It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy.That's why anti-Obama liberals must walk a difficult path. It is important to oppose Obama -- but for the correct reasons. We cannot stand with the populist rage peddlers who see "socialism" in the policies of an administration where none exists.
In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.Last ditch-ist? Hm. I see it as a long-haul strategy. If kept up, the effort should work. Look at history; look at how well similar histrionics worked during the Clinton administration. That success came despite the fact that Clintonism worked, while Obama-ism won't.
When that failure becomes evident -- well, I shudder to think of what may happen to this nation. Today, progressives snicker at the teabag brigade. They won't snicker for long. As always, when progs play chess they look only one or two moves ahead.
Forgive another long quote, but this is choice stuff:
...when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.This observation goes to one of the supreme ironies of 19th century history: When the lower classes acquired voting rights in Europe, they showed themselves to be of solidly conservative instincts. After the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris commune, most of the "peasants" in France would have voted for a restoration of either Napoleon III or the House of Bourbon. That's why many Marxists later decided that the proles could not be trusted to look out for their own interests.
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields.
And yet. What are we to make of this Rasmussen poll?
Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.Observations:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.
1. A telephone poll is likely to under-represent what Taibbi has called the "peasant" class. How would the full inclusion of their opinions affect the results?
2. A generation of far-right propaganda has taught Americans to equate socialism with communism. When I was a boy, everyone recognised the difference between West Germany (which had a mixed economy) and East Germany (communist). Indeed, that difference was considered so profound as to justify nuclear war. But ever since the USSR fell, the propagandists have insisted that no such difference exists, that the socialist policies of an Adenauer were essentially Marxist and therefore as evil as Stalinism. Any hit of pink in a government's program meant that the entire thing had gone, or would soon go, Bolshevik red.
Or so we have been told, repeatedly. Thus, when 20% of Americans say they prefer "socialism," are they talking about the Soviet model or about the Swedish model? Do Americans see a distinction?
3. Here's a thinker: If a fascist movement ever takes hold in America, will it have the greatest success recruiting from the 52% capitalist bloc, from the 20% bolshie bloc, or from the 27% dunno-what-the-fuck bloc? (I mean real fascism here, defined with some rigor. Too many people tend to apply the word "fascist" to anything or anyone they find annoying.)
13 comments:
From the capitalist bloc, of course.
I'm not sure, Mike. The National Socialists made inroads with traditional Socialists. Hence the name.
Conversely, the dunno-what-the-fuck types are usually the easiest to con.
In discussing the right wing we often see progs say something to the effect that "no sane, intelligent person could honestly believe that"
implying that wingers are either insane, stupid or dishonest.
While I disagree with the wingers they are none of those things, or at least no more so than progressives are.
I keep trying, but I just can't work up the same fear of a populist-fascist takeover of the country that you have. These right-wingers who are holding tea parties may not be serving my cup of tea, but I get the sense that these people use the word "socialism" to describe any instance of perceived over-reaching by the state. So when Matt Tiabbi claims that Obama is anything but a socialist, yes, of course he is right, but it's also true that Obama's actions have been rather unprecedented, in terms of the amount of public debt being accrued and the degree of government involvement in the private sector. So, perhaps foolishly, I feel that this gives people on the left an opening to have fruitful discussions with people on the right. I know, for instance, that whenever I've presented a conservative with the "privatizing wealth while socializing risk" criticism of the bailout, they have generally nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
Perhaps when you talk about "a rigorous definition of fascism" we need to define the term better. I always think of the "14 defining characteristics of fascism" but I know that some scholars of fascism disagree with the list. In any case, I still am more afraid of the entrenched powerful interests in this country than I am of the rabble. I also disagree with Noam Chomsky who seems to be in your camp, so much so that he went all Godwin on Sarah Palin in a recent interview on Democracy Now!
Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do—-it’s interesting—-there’s a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.
Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, “What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?”
That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: “Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there.” OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting. It’s been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase “working class.” She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.LinkCall me naive, but Sarah Palin simply doesn't scare me in the way.
Inky
No. Lower-class voter support for conservative candidates was not where 'Marxist' substitutionism, as espoused by Leninism and social democracy, came from.
Take Russia. Look at the influence on Leninism of say Chernyshevsky. Hell, it's even in the newspaper titles - Iskra (the 'Spark'), Kolokol (the 'Bell'). And all that began before the workers got the vote.
Or take Germany. By the time full-throttle parliamentary democracy was introduced (fat lot of good it did the poor!) there was already a well-established substitutionist Social Democratic Party - the birthplace, as is seldom realised, of the 'academic Marxism' that to my mind has only stood in the way of a real radical advance ever since.
Or France. There wasn't a significant 'Marxist' movement in that country until the 1930s, so neither he of the 18th Brumaire nor his lower-orders supporters were of much relevance to it. You may have a valid point regarding Clemenceau vis-a-vis Blanqui, but that's verging on a whole other biz.
By the way, why do you put 'peasants' in inverted commas? The bulk of Louis Napoleon's supporters (counting by numbers only, of course) were indeed 'paysans'. What's wrong with calling peasants 'peasants'? When your own elitism gets uppermost, doesn't that connect with a peasantifying caricaturing of Americans who watch wrestling on the telly and don't hang around in art galleries?
If there's a word around here that I really don't like, it's 'prole'. Here's why - it's standard usage among much of the bourgeoisie in Britain - as I found out at the sharp end, at school.
Those b*stards have much more class hatred in them than most working class people have ever had. They think we're animals; they think we're scum. The word is used with similar hatred (and meaning, when we really come down to it) as 'n*gger'. I can't stand middle-class tosser ultra-lefties who adopt it with pseudo-irony. (I've stayed away from such characters for 15 years, but still shudder sometimes in recollection). I realise that's not what you're doing, but...words resonate.
b
I put "peasants" in quotes because I was quoting.
It's a word I would avoid under most circumstances, since it has so often been used to convey the ideas of filth and ignorance and poor table manners.
American and British attitude toward the word "prole" may differ. The term has seen increased usage since the publication of Paul Fussell's "Class," in which an illustration depicting the profile of a "typical prole" turns out to be a portrayal of Fussell himself.
I myself am a person of proudly prole circumstances, despite rather patrician tastes in music. Okay, here's a secret: I once, years ago, had a foot firmly planted in the middle -- dare I say upper-middle? -- class. THAT sure as hell didn't last long!
The point is this: For me, "prole" is a self-description. That term encompasses all of us who know what it is like to have to sleep in the back seat of a 20-year-old car, reading Orwell by the light of a streetlamp while Verdi plays on the radio.
Like you, I can't stand it when smug, well-heeled lefties use that term, or any other term, in an ironic way. In fact, I have a standing antipathy for irony altogether, as the post-moderns poseurs define irony. Say what you mean and mean what you say, I say.
But hey -- screw those twits. I'll keep using "prole" until someone comes up with a better one-syllable word.
"There wasn't a significant 'Marxist' movement in that country until the 1930s..."
Yeah, well, as I recall, Marx had some high praise for Blanqi and the Communards, who were, let's face it, pretty fucking radical. Also pretty fucking stupid and self-destructive, if you ask me. I don't think they understood that Paris and France were, in essence, two very different countries, and that little things like murdering an archbishop might not play well in the stix. But this brings us right back to my main point about the essential conservatism of the, er, proles.
I've been reading a lot about that period due to a personal writing project. What gets to me is that within the space of months, the Parisian masses took to the streets to hail the Emperor -- and then the installation of a rather conservative Republic -- and then the installation of the most radical political idea yet tried. Lots of cheering in each case. The same people doing the cheering. And each time, the whole thing failed. You can argue that the failure resulted from pressure from without, and there is truth in that, but there was also much rot from within.
During that entire goatfuck, which system proved to be the most effective? Bismarck's. A rotten militaristic dictatorship which made use of the trappings of a parliamentary democracy. Utterly ruthless. Utterly cynical. But it WORKED.
What does this tell us about the human condition?
We really don't have market capitalism. We have some form of corporatism that buys political influence to ensure they can become big comfortable, rival-blocking, rent-seeking, extraordinary profit making monopolies.
Free market capitalism is defined by a bunch of little businesses where none control the market price of their output (it's a byproduct of Supply AND Demand), none of which can block the entry of rivals, so small no one cares if they go bankrupt, that have to compete on effectiveness in production and costs. There's no insider information, there's no such thing as buy market protection from Politicians. There's also no way you can restrict your output and impact any one but you.
We don't have anything remotely resembling capitalism.
I agree, D. With the proviso that differing forces operate on differing levels of the economy. "Capitalism" means something different when talking about B of A and when talking about your local dog groomer.
The question is, is corporate pseudo-capitalism the inevitable result of free-market capitalism?
I have to agree with Inky: I can't seem to work up any fear about tea parties or right wing populism. Every part of the political spectrum has its crazies and I'd say the neo-progs who now hold the reins of power have a higher proportion of 'em. Indeed, their reaction to the tea parties seems unhinged to me -- from Maddow to Democratic Underground, the new establishment seems unable to bear any other political group having any legitimacy whatsoever. But I guess that's what makes them the Obama Establishment.
From Taibbi's quotes, I'm at a loss at his criticism of the peasant mentality in Beck's audience -- when, if you want to go down that road, that exact same "peasant mentality" is employed by the neo-progs. Their obsession with "tea baggers" is creepy. Ditto the hypocritical obsession with Sarah Palin. They need to blame all of Taibbi's imaginary peasant enemies, because they can't blame Obama or the Dems... or themselves. They have chosen distracting targets of anger instead of the true locations of power.
RE:The question is, is corporate pseudo-capitalism the inevitable result of free-market capitalism?
Joseph: I guess that depends on the vulnerability of the government to 'rent-seeking' by corporations. At various times through history, we've had governments that actively fight corporatism and don't enable monopolies.
I've always thought it weird that the first thing we do in a theoretical microeconomics class is prove that perfect capitalism has the same wonderful result as a perfect planned economy. The problem is it's all theoretical models and it assumes, in both cases, that the government agent or the market can't be captured by some huge powerful force. A lot of the enabling comes from a corrupt political class either way.
I've often thought that if you couldn't sell equity to become enormous as a corporation, and had the government run the kinds of things that are natural monopolies (like public transportation, energy and water providers). You can have an effective combination of both. In other words, let market capitalism flourish with mom and pop outfits for things like skis and jackets. Leave things like getting vaccines to babies to government organizations that operate on welfare rather than profit motives.
Dakini astutely highlights the profound difference between an healthy free market and cartel-and-monopoly capitalism.
In response to the complaints over the AIG bonuses, Mr. Oxycontin bellowed, "they're trying to make you hate Capitalism!" That beneficent institution which, of course, provides us with all the amenities and comforts that those deprived socialists in Western Europe lack.
The robber barons have disingenuously but skillfully conflated Capitalism with Democracy, and Socialism with one-party tyranny. In truth, political, social, and economic are three separate attributes. One can have a political democracy and a free market in concert with strong social programs.
Amid all the (valid) complaints about the ineptitude of our federal gov't., we ought not forget that the purpose of a government is to better the lives of the people; the purpose of a corporation is to reap profit for its stockholders.
I've had very mixed caste experiences too...raised on social welfare by a single mother on a council estate and then two years as a scholar at the top private school in England before getting kicked out. The school was where I learnt the word "prole".
Whilst not taking a (usually put-on) "Kill 'em and enjoy it" attitude (if the social bases of religion and monarchism and bourgeois power aren't removed, there will be more archbishops to replace any who get the chop), I've got little problem with such acts by the Communards.
It's a shame the revolutionaries who wanted to burn down Notre Dame in the last few days of the Commune were deterred by artist comrades from doing so. (Unfortunately the story that Bakunin tried to get the Sistine Madonna put on the barricades in Dresden a few decades before may be untrue).
Agreed about Paris and the rest of France. It's an issue that's never been resolved. Paris and the desert, as one long-term Left Bank radical told me. But then again...nothing would have been gained by giving succour to Catholicism in 'la France profonde'. The reason why Ireland has never had a revolutionary movement on even 1/1000 of the scale of Spain is that people have never dared to stand up to the priests.
The Blanquists are my favourite radical faction of the 19th century, given that Babeuf had his head removed in 1797. In practice they were far more radical than the Marx circle - there's no denying it. I don't blame Marx for social democracy and Bolshevism, but part of the reason those latter movements were anti-Blanqui (especially the social democrats) is that they sought institutionalisation, not revolution, whereas with Blanqui it was the other way round. He may have made mistakes but he didn't do deals to give the Ukraine to Germans, or travel around in trains carrying loads of gold, or get involved in setting up a 'labour establishment'.
What I can't get my head around properly is how at certain times Blanquist types used to meet in (or underneath) major city-centre buildings...at one time beneath the Pantheon, if memory serves. It links up with secret society stuff.
Blanqui coined the term "industrial revolution". I once wrote to some bourgeois historian who'd had a big contract with the BBC, who was fulsome about the role of posh Oxford 1880s historian Arnold Toynbee, who many students are told coined the term. She was so sneery, saying yeah, Blanqui must have "picked it up" somewhere in the 1830s.
Blanqui was popular; a fifth of a million people turned out to his funeral.
Have you read Blanqui's cosmological work, "Eternity among the Stars"? I once translated some of it. There's definitely some Giordano Bruno in there. Some of it also reads like Thomas Wright of Shugborough Monument fame, who sussed what the Milky Way was all about!
Re. France and Bismarck, maybe revolutionary movements from the lower orders have prevented France from "working" in the way that set-ups in other "advanced" countries do? If so, great!!
There's certainly a lot of people in France nowadays who don't give a shit about the Fifth Republic and are awake enough in their minds to say so. I think being swept along in a fascist movement would be the last thing they'd be up for.
b
PS "Ironic"? I thought you were being ironic when you said other people are conspiracy buffs but "I" do conspiracy research? :-)
Joe - I've been thinking about your take on the Blanquists and the countryside, especially in relation to the Commune. What do you think they should have done? After they got defeated, maybe the answer was to "go to the people" in the way the Narodniks did in 1873?
Left-wing rhetoric aside, it's extremely rare for 'revolutionaries without a revolution' (i.e. I'm not talking about what goes on during revolutions, when the revolutionaries tend to be the 'people') to 'go to the people' in a genuine sense, as opposed to seeking support for a faction (or get grants from an NGO).
During the miners' strike in Britain 1984-85 (since the defeat of which, conditions have plummeted downhill without cease), only a handful of 'revolutionaries' actually did it.
When the Maoists did it in the 1970s it was fake. I'd like to think that perhaps - just perhaps - some people in Venezuela and Bolivia aren't faking it today...
What did the Blanquists do after the Commune? Answer: eventually they set up a political party and got into the whole bourgeois-democratic kick. They stopped being revolutionary. Stopped being Blanquists, really. Rather than despairing of the 'people', they operated (doubtless with good intentions in many cases) to bolster popular passivity within pseudo-activity. No more uprisings in Paris until 1944. A truly terrible period in the history of that great city! Even today, things are very much on edge in the suburbs and fights over issues such as university reform can bring various combative groups together against the shit-soaked Fifth Republic. You couldn't say that about the monarchist regime in Britain.
(I leave aside the fact that one of the reasons the bourgeoisie didn't defend Paris in 1940 was that they feared another Commune. Their fears were unfortunately unjustified).
I wish the Paris Commune was better known. One of the things they did was to make pawnshops give all the workers' stuff back.Who wouldn't like to see the banks today forced to tear up mortgage agreements, thereby getting their filthy hands off of people's houses?
The Commune was fucking ace!
b
PS The text here is showing up massive.
Post a Comment