| Assistant Editor Calico with her back to the camera to the left of her residence |
By Kamran Nayeri, September 11, 2012
This is an election year here in the United States and American elections epitomize the core problem humanity faces today: deep-seated alienation of working people, the social agency that can overcome the crises of society and nature, reflected in our willingness to delegate the most crucial decisions to powers that oppress us.
The reader of Our Place in
the World finds enumerable examples of these crises. The central role of
American capitalism and the way of life it fosters worldwide is beyond dispute.
So, the U.S. elections
matter not just to the future of the American people but also to the
world. Could the American
public muster the universal consciousness and a sense of its historic responsibility
to initiate a radical break with the status quo and set course for radical
social change necessary to reverse the present course to disaster?
Of course, we cannot count
on the part of the U.S. population that has polarized to the right precisely because
of the deepening crisis. Southern
Poverty Law Center that has monitored hate groups in the U.S. reports
that their number mushroomed from 149 at the end of 2008 to 1,274 in 2011. The recent rise to prominence of the
Tea Party, a rightist formation with quasi-fascist affiliations, involves
broader layers of the population and has been credited to push the Republican
Party even further to right.
How about the other side of
the polarization process? What has been happening with the social justice,
anti-war, and environmentalist movement?
Aside from the exciting
but rather short-lived experience with the Occupy Movement, there is every sign
that the old pattern of lesser evilism is being repeated. The bulk of labor, feminist, civil
rights, environment and ecology, peace and justice activists and the like, are
drawn to the logic of “stopping” Republicans at all costs. That is, by voting
for Democrats. George W. Bush did
not invent the politics of fear; his liberal counterparts have used it for some
time already.
In the United States,
lesser evilism has its social roots in the ascendancy of American imperialism
that gave rise to labor aristocracy and labor bureaucracy with their middle
class life-style who identified ideologically and politically with the employer
class and its institutions. In the
decades after the Great Depression, the Democratic Party was promoted as the party
of the “middle class,” that is, the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy that
spoke for the working class. Unlike other industrial capitalist counties, the
United States does not have a labor party or a mass socialist party.
Of course, from a working
class point of view, despite real or perceived differences on a host of issues,
Democratic Party and Republican Party represent the two public factions of one
party, the party of American capitalist class. They both seek to advance American capitalist interest at
home and abroad (“national interest”), including through what seems to be a
permanent series of imperialist wars.
Also, there can be little
doubt about what class rules the United States and what the character of the
American State is (although even within the Occupy Movement there was debate
about this issue). In his just
published book about the failed negotiations between Obama administration and
the House of Representatives Republican leadership, The
Price of Politics, journalist Robert Woodward recounts an episode when Ivan
Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, tells Valerie Jarrent, a key Obama advisor, “With
due respect, we will be here when you’re gone.” Administrations come and go. The capitalist class remains in
power.
Similarly, the State
machinery remains essentially intact with its mission established and its
cadres trained for the long term regardless of who is elected to the White
House or Congress or who ends up sitting on the Supreme Court bench. With the
main levers of power established and controlled by the capitalist class,
elected representatives are given a certain space for policy initiative. This
arena for public policy is bounded by what can benefit the capitalist system in
part or as a whole. Proposals that fall outside of this boundary will not
succeed or if enacted are reversed at first opportunity.
While the parliamentary
system gives the illusion of choice and democracy, the economy and the State
are organized hierarchically: workplaces, including the institutions of the
State are top-down institutions. While the market economy shows the appearance
of all-inclusiveness, wealth and capital also are extremely centralized (thus,
the appeal of “we are the 99%” slogan).
The game of lesser evil
parliamentarism invented by reformists of all kinds, mainly the leadership of
trade unions, women’s organizations, organizations of ethnic minorities,
environmental groups and the like but also by reformist socialist currents like
the Communist Party and social democrats, and supported by the bulging middle
class layers, has created a culture of dependence of the working people on the
Democratic Party. The result has been catastrophe.
The period since the
1973-75 world recession, characterized by a cycle of stagnation, policies to
inflated the economy (even Reagan was a military Keynesian), boom and bust, and
virulent capitalist offensive to take ever more from the U.S. and world’s
working people and from nature degrading both have received bipartisan
support. Typically, the Republican
Party has taken the lead by proposing an increasingly barbaric program of
capitalist offensive. The
Democratic Party promises some reprieve while accepting the general Republican
framework (a case in point is Obama’s health care law that was modeled after
the Republican proposals in late 1980s and early 1990s, a version of which was
implemented by Governor Romney in Massachusetts. For comparison, consider that
Obamacare falls short of what Richard Nixon proposed in early 1970s).
Thus, the center of U.S.
politics has moved to the right over the past 40 years. The New York Times journalist
Eduardo Porter recalls in his Business Section article,
“G.O.P.’s Shift Moves Center Far to the Right,” that Richard Nixon
administration’s record was to the left of Democratic and Republican
administrations that have followed.
“The
Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative
action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the
agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration to police working conditions….
“Nixon
bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy
and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed
health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for their
employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because of Democratic opposition.”
Porter argues the shift in
the Republican Party beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign was
ideologically driven. In reality, it was more motivated by economics and
politics and that it was often bipartisan. The long post-war capitalist boom had come to an end by the
late 1960s as was registered by Nixon’s annulment of the Gold Standard (Thus shifting
much of the U.S. economic burden to its European and Japanese competitors). The
profitability crisis that ensued required pushing back the working people’s
standard of living and rights and to pillage nature on an ever more massive and
intensive scale. The social contract labor bureaucracy was able to get from the
employer class was shredded and cast aside. A fierce anti-labor policy replaced
it.
What Porter also ignores
the impact of the civil rights, women, youth, anti-war, and environmental movements
on policy decisions under both Johnson and Nixon administrations. That was a
period when sections of the American working people began to shed some of their
illusion in the imagined or real powers that oppressed them. This step in the
direction of shedding their alienation through their self-organization and
self-activity was the essence of what is know as the “The Sixties.”
In contrast, today’s
lesser evilism will most certainly delay the kind of independent mass movements
we need to initiate the process of undoing the present American and world
capitalist structure and beginning the task of building a better future, an
ecological socialist society, where our labor process will bring humanity
together and heal the wounds of centuries destructive production inflicted on
Mother Nature. What we need is not
a lesser evil in the White House but more of “The Sixties” and the “Occupy
Movement” with direct producers taking the lead.
* * *
There have
been 99 posts since my last communication (nos. 801 to 899 inclusive). As
usual, the focus has been ecology, environment and ecocide (8 posts), global
warming and climate change and other planetary crises (20 posts), evolution and
evolutionary theory (11 posts), science and methodology (12 posts), nature (11
posts), animals (4 posts) and issues regarding socialism/ecosocialism (7 posts)
and the Cuban revolution (18 posts).
As I state
regularly all signed articles represent the views of their author(s).
They are posted here because they relate to a subject of our interest and
some from the mass media can even represent current bourgeois thought.
Only unsigned articles are the points of view of Our Place in the World.
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Place in the World if you repost material that first appear here.
A list of
hotlinks for the last 99 posts follow:
861.
Cuba's National Assembly Adopts First New Tax Code Since 1959 and Approves Plan
on Cooperatives
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