This is the third installment of video-based blogging on the 2011 Left Forum, although it won’t be my last report. The final one will cover some panel discussions that I attended but did not videotape, or in one case forgot to turn my camcorder on (sorry, Michael.)
On Sunday afternoon Doug Henwood, David Harvey and Mark Weisbrot spoke on “Post-Financial Crisis: Neoliberalism and the Global Economic Recovery”, a high point in many ways for me. Doug and David’s talks touched on something that has been on my mind for a year or so at least and led me to offer up a comment during the discussion period (I recorded most of the discussion.)
Both addressed the failure of the Obama administration to implement anything resembling a New Deal, notwithstanding David Harvey’s hope that a new New Deal might be enacted. I should add that Harvey first raised such expectations in 2003, long before Obama’s election:
In my own view, there is only one way in which capitalism can steady itself temporarily and draw back from a series of increasingly violent inter-imperialist confrontations, and that is through the orchestration of some sort of global “new” New Deal. This would require a considerable realignment of political and economic practices within the leading capitalist powers (the abandonment of neo-liberalism and the reconstruction of some sort of redistributive Keynesianism) as well as a coalition of capitalist powers ready to act in a more redistributive mode on the world stage (a Karl Kautsky kind of ultra-imperialism). For people on the left, the question is whether we would be prepared to support such a move (much as happened in leftist support for social democracy and new deal politics in earlier times) or to go against it as “mere reformism.” I am inclined to support it (much as I support, albeit with reservations, what Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is doing in Brazil) as a temporary respite and as a breathing space within which to try to construct a more radical alternative.
Ironically, Harvey felt that it was a waste of time expecting Obama to deliver the FDR type goods a few years later, when the Nation Magazine et al were fostering exactly such illusions. Here is Harvey in 2009 stepping back from his earlier projections:
The collapse of credit for the working class spells the end of financialisation as the solution for the crisis of the market. As a consequence of this we will see a major crisis of unemployment and the collapse of many industries unless there is effective action to change that. Now this is where you get the current discussion about returning to a Keynesian economic model, and Obama’s plan is to invest in a vast public works and investment in green technologies, in a sense going back to a New Deal type of solution. I am skeptical of his ability to do this.
My comment to the panelists focused on why the ruling class did not opt for a new New Deal, leaving aside the question of whether the absence of mass pressure is sufficient to explain this. I have found Shane Mage’s reference to FDR’s very early reform measures, taken long before the sit-down strikes et al, very convincing. What could possibly explain the difference between FDR and Obama, and as a corollary the difference between the bourgeoisie that backed FDR and that of today?
As I pointed out in my comment, there is absolutely no indication that the ruling class of today is willing to act in its own long-term interests. If serious financial re-regulation is the only way to avoid a new financial meltdown, why is so hard for Wall Street to back serious reform? If “fracking” will unleash carcinogens in the water supply that will cause cancer for the rich and poor alike, why won’t the billionaires who live on Park Avenue do something to protect our waterways?
Fresh from his research on a new book about the American ruling class (that one hopes he will find the time to complete one day), Doug Henwood replied to my question by pointing out that it is not as homogenous as it once was and poorly structured to act in its own interests and in a “noblesse oblige” fashion of the FDR type gentry.
All this, of course, leads to the conclusion that socialist revolution is the only solution as we used to put it in the 1960s.
The US ruling class is the process of long term decline and the breathing space available for a New Deal is much smaller. There are no social movements capable of challenging them as there were during the original New Deal. Realistically, things could get much worse for the U.S. working class and probably will. The political trajectory says we are heading toward Texas, where the poor and working class are brutalized, awash with fundamentalism, and subservient.
Comment by purple — April 4, 2011 @ 11:50 pm
“As I pointed out in my comment, there is absolutely no indication that the ruling class of today is willing to act in its own long-term interests. If serious financial re-regulation is the only way to avoid a new financial meltdown, why is so hard for Wall Street to back serious reform? If “fracking” will unleash carcinogens in the water supply that will cause cancer for the rich and poor alike, why won’t the billionaires who live on Park Avenue do something to protect our waterways?”
Like that movie Up in the Air, the rich don’t really “live” anywhere. Before jet travel, to be rich meant bigger and bigger mansions. Now it often more often means more homes and the transportation modes to travel between them.
Comment by Rojo — April 5, 2011 @ 12:13 am
@ purple: “There are no social movements capable of challenging them as there were during the original New Deal.”
IIRC, there were no social movements capable of challenging the ruling class at the start of the Depression, nor at the start of the New Deal. Instead, those social movements grew in response to the Depression and in tandem with the New Deal. What am I missing here?
Comment by Townsend Harris — April 5, 2011 @ 3:40 am
This is interesting. The fragmentation of subjectivity and so on that is understood as a symptom of postmodernity (Jameson, Harvey, et al.) is often theorised in relation to the decline of working-class consciousness, but it hadn’t occurred to me that ruling-class consciousness might be experiencing a parallel trajectory. So, indeed, while the ruling class retains the obvious material benefits in terms of capital to wield as influence, their collective, long-term interests are also no longer as readily apparent to them as a result of the erosion of class consciousness?
Comment by KC — April 5, 2011 @ 4:20 am
a small epiphany I had in connection with this discussion of class consciousness: It occurs to me, after a rally at the capitol here in Des Moines, that while the crowd was dreadfully small (400 mostly union activists, half bussed in), there were some who were new to activism and a good mix of industrial unions and government ones. The thing I sense is this: the decline of working class consciousness together with a general ignorance of even mainstream economics (hence the return of power of the cretinous Republicans), nurtured by the ruling class, has had a negative effect for them insofar as they haven’t, or I daresay won’t, be able to de-link the government unions from the industrial unions. That wedge the bosses need to drive is not getting traction….if people have been trained to disregard Keynes and see the bailouts as socialism by the right, they may not get the complicated concept of the need to eviscerate the government workers’ unions in favor of “good” private sector unions either. To a worker a union is a union, not dependent on what the economic basis of their employers are. Of course, the propaganda mills of AM radio are still running strong…
Comment by Bob Allen — April 5, 2011 @ 3:43 pm
One of my favorite Marx quotes: “The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the resurrection of the lumpenproletariat at the top of bourgeois society.” So, with increasing financialization, monopolization, deindustrialization, we get increasing lumpenproletarianization throughout (including of the ruling class).
Comment by Alex — April 5, 2011 @ 4:50 pm
‘What could possibly explain the difference between FDR and Obama?’
FDR, although a capitalist, was a self-assured patrician willing to criticize greed in general and the finance sector in particular.
Obama is an outsider who seeks establishment approval and the perks that go with it. It seems that he has no firm position other than kissing the ass of the ruling class.
Comment by Seekonk — April 5, 2011 @ 6:18 pm
The far-right has just about exhausted the “Yes to Small Government and No to high Taxes” shtick. After all, that role is being played equally as well by the Democrats. Due to the deep decline and falling rate of profit, the far-right within the bourgeoisie will sooner or later have to float the test balloon of National Socialism. People like Glen Beck have come close, but even he has not, as of yet, propagandized against “degenerate capitalists” and “vile Jews”.
Comment by dave r — April 5, 2011 @ 9:58 pm
`What could possibly explain the difference between FDR and Obama, and as a corollary the difference between the bourgeoisie that backed FDR and that of today?’
America is bankrupt.
Love that quote alex. It seems particularly true here in Britain as most of the jobbing stock brokers in London seem to be de-classed Essex boys or cockneys who moved out to the suburbs. They also seemed to supply many of the yuppies in the 1980s.
Comment by David Ellis — April 5, 2011 @ 10:49 pm