America: A Nation of Whiners

It is undoubtedly the case that America is a nation of whiners. It is and always has been, how else do you think it came into existence? I don’t think anyone will contend otherwise, which is probably why the media has focused almost solely and unrelentingly on the “America is a nation of whiners” sound-bite from Phil Gramm’s recent diatribe. Even the blogosphere is partly to blame for this. Of course, this focus is essentially a reaction-formation designed to obscure and repress the far more ideological claim on Gramm’s part that economic failure is “psychological,” i.e. subjective.

The subjectivist theory of economics has long been a staple of neoliberal ideology, which argues, for example, that the value of a commodity, rather than being the objective cost of the labor required to produce said commodity, is in fact reflective of its marginal utility. But on the specific issue of the business cycle and economic crises, marginalist theory fails to provide an adequate explanation: instead it has to rely on its late-capitalist ideological counterpart, New Age obscurantism, which promulgates that the problems we experience, and our reality in general, are purely of our own making. And clearly the liberal rejoinder that “it has real consequences!” is not enough. It is a prototypically pathetic response, as it accepts the neoliberal framing of the debate, simply adding that subjective reality can lead to actual, concrete harm to human-beings.

There is obviously a grain of truth to the liberal argument, but the more important issue at stake is whether economic crisis is “psychological” in nature, or part in parcel of an objective process. Marx articulated the latter view in his Theories of Surplus-Value. His formulation of crisis theory, which points to an inherent tendency of capitalism to undergo crises as a result of the over-production of fixed capital, is perhaps one of his most important contributions to the critique of capitalism.¹

As Marx writes, “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed.” To take that a step farther, crisis also reveals these very same contradictions and antagonisms within our political discourse. Here the link between Marxism and psychoanalysis becomes quite explicit: it is the goal of the analyst to confront the analysand with the contradictions inherent to her/his discourse in order to fully expose to them their relation to the unconscious truth, a truth which contradicts every discourse, including its relation to itself. The whole debacle involving Gramm points to an unconscious repression of class struggle, which is the sine qua non of the political struggle.

That is why I will be voting for Stalin come November.

1. A condensed overview of Marx’s crisis theory is available at ISR. ↩