posted by Richard Seymour

In light of the recent refulgence of arguments for white supremacy, it is worth taking a look at precedents. No sooner were the British ruling class strategically terminating their own colossal role in the enslavement of millions of Africans than they bitterly regretted it. Such is the contemporary understanding of historians of that institution, at any rate. In a somewhat analogous fashion, as soon as Southern white slaveholders were defeated, they started to experience a "Negro problem" that made them regret their defeat all the more. This "problem" was experienced variously as economic competition, displacement in political institutions, the spread of education among those who had previously been strictly banned from learning the first letter of the alphabet, the resistance to continued subordination - in short, a transformation in the status of African Americans so great as to constitute a state of emergency for white elites. Their response was to revisit the 'peculiar institution' and to give rise to a flood of historical revisionism about slavery whose core doctrines would impress themselves upon leading political figures of the Progressive era, up to and including Woodrow Wilson.

The cardinal belief among the pro-slavery revisionists was that the institution was a sort of school through which all 'races' had to proceed in order to attain civilization. For example, Matthew Este's post-bellum text 'A Defence of Slavery, as it is practised in the United States' made a very particular argument about slavery: it could be a barbarous practise, he admitted, when the overseer was a brute, but Americans stood in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition and could be entrusted with the administering of such a sacred duty. Biblical references were crucial here: Abraham held slaves, Moses too, all the old Semites in fact, even the priests. The practise was an ancient passage of rites, as venerable as wife-beating and child-rape. Since many of the foremost opponents of slavery were Christians who believed fervently in the literal truth of the monogenism and - to purloin a prase - 'moral equivalence' established in the tale of man's descent from Eden, it was obviously important to pay particular attention to scriptural support. "No institution," Este writes, "clearly sanctioned by Divine authority, contains within itself the principles of its own destruction. Slavery is clearly established in the Old Testament - it met the Divine Sanction - we cannot therefore suppose it is wrong". At any rate, slavery is not the product or foe of Christianity, according to Este - the province of religion is to abolish evils arising out of social relations, not to create or abolish social relations (which advert to a 'human nature', an essence put into manufacture by the Creator in the same way that the blueprint for a watch is put to practise by the watchmaker).

The slave benefited, of course. This was the ultimate moral mandate for slavery. In a moral/religious sense, in that he gains systems of virtue that were otherwise denied him; in a political sense, supposing he gains a level of freedom hitherto denied him (yes, it may be tyranny, but the other kind of tyranny was worse); in the economic sense (the most important of all), since the slave has learned the customs of industry, the arts of civilization, the means of self-government. Self-government is the crucial point: Americans were constantly faced with the question of who was fit for self-government. Since their ruling elites were perpetually having to give way to unpropertied classes (extension of the franchise), to enslaved peoples (ending slavery), to women (letting them out of the house), it was a decisive question. In this sense, democracy and independence are not political-economic states, but cultural ones. Can you handle your money, can you save, are you morally virtuous, is your wife obedient, do your children maintain cleanliness, are you industrious? Etc etc. Este cites the example of Rome where, he maintains, at its most virtuous and vigorous it was ready for self-government - but then it degenerated and so, Providentially, the necessary despotism arrived to save its olive-toned skin. Similarly, the procession through historical examples yields an absence of deities among Africans (a lack of religious wisdom); only a brief acquaintance with reason among Indians and Chinese (a lack of secular wisdom); and of course a total lack of written history among the indigenous - they have only oral histories. Egypt had its heiroglyphs, true, but never the remainder of Africa. (Derrida's attack on logocentrism becomes more comprehensible when you study the history of racist doctrine).

At any rate, the whole system at the late 19th and early 20th Century seemed ripe for re-examination. It was bursting with potentia. Democracy would soon mean the rise of the labouring classes. Abolitionism would soon overthrow peonage and wage-slavery. The woman would soon be out on the streets, cavorting with men of all hues. Children would no longer learn to obey, or expect a harsh competition over resources ordered along lines of race, class and gender to be natural. It was predictable that white capitalist elites would seek to invent a history that would legitimise their violent restorationism. John David Smith has shown that African American historians challenged this - often in contradictory ways, ways that accepted some part of racist doctrine, or worried over how much to accept, but the challenge was usually radical. It attacked the foundations of racism, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the white purview as natural, the Providential arguments - many of these writers had enough experience of slavery themselves to know how to unsentimetally dispose of such trash. However, it bears reflecting on the fact that their outlook would almost certainly have been seen as 'biased' by their experiences, as immature, insufficiently appreciative of what the cold, unsentimental facts of the matter would tell them. That seems to me to be the automatic point of view of those considering southern or Third World writers today, however liberal or 'moderate' they in fact are.

The current breed of apologists for Ian Smith are disgusting, of course, not least because of their resemblance to their forebears. They are, however, a breed almost as extinct as Smith himself (one hopes). Far more insidious, perhaps, are those who repeat the gestures of pro-slavery doctrine in bad faith, who accept its basic contours without the discredited racial mythologies. They still hold that systems of white supremacy can be an education in democracy, that populations can be fit for self-government only when an Anglo-Saxon Christian man named George takes them through it step-by-step (with a limitless willingness to use violence, and be enthralled by violence). They still hold that tyranny is a benign 'civilization' academy. They maintain, in such a way that it does not seem fit to question on CNN, that capitalist habits of practise are the surest road to freedom (Arbeit Macht Frei, in other words). They cleave to the cultural supremacy of the West. The only doctrine that isn't completely fashionable in liberal imperialist circles is the doctrine of biological racial superiority. The meme of 'totalitarianism', really a prophylactic against communism in their hands, has the unintended consequence of prohibiting their natural racism, forcing them to find inventive ways of commuting it through new discourses. The neocons of the Cold War found that racism was okay if it was seen as a meritocratic reflection of cultural hard-headedness, a proportionate reward for the will or lack of will to pull oneself up by the boot-straps - what could be more democratic and all-American than that? In a similar sense, today's racists find themselves on good standing when they speak of cultural distinction rather than a biological one. The culturalist aspect of racism, which was actually prevalent during the post-bellum pro-slavery revision, has not been successfully assailed, so that it remains the last refuge of the vicious supremacist. And so the arguments for imperialism that we hear today are arguments for slavery - how unsurprising that each imperial adventure seems to end in the long-term violent bondage of a whole country.

Labels: america, rhodesia, slavery, white supremacy

Monday, November 12, 2007

American insurgents: caught on video posted by Richard Seymour

The kids take on the military-industrial complex:

The writers take on the moguls:

Labels: america, kids take on military, writers strike

Saturday, August 04, 2007

Recession peers over the horizon posted by Richard Seymour

The mortgage market collapses, as US housing enters its worst recession in sixteen years. Two-thirds of Americans believe a recession has already begun. Investors are persuaded that a recession is on the way. This year has seen repeated fluctuations on the stock market, sharp falls followed by a temporary recovery, indicating how nervous the planet's owners are. As last year's post about The Great 2007 Recession pointed out, it was the housing market's strength that bailed out the American economy during the 2001-2 recession, so its current weakness exacerbates the already existing structural imbalances in the economy. US workers experienced the first (very slight) real-terms wage growth for six years over a few months until February this year, but these have since contracted. As the New York Times points out:

Wage growth in the current economic recovery has been unusually weak. The real average wage for rank-and-file workers actually fell from the start of 2002 to late 2006, despite solid economic growth. As job growth picked up, wages surged in the second half of last year before falling back this year.

The recent moves to increase the minimum wage have predictably made little impact on this, since the raise is gradual and small, and affects only 1.25m workers. What's more, for a full time worker on the new rate of $5.85 an hour, as this report points out, there will still be huge problems meeting bills. American capital is obviously anxious to see how far it can go, since at some point there's the prospect of a massive wage-free work-force, as in Mexico, but the reports in the business press do indicate some concern that it aggravates the economy's weakness to have a population that can't pay for the stuff they sell, especially since the record debt levels are no longer sustainable due to the collapse of the housing market. So, what are they going to do about it? Oh, probably demand another tax cut, hope for rising unemployment to further discipline the workforce, hire retainers and repo men, and ride out the storm.

Labels: america, capitalism, global economy, recession

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The American Ruling Class posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: america, capitalism, kappa kappa gamma, ruling class

Friday, May 25, 2007

"How transcendentally, how historically pathetic..." posted by Richard Seymour

Keith Olbermann, in case you didn't know him, is MSNBC's epigone of Ed Murrow (he even copies the sign off). And as performances go it isn't all that bad, even if Olbermann never actually says anything that isn't entirely within the 'mainstream' of permitted thought. This rant, following the failure of Democrats to hold to their very loose 'withdrawal deadline', reaches some sublime peaks of outrage: