July 5, 2019
By: Rob Urie
The unifying factor behind environmental decline, an extractive health
care system, mind-numbing work for poverty wages, perpetual wars and
increasingly intrusive and assertive commercial relations, is capitalism. Of
course, the term is an abstraction, shorthand for a belief system used to
explain and organize social relations. Its history is of brutality, pillage and
genocide explained by its perpetrators as laying the ground for some imagined
future civility.
The motivating factor behind its endurance and spread is the perpetual
promise of a better tomorrow. If economic growth can only reach a certain level
goes the logic, the social isolation, fractured relations, ruined landscape and
brutality that is its product will all be proven worth it. In the half century
since its newest incarnation, neoliberalism, was launched this certainty
remains despite mounting evidence that it represents the greatest wrong turn in
human history.
The political question in the present is: what to do about it? As with
other turning points in history, embedded relations and social stasis form an
anchor which must be raised to prevent them from determining the future. And in
contrast with the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
future is more about foregoing and not doing than doing. It is the doing,
acting on a misplaced arrogance of certainty, that has brought us to the
precipice.
Imagined civility was the backdrop for the exchange that momentarily
levelled presidential hopeful Joe Biden— made between people who each had long
careers perpetrating ‘acceptable’ social violence, one as a segregationist and
the other putting poor people in prison. Together they are vying to represent
the rich under a façade of inclusion. How much better for a woman (Kamala Harris)
to lead the banking sector, the U.S. military and the oil and gas industry into
the abyss. We do have our distractions.
What then are the implied preferences when considering most of the
political candidates? Broad and rapid environmental decline is one.
Perpetuation of the business of ‘war,’ in its current incarnation a term for
slaughter to further business interests. ‘Inequality’ as rule by oligarchs and
bosses. Increasing demands for consumption of goods and services. And
subjection to well-funded and ever less accountable state power. This is the
subtext of this electoral competition.
As political theater, the quantum of Fords sold, and pensions looted
tells the truer story. Where, precisely, was a people’s representative in the
debates? Wouldn’t simple self-preservation argue that social democrat Bernie
Sanders is the less insane choice to move the capitalist conundrum back from
the precipice? Sure, the other candidates could competently bail out Wall
Street and create the illusion of environmental progress. But just such a
program arguably brought us to the current moment.
For all the verbiage around authoritarianism and ascendant fascism,
the history put forward to support it has been selective to a fault. European
fascists didn’t end liberalism— defined here as self-legitimating explanations
of capitalist predation. Liberalism ended itself, just as it is in the process
of doing in the present. The danger was well broadcast during the prior eight
years of efforts to restore the ruling order, regardless of the consequences.
Saving the rich from the consequences of their own malpractice while leaving
the polity to rot is the formula for fascist ascendance. It is also the
entirety of the liberal political program.
Here environmental degradation flowering into full crisis is apt
metaphor. While America has always been authoritarian, in the sense of being
controlled by oligarchs, by the early twentieth century democratic political
choice had been recast as product selection. The present claim that ‘we all’
are responsible for climate change and mass extinction places social choice
where it never existed, or more precisely, where it has long been excluded.
Choices within capitalism aren’t the choice of capitalism.
This comes to bear in the alleged ‘debates.’ A less propitious group
of self-interested careerists is difficult to imagine. Other than Bernie
Sanders, the system that brought them forward is broken. Kamala Harris spent
her adult life putting poor people in prison. Joe Biden built his political
career demonizing the poor and murdering brown people. Whatever they hope to
win with election, the only guarantee is that the oligarchs will benefit while
the lives of the rest of us are diminished.
In the realm of democratic choice, what isn’t on the ballot is
democracy. The half of eligible voters who don’t vote appear to know American
history better than the half that do. The technology for 100% voter
participation has always existed. But the candidates represent the veil of
oligarchy, not democratic choice. Capital controls political outcomes, not
voters. And more bluntly, without the economic wherewithal to determine one’s
life, the concept of political choice is cluttered at best.
Ultimately, the debates are commercial theater posed as political theater.
The conception of time behind the imposed time constraints is commercial— long
enough to sell Coca-Cola and Chevrolets, but never long enough to ask if any of
the commercial offerings are really a good idea. The (alleged) debaters are
part of the set, making commercial speech as political speech to sell the
illusion of democracy. Rachel Maddow exists to sell munitions, predatory loans
and foreign entanglements (GE), Lester Holt to sell Chevrolets.
Phrased differently, wouldn’t it make more sense for the candidates to
ask Ms. Maddow and Mr. Holt what the commercial interests they represent want
done about the environment, health care and inequality? These are the interests
to whom actual establishment legislators defer when crafting policies. And it isn’t
like this is a secret, aside from bourgeois blather about ‘our democracy’ when
what they mean is their democracy. There is little doubt that this is precisely
what they mean when claiming political choice.
More broadly, the U.S. is the vessel from which the pathologies of
capitalism were poured. Any notion of Sao Paulo, Osaka and / or Beijing adds
scale and complexity to the capitalist conundrum. How did they, like Americans,
come to view the space between words, the comma and the exclamation point— the
narrative sideline, as the substance of life? More troublingly, how do ‘we,’
those with a stake in the outcomes, move such a large object with so many
moving parts away from conscious self-destruction?
It is telling that Mr. Biden thought his segregationist history was
more politically palatable when explained through class, rather than race. Mr.
Biden opposed school busing because it meant sending poor kids to better funded
schools and vice-versa. The solution, ending class disparities to adequately fund
public schools so that every child receives a quality education, was hidden
behind carefully crafted resentment. Through what moral prism are poor children
unworthy of adequate educations?
Class divisions were effectively used to sell the 1994 Omnibus Crime
Bill and to ‘end welfare as we know it’ by demonizing poor blacks to push the
stressed middle class to the ‘side’ of capital. The program was racialized
class warfare— most welfare recipients were poor whites and class is the major
determinant of who is mass incarcerated. The hurtful history of race is still
put forward in 2019 as a prelude to civility.
By the 1990s trade agreements and cuts to social services had put the
bottom 90% of Americans at risk of disenfranchisement, so what better way to
shore up support for capital than by setting the at-risk classes against one
another? The black mis-leadership class (Glen Ford’s term) was the new face of
class warfare, the enforcers of class power intended to further isolate the
poor as capital set about increasing their numbers through offshoring, the
disempowerment of labor and selective immigration (H1-B visas) policies.
Kamala Harris was a mis-leadership class comer, willing to use the
prosecutor’s power to assure that those who lacked the social power to defend
themselves spent decades behind bars. Framed askew, those who conspire to
commit murder belong in prison, but rather than surrounding the Capitol Dome,
the White House, Wall Street, and various and sundry executive board rooms to
demand that their inhabitants prove improbable innocence, Ms. Harris went for
the easy money by putting poor people away.
With little apparent knowledge of its history, the ‘good ole boy’
system was recreated by bourgeois liberals following the financial and economic
unpleasantness of the mid-late 2000s when ‘ole boys’ in three-thousand dollars
suits were given a pass for defrauding homebuyers with predatory mortgages.
This followed closely the ole boy treatment of war criminals in the George W.
Bush administration for whom justice was deemed ‘political,’ as if the same
isn’t true when poor people are put in prison.
In the realm of neoliberal performativity, the strategy works— until
it doesn’t. The brutal bourgeois, liberal hawks with well-nourished hatred of
the poor, appear to see current political choices as reasonable. While nothing
either meaningful or necessary is likely to be accomplished, goes the logic, at
some future time actions can be taken and adjustments made. And racism can be
eliminated providing the help cooperates by foregoing demands for better wages
and working conditions. Such is the moral clarity.
And so it is with the issue of capitalism. Under what plausible
scenario will environmental resolution, a functioning health care system,
ending militarism and providing for the least among us be accomplished while
capitalism determines Western economic relations? Conversely, what evidence is
there that these deficiencies are incidental to capitalism, rather than its
predictable results? Technocrat Elizabeth Warren, along with the Democratic
Party establishment, claims that capitalism can be reformed. However, a half
century of reforms has brought the West to its current predicament.
As applied to historical inflection points, the quiet before the storm
separates understanding of great events from their causes. The ‘best economy in
our lifetime’ has preceded every major economic calamity of the modern era.
Perpetual surprise that political economy based on gratuitous wars, political
and economic subjugation, pillage of the natural world and social division
posed as market competition, admits only more insistent versions of these as if
causes were magically dissociable from effects.
For several centuries the tendency has been for private interests to
use government in the ‘public’ realm just as politicians have relied on private
power to fund their political careers. In recent times the back-and-forth
between public and private sector ‘service’ has resulted in the capture of
government by private interests. Chartalist and Marxist theories pose the state
as fundamental to capitalism. But capitalist theory (economics) can’t explain
the state. This paradox has the people and institutions most dependent on state
power at a loss to explain its existence.
As loathsome as Republicans are, the distance between them and
establishment Democrats is tiny when scaled to the tasks at hand. Without
radically transformative environmental programs we— humans and the other living
things on the planet, face near certain decline on our way toward annihilation.
Commercial difference— the two capitalist parties, posed as political difference
points to the shortcomings of establishment politics. The bourgeois political
program is to elect a Democrat— any Democrat, and then go to sleep for eight
years.
Understanding the implausibility of capitalist solutions to capitalist
crises requires relating cause to effect. Environmental problems are the result
of capitalist production. The profit motive has made the American health care
system the least efficient in the world. Through predatory lending, employment
and control over housing and food, ghettoes are urban plantations where people
are the cash crop. State management of capitalism, the New Deal, raised living
standards. This shouldn’t have happened if capitalism ‘works.’
When leading Democrats proclaim themselves to be capitalists, they either
don’t believe that crises are unfolding, or they don’t relate them to their
causes. What would capitalist health care look like? Pretty much like what the
U.S. has now. Why would they want to address ‘inequality’ when capital
accumulation is claimed to be the generating mechanism for greater prosperity?
Capitalist economists have never adequately accounted for environmental
destruction because doing so would eliminate all the profits ever claimed to
have been produced by capitalism.
The question remains: what will the collective ‘we’ do about these
unfolding crises? Here, officialdom is an impediment. The goats, sheep and
lambs ‘debating’ solutions are entertainers, establishment comers whose
political fortunes will be determined by how effectively they deflect efforts
to create a just, peaceful, democratic and environmentally sustainable world.
In this context, the rationale for Bernie Sanders to ‘play by the rules’
disappeared with the release of the UN reports on climate change and mass
extinction.
Without rule by the rich, the people of this country, and the world,
can make a go of it. I’m involved in village and city government and go out of
my way to know the municipal and government workers, the people who work for a
living and those who hold down chairs and porch steps during the day because
they’ve been economically excluded. They are mostly decent. And when called
upon to make decisions, they generally rise to the occasion. The problem is
that they are never called on to do so because Western political economy is
controlled by the rich.
Frankly, I would rather tend my garden than help stir up a socialist
revolution. But the trajectory of capitalism leaves little choice.
Environmental crises will force a profound transformation of economic relations.
Paradoxically, liberal technocrats are the least capable of conceiving the path
forward. It isn’t just that if you chased the idiots out of Harvard and Yale,
the service staff would be the only people left. The theory of knowledge that
guides them renders the world largely invisible.
Independence Day is a celebration of slave-owning, genocidal oligarchs
freed from the rule of European monarchs. To the extent it reflects aspirations
for true democracy— including economic democracy that is the prerequisite for
political democracy, it occasionally also serves as a reminder of political
possibility.
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