THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AT THE OUTSET OF TRUMPISM AND THE BRAZEN RISE OF WHITE SUPREMACIST MOVEMENTS. ALSO IT WAS WRITTEN AT A TIME WHEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, INCLUDING THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN, HAD CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF MANY YOUNG PEOPLE, PEOPLE OF COLOR, IMMIGRANT ACTIVISTS AND OTHERS. MOST RECENTLY GEORGE FLOYD WAS MURDERED BY POLICE AND THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC EXPOSED TO ALL THE FAILURES OF OUR ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SYSTEM. WHILE CHANGES ARE OCCURRING AT BREAKNECK SPEED THE ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE ENVISIONING OF SOCIALISM DESCRIBED BELOW SEEM STILL RELEVANT, EVEN AS WE APPROACH THE NOVEMBER, 2020 ELECTIONS.
THE MATERIAL REASONS FOR THE CURRENT INTEREST IN
SOCIALISM ( a repost from July 28, 2017)
Harry Targ
Introduction
The twenty-first century economic
reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated
wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the
other. More and more of those in the latter have become political
activists, particularly among the young. This new class society in the United
States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a
result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have
arisen everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to
Chile, from Syriza and Podemos to the Sanders campaign, the cry for change,
often a demand for socialism, is spreading. The outcome of this new activism is
unclear but for the first time in a long time, the prospects for positive
social and political change look promising.
The
New Class Society
In 1999, Robert
Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions of a perceptive
sociological analysis that identified what the authors identified as “the new
class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian analysis of class that
combined workers’ relationships to the means of production with their
organizational position.
Using data
reflecting their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that
the popular portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class,
a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically
marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe
society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s
until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had
become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”
In the new class
society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class”
composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and
“professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute
about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working
class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the
constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed,
and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80
percent of the population.
In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in
which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated
enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly
insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.
Peter Temin,
an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The
Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class
society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and
powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling
class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE),
representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;”
clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and
profits for the top twenty percent.
In summary,
both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest
have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the
twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the
eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the
interests of the wealthy and powerful.
The
Precariat
Guy
Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing
portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in
economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of
the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a
capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is
unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation
increasingly is experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials
as well as the traditional working class.
Standing
argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations
of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that
in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not
have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them
often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow
workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.”
These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for
example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.
Accumulation
by Dispossession
David
Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive
accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.”
Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of
indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other
words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism
was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the
accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.
Harvey then
argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in
outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century.
Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system
that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on
mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate
property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession,
while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same
outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the
few.
Growing
Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification
Virtually
every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States
demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by
international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute
poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central
feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between
countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union,
have occurred while inequalities within these countries have widened. In the
United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until
the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.
The patterns
of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people
are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,”
demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the
top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and
vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create
recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies.
Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.
On the other
hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing
stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly
underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and
intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the
population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict
and violence spread across communities.
Also in the
new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the
fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to
scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost
of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become
prohibitively expensive. For those who accumulate massive student debt the
experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for
those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage
service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest.
Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity
of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.
Racism
Manning
Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and
Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global
political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem
of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new
global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid
manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South.
Unemployment increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages
and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of
US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global
South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.
Marable
suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global
economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in
poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new
gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity
led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly
devastating impacts on educational institutions.
With
declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian
government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of
African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass
incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many
states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework,
which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus
links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment
and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter
disenfranchisement.
Neoliberalism:
the Latest Stage of Capitalism
The
so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an
anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as
the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase
in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about
2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments
constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation
accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive
program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and
services.
In terms of
international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in
establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist
Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign
assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their
commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.
At home a
United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People
were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity
and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium,
television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as
the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).
However, by
the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though
wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments
had been increasing services such as education, health care, and
transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing
political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added
to emerging economic stagnation.
By the
1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle
East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations
and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and
unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to
what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and
corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from
encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system
was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money
from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would
promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending,
privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift
economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in
the world market.
Thus, the
new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven
by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the
downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit
for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial
institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was
initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of
the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism
was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald
Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of
neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of
the many for the benefit of the few.
Neoliberal
globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual
economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing
inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.
A
Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century
As history
has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant
classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And
resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building
alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey
the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and
where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is
many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive
results.
History
shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require
organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the
causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a
better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between
the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a
vision of a better society.
The analyses
above highlight the changing character of the global political economy,
emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally
millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male;
gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of
the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the
maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a
socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people
contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably
in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation
in work places, the political system, and the community.
References
Robert A.
Perrucci and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society, Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999 (the first of four editions).
Peter
Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual
Economy, MIT Press, 2017.
Victor Tan
Chen, “The Dual Economy,” Working Class Perspectives, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-dual-economy/
Guy
Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014.
David
Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Mike
Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2017.
Harry
Targ, Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and
Militarism, Lulu.com, 2006.
Manning
Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” ZNET, zcom.org,
March 2, 2009.
Various articles on political economy,
social movements, peace and justice in Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland
Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
