I’m a guest diarist this week, so I want to make clear in advance that I lack the extensive knowledge base and theoretical grasp of economic social theory which always makes these diaries challenge and sparkle. Almost every word I read in this series is news to me, and enlightening news at that. I’ll be dabbling, you might say, so I hope people will be kind in correcting any naiveté or misinterpretation that may crop up. I hope to make up for this limitation, however, by presenting a readable, intuitively accessible view of the frightening tendencies we must face down if we are to leave behind a world which is comfortable for more than a small percentage of people. Hat tip to NY Brit Expat and goinsouth for pointing to the article which is the springboard for these thoughts.
UCSB sociologist William I. Robinson begins his Al Jazeera opinion piece,Global capitalism and 21st century fascism
The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity.
As they say in the South, Robinson has said a mouth full, seems more fact than opinion. If I were less of a procrastinator, and this were a short book rather than a diary, I would provide sobering evidence for each item on that list of crises, thus justifying his dire contention: “We truly face a crisis of humanity.” As it is, I’ll just ask people who don’t like to get bummed out or consider gloomy scenarios, please don’t bother to read on. This diary will not put a happy face on things.
I will say at the outset, however, that there is an antidote. It is solidarity. I believe the only solution to the varied onslaughts on daily living for the vast majority of humans is collective action toward a goal of mutual well being—the opposite of competitive capitalism which pits citizen against citizen and profit against the common good. At the heart of the necessary changes is a correction to the grossly inequitable distribution of wealth world-wide. Robinson points out that this maldistribution of wealth is a problem for capitalism itself, a problem which the global uber-rich are attempting to solve through various methods which bode ill for most people.
Please read Robinson’s article for the full-bodied, succinctly thorough version. He manages to include in a single overview most of the things I spend time worrying about and analyzing. The following is a pale summary. And, of necessity, I’ll have to pick out just a couple of things to focus on closely from this densely packed article.
Widespread impoverishment and hyper-accumulation lead to crisis of profit-making
Robinson calls the already extreme and still increasing concentration of unprecedented wealth in the hands of a relative few “hyper-accumulation.”
…The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour.
Put simply, Bank of America cares less about America than about its bottom line, its global reach. This attitude extends as well to the powerful executives who control jawdropping amounts of capital, no matter how often the U.S. flag appears in their commercials or on their products. Most tragically for the common welfare, U.S. politicians today are overwhelmingly in the pockets of those with the largesse. Just for one example, the Economic Policy Institute now says [PDF] that NAFTA has resulted in the loss of 700,000 jobs. This is not what we were told NAFTA would do, but that is because we were being played by people who talk about national interests for public consumption but who make decisions on the basis of what is best for the TCC. If anyone cares to make sense of the world around them, this basic understanding is essential. For example, this is useful information to apply when you hear these discredited arguments being made in favor of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement.
Robinson points out that global capitalism has been in chronic crisis since the 1990’s. With the increasing impoverishment of swaths of humanity, capitalism as a system of supply and demand is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Without demand, without sales, how can capital generate profit? The responses of the TCC to this situation is what brings Robinson to say we face a crisis of humanity. Every response entails an assault on individual freedom.
Responses of transnational capitalist class to crisis of accumulation
One is militarised accumulation; waging wars and interventions that unleash cycles of destruction and reconstruction and generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex. We are now living in a global war economy that goes well beyond such "hot wars" in Iraq or Afghanistan.
One example of this broad category is the manipulation of the immigration issue. The obscene privatization of the U.S. prison system underlines as well as any issue the fatal flaw in thinking that seeking profit always leads to the optimal outcome. When incarceration of those who are dangerous to society is decoupled from mechanisms for exercising the common will, perverse motivations lead to perverse outcomes. We now find a formidable amount of prison industry capital devoted to creating prisoners independent of the behavior of the citizens or the needs of the state.
The most accurate understanding of the infamous Arizona anti-immigration law comes not through focusing on disgusting bigots, or horrible Republicans, or sparsely populated hick inland states. These views, which are eagerly promoted by a divide and conquer elite, are an obstacle to the solidarity necessary to prevent the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the organization which drafted and bought SB1070, from creating legislation for no other purpose that to enhance their own bottom line.
The suffering of humanity resulting from linking wars and prisons to profit can hardly be over-stated. When cities are being bombed for the sake of profit, surely we can see that we face a crisis of humanity.
A second mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets. Transnational capital uses its financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the working majority, resulting in ever greater social inequality and hardship. The TCC has used its structural power to accelerate the dismantling of what remains of the social wage and welfare states.
Again, the category is broad, the suffering created immense. And again, I’ll focus on one example. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi offered a blow by blow description of the process through which the people of Jefferson County, Alabama have been brought to their knees just because they needed a new sewage treatment plant. This article is worth reading if you would like a grounded sense of how government can be used as a conduit of funds from working people to distant capitalists with absolutely no concern for the general welfare.
If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."
snip
The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.
snip
The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.
For those interested, Taibbi has added a one-year follow-up describing the continuing collapse of Birmingham’s public infrastructure so that distant capital can carve out profits.
And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation - turning the global economy into a giant casino.
Passive Revolution: responses of states and social and political forces
Robinson names three responses to these crises. The one he stresses is “a political polarisation worldwide between the left and the right, both of which are insurgent forces.” Robinson’s analysis highlights the significance to the passionate anti-Obama/pro-Obama divide here on dailykos. He states the well-documented fact of a resurgence of neo-fascist forces. I hope to find little argument among liberals with this fact, or with its disturbing implications. The more problematic discussion involves the role of the Obama administration in the neutering of the left.
To Robinson, with whom I agree, the Obama administration channeled growing discontentment from the left, a swelling demand for fundamental change, into a program of mild reform which protected the status quo from the dramatic change needed to stem the flow of wealth and income from the few to the many. In the process, the door was left open for neo-fascist forces to seize on popular outrage. Robinson sees “the Obama project” as passive revolution.
The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to undercut mobilisation from below for more far-reaching transformation….
Obama's campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.
In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis - for a project of 21st century fascism - to become insurgent. Obama's administration appears in this way as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis, but rather side-lined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933.
Any regular reader on this website will immediately see this passage as a powder keg. I hope there is little doubt of the existence of a powerful push to “side-line” those described as purists, professional left, and, in a recent diary, left absolutists. This passage explains as well as any I’ve seen why some of us continue to resist this marginalization: we feel the alternative to strong restructuring led by the left will be neo-fascism, something none of us wish to see. The ultimate source of the challenge is not political—it is the economic problem of maldistribution of wealth and a transnational capitalist class more divorced than ever from the interests of the common person. The only response with a prayer of success is solidarity from people who value the common interest. This fact lends a tragic aspect to our inability to agree on the most effective response to the crisis of capitalism.
Here is an example of the calming effect of President Obama on the forces of the left. John Pilger is speaking at Socialism 2009:
I write for the Italian socialist newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather, I used to write for it. In February I sent the editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. “Why?” I asked.
“For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more positive approach to the novelty presented by Obama. We will take on specific issues, but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.”
Few of us would like to say President Obama will make no difference. Many of us fear he will not make enough of one.
Robinson goes on to describe his vision of 21st century fascism, a fascism whose face will be less obvious than in earlier times as a result of widespread and sophisticated propaganda, unprecedented wealth concentrated in few hands, state mechanisms covertly manipulated by capital, and modern methods for controlling movement. A probable vision of the future involves a third or much more of humanity suffering with no systems for expressing their common will and no leverage with which to sway entrenched interests. Meanwhile, creation of suffering will result both from perverse motivations to make profits and from an increasing need for the state to exert its authority through raw force rather than through perceived legitimacy. The question is whether Obama will make enough of a difference. The stakes are very high. We face a crisis of humanity.
Absolute necessity of heart-centered commitment to a group
Please allow me a epilog to this overly long piece. Human emotions play a crucial role in these matters. I had hoped to get to the subject of solidarity—its importance, the forces intentionally deployed to undermine it, and methods through which it can be strengthened. I’ll have to be content with a mere mention of the thought of Texas A&M sociologist Stjepan Meštrović:
[emphasis added]
Without strong integration into social groups—not just normative consensus on the rules of behavior and common values, but a love and commitment to these groups—the individual lacks strong moral guidance from their society and the ego or will is set loose upon the world. In such situations, men and women essentially exploit their fellow humans.
It is important to note that Mestrovic does not believe the needed morality can come from a rational source; in fact, rationality tends to erode the moral authority needed to restrain exploitive behavior.
Rather, what is needed is a revival of traditional and emotional structures that are capable of fully integrating people into society to keep them in check; love and commitment most of all. Lacking this integration, the will is left to its own devices and engages in barbarism and other exploitive behaviors to satisfy its whims.
snip
Civilization, or the creation of rational institutions to contain barbarism, is simply not effective. Barbarism, or the will of the individual, cannot be constrained by such rationally constructed systems.
The “heart” (egoism) is always stronger than the “mind” (society); the constraining of the barbaric will can only be accomplished by other “habits of the heart” that are equally powerful. These habits of the heart are feelings of altruism and compassion, the other side of human nature that must be cultivated and given expression in our culture.
But, altruism cannot be systematized: “The moment one tries to systematize compassion into socialism, for example, one has converted a benign trait into its opposite. This is because, according to Durkheim, any time we act from duty, fear, or any sort of compulsion, we are really acting on the basis of egoistic self interest, which is the basis of barbarism.
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According to Mestrovic, the key insight of Durkheim and other early social scientists that society is held together by irrational feelings of love, affection, attachment, empathy, and devotion to one another has been lost to most modern sociologists.
This loss, according to Mestrovic, has had tragic consequences for sociology and for western society.