The first twenty years of my life were spent proving George Orwell wrong. The last ten have largely vindicated him in all but his temporal forecasting. The analysis in 1984 was actually quite dead on. I don't say this lightly, sensationally, or "hyperbowlically," (as John Boehner might allege). No, I mean this quite literally. Consider: the paradox of thrift holds that in a crisis more private and/or public saving tends to decrease overall savings. Yet here we are on the cusp of our fourth year of roughly double digit unemployment, and federal and local governments are deep into a policy of austerity measures aimed at increasing public savings (and thus, overall savings somehow). If the economy continues to show poor job growth, the solution must be... more austerity! Even as this goes on, the stock markets and GDP continue to improve hand over fist. But how you ask? It's easy to know where to invest when there's only one investment bank in town. The 2008 crash did wonders for the consolidation of elite financial power, and no serious person will deny this. However, the reason most of this growth is jobless is based on the fictitious nature of investing in asset values. There is surely a bubble somewhere, even if that bubble is now Goldman itself. What is much more realistic is the housing market. Environmentally, we've seen the worst Oil spill in US history lead to just a slap on the wrist and renewed off shore drilling, tar sands in the Northeast and Canada, and Nuclear meltdowns in japan that are threatening the world's supply of fish. There are massive right wing attacks on public sector unions, women's reproductive health, and the environment, while the elite "left" is sidelined despite having controlled both houses of congress and the Whitehouse with veto-proof majorities for two of the last four years. Despite hundreds of billions in pledged aid, Haiti is experiencing a failed state superimposed on a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, and we (the US, who run the show) have yet to distribute more than 10% of the aid money that has already been delivered. Our foreign policy is as toxic elsewhere as it was in Cholera infested Haiti, and the plight of the American middle class is looking more and more like the plight of the Chinese migrant workers who made these jeans I wear. In short, upward mobility is becoming an increasingly slippery and more treacherous slope, while from the bottom, the world is looking more and more like 1984.
The puzzle this diary would like to address is why this confluence of mismanaged events by the American ruling class has yet to produce a viable organized protest movement in response, and whether from this we can assume that Orwellian levels of control leave any kind of major backlash almost beyond the realm of reasonable possibilities. The argument I make is that we are nearing that point, will never know when we have crossed it as the line is as much cultural as it is structural, and thus must act now as if our life depended on it. Following Gramsci, I propose that we must address our own culture, then structure, in that order. This is because structures intended to produce culture that sustains particular configurations of power through intellectual and moral leadership must be in place for a significant period of time, whereas structural modes of control, such as police and uneven material capabilities are a much more immediate concern that can not be dealt with in half measures. By first uniting the people behind a message of class struggle against an ever-more-incapable and dangerous ruling class, we can first throw off some of the engrained cultural control systems currently privileged, THEN pursue a solution to the structural aspects of the system, which requires both time and legitimacy to undermine a class movement intellectually and morally. Too often as progressives we have privileged structure at the expense, or even total neglect, of agency, and agency is as much contingent on culture as it is on structure. Our Ruling class, on the other hand, has had this order of operations more or less figured out since the beginning of history.
Specifically, I propose an unemployment deadline of one year. We need to have a deadline or we are never going to be able to see how bad things have gotten in retrospect. This is because perspective is relative and some people look back further than others, or at different measures of "Good" than others do. In short, an unemployment deadline and countdown puts us all on the same page about the scope and methods of measuring the deteriorating state of the non-ruling-classes. Moreover, by creating a line in the sand, we are pledging to ourselves that if easily achievable levels of improvement are not met in a generous amount of time, we are left with no other CHOICE than to revolt. So there you have it, my proposal is quite simple: if unemployment has not gone down by 4% within 1 year from today, we revolt. Who's with me?