Three Words that Need to be Retired

Words can be tyrannical. They can dictate the tenor, the direction, and the limits of political discourse, even political action. 

Contrary to the simplistic positivist account, words are elastic, they take on different meanings in different contexts, with different communities, from different motives, and at different times. Users can manipulate, distort, or shape usages to fit particular ends or effects. The coinage of new words-- like the creation of brands-- can persuade or influence. Indeed, words can become a political weapon, possibly unrecognized as such by its victims.

In his own fashion, Marx warned of the tyranny of words. He seldom couched his theories in the linguistic mode, preferring, broadly speaking, to write directly about the referents of words, as was common before the linguistic turn in philosophy. 

Nonetheless, it is sometimes useful to recast some of his thought into an argument about the role of words. This tactic is particularly of value in explicating his wonderfully rich and suggestive Fetishism of Commodities, Section 4 at the end of the first chapter of Volume one of Capital. Marx felt it necessary to devote an entire section to this often misunderstood idea after the publication of the first edition and in subsequent editions. Much could be said about this topic, but, suffice it to say that, in ordinary discourse, the word “commodity” and words denoting various commodities exert an almost hypnotic effect over our thinking, obscuring the complex of historically and materially determined relations that constitutes the deeper analysis of commodities found in Capital’s chapter one. But there are other fetishisms as well...

Terrorism

“Terrorism” and its associated words should be retired. To most of us, they conjure a vicious, brutal attack upon defenseless, innocent victims. Acts of terrorism are thought to be senseless and cruel, the product of a callous disregard for the lives of its victims. In this sense, “terrorism” aptly describes the slaughter of colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. 

The word is tailor-made for the plight of the indigenous peoples of these lands and their experience at the hands of European colonizers. 

Indeed, colonial genocide of native peoples might well serve as the ostensive definition of “terrorism.” What makes these acts so morally despicable is the gross asymmetry between the might of the colonizers and the powerlessness of their resisters.

But since the Second World War, the meaning of “terrorism” has been completely turned on its head by capital’s stable of idea-shapers. Western governments and the Western media have turned the resisters into “terrorists.” The Mau Mau risings in Kenya, the Hukbalahap resistance in the Philippines, the FLN in Algeria, the ANC in South Africa, the PLO in Palestine, and virtually all other national liberation movements have been slandered as terrorists by the colonizers, occupiers, and aggressors and their allies. Despite the overwhelming asymmetry of power and resources, the victims of that power are labelled “terrorists” for feeble, often desperate attempts at resistance.

In the brilliant movie, The Battle of Algiers, a telling moment comes when the fictional leader of the FLN, Ben M’Hidi, is captured. At a press conference, an indignant French reporter asks Ben M’Hidi how he can justify acts of “terrorism” against colonials. He replies, “Is it less cowardly to drop your napalm on our defenseless villages? ...Let us have your bombers and you can have our women’s baskets [in which the FLN plants bombs].”

Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s point is a profound one. In a war of liberation, the resistance must fight with the weapons available or submit to the oppression of their aggressors. In the best of circumstances, the balance of power still overwhelmingly favors the oppressor. The oppressed have their determination.

Similarly, Native Americans who fought against their genocide at the hands of US land thieves and the US military were called “savages” by the government and press of that time. Today, they would be called “terrorists.”

The US government has abused the term further by promiscuously using “support for terrorism” as a charge levelled at a whim to justify sanctions, blockades, and aggression, a charge levelled or withdrawn based on whether those charged are in or out of favor.

A further reason to retire the word “terrorism.”

Globalization

When “globalization” became a popular word, it was never clear what people meant by it. Some saw globalization as a new stage of capitalism: post-imperialist, post-nation-state, or on a course returning to a kind of new mercantilism. All those claims seem silly now, with imperialism caught in perpetual wars, a new burst of populist nationalism, and global trade struggling to reach levels attained before so-called “globalization.”

Even capitalist elites concede that it is time to retire the word.

Others, including many labor leaders, saw globalization as a job-sucking aberration of capitalism inspired by political mis-leadership and corporate over-reach. Lacking a class-struggle perspective, they failed to see that what they called “globalization” was really a continuation of a process that dated back to antiquity: the division of labor, in this case, a malignant global division of labor. 

In pursuit of profit and supported by revolutionary advances in the productive forces, capital was able to find cheaper sources of the commodity, labor power. They happened to find sources outside the old imperialist nexus, leaving the advanced capitalist countries with job growth only in finance capital, the professions, and the low-paying service industries, while locating manufacturing in low-wage countries.

By coining or embracing the misleading term “globalization,” labor and political fabulists were able to distract workers from the real source of job loss: the capitalist system. For that reason alone, “globalization” should be retired.

The Middle Class

All efforts to objectively and materially anchor the concept of social class have failed except for that of the Marxists. For Marxists, classes are grounded in a division based upon social relations dictated by the material production of society’s wealth. In the capitalist mode of production these social relationships produce a sharp division between those who purchase labor power and those who sell it. This division identifies two classes, appropriately named the “capitalist class” and the “working class.”

Of course there are grey areas-- strata-- at the edges of the two classes, varying in size and importance at different times, places, and under different conditions. Between the working class and the capitalist class, Marx identified a stratum which he dubbed the “petite” or “petty bourgeoisie.” This social stratum is comprised of people exhibiting some social relations of both classes, but subjectively identifying with the bourgeoisie while having a tenuous hold upon this intermediate status. 

Examples of this strata in today’s world of mature, monopoly capitalism are some doctors, lawyers, and small business people, as well as a coterie of courtiers, parasites, and entertainers to the bourgeoisie.

In the most wealthy countries of North America and Europe the petty bourgeoisie is large, even growing in size and wealth. It constitutes a buffer and political base for the much smaller bourgeoisie.

Historically, many social scientists have conveniently used the term “middle class” to designate the petty bourgeoisie, without doing great injustice to the Marxist distinctions.

But today, charlatans in the US union leadership, the capitalist media, and the political parties use the term differently. They describe everyone occupying the huge space between the hyper-rich (the so-called 1%) and the poor as “middle class.” 

Such a broad, wide-ranged notion of class is an affront to rigor and clarity. It blurs distinctions that reveal the social, political, and economic character of the capitalist system. It artificially and unrealistically ties the class interests of the working class with the apologists, advocates, and beneficiaries of the capitalist system. It masks processes that are impoverishing working people and enriching the capitalist class and much of its petty bourgeois appendage.

With this definition, the retail clerk and the laborer are in the same social class with the small business owner and the salaried mid-, even upper-level manager, sharing the same interests.

By consigning nearly everyone to a nebulous middle class, politicians, bankrupt union leaders, and media lapdogs paint a picture of harmonious common interests shared by everyone but the very rich and the very poor. There is no class friction except possibly at the extremes. Everyone shares in the bounty, shares a common world-view, and strives for the same goals, though some are more “successful” than others. Those outside the harmonious “middle class” and the “extremely successful”-- that is to say, the poor-- appear as somehow misfits, saddled with poor motivation and social dysfunction, worthy of society’s charity.

This Panglossian best of all possible worlds serves capitalism well, obscuring genuine class differences and conflict, while masking the need for working class struggle.

It is time to retire this misleading usage of the term, “middle class.”

The tyranny of words is insidious, especially when so much popular “communication” is limited to 140 characters. Social media encourages brevity, with little room for elucidation or nuance. Hence, millions pounce on words that seem witty, fashionable, or clever. Wit, fashion, and cleverness have never been the measure of clarity or truth.

More ‘subversive’ or ‘misleading’ words in future postings!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“Middle Class Revolution”: A New End of History?

The US is notoriously unkind to “intellectuals.” Popular culture portrays intellectuals as absent-minded, divorced from the everyday world, and obsessed with spinning useless, but harmless abstractions. They are good to keep contained in universities where they can give future cogs in the capitalist machine a taste, but not a passion for, impractical thought. Regrettably, those posing as intellectuals have gone far to earn contempt, favoring arcane, specialized languages and scholastic debates.

That's not to say that there is no room for thinkers in the US, but they are dubbed “pundits,” “experts,” “researchers” or “consultants,” words that ring with practicality and single-mindedness; they are purveyors of small, easily digested ideas and not the “big” ideas associated with intellectuals.

In the US, we are taught to distrust big ideas unless they are linked to religions. But then religion has been compartmentalized, shunted off to Sunday mornings or weddings and funerals. All the big ideas we need were decided with the ratification of the US Constitution.

We can thank corporate marketers and their masters for our continuing alienation from big ideas and taste for small ones. They prefer ideas that are easily and flashily packaged, readily digested, and quickly obsolesced. They select for us ideas that can go “viral,” grabbing the attention of not thousands, but millions. They select ideas that easily fit in a two-minute TV commentary or on 6 or 8 column inches of news print. Intellectuals didn't invent the term “sound bite.” Nor did they invent “twitter.” Corporate taste makers did. So what we get in the market place of ideas are small ideas, commodified ideas with shiny packages.

Thus, it may be hard to understand how Francis Fukuyama fits into the world of ideas. We know him for his celebrated 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, an ambitious intellectual tome designed to place triumphant capitalism and its attendant bourgeois democracy at the pinnacle of a long historical, dialectical process. A big idea indeed!

Of course it wasn't that difficult to conjure a motive for this rising star of the Right. On the heels of the fall of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries, Fukuyama saw the opportunity to mark "paid” to the theoretical foundations of Marxism by co-opting the Hegelian “dialectics” that Marx was schooled in and replacing the socialist ideal with something that looked remarkably like the socio-economic system of late twentieth-century US capitalism. Moreover, since Fukuyama had discovered the “end of history,” we needn't worry about any serious future military conflagrations or rebellions because we were entering the blissful era of market justice, parliamentary democracy, and human rights.

Fukuyama's big ideas can take small credit for the pious military crusades led by the US ruling class in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently in Libya and Syria, as well as the meddling in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. Those who failed to accept the end of history soon felt the wrath of history's enforcer. At the same time, the resistance to Fukuyama's vision of history's end challenged his big idea. The intense confrontation between the US and peoples in the Middle East and Latin America shattered the idea that with the demise of the Soviet Union the world would rush to embrace the values of the US and Europe.

With the “end of history” forestalled by unforeseen events, Fukuyama knocked around the research institute/think tank/academic circuit, writing books and resisting the temptation to join the courtiers of the mass media trading in small, nasty ideas. He passed on the enormous earnings available to the likes of the O'Reilly's, Limbaugh's, or the other aristocrats of wind-baggery. Instead, he scoured the landscape to find new opportunities to float big ideas.

And now he's back with a new big idea.

Fukuyama won a think-piece in the June 28/29 weekend Wall Street Journal entitled “The Middle Class Revolution.” He argues that “All over the world, today's political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and educated.” Cognizant of the worldwide mass risings of recent years, Fukuyama chooses this moment to offer an explanation, a theoretical explanation for those risings, an explanation palatable and comforting to US elites.

He rightly understands that linking the most recent mass upsurges requires sizable ideas. While there are many similarities, there are many differences as well. Successful exposition of their common features would tell us much about the underlying processes and likely offer a glimpse into the future. In short, it would give us a theory of contemporary social change, a decidedly big idea.

Unfortunately, he gets it all wrong.

He builds his case around reflections on events in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey, a mixed collection neither reflective of all of the mass activity of our time nor sharing many common features. Seduced by recent headlines and sensationalist accounts, Fukuyama finds the “middle class” as the revolutionary agent in all cases. Besides the elusiveness of the term, he offers no evidence beyond youth, cell phones, and the presence of a vaguely sensed entrepreneurial spirit to justify the assignment of this role. And he is equally slippery in explaining what constitutes a “middle class.” Instead, he considers a series of candidates: income ($6,000-30,000 year), relative income (the middle of a country’s income distribution), and relative level of consumption (greater than the subsistence level of the poor). Rejecting these, he settles on “education, occupation, and the ownership of assets,” none of which is produced as evidence regarding any of the particular countries under review. In fact, the demographics of the four “revolutions” fail to show common attributes; nor do they demonstrate a rising of the “middle class.”

When Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vender in Tunisia, set himself afire in December of 2010, he became the symbol for the uprisings that pundits have dubbed “the Arab Spring.” Tunisia, under Ben Ali, was one of the success stories of neo-liberalism, a poster child for corporate-friendly “competitiveness” and foreign investment. Its industrial and service economies were relatively well developed. 

While the neo-liberal regimen delivered growth, modest GDP/capita, some social benefits (education and welfare), it was rocked by the economic crisis and the scourge of high unemployment. The youth (constituting nearly half of the population) endured one of the world's highest unemployment rates: 30.7%. As in the US, Tunisian youth are relatively well educated, but denied access to meaningful employment. The relative affluence of Tunisian elites enjoying the fruits of a growing economy and the lack of opportunity for a youthful population spurred the overthrow of Ben Ali.

Egypt presents a different picture. While Sadat and Mubarak also embraced the tenets of neo-liberalism, they did so in the shadow of Nasser's legacy of anti-imperialism, public ownership and social welfare. Moreover, free market capitalism fared far worse in this country. Despite a large industrial base and due, in part, to a relatively large agricultural sector (56.5% of Egyptians live outside of urban areas), Egypt achieved a GDP/capita roughly only 2/3 of that of Tunisia. 

But Egypt shares with Tunisia an extremely youthful population with massive un- and underemployment. With little government educational expenditure, it is no surprise that Egyptians have a relatively low participation in higher education.

Egyptian professionals-- the social base for the Muslim Brotherhood-- could count as a “middle strata,” though they are a small part of the population. Most Egyptians, however, enjoy an income only marginally above poverty, marking membership in what would properly be considered the working class.

The global economic downturn only brought the plight of young Egyptians to the fore and prompted mass action and the deposing of Mubarak. The subsequent Morsi presidency brought a further disintegration of the economy and a spike in unemployment and poverty. The Muslim Brotherhood failed to attempt an exit from neo-liberalism and restored the foreign policy of Mubarak, even betraying the Syrian government to imperialism.

The people have again taken to the streets. In the words of Salah Adly, General Secretary of the Egyptian Communist Party, Egyptian Communists believe “that what happened on 30^th June is a second wave of the Egyptian revolution that is stronger and deeper than the first wave in 2011. It has taken place to correct the path of the revolution and seize it back from the forces of the extreme religious right...”

The street demonstrations in Turkey, a country that has one historic foot in the Arab world and a tentative one in Europe, is more a political struggle than an explosion of economic discontent. Turkey's demographics are similar to a European country, a poorer European country like Portugal or Poland, but with a much higher percentage of youth in the population. The Islamist president Erdogan represents cultural traditions that conflict with that of more secular youth. Of course others, including workers, who have economic demands, support the demonstrations, as do unemployed youth. But they do not challenge the structures of bourgeois democracy or monopoly capitalism. Turkish Communists recognize this fact. As Kemal Okuyan, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkey, states “... this is an outburst of a huge social energy. It is powerful in extent and effect. But there are some Marxist criteria for defining a situation as a revolutionary crisis. We are far from that. At least for now...”

Brazil, Fukuyama's final example of a “middle class” revolution, demonstrates its own unique demographics and weaknesses. Despite showing exceptional economic growth, Brazil counts as one of the most economically unequal countries in the world. Highly urbanized, Brazil's poverty is concentrated in city neighborhoods, with all of the attendant social problems of poverty intensified. The large and growing service sector affords enough jobs to contain unemployment below crisis levels. But grinding poverty and the contrasting extreme concentration of wealth produce a persisting tinderbox.

Brazil's social democratic government has shown occasional anti-imperialist spunk, standing up to US arrogance at different times. This, along with the government's competent management of the capitalist economy, and some social welfare initiatives, has spawned national pride. At the same time, support for the government is fragile because of its inability to dent the massive economic and social inequalities suffered by working people. This contradiction between national sentiment and contempt toward the working class was brought home by the mass objection to new soccer stadia, in a soccer-crazed country, expressed by the mass demonstrations.

Clearly what all of these countries do share is a popular response to the failure of leaders, institutions, and political parties to overcome the legacy and reality of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. Fukuyama hides this failing behind the mythology of middle class dissatisfaction with the level of consumerism and cultural expression: they rebel because they want to be like us in Europe and the US. One would never guess that an almost unprecedented and persistent economic calumny has shaken the social and political foundations of nearly every country over the last five years. One would never guess that all four of the countries under discussion suffer from severe economic and political problems unsolved by their past and current leaders.

In Tunisia, Ben Ali's embrace of neo-liberal fundamentalism was a bankrupt answer to youth unemployment. In Egypt, corrupted leaders brazenly counted on the accommodation with imperialism to prop up their aloof rule over an abused people. Turkey's leader, like politico-theological leaders of other persuasions, overstepped the limits of governance and opened the door to airing the many grievances of the opposition, formerly trumped by religious commitment. And Brazil's social-democratic government learned the folly of attempting to manage capitalism while promising to rectify its inequities.

From the Indignados to the Occupy movement, from the revival of the Latin American left to the Arab Spring, authentic popular up-risings have emerged from the failure of capitalism to deliver the future and security so seemingly assured before the great crisis of 2008. Millions have been failed by the institutions, parties, and leaders that they formerly trusted. It's not as though they have been dealt a bad hand, but it is as though there is no good hand to be found in the deck.

Spinning theories based on such a corrupted sociological idea as the “middle class” guarantees failure. Of course one can't blame Fukuyama entirely for buying in on one of the great intellectual frauds of our time. Everyone, from the Chamber of Commerce to the misleaders of labor, likes to remind us that we are all members of a vast collection of people located economically between the rich and the poor. Within this distorted picture there is something for everyone. We all share home ownership, a good job, vacations, family, and comforting values, so the fantasy goes. The unfortunate poor are with us because they have failed, though they deserve our compassion and, perhaps, our charity. The rich are with us because they are successful and merit our respect. This harmonious picture is only disrupted when the rich get too greedy or the poor get rebellious.

This myth serves the ruling class, their political flunkies, and labor's class collaborationists in maintaining class peace and stability. But most importantly, it obscures the real class divide between employers and employees.

The divisions that spark genuine revolution are not between some muddy notion of a middle class at odds with an equally obscure specter of government, but between the power and dominance of capitalist corporations and the diverse and largely unrepresented workers who enrich them. This sharply drawn class division accounts for the fundamentally economic, but also cultural and spiritual alienation of youth. Whether conscious or not, this division generates discontent and outrage. Expressed in many ways, the conflict between the employers and their employees stands behind the conflicts of the twenty-first century. And only its resolution in favor of the employee class – the working class-- will bring these conflicts to a close.

It's not a new idea; it's a big, but not too big of an idea; and it’s an idea that promises an escape from the failure of capitalism: Socialism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com