Louis writes: > One of course might question whether [Robinson's] analogy with 1929 makes as > much sense as would one with the 1890s when both the U.S. and Britain were > deep into Empire-building. In a period of rampant social Darwinism, > speculators such as J.P. Morgan virtually ran the government—regardless of > whether a Republic or Democratic occupied the White House. You also had state > and municipal governments that did little to assist the unemployed or the > poor, as a visit to New York’s Lower East Side or London’s East End would > attest. Finally, you had war after war. Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Sudan, > China, and Egypt all experienced the sting of gunboat diplomacy.
> Indeed, if you pay close attention to the words of Tea Party politicians and > the hired guns of the Heritage Foundation, you will see that their model is > not Nazi Germany but Grover Cleveland’s America. Of course, we should never > forget that Cleveland, an enemy of trade unions and an arch-imperialist, was > a Democrat just like his protégé in the White House today.< Excellent! "Grover Cleveland Capitalism" joins "Calvin Coolidge Capitalism" and "Scroogean Capitalism" as a description of the contemporary US political economy. It looks like there are two main images that are burnt into the retinas of leftists these days: the "Golden Age" of US capitalism (the 1950s & 1960s) and the 1930s-style fascism. The first represents a very limited phase of US history -- a mere 20 years or so of the 235 years since Independence. This was also a very exceptional era, when (for the first time) the culture of mass consumption was available to many workers. If the political economy doesn't fit into that basket, my stereotyped leftist stuffs it into the latter one. It's either/or, always a poor way to think. But when has the US experienced full-scale (1903s-style) fascism (rather than mere fascistic attitudes and tendencies seen in scattered localities)? Maybe it was going that way when Jack London wrote the IRON HEEL (1907), but as far as I can tell it was never fully established. As Louis says, that kind of fascism is a response to working-class strength, not to working-class weakness (the current situation). So we have to recognize that there are other types of "good times" for the working class besides that which characterized the "Golden Age" (cf. the temporary prosperity of the late 1990s tech bubble) and other types of "bad times" than the that of the fascist ilk. After the rise of US capitalism and a full-scale industrial working class, most of the "bad times" seem to fit the Scroogean capitalism rubric. In these times (that try our souls), it's more a matter of capitalist _hubris_, going much too far with "laissez-faire" (pro-business) policies. This is not going too far by moral standards but instead by the standards of the capitalists' own collective good, producing financial crises (1929, 2008), steep recessions (1929-33, 2008-09), and mass working class resistance (1930s, some recently in Wisconsin). > Robinson alleges that a social base is being “organised among sectors of the > white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that > have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility > as neo-liberalism comes to the US – while they are losing the security and > stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national > capitalism.” < There is some truth to this, though the word "caste" makes no sense. During what some call the "Golden Age," working-class prosperity was highly concentrated among the whites -- and also among males (which Robinson seems to forget). This now-dead utopia has been destroyed, as these groups suffered from "displacement and ... rapid downward mobility as neo-liberalism comes to the US." But in many ways this is old news. This trend helped to produce domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and the 1990s militia movement. While such forces still exist, my impression is that they have mostly become disheartened, atomized, and politically more moderate. If that's true, it goes against the "21st century fascism" thesis. More importantly, the so-called "new fascists" -- the Tea Partiers -- seem to be overwhelmingly petty bourgeois, not working class in their social position. -- Jim Devine / "Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
