"He [Obama] needs to hear from all of us that Larry Summers would be a terrible pick."
This seems to me be a classic instance of what I call Crackpot Realism. Let's consider the several larger (political) contexts within which this proposed action is to be taken (the content itself, for reasons to be given, is utterly irrelevant). The larger contexts are relevant here because of the most immediate context: Wisconsin/OWS. 1. The drive for austerity. (Marv a few weeks ago submitted a post on Caterpillar closing down a London, Ontario plant). The 40-year drive to discipline through austerity the world's working classes continues unabated to gain moementum. 2. Endless War. 3. Wisconsin/OWS. [On "Discipline." Chapter 14 of Wages, Price and Profit lays this out very clearly: "These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement." (A merely personal opinion: For understanding and acting in the current conjunction this is the most important passage in the Collected Works of Karl Marx. And I do not think it necessary to be a "Marxcist" to gras the profound relevance to the presence of these words.) Capitalists (or, more precisely the political elites of capitalist nations) understand this - that the working class, or significant sections of the working classs - become most dangerous when their free time enlarges (and the banality, "Time is Money" applies here). When that potential of the class asserts itself, the surge can be best suppressed through an intensification of exploitation, directed towards reducing the class to the mass of broken wretches Marx envisages. And this has to be seen in _relative_ terms: most higher paid workers will (correctly) feel as "immiseration" developments that, for example, makd it difficulty for them to carry their load of debt, or make sending their children to college unexpectedly difficult. Over the last 40 years perhaps the most powerfully repressive force has been the distinction between "Exmpt" and "non-Exmpt" workers, leading to a stady increase in the work week of millions of "Exempt" workers. Now the huge (and nearly world-wide) upsurge in working-class power which constituted "The '60s" both put downward pressure on profits but scared the ideologiss of capitalism shitless. (Many leftists, including manyMarxist economists, could not and do not see this because of crudely false conceptions of "what the working class is." If you don't see "The '60s" as a working-class movement, of great danger to capitalism, then you don't understand "The 60s." The Class War is over the Free Time of workers: the demands for higher wages or for increased social benefits are demands for increasing Free Time, and such time had expanded for two important sectors of the Working Class during the '50s: Blacks & Students. This small taste of freedom (for freedom itself is best defined as Free Time) emboldened the demand for MORE freedom. Neoliberalism at least temporarily 'solved' both capitalist 'problems': Dwonward pressure on profits, expanded sense of possibility within the working class. Now, we can understand _neither_ U.S. domestic policy _nor_ U.S. foreign policy unless (a) we see their interconnections and (b) understand the special U.S. 'place' withn what Ellen Meiksins Wood has aptly labeled, the Empire of Capital. Capitaism has become 'global,' but it is a system that can only operate within a State, and thus must operate 'globally' within over a hundred different States. Hence the stability of the world capitalist system depends on the stability of all the different states within which it operates. And that requires the establishment of _discipline_ over all those states. And by implicit consensus among the 'core' capitalist powers, the U.S. is the "Power of Last Resort" in maintaining that discipline. (In the recent case of Libya NSATO handled the the 'problem,' U.s. intervention would have becme necessary.) This 'responsibility' of the U.S. to maintain global discipline means Endless War, a war conducted under different labels and with different means, but nevertheless unavoidable, and that war depends on continued domestic support. That is, the disciplining of the global system of states is inseparable from the disciplining of the U.S. working class (as well as the working classes of the other core capitalist nations). To put it bluntly but I think accurately: The 'stability' of world capitalism is dependent upon a stagnant or falling wage share. And that can be a 'problem' also. It is currently being resolved through the Austerity Programs initiated in both the EU and the U.S., which can be seen as an intensification of the discipline imposed through the general tendencies of Neoliberalism. And of course, we have to see the greatl expansion of repressive machinery carried out under the Clinton/Bush/Obama Administration (beginning with the Antii-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act & extending up to recent legislation empowering the Military to take part in the police functions of the state. AND NOW COME Nita and Shaunna proclaiming the (coweardly) Dawn of Reistance to this Capitalist Offensive of the last 40 to 50 years: We shall beg the president not to appoint an obnoxious individual to the World Bank (the viciousness of which under _any_ leadership having long since established beyond doubt). To blunt, even to slow down, this Capitalist Offensive will require mass movements (particularly in the EU & the U.S.) which dwarf all preceding periods of resistance-which go well beyond the conbined stuggles of the 1930s and the 1960s. This is Treason of the Intellectuals Indeed. And leftists who honor such Treason by debating its details should be deeply ashamed of themselves. And this returns us to the Third of our contexts within which to see the utter shamelessness of such triviality- Wisconsin/OWS. We do not anc cannot know the future, but Wisconsin/OWS has raised the promise of an end to 45 years of the coward retreat of which Marx spoke. We have a faint promise that the East Again is Red. It is easy not to notice how rarely, once or twice a century perhaps, that capitalism as a system seems even slightly vulnerable. If Wisconsin/OWS (combined with the economic crisis and the growing opposition around the Mediterranean rim, do shadow forth such a possibility, we should not fritter away the opening by absurd appeals to the Enemy (Obama) to be nice to us. Carrol ********************** Basic Texts Assumed in this Post Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Retreat from Class __________, Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundtions of Athenian Democracy __________, Democracy Against Capitalism. __________, Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View __________, Empire of Capital Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened To the 1960s. Following Symposia in HM On Lars Lih On David Harvey On Ellen Meiksins Wood This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
