Jim Devine wrote:
Methinks that Doug is more against the Schadenfreudian emotions and unhealthily optimistic expectations evoked by the crisis among leftists than about the reality of the actual crisis. But I could be wrong...
In the course of researching this article, I found myself increasingly and morbidly fascinated by Edward C. Banfield, who comes across as one of the meanest intellectuals ever. Banfield served as head of the Presidential Task Force on Model Cities under President Richard M. Nixon, one of the meanest presidents in our history. His best-known and most controversial work is the 1970 “The Unheavenly City”, an excerpt of which appeared in a N.Y. Times op-ed piece that year:
The tangle of social pathologies that people mainly have in mind when they speak of “the urban crisis” arises principally from the presence in the inner districts of the central cities and of their larger, older suburbs of a small “lower class” the defining feature of which is its inability (or at any rate failure) to take account of the future and to control impulses.
The lower (as opposed to working) class person never sacrifices any present satisfaction for the sake of a larger future one. He lives from moment to moment.
This is to say, he does not discipline himself to acquire an occupational or other skill, to hold down a regular job, to maintain stable family ties, or to stay out of trouble with the law. His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for “action” take precedence over everything else. The slum is his natural habitat. He does not care how dirty, and dilapidated his housing is, and he does not notice or care about the deficiencies of public facilities like schools, parks, and libraries. Indeed, the very qualities that make the slum repellent to others make it attractive to him. He likes the feeling that something violent is about to happen and he likes the opportunities to buy or sell illicit commodities and to find concealment from the police.
When I read this garbage, a feeling of déjà vu comes over me. Where have I read this sort of thing before? And then it dawns on me, it is the same kind of hatred of the poor that you could find in the 19th century.
For example, Charles Loring Brace, the head of New York City’s Children’s Aid Society, argued that the “greatest danger” to America’s future was the “existence of an ignorant, debased, and permanently poor class in the great cities. . . . The members of it come at length to form a separate population. They embody the lowest passions and the most thriftless habits of the community. They corrupt the lowest class of working-poor who are around them. The expenses of police, prisons, of charities and means of relief, arise mainly from them.”
Meanwhile, the draconian British New Poor Law of 1834 was designed to save the poor from themselves:
We must make it evident that in the exercise of moral restraint, and by industry, sobriety, a peaceful demeanour, an economical management of their resources, and a far-sighted provision for the day of calamity from which few are exempt, they may escape the misery into which imprudent marriages, insobriety, irregularity, turbulence, infrugality and improvidence plunge men gifted by nature with every quality necessary to procure happiness.
By the end of the 19th century, the very same social process that had condemned the poor to lives of unremitting misery had allowed the Bruce Kovner’s of that time to live like Kings and Queens. If you stroll around Manhattan’s Upper East Side, you can see what their ill-gotten gains bought them. From the Astors to the Rockefellers, there are mansions dotting the landscape–most of which were turned eventually into consulates or museums.
In keeping with the historical regression we are now enduring, it is fitting that one of these very museums is now owned by somebody like Bruce Kovner, who was taught at Harvard University that it good for the poor to fend for themselves. With people like Kovner aspiring to become the new robber barons, it is only natural that outfits like the American Enterprise Institute are churning out propaganda by the day that seeks nothing less than to turn the clock back to 1890.
As it turns out, the mansion now owned by Kovner was built for somebody originally who embodied the contradictions of that age. Unlike an Edward C. Banfield or a Bruce Kovner, Willard Dickerman Straight–the original owner–did not accept Victorian era values unreservedly. Straight was an investment banker and diplomat who served in the hot spots of the American Empire, from Cuba to China. After an anti-colonial revolt in China forced Straight to high-tail it back to the United States in 1912, he founded a new magazine called The New Republic dedicated to the values of Progressivism, a movement that challenged the excesses of late-19th century capitalism. The first editor was Herbert Croly, the author of “The Promise of American Life”, a book that argued for a planned economy, increased spending on education and the creation of a society based on the “brotherhood of mankind”. Some of the frequent contributors to The New Republic in this period were Walter Weyl, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Amy Lowell, Henry Brailsford and H. G. Wells.
Like the Nation Magazine, the New Republic was never quite able to take the side of the working class since its own middle-class prejudices induced the same kind of fears expressed by Banfield, but not to the same extremes. For example, the Progressives as well as their Fabian cousins in Great Britain looked to eugenics as a way of dealing with society’s underachievers. Wells, for example, once wrote: “It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” Some critics even believe that the “degenerate” man-creatures portrayed in The Time Machine exemplify Wells’s eugenic beliefs.
The recent stock-market slide and the subprime mortgage/credit crisis have led some Marxists and mainstream journalists to speak in terms of a new Great Depression. That decade looms large in our minds since it sparked a massive radicalization that could have succeeded in the abolition of capitalism in country after country if not for the bankrupt policies of Stalin’s Comintern.
I would suggest that the current crisis will eventually work its way through with the usual amount of pain and dislocation experienced by those who are not fortunate enough to live in 35,000 foot mansions on Fifth Avenue.
Moreover, it would appear that the proper time-frame analogy is not 1929 through 1940 but 1880 to 1900 or so. The fact that hedge fund robber barons are once again ensconced on Fifth Avenue, while Harvard Professors write screeds against the poor should wake us up to the period we are living in.
I think that Doug Henwood understands this completely as evidenced by his article in the Nation that appears side-by-side with Gabriel Thompson’s:
It has become a cliché to say that we live in a new Gilded Age. True enough, up to a point. Money, mostly new money, rules politics and culture. Corporations merge into ever larger corporations. You have to go back to before World War I to match today’s levels of income and wealth inequality.
In some ways, the second Gilded Age is worse than the first. Sure, we live longer now, more of us can read and you don’t have to be a white man to be able to vote. But to prove my point, consider two big parties, thrown 110 years apart.
In February 1897 elite lawyer Bradley Martin and his wife, Cornelia, threw a costume ball at the Waldorf. J.P. Morgan dressed as Molière, John Jacob Astor dressed as Henry of Navarre and brandished a sword covered in jewels, and fifty women dressed as Marie Antoinette. But the hosts were so nervous about “men of socialistic tendencies” that they surrounded the hotel with Pinkertons and had the first-floor windows nailed shut.
Given the similarity between our age and the first Gilded Age, we are invited to think about the possibilities for the rebirth of the kind of mass socialist movement that existed in the time of J.P. Morgan. If there is anything that remains true in politics to this day, it is that the poor and the working class will soon learn where their own class interests lie. As a weak and marginalized movement that is still bearing the brunt of the collapse of the USSR and social democracy in Europe and elsewhere, it will be a difficult job to organize a new movement when so many pundits tell us that our time in history has come and gone. We can only reply that as long as there are scumbags like Bruce Kovner lording it over us, we will find a way to struggle and to win.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/bruce-kovner-capitalist-pig-of-the-month/
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