Thursday, October 15, 2020
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY CONTINUES: A REPOST THAT IS STILL RELEVANT
Harry Targ
(We are witnessing many forms of voter suppression. Gerrymandering continues. Reactionary minorities move to pact the court. Politicians work to undermine the desires of majorities on education, health care, jobs, and the environment. In short, the processes and substance of democracy are under threat. Nancy MacLean, see below, told us how some of the threat to democracy in recent years has unfolded. October 14, 2020).
What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme-and some would say greedy-subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could. (Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, New York, Random House, 2017, 5).
“Democracy in Chains”: Multiple Themes
Friends
of mine insisted I read Nancy MacLean’s recent book, Democracy in Chains. Their
enthusiasm for the book was so great that I finally picked it up. I found it
profound as to how it addressed issues of political theory, consciousness, and
political practice.
First, the book is a narrative biography of one scholar of political economy, James Buchanan, who has had a significant impact on the development of “public choice” theory in political science, sociology, and economics. In addition, the text uses his biography to develop larger theoretical, historical, and political themes.
Second, it is a book about what used to be called the “sociology of knowledge”; that is how ideas are developed, disseminated, institutionalized, and become dominant ways in which academic disciplines address the subject matter they study.
Third, Democracy in Chains addresses the development of democratic theory, relating contemporary ideas about public participation in decision-making to eighteenth and nineteenth century American political theory. Significantly, it addresses Professor Buchanan’s attraction to Southern anti-federalist John C. Calhoun.
Fourth, the book provides a rich description of the theory of “free markets” developed by the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises and Fredrich Hayek and institutionalized by the economics department at the University of Chicago.
Fifth, the book describes in some detail how scholars such as James Buchanan and wealthy advocates of “free market” philosophies have worked to influence higher education and public policy, not only at the national level but through the states and local government. The book describes how enormously wealthy free marketeers led by Charles and David Koch, their association, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and hundreds of think tanks, lobby groups, and funded politicians have been implementing their policy agenda.
Each of these themes richly developed by MacLean deserves detailed examination and evaluation. As my exuberant friends suggested to me, the MacLean book is a major work of political theory and policy analysis that should significantly energize those progressives who see democracy in the United States as an endangered species.
The Threat to Democracy
But for starters, it is critical in 2018 to address one of the central themes developed in her book, the contradiction between democracy and capitalism.
MacLean analyzes central premises of the so-called Austrian school of economics. Nineteenth and twentieth century luminaries from this tradition, particularly Van Mises and Hayek, articulated the view that the main priority of any society, but particularly democracies, is the extent to which markets are allowed to flourish, unencumbered by governments.
According to this view in a truly free society markets remain supreme. In fact, “liberty” exists in a society to the extent economic actors are able to act in the market place. Virtually all limitations on economic liberty so defined constitute a threat to “real” democracy. Governments exist only to maintain domestic order (the police power) and to defend the nation from external aggression (defense of national security). Governments provide police protection and armies. And that should be all. In sum, as President Ronald Reagan expressed the market vision: “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”
To further illustrate, MacLean describes the brutal dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970 presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States, based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government. The military coup, ousting Allende from power, was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.
As MacLean points out, in the aftermath of the coup, General Augusto Pinochet rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters, destroyed the long tradition of electoral politics, abolished trade unions, and began the process of ending government involvement in the economy and public institutions. Social security and education were privatized. Policies of nationalization of key industries were reversed. All of the shifts to what the Austrian school called economic liberty were imposed on the Chilean people with the advice of University of Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, and later, George Mason University economist, James Buchanan, who was instrumental in recommending “reforms” to the Chilean constitution making return to democracy more difficult. Subsequently only a few other dictatorships in Latin America showed any sympathy for the Pinochet regime with most of the world condemning its domestic brutality. But as MacLean reports, Milton Friedman and his colleagues never condemned the Chilean regime and Buchanan regarded it as a paradigmatic case of economic liberty, a model which the world should emulate.
Although the Chilean case represents an extreme example of dictatorship and free market capitalism, she uses it to illustrate a central point. In most societies, and the United States is no exception, majorities of people endorse government policies that can and often do serve the people. As a rule citizens support public transportation, schools, highways, libraries, retirement guarantees, some publicly provided health care, rules and regulations to protect the environment, as well as police and military protection. The problem for Buchanan and his colleagues is that each one of these government programs. except for the police and military, constrains the “liberty” of entrepreneurs to pursue profit.
To put it simply, if citizens of the United States were asked if they support public programs, majorities would say “yes.” Although there have been extraordinary constraints on majority rule, even enshrined in the US constitution, the history of the United States can be seen as a history of struggle to improve and achieve majoritarian democracy. Demands for voting rights for women, African/Americans, non-propertied and low-income workers and others have been basic to the American experience. The great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century all across the globe were premised on the vision of individual and collective sovereignty of the people. If economic liberty is conceptualized as inversely related to majoritarian democracy, then capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
Nancy MacLean, based on this fundamental contradiction, develops a narrative of efforts by celebrants of economic liberty, the Koch brothers and their allies, to build campaigns in virtually every state and locale to disenfranchise people. ALEC affiliates in state legislatures over the last decade have promoted legislation to suppress the right to vote, eliminate the rights of workers to unionize, disempower city councils, eliminate the right of local governments to make fiscal decisions, and to enshrine in curricula in K to 12 education systems and the universities ideologies about the virtues of economic freedom. There are powerful political pressures to privatize every existing public institution. Again, the best government is no government (except for the maintenance of police force to squelch demands for change and military power to protect the nation at home and abroad).
So Democracy in Chains is as rich in analysis and warning as my friends have suggested. Much more needs to be disaggregated and discussed. But for starters Nancy MacLean is warning us that there is a powerful drive, based on wealth and power, in the United States to destroy democracy. This democracy, while flawed, has been fought for since the founding of the United States. Its continuation, leaving aside its need for improvement, is under fundamental threat.
Saturday, October 10, 2020
A BETTER WORLD IS STILL POSSIBLE
As we approach the November election and think beyond it we see more and more charters and declarations. While we can create our own, our energies might be better served uniting with those who share our concerns and visions of the short-run and the longer period.
The first link is to a domestic People’s Charter, the second to a discussion of principles of peaceful coexistence and anti-militarism, and the third a video presentation of expressions of anti-imperialism from people on the left, mostly from the Global South.
We probably share the views of these statements. The big question is how to participate with others in achieving changes of policy and more fundamental structural change.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-twenty-first-century-peace-charter_29.html
Monday, October 5, 2020
UNIVERSITIES AND THE NEW COLD WAR CONTINUE: a repost
Harry Targ, dh must be confronted in devising pathways to greater security.
The National Defense Industry Association NDIA is an association of defense industry contractors who lobby for increased military expenditures. Its members are described as “informed opinion leaders” dedicated to improved national security.
****************************************************************************
One of Discovery Park’s core strengths is “Global Security.” Key research on this subject is designed to respond to security threats, global instability, defense needs, terrorism, nuclear deterrence and proliferation, basically responding to “the most pressing security and defense challenges facing the nation and the world.”
“It has become apparent that the U.S. is no longer guaranteed top dog status on the dance card that is the future of war. In order to maintain military superiority the focus must shift from traditional weapons of war to advanced systems that rely on A.I.-based weaponry. The stakes are just too high and the prize too great for the U.S. to be left behind. All the more reason to call upon Purdue University and its inestimable capacity to weave together academia, research, and industry for the greater good. We’re stepping up to secure our place in the future of our country, and there’s much more to come!” He warned that China had announced that it would overtake the US by 2030 in the global artificial intelligence market.
These qualitative changes in university priorities are being made largely in non-transparent decision-making ways. But when challenged, the military/industrial/academic complex tends to defend its existence by claiming war is inevitable. And to secure support, when questioned, self-identified experts construct narratives of enemies; whether they be the Communists, the terrorists, China, the Cubans, the Venezuelans, artificial intelligence, or all of the above. As Andrew Bacevich so compellingly has argued, ever since the end of World War Two, the United States has created a “permanent war economy.” Given the increasing financial challenges universities face in the twenty-first century, collaboration with this permanent war economy becomes attractive to university administrators.
For more on the concept of the military/industrial complex see:
For a discussion about competing paradigms in the study of international relations see:
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
WHERE DOES THE FOREIGN POLICY OF DONALD TRUMP FIT? HOW DOES THE PEACE MOVEMENT JOIN THE DIALOGUE THIS ELECTION SEASON
Extracted and revised from:
https://mronline.org/2019/10/23/united-states-foreign-policy-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow/
Harry Targ
The US Pursuit of Empire
Taking “the long view” of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has pursued global hegemony. And foreign policy influentials, such as a recent Council on Foreign Relations position paper suggests, regard the maintenance of global power the main priority of foreign policy in the years ahead. It is also clear that the pursuit of empire has, of necessity, involved the creation of a permanent war economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of enormous military expenditures.
It is also clear that justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism; then terrorism; and now China. The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation, US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white race and western civilization.
In this light, while specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new technologies, continues unabated. And a significant Council on Foreign Relations report raises the danger of the United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the late 1950s to challenge President Eisenhower’s worry about a military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the 1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to overcome the “window of vulnerability.”
Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other operatives financed by outside nations like the United States. Also the hybrid wars concept also refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. So the hybrid war concept suggests that wars are carried out by other, less visible, means.
Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world replicates the bipolar, super power narrative of the Cold War. Only now the enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high tech aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have to do so militarily. This position is the centerpiece of the recent CFR Task Force Report.
Imperial Policies in the Trump Era
Recognizing these continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately recognize the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the Trump era. He has reached out to North Korea and Russia (which has had the potential of reducing tensions in Asia and Central Europe). He has rhetorically claimed that the United States must withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including the Middle East. He has declared that the United States cannot be “the policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile. For some of these measures, Trump has been inappropriately criticized by Democrats and others. Tension-reduction on the Korean Peninsula, for example, should have been encouraged.
However, while Trump moves in one direction he almost immediately undermines the policies he has ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement. Time after time, one foreign policy decision is contradicted by another. These contradictions occur over and over with allies as well as traditional adversaries. Sometimes policies seem to be made with little historical awareness and without sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. (One is reminded of the old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” Nixon allegedly wanted to appear mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US interests out of fear of random responses).
Working for Peace in the 21st Century
The contradictory character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. How does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional imperial grain at the same time that he acts impetuously increasing the dangers of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war? Perhaps the task for the peace movement is to include, in the project of building a progressive majority, ideas about challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy.
Without illusions, the peace movement must participate in politics: which means in 2020 the electoral arena. Articulating a peace agenda, demanding that politicians running for office at all levels embrace it, and convincingly demonstrating that politicians who embrace it will be held accountable. Meanwhile, by articulating a peace platform, activists will be participating in a broad educational effort to construct a majority “people for peace.”
These are truly troubled times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about and every avenue must be used to challenge it.
Thursday, September 24, 2020
The Long Troubled United States Relations With China: U.S. Globalism, the Open Door Notes, and the Centrality of China for Building A Global Empire
The developing United States international obsession with China (leaving aside the super-exploitation of Chinese labor and profound anti-Chinese racism in the United States), has its roots in the rise of the US as a great power. As historians such as William Appleman Williams have pointed out, the United States emerged as an industrial power on the world stage between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s. Not only was the US economy experiencing industrialization, but private entrepreneurs were building a transcontinental railroad, with Chinese labor, to create a vast continental empire. Coupled with industrialization, a vast transportation network, was the development of agricultural surpluses, well-beyond the consumer needs of persons in the United States. Williams concluded that by the 1880s the United States, because of increased agricultural productivity, began to seek world markets for its goods (The Contours of American History, 1961).
Increasingly the industrial and agricultural
revolutions in the United States were leading to increased competition with
European imperial powers and the rising Japanese empire. A sector of the United States political class,
exemplified by former Secretary of the Navy and soon-to-be President Theodore
Roosevelt, argued for the United States to develop a global vision and a naval
military capability to facilitate becoming a global empire, particularly to
challenge Europe. After diplomatic skirmishes with Great Britain over who
should have dominant influence in Latin America, the United States entered the
Cuban anti-colonial war against the Spanish empire in 1898. (Over the
subsequent years until 1959 the United States replaced Spain as the colonial
overseer of Cuba). In addition, the United States took Puerto Rico, reaffirmed
its dominance over the Hawaiian Islands and seized control of the Philippines.
To further the globalization of US empire President Roosevelt was able to get
Congressional support for a “two-ocean” navy. The United States was on the road
to becoming a world power.
But the lack of control of the political economy of
China remained an obstacle to the completion of the imperial project. The 4,000
years old Chinese empire, controlling vast amounts of land, people, and neighboring
countries had begun to deconstruct in the nineteenth century. The Opium Wars of
1839-42 and 1856 were carried out by Great Britain and later France, Germany,
and Russia to force China to open its domestic markets to foreign penetration,
and further, to the development of spheres of influence for each of these
countries (and Japan). The devolution of the Qing Dynasty and the defeat of
Chinese nationalists during the Boxer Rebellion in 1901-1902 seemed to solidify
European and Japanese control over the vast Chinese empire.
Fearful of being frozen out of the vast potential Chinese market, President William McKinley’s Secretary of State, John Hay, issued two “notes” to European powers in 1899 and 1900 indicating that the United States would insist upon equal access to Chinese markets, even in areas of the country that had been seen as part of the “spheres of influence” of the colonial powers.
Traditional interpreters of United States foreign policy, such as George Kennan, regarded John Hay’s Open Door Notes as examples of typical U.S. diplomatic bluster; empty threats that could not be backed up by economic or military power. Williams in his classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, argues that the Notes were emblematic of the development of United States global imperial power.
What had been the nineteenth century
vision of U.S. domination of Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine, was being
applied to Asia as well. The defeat of the Spanish, the occupation of the
Philippines, the development of a two ocean navy, burgeoning agricultural
products, a vision of American exceptionalism often articulated by Theodore
Roosevelt and spokespersons of both political parties, all made it clear that
domination of China was to be a key global project of the twentieth century.
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
BUILDING A SOCIALIST FUTURE
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
The Bookshelf
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background on united state/iranian R elations Saturday, March 24, 2012 MEASURING TARGETS OF US IMPERIALISM: HISTORY, ECONOMICS, GEOPO...
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