The New Socialism
Matthew Yglesias:
Over the past 30-35 years or so, the world as a whole has retreated from the high tide of state management of the economy that was reached around midcentury, and moved more in the direction of laissez faire. But I think it’s fair to say that though the trend has been perfectly general, the political leadership in this movement has tended to come from Washington and London, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the loudest and clearest exponents of it and their successors on the center-left tended to confirm, rather than reverse, a new Anglophone consensus. And yet:
The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. […] The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”
This is what a lot of left-of-center economists said in the first place, but the ideological taboo against nationalization was very strong. Now, though, the forces of looming collapse in the banking sector are proving even stronger. Thus, it looks like it’ll be George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke who bring a very strong dose of socialism to the United States of America. And yet Andy McCarthy’s busy worrying if Barack Obama is a closet Maoist.
The End of Freedom
Lenin:
… This is what is important in Marx’s ‘ideology criticism’ - far from upholding a banal dichotomy between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’, Marx collapsed the distance between the two. They are not identical, but nor are they autonomous. As he argued in the Grundrisse, against Proudhon and his followers, social equality is precisely not just a false claim made for markets. Rather, individuals are “stipulated for each other”, in the context of an exchange of equivalents, as free and equal agents. Market transactions do not express themselves as involuntary expropriation, even where that is in fact what is happening, but as voluntary engagements.
That explains the context in which the ideas of neoliberalism could even be comprehensible; the historic collapse of the postwar social democratic compromise provided the occasion for their aggressive relaunch; and the liberalisation of the stock exchange announced their hegemony. The true believers really do see the broad historical shift that is taking place…
The Sound of Raining Bullshit
Lenin chimes in with his usual perspicuous analysis of the situation:
… The news can’t talk sensibly about this, because they can’t talk about class. They implicitly favour the capitalist purview in their focus, but they cannot directly address the issues involved. That is why no one relying on the papers and the television for enlightenment is going to have a clue what is going on…. In fact, the best explanation you are likely to end up with is that some banks made some horribly bad bets on mortgages for poor people (and, therefore, what? - poor people shouldn’t have mortgages?). To talk realistically about this crisis is to talk about what has happened to wages and profits for thirty years, the contours of class struggle and the associated political projects (socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, etc), as well as the basic mechanism of exploitation behind that. To talk realistically about the issues raised by this crisis is also to talk about class, and particularly the impact on working class people. You can’t understand why those who gain most from the system suffer least when it fails, while those who gain least suffer most unless you at least mention the fact that there is such a thing as highly concentrated class power in the society…
The Case for Socialism
Shaun Harkin in the Socialist Worker:
So the question is: How do we restructure our society to meet the needs of the vast majority of humanity and rid the planet of the scourges of war, exploitation and oppression? Socialism—a society based on workers’ control and dedicated to meeting human needs—is the alternative that we urgently need.
My only problem with the piece is that a lot of the rhetoric is hopelessly outdated. This isn’t to say that it isn’t true, but simply that it isn’t an effective way to argue a point, especially if the goal is to write a persuasive piece (although I suppose if one is receiving their news from the Socialist Worker to begin with, then it wouldn’t really matter).
Zizek on Haiti: Democracy versus the People
Slavoj Zizek reviews Peter Hallward’s book on Haiti in the New Statesman:
As Aristide himself puts it: “It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people.” Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its “base”, to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not “representing” them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our “postmodern” terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic “agonistic pluralism”.
This is why Hallward’s outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but about what it means to be a “leftist” today: ask a leftist how he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who wants “globalisation with a human face”.
(Via I cite.)
Morales Victorious in Bolivian Referendum
The BBC confirms that the recent poll undertaken by the Bolivian government has come out in favor of continuing Evo Morales’ reforms. This is not only a political victory for Morales, but for socialism in general, and a thorough rejection of the tendentious separatism of the Bolivian aristocracy that has threatened the country’s unity.
“The Dark Knight” Has It Both Ways
The Socialist Worker rectifies Joe Allen’s previous negative review of The Dark Knight, which exhibited left-wing contrarianism at its worst. This one by Scott Johnson is much more nuanced.
If The Dark Knight is a parable of the “war on terrorism,” it is also a parable about its dangers. Having said that, it should not be pigeonholed as simply a “progressive” or “reactionary” film—but neither does it transcend these labels. It wants to have things both ways, as when Batman builds an incredibly invasive eavesdropping device, uses it, then has it destroyed because it is too powerful.
UPDATE: On the further subject of the politicization of The Dark Knight, here’s a great write up by k-punk.
Defending the 1960s
Peter Marcuse in In These Times:
The protests of 1968 — symbolically, the occupation of the Columbia University buildings, the student uprisings in Paris and the street protests in Berlin — are now in danger of being denigrated as the actions of spoiled, confused, if not neurotic, students and rebellious youth who were “finding” themselves in making trivial demands of their uncomprehending and benevolent societies.
…Internationally, the ‘68 protests changed the character of post-war politics, helped end the Vietnam War, and legitimized concerns about peace, welfare and democracy beyond the prevailing mainstream consensus.
And on a related subject, here’s an article on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring over at the Socialist Worker. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
What Would Allende Say?
Interesting profile of former Chilean socialist revolutionary, Salvador Allende, in n+1 Magazine. The excerpt from 3 Quarks Daily about his taste in suits is pretty great, too.
Fed Raises Specter of Class Struggle
World Socialist Website:
The US ruling elite is determined to do everything in its power to transfer its own enormous losses onto the backs of the American working class. The unlimited bailout power being called for by the Treasury and the Fed constitutes one part of this attempt. The systematic drive to slash real wages in order to finance the return to profitability constitutes another.