A Political Conundrum

Sixteen months ago, political commentators and analysts felt they had a handle on the mood of US citizens. All saw the election of Obama and the sweep of Congress as a powerful rejection of the politics of the Bush era, including a repudiation of the extreme-right agenda associated with it. Roughly 20-25% of the electorate still tenaciously embraced the bizarre brew of religious zeal, rabid nationalism, racism, and social retardation, but polls – like the detailed, twenty year survey of “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes” conducted by The Pew Research Center – showed a decided tilt towards more socially progressive, government-directed policies on the part of the US population. Some pundits even spoke of a sea-change in US politics: the emergence of a new democratic and progressive era as potent as the so-called “Reagan Revolution”.

That moment has passed. Today, the political stage is not dominated by progressives or even tepid liberals, but by a motley, but dynamic group dubbed the “Tea-Party Movement”. While still a minority movement, its intense activism is amplified by the media, both the partisan right of Fox and talk radio as well as the “mainstream”. Today’s Father Coughlin’s – Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck – nursed the stirrings against Obama’s health care plan into a national campaign knitted together around hatred for Obama and anti-government grievances. It is worth noting that no similar media courtesy has been extended to any left or liberal formations by the more moderate media. Indeed, the “mainstream” has shown a curious fascination - a sensational fixation – that has helped to propel the Tea-Party movement forward.

Of course this movement did not spring from nothing. The elements have been there for years, if not decades. Arguably, this political formation was even larger and more influential during the years of extreme anti-Communism, the era associated with the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Again, rightwing extremism forced itself center stage behind the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in the sixties. And, of course, it returned with a vengeance with the election of Ronald Reagan.

In most cases it attached to the Republican Party for its political expression. In most cases, it found a happy home with Republican leaders who were able to marshal the movement’s energy and press some of its demands without surrendering any of the Party’s commitment to a corporate-coddling agenda.

That is not to say there were not times when the extreme-right could not be contained within the bounds of the two-party system. The Wallace-LeMay campaign of 1968 drew nearly 10 million votes (13.5% of voters) to a virulently racist, belligerently war-mongering program outside of both major parties. But generally, the extreme right sees the Republican Party as a natural haven. Likewise, Republican leaders find extreme-right ideology as a handy weapon or ready diversion against liberal-left ideas that might slow or stop the rapacity of capital. They have succeeded in wedding “free enterprise”, anti-regulation, anti-tax principles to the racist and nationalist intolerance and conservative values of the historical extreme-right. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bond cementing this wedding was anti-Communism.

Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer (LBO #125) takes a stab at describing the social composition of the Tea-baggers, the current crop of extreme-right foot soldiers: “Though no one has done the rigorous sociological work, they look to be a movement of middle managers, professionals, and retirees – the petite-bourgeoisie, to use the old language.” I think Henwood is substantially correct, though “petite-bourgeoisie” is both a broader and more precise category than he suggests while still eminently useful despite its age. Those who answer polls by identifying with the wealthy few because they mistakenly believe they are the rich or soon will be instantiate this class or, at least, this mentality. Further, I think this class has historically always provided the fertile ground for extreme-right views. The shrillness and threatened violence of the extreme-right’s actions are clearly rooted in fear and the threat to petit-bourgois illusions from the economic crisis.

Tea-baggers and Fascism

It is a facile and immediate response to label all extreme-right movements as “fascist”. The term has been wrenched from its precise meaning in a particular historic period applying to particular historic developments and particular social movements as to lose all meaningfulness. Its common use today is more as an expletive rather than a helpful explanatory term. Nonetheless, it is useful to locate extreme-right movements in relation to historical antecedents. Thus, we understand the Tea-Party movement better by uncovering its common features and differences with the fascist social movements of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

As Henwood points out, the Tea-Party movement is predominantly petit-bourgeois in social composition. It shares this feature with the earlier fascist movements which drew heavily from the upper-middle and middle strata. These strata – in pre-war Germany, but also Italy – feared the loss of a comfortable and formerly stable way of life. Then and now, that life-style was seriously threatened by an economic crisis. Assumptions about values and world-views were and are challenged by the crises.

For the most part, fascist movements were responsive to a left and working class movement growing in power and influence. While that is not true today, the Tea-baggers have constructed an imaginary left by drawing on Cold-War imagery and crudely pasting that imagery on a President perceived by them as alien. If indeed history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the Tea-bagger fears of the left are surely farcical – labeling policies aiding corporations and the wealthy as “socialist”.

Like their fascist predecessors, the Tea-Party groups operate somewhat independently of the established political parties. Previously, the extreme-right found a comfortable home inside the Republican Party. And to a great extent, the cynical, corrupted leaders of the Republican Party exercised a control, even manipulation, of the fundamentalist zealots, racists, libertarians, etc. that nested in that party. But the new movement challenges those reins on many counts, generating some consternation among Republican big-wigs.

Recently, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a trusted member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, chastised Sarah Palin in an op-ed piece (2-18-10) for Palin’s recent endorsement of Rand Paul – libertarian Ron Paul’s son. Paul, the younger, “holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left.” She notes that Paul, the elder, has “said repeatedly that the United States had given Osama bin Laden good cause to attack us…” In addition, Rand Paul “stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.” Rabinowitz is warning Palin, the Paul’s, and others in the Tea-Party movement that any deviation from the Republican pro-corporate, pro-imperialist agenda will not be tolerated. The defense procurement and supporting industries are among the most generous and loyal components of the Republican fund raising apparatus. Moreover, imperialist aggression is the policy that drives the growth of these industries.

Twelve days later, Gerald F. Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s influential Capital Journal columnist emphasized the dangers of a renegade Tea-Party movement with an article “Tea Party Holds Risks for GOP” (3-2-10). “In particular,” he writes, “Republicans’ courtship of the Tea Party movement threatens to pull the party away from its moorings on two crucial and emotional issues: the war on terror and immigration.” One can translate this to mean that Republicans are fearful that this movement will alienate its corporate sponsors in the defense industry and challenge Republican efforts to recruit voters from the ranks of Hispanics. Seib cites many examples of Tea-Party leaders opting for a libertarian slant on civil liberties over the repressive, police state Patriot Act – further signs of a distance from a corporate agenda. His closing comments reveal the danger perceived by the two-party system insiders: “The problem with those independent movements is that they are exactly that – independent.”

Some on the left confuse this independence with a spark of progressivism, taking attacks by Tea-baggers on the current health care reform initiative, the bailouts, and the stimulus package to be anti-corporate populism. In fact, they are rabidly and solely anti-government. The fact that there is virtually no popular understanding of the fusion of government and monopoly corporations in contemporary capitalism– state-monopoly capitalism – feeds this confusion. This same confusion creates a false and diversionary political divide between those who are pro- and anti-government. The truth is that government and big business are joined at the hip and any serious, progressive movement for change must tackle both.

A Conundrum

For those who cry wolf at the activities of every right wing movement on the political stage – easily recalling the rise of European fascism in the twentieth century – something resembling the real deal may now escape them. For generations, the extreme right has been nourished and groomed by the leaders of the Republican Party. Our current incarnation was courted by Ronald Reagan and his successors to serve as electoral troops for the Republican Party. In return, Republican leaders gave gestures and symbols to hold their attention while relentlessly pressing a corporate, wealth-coddling course. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was sacrificed from that course to hold the extreme-right in place. The raw meat of prayer, flag waving, charter schools, government funding for religious charitable work, anti-abortion posturing, gun rights, etc. cost the corporate world nothing, while cheaply satisfying right-wing zealotry.

Yet in the last few years –especially with the exposure of the callowness, cynicism, and corruption of the Bush administration – the movement has taken on a new life, fueled by Fox News, talk radio, unabashed racism, and economic uncertainty to make demands upon the Republican Party often out of step with the larger goals of the Party leaders, corporate board rooms, and our ruling class. The tail is beginning to wag the dog.

I believe this evolution of the organized extreme-right towards independent action accounts for the near unanimous Republican opposition to the TARP bailout – an event that found candidate Obama offering unconditional support for this blatant gift to the financial sector. Likewise, the Republicans fought hard against a stimulus package that Herbert Hoover could have endorsed in 1932. Republican intransigence towards the final Congressional health care proposal – a plan that had substantially won the support of the health care and pharmaceutical industry – counts as another example of the political weight of the extreme-right’s new found independence. In my view, it is this departure from the capitalist program that has Republican leaders – and mouthpieces like Rabinowitz and Seib – so frenzied over the Tea-bag movement. They – like their bourgeois antecedents in the nineteen thirties and forties – are trying to tame a tiger that has its own appetites.

Missing from this discussion are liberals, the left, and the Democratic Party. And therein lays the problem: they are missing. I begin with an account of the promise – both emotionally and objectively – of the election of 2008. If no other lesson can be drawn from the Tea-Party phenomenon, it is that an independent political movement, even a minority one, exercises inordinate influence upon the direction of US politics. As Seib points out so well in the above quote, independent movements pose serious problems to the corporate dominated two-party system, problems that bend the parties away from the trajectory preferred by the US ruling class. This is an old lesson – one that many of us drew from the mass upsurges of the thirties that shaped the programs of a cautious, relatively conservative President into the show pieces of the New Deal. The independent militancy of labor and the left prodded Roosevelt into becoming the icon of liberalism that he is today.

Many are wringing their hands and crying “betrayal”, blaming Obama for the failure to bring any significant change to the political landscape. This is silly. Anyone paying attention would recognize Obama as a mainstream corporate Democrat sensitive to the moment, but - left to his own devices - inclined to support the call of monopoly capital. I have written often of his career and the parallels with other Democrats who have been publicly ordained with messianic qualities. I have pointed to the strong corporate sponsorship – especially from finance capital – of his candidacy and warned of any easy dismissal of what that might mean. Those who fostered such illusions have only themselves to blame for the disappointment of the last fourteen months.

Facing an interim election in eight months, it is likely that little will be accomplished legislatively after the spring. Few politicians will want to take any risks and campaigning will begin in earnest. Still it will be a great opportunity to press an independent progressive agenda on vote-hungry, promise-happy politicos seeking support in November. It will be a chance to build a counter-force preparing for the legislative battles to come after the elections. Support for independent candidates – many Green Party candidates are projecting effective campaigns – will scare the pants off of complacent Democrats, much as the Tea-Party advocates frighten Republican leaders. There is much to do to put some spine into labor leadership and rekindle the anti-war movement. All of these steps will move us closer to creating a left-oriented third-party that can consistently influence our political course. Its time to lose the defensive posture of the last period and mount an offensive against those offering two flavors of the same poison. And we won’t have to explain the puzzling fact that the people are hungry for progressive change while the political winds are blowing rightward.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Ukraine: Five years after the “Orange Revolution”

Five years ago, my colleague, Louise Michel, and I posted several articles on MLToday divulging the intrigues behind the Ukraine Presidential elections. Michel placed the celebrated “Orange Revolution” in the context of the other orchestrated “color” revolutions organized and encouraged by NGO’s funded by EU governments and the US. Michel and I “sought to expose the enormous amount of money and resources flowing into these countries from such noble sounding institutions as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and many others”. “It was apparent to [me]” she wrote, “that these ‘popular risings’ were far from spontaneous, but rather highly manipulated, and compatible with US foreign policy objectives”. She recounted “AP reporter Matt Kelley's revelations about more than $65 millions worth of US influence peddling in the Ukraine…” Michel argued persuasively that the contested election and the subsequent new election were more properly viewed as a coup, rather than victory for democracy. She cited a New York Times writer, C.J. Chivers, who “exposes some of these machinations… [T]he Times article really chronicles how the Ukraine government's decision to halt the highly orchestrated, well funded opposition demonstration in Kiev were thwarted by the surreptitious, behind-the-scenes maneuvers of high ranking security and military officials within the government. They used their influence to undermine the government response.”

Michel’s careful scrutiny of the mainstream media dug up another suggestive revelation of the phoniness of the “democratic” revolution:

How deeply did this corruption and perfidy go? Very deeply, if a recent communication in the New York Review of Books (2/10/05) is to be believed. Peter Savodnik — identified as the political editor of The Hill newspaper in Washington, DC — writes to "share with your readers a story I've come across here in Washington that may be of interest."

And indeed it is.

"Last month", he goes on, "between the first and second rounds of voting in the Ukrainian presidential election, Lytvyn [the powerful speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and former chief of staff for Kuchma] made a brief, low profile trip to Washington, where he met with Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Senators Richard Lugar and John McCain, and Representative Henry Hyde…"

"In any event, the Americans apparently thought Lytvyn might be able to help Viktor Yushchenko win some key support in the Rada.... Interestingly, on December 1[2004], Lytvyn permitted the Rada to hold the no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Yanukovich's government [Yushchenko's opponent]; this proved to be a critical development that was soon followed by the Supreme Court's ruling that the runoff was invalid because of fraud."

Soon after the new President took office, the “democratic” victory had become a colossal farce. I wrote: “The showdown with Russia over establishing world market prices for natural gas was portrayed widely as a victory for the Western-friendly President Yushchenko. Apparently, the Ukrainian people disagree. Buoyed by poll figures leading up to the March parliamentary elections that show the formerly elected and then unelected Presidential candidate’s bloc leading over both of the "Orange" stars, the current parliament voted 250 to 50 to fire the Prime Minister and his cabinet.” The script written by Western powers was not setting well with the Ukrainian people.

And a year after an election result agreeable to Western imperialist powers, Yushchenko, chastened by confrontation with Russia over natural gas prices, proposed an approach embarrassing to his Western sponsors. I wrote:

Today’s news (January 14, 2006) brings the latest desperate move on the part of puppet-President Yushchenko: faced with the ominous threat to his power spawned by the natural gas fiasco, he now proposes nuclear power as an alternative to the countries dependency upon Russian natural gas. "We must change our ... policy on the use of uranium for peaceful purposes.... We must cooperate with international allies on a serious political and economic level, so that we can have a full cycle of processing and production of nuclear fuel ..." stated Yushchenko on national TV. Of course this is exactly the policy that has created hysterical Western threats to the DPRK (North Korea) and Iran. As Yushchenko spoke, Bush was declaring Iran a "grave threat" because it announced the resumption of its nuclear reactors and its own nuclear enrichment program.

The hypocrisy of allowing Ukraine to develop a nuclear program while threatening Korean and Iranian programs was apparent even to Western news services who noted: "Mr. Yushchenko’s call could put his Western allies in an awkward position as they seek to balance the desire to help Ukraine shed Russian influence with concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation and their campaign to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions" (cited on www.post-gazette.com/nationworld).

The hypocrisy is blatant on all sides. Imperialism intervened in Ukraine’s internal affairs, engineering a coup masking as a democratic revolution. And the designated “liberators” proved to be incompetent, corrupted, and unpopular.

Now, five years later, The Wall Street Journal makes a candid admission. In a front page feature, writer Richard Bourdeaux exclaims that “Rent-a-crowd entrepreneurs find people fast to cheer or jeer for $4 an hour.” This is the face of the new Ukrainian democracy. “’We’ll do business with any political party. Ideology doesn’t matter to us’ says the 21 year-old web design major at Kiev Polytechnic Institute. ‘It matters less to most students’, he adds grinning. ‘They have become tired of politicians. They will rally only for money.’”

As comrades at the City of Future paper (www.stbudg.ucoz.ru) in Kharkov point out, Simonenko, the candidate of the Communist Party of Ukraine received 22.4% of the presidential vote in 1999, but only 5% in 2010. With the privatization of the state sector, public ownership has been reduced to 12% of economic enterprises (the state sector accounted for 90% of enterprises in 1990) and the role and influence of money in determining outcomes, the corruption of political life, and the distortion of democracy has increased dramatically. Contrary to media mythology, the ascent of capitalism stifles democracy. Today in Ukraine, a candidate for president must post roughly US$300,000 to even run for office. Following the US model, candidates must gather signatures to achieve ballot status, regulations that effectively undermine minority party candidacies. The massive 2004 intervention in Ukrainian political life by Western imperialist powers has produced its intended result – not an infusion of democracy, but a decided shift to the right. Even much of the left has shifted rightward in a response the new rules of the political game. Rather than promoting democracy, foreign intervention – expressed through the “Orange revolution” – has shaped a sham, money-driven pseudo-democracy dominated by powerful elites.

Ironically, matters have come full circle. The once demonized Victor Yanukovych won election in 2010, defeating the former darlings of Western imperialism. Julia Tymoshenko – a caricature of vulgar nationalism and Sarah Palin-style populism – held out her concession, hoping for another Western-backed, manipulated challenge to the elections. This time it didn’t come.

As I promised four years ago, “[w]e continue to hold Ukraine under our Marxist microscope…” in order to expose the cynicism of Western “democrats” and the degradation of democracy by capitalism.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Class War: Where Things Stand

The singular contribution that Marxism offers to the theory of the working class movement is the idea of exploitation as well as a way to gauge its intensity. Prior to the pioneering efforts of Marx and Engels, those sympathetic to the miserable conditions of working people brought on by the rise of industrialization pointed to the grinding poverty and short, brutal lives of employees and urged reforms and relief. They failed to locate these conditions in the very logic of capitalism. They failed to find the source of these conditions in the relation between capital and wage-labor.

Marx and Engels brought the concept of exploitation to the fore as both a rich and robust moral concept and as an objective, measurable centerpiece of working class political economy. Exploitation, in its most intuitive and simplified sense, is the appropriation of the product of labor by those not engaged directly in producing those products. Stealing, of course, is a kind of appropriation as well, and a kindred notion to exploitation, but exploitation differs by existing in a socio-economic system that permits and even encourages its practice. A clear and transparent example of exploitation is the extraction of coal from a tract of land. The workers produce the end product, but the owner of the land, by virtue of the institution of private ownership, appropriates that product in its entirety, paying the workers the least amount adequate to coax them to take the risk and supply the effort. In such a pure example, it is apparent that the compensation of the workers is largely independent of their necessity and sole role in creating a useful product. It is equally clear that the owner may very well add no effort to the product’s creation though commanding its disposition – possessing the product – solely by virtue of a contingent social relationship: ownership of land. The amount paid to workers is determined independently of their role in production; the less the owner pays for the production of a given quantity of commodities, the greater the rate of exploitation.

The Mechanism Unveiled

While the complexities of a modern capitalist society tend to obscure the relations of exploitation, a deep capitalist crisis serves to expose these relations. With growth slumping, investment meager, and wages and benefits stagnant, the unquenchable thirst for profits requires an intensification of exploitation to restore the system’s health. If profit is the life blood of the capitalist organism, exploitation is its nutrient. We see the rising rate of exploitation in the current US economy with the dramatic growth of labor productivity. Beginning early in 2009, worker’s output per man hour accelerated dramatically, advancing by 5.1% in the fourth quarter over the previous year. Nearly all of this increase can be attributed to layoffs, resulting in fewer workers producing as much or more than in the prior year. The mass layoffs of the last two years retarded and reversed the declining productivity of 2008 and spurred an explosion of productivity growth in 2009.

The rate of exploitation, as expressed today in productivity growth, serves as the best indicators of the condition of the working class and its prospects. Increasing exploitation reflects capitalist aggression, the failings of the labor movement and the politicians it sponsors, and the unlikelihood that any great effort to improve employment is forthcoming. Political leaders and corporate managers are reluctant to deny the market economy the one lever that has successfully restored profitability and corporate health. A glance at the last recession earlier in the decade reveals the same pattern: economic decline followed by layoffs and a jump in labor productivity, restoring profitability. Commentators then wrote of the “jobless” recovery. Today we are experiencing the same process in a far deeper recession. As long as layoffs remain the mechanism for gains in productivity, profit restoration and corporate recovery, unemployment will remain high. Only a new level of labor militancy and anti-corporate fight back will install a recovery for the people ahead of a recovery for capitalism. The bankruptcy of shoring up capitalism to promote the people’s needs – the ideology of social democracy and labor-management cooperation - has been demonstrated over the last decade.

The Other Side of the Coin

Exploitation is equally intensified by paying less in wages and benefits for the same effort, a process made easier by labor capitulation and the fear of job loss. In late January, Ford announced that it will hire 1,200 union workers, many at “at significantly reduced wages” (The Wall Street Journal, 1-26-10). The 2007 contract with the UAW allows the Big Three domestic automakers “to fill jobs vacated by older workers who leave or retire with new hires earning a little more than $14 an hour, about half what veteran workers are paid. Newer workers also get reduced benefits”. The “second tier” workers will have a 401(k) retirement plan rather than a traditional pension. Bob King, the heir apparent to the UAW Presidency, confirmed that “[t]here will be new people hired at Ford.” Since the 2007 UAW contract gives existing workers priority, the hiring of new, entry-level employees is retarded by desperate workers laid off around the country, but willing to uproot and relocate where jobs are available. Nonetheless, industry experts expect the mass hiring of low wage workers to be a significant factor in employment by 2015.

The same depression of wages and benefits – an increase in exploitation – is ravaging the public sector. The Chicago Transit Authority secured concessions from the unions in 2007, but are back again with even greater demands upon the workers. The CTA threatens to layoff more than 1,000 workers unless deep cuts in wages and benefits are made. A transport workers’ concessionary proposal has been ignored by management. The Chicago Sun-Times (1-29-10) reports that Chicago Federation of Labor President, Dennis Gannon, has urged the transport unions to accept in whole the management proposal to “save 1,100 jobs…” Once again, the long standing philosophy of labor-management cooperation proves ineffective and thwarts the fight back to rally workers and the public to defend living wage jobs.

This failure to marshal a resolute and militant struggle against corporate aggression – a legacy of the destruction of labor’s left in the Cold War – is confirmed by the latest Labor Department figures. In the last twelve months, inflation adjusted wages and benefits in the private sector fell by 1.3%, the worst performance since the government began to record data in 1983. At the same time, US corporations succeeded in reducing 2009 health care cost increases to the second lowest yearly figure in the decade by cutting their contribution or shifting workers to less comprehensive health plans.

Can a capitalist economy recover without forcing the burden of recovery on the backs of working people? At a time when corporate profits are improving and management salaries are exceeding historic levels is it inevitable that workers must endure great sacrifices for the economy to bounce back?

Another Way

On January 18, 2010, The New York Times reported that the French government – led by the conservative President, Nicolas Sarkozy – demanded that the firm Renault “maintain employment at its French factories.” Meeting with the head of Renault, Carlos Ghost, Sarkozy extracted a commitment that “Renault is a French company, a socially responsible citizen, attached to its industrial and technological roots.” Of course the French car companies do not want to do this; they would prefer to shift production to low-wage countries and layoff French workers. Nor does Sarkozy, an avowed fan of the US neo-liberal, free market model, want to make these demands upon the industry. But all know that any retreat from guaranteed employment will bring French workers into the streets and into occupancy of the factories. They know that the public will rally around the French workers.

Renault, like Peugeot-Citroen, received government bailout money from the French people under the condition that they would maintain employment; “The companies pledged in return to protect French jobs.” The industry minister stressed that “The state will have its say. When a French car is destined to be sold in France, it should be made in France.” This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the US President, allegedly a progressive and friend of labor, whose policies dictated that US auto companies would close plants and layoff workers in exchange for bailout money. The difference, quite clearly, is the militancy and class consciousness of labor. French unions, unlike their US counterparts, have consistently and without relent, refused class collaboration.

Politicians, media pundits, industry experts, and the EU competition commissioner have cast dire predictions that supporting employment, wages, and salaries in France will result in a weak, uncompetitive economy. Ironically, France showed the best economic growth of all EU member states in the fourth quarter of 2009.

We Can Do Better

Weakened by years of close and servile collaboration with management, most US unions and the AFL-CIO hierarchy are in a difficult position. The atrophy of labor militancy has backed leadership into the corner of choosing concessions or job loss. Labor’s political “friends” have betrayed labor’s cause without retribution to the point that they no longer fear labor’s still significant strength. The only way out of this corner is mobilizing the membership, the unemployed, and its many allies in a determined campaign to stand up to the corporate offensive and expose the political charlatans who pose as friends. As always, this begins with bringing people to the streets.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Looking Back and Going Forward

One year ago, President Obama took office. His assumption of the highest executive office was met with relief by most (nearly 80% of citizens polled in October 2008 thought the country was heading in the wrong direction) and high expectations by many.

Quite naturally, those who opine on the big national media stage used the occasion of the anniversary to record an assessment of the first year. Judgment was heightened by the result of the special election for the Senate seat in Massachusetts of the deceased incumbent, Edward Kennedy, a result that, by all accounts, was an ominous and severe setback for the Democratic Party.

With equal vigor, the Democratic Party mainstream, uncomfortable with anything even vaguely threatening to corporate interests, points to a non-existent leftish tilt as responsible for their failings. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, ever anxious to speak for Party moderates, decried the Democrats “overreach” and failure to find consensus “with independents and moderates”. With all the seriousness that a scolding Democratic Leadership Council icon can muster, he warns of a “catastrophe of biblical proportions” unless Democrats mend their ways. Like so many of his Party colleagues, Bayh is more comfortable with sermons than realistic or effective policy proposals. He advocates a “positive populism” that will miraculously create jobs and prosperity while reducing government spending, a prescription akin to advocating diets for the starving. In his world this makes sense, only emphasizing the irony of his remark that “Washington is out of touch with mainstream America” as expressed to The Wall Street Journal (1-26-10)

But this seems to be the message that Obama and his team are hearing, given his emphasis on reducing the deficit. Not only will he freeze non-defense related federal spending, already eviscerated during the Bush years, but he will enact a stealth budget slashing strategy recently rejected by the Congress. A commission – to be established beyond the bounds of democratic engagement or transparency - would make wholesale recommendations for spending cuts and present them as a package to Congress to be voted up or down. With little debate and no possibility of amendment the package-strategy would provide cover for those politicians
facing potential outrage in their home states or districts. They will argue that they had no choice but to accept or reject the whole policy even with some unpopular aspects. There is no question that the ultimate target of this devious strategy is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We find here an example of the Obama pattern – now a finely honed tactic – of “faking left and going right”.

Despite Obama’s best rhetorical flourishes, there is absolutely to connection between deficit austerity and job creation. Every economist concedes this point. In fact, most would recognize an inverse relationship between reduced government spending and improved employment. Indeed, the great lesson of the last profound and persistent struggle against unemployment – The Great Depression – demonstrates the utter folly of a policy of deficit reduction in the face of mass job loss. Roosevelt’s drive for a balanced budget in 1937 sent the economy into a sharp descent while sharply reducing employment. It took a return to massive public employment to stabilize the US economy. That lesson is lost on an Administration dogmatically committed to private, market-based solutions.

Rather than listening to Evan Bayh, his corporate cronies, and the baying hounds of the know-nothing media, Obama and his team might consult with the people. He might begin with the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (1-20-10).

Around 57% of US citizens think the economy will stay the same or decline over the next 12 months. This is hardly an endorsement of the policies crafted by Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, and the rest of the Obama economics team. If Obama were listening to the people, they would be gone. Nonetheless, the DC political cabal is hanging tough with Bernanke and Geithner. Since June, 2009, the percentage of people confident in Administration economic goals and policies has steadily declined, settling at about 35% in January. This should come as no surprise given policy makers’ near total neglect of the 16 million under or unemployed in the US while urgently rendering life support to the unappreciative financial sector.

In October of 2008, before Obama’s inauguration, only a bit more than one in ten US citizens felt the country was going in the right direction, a reflection of the overwhelming disgust with the Bush era. Immediately after the inauguration, that number rose to over 40%, bolstered by the great hope and faith that so many had placed in Obama and the Democrats. In January, 2010, the number had dropped to the mid-thirties, reflecting growing disappointment with the Administration.

Contrary to the wide spread, media induced belief that the country is being overrun by wild-eyed, Obama haters, 72% of the poll respondents found Obama to be “likeable and easygoing”, 59% “inspirational and exciting”. This result demonstrates the vast exaggeration of the tea-bagger movement as representative of the attitude of most US citizens. It further suggests to what extent the corporate media was complicit in pumping up the phenomena. On the other hand, the poll does show a decided unhappiness with the direction Obama has taken: only 38% agree with position on issues and 40% believe he will achieve his goals. Less than a third believe he is “changing business as usual in Washington”.

Despite the symbolic impact of the election of the first African-American President, 78% of those polls believe that race relations in the US have stayed the same or gotten worse.

Lest it appear that disappointment with Obama translates into support for Republicans, one need only turn to US attitudes towards health care reform: 55% of respondents disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue, while 64% disapprove of the Republican approach! Clearly neither party offers the answers to health care that the people want. Of the options available – including the popular single-payer solution- both parties chose a course out-of-step with the people’s desires and, I might add, the people’s needs.

It should be even more obvious that both parties are trapped in a box dictated by corporate interests, a box that allows only limited policy options, failing both the test of popular desires and needs. Obama’s recent, extraordinary meeting with Republican bigwigs seems a calculated attempt to rally the other party to defend that box. When he stated: “I know many of you individually. And the irony, I think, of our political climate right now is that, compared to other countries, the differences between the two major parties on most issues is not as big as it's represented”, he spoke a truth that defined his own approach as well as the basis for the crisis in the two-party system. It is precisely this identity of outlook and interest that Obama persistently and enthusiastically pursues with his tiresome, ineffective, but dogged call for “bi-partisanship”.

It fails, and it will fail, because the Republican Party is under constant and unrelenting pressure from its right. The evangelicals, the anti-immigrant cabal, the anti-abortion crowd, the anti-gay fanatics, the racists, the war-mongering nationalists, and, yes, the tea-baggers are organized, vocal and independent of the Party leadership. They make nearly non-negotiable demands on the Republican Party. And the party complies.

This lesson has escaped liberals, progressives, and many on the left who consistently work and support Democratic candidates who neither share nor swear to a progressive agenda. Moreover, they refuse to call out politicians in the Democratic Party who stray from a progressive course out of some perverse sense of loyalty or twisted appeal to unity. In my view, this is unprincipled and opportunistic. But even if some see this as too harsh of a judgment, surely this past year demonstrates that complacent trust is ineffective. The dynamic of Obama’s first year shows that one cannot simply work for the election of a “better” candidate and put aside the critical activism that can shape that candidates political course. We would do well to study the strategic approach of the demonic right. We’d do even better putting our energies into building a left-of-center third party.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

How Not to Create Jobs

The Associated Press reports that after studying in detail over $21 billion in stimulus projects designated for road and bridge construction in the Administration’s first stimulus program, they found no discernible change in local employment associated with the completion of these projects. One of the five economists who reviewed their work stated: “There seems to me to be very little evidence that it’s making a difference.” Another economist commented: “In terms of creating jobs, it doesn’t seem like it’s created very many. It may well be employing lots of people, but those two things are different.” (Spending Fails to Stimulate Jobs, Matt Puzzo and Brett J. Blackledge, 2-12-10)

How can the widely lauded construction stimulus fail to improve the unemployment picture?

The answer lies in a gross misunderstanding of the New Deal employment programs and a slavish, dogmatic reliance upon the private sector.

I wrote - regarding the Obama stimulus program – in February of 2009:

Roosevelt sought job growth by directly employing the unemployed in Federal works projects. Obama, however, has pledged that 90% of his job-creating investments will be done though private firms. This raises many issues that Stanley Aronowitz perceptively explores in an article entitled "Facing the Economic Crisis" (Socialist Project, 12-26-08). He raises questions of wage rates, unionization, a living wage, and the technical composition of various kinds of projects. But most importantly, he notes that private sector job creation engages profits which siphon off the maximum impact of government expenditures; all things being equal, more jobs can be created from a given amount of dollars without awarding profits to a private firm. Aronowitz speculates that 30% gross profit would be a common return for a private firm given a government project. In fact, it is customary in bids for municipal and state government contracts for the private firm to offer estimates calculated at three times the cost of the hourly rate for the employees engaged in the project. Thus, for every three dollars of government stimulus, one dollar of hourly wages would be passed on for job creation. In any case, the Obama strategy would sharply reduce the impact of Federal expenditures designated for reducing unemployment, in sharp relief with the New Deal counterpart programs. Clearly, the economic advisors associated with Obama cannot escape their private sector fixation. (Looking Forward, MLToday, http://mltoday.com/en/looking-forward-542-2.html)

Both the Aronowitz insight and my observation point to the folly of creating jobs through private sector, contractor-based programs, the approach to which Obama and his advisors swore allegiance. Now, a year later, that folly has been demonstrated. Scorning the New Deal approach and wedded to dogmatic, conventional thinking, $21 billion has been wasted - dare I say, misappropriated – against the professed goal of job creation. The folly goes deep. The notion that contractors would pass on an opportunity to use existing employees to secure super-profits on government contracts, the notion that they would, out of some new-found support for the common good, hire additional workers and forgo profits, should be ridiculous even to the neo-liberal brain trust assembled by Obama.

Despite these findings, the Obama economic team has proposed and the House has approved an additional stimulus of $28 billion for another round of road construction targeted at reducing construction unemployment. White House economic advisor, Jared Bernstein blithely asserted: “When you invest in this kind of infrastructure, you’re creating good jobs for people who need them.”

It is becoming more and more apparent that permanent unemployment is a structural component of contemporary monopoly capitalism. Even with the absorption of millions of potentially productive employees by the criminal justice system (the world’s highest incarceration rate) and the military-industrial system (permanent and expanding wars and military spending), state-monopoly capital has no use for millions of workers. More to the point, capital has every interest in maintaining a “reserve army of the unemployed”, as classical Marxism maintained. Desperate workers, desperate for a job, will work for less, pressuring the wage rates and benefits of those currently employed. As most commentators have conceded, the last recession produced a jobless recovery and this far deeper downturn has shown no signs of restoring jobs once any real or fantasy recovery comes. The last decade is the first in US history – including the decade of the Great Depression – to show negative job growth.

Because of the decades of privatization, contracting out, outsourcing, and public subsidization, the notion that more public funding will stimulate private job generation is as foolish as the notion that pouring public funds into the financial sector will restore sanity to banking practices. The same economic thinking that produced the crisis will not be undone by feeding the beasts that it produced.

The first order of business should be to send Geithner, Summers, Rubin, and the rest of the economic whiz kids packing. Their dogmatic, narrow, corporate-friendly thinking has only worsened the crisis while wasting resources and betraying the public.

In addition, a robust, well funded public works program is urgently needed: publicly funded, publicly run, with public employment, and with the public as the beneficiary. With the money spent and proposed, a million workers could easily be employed at decent wages and with benefits in repairing homes and neighborhoods, cleaning, inspecting, and beautifying communities, and developing and expanding public spaces. In short, the unemployed could be put to work in an updated version of the New Deal programs. As in the New Deal, the direct payment of wages to these public employees would expand consumption and fuel further economic activity while giving the re-employed a sense of worth and accomplishment.

This approach to job creation is not only the best route, but – in light of the failure of private sector stimulus – the only route to generating employment.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Abusing Human Rights

The doctrine of human rights, as we know it - an invention of the era of liberation from feudal tyrannies - reached its apogee with the adoption of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948, a declaration that expanded the classical notion of individual, personal, and formal rights to include a measure of social and economic rights. The debates over this declaration, occurring with the onset of the Cold War and largely obscured by the sharp ideological divisions of the time, highlighted the limitations of existing rights doctrines in addressing the socio-economic concerns that emerged with the maturation of capitalism. For most of the world’s people, the individual rights spawned by liberation from absolute, tyrannical rule were fine, but irrelevant to the conditions of desperate poverty, homelessness, insecurity, and social neglect spawned by an exploitive capitalist system and its destructive wars. For most of the world’s people, social and collective rights were at least as important as individual rights. For most of the world’s people, rights to the material means of survival, security, and welfare were at least as important as rights to act without restraint.

As the UN changed its political complexion over the next several decades, new covenants were added to address many of these concerns, though they were largely ignored or dismissed in Western Europe and the US. Instead, western intellectual circles shamefully clung to the classical doctrines of rights, serving, knowingly or naively, to justify these solid pillars of bourgeois rule at the expense of a more generous, robust, and relevant notion of human rights. Early in the Cold War, the celebrated essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin was established as canonical, dismissing any claims to rights-status for “liberties from…(want, exploitation, domination, etc)” as opposed to “liberties to…(travel freely, speak openly, own property, etc.). In point of fact, all of the classical rights were birthed by “liberties from…” - liberation from religious, traditional, or autocratic intolerance or domination. This artificial distinction was elevated to an unsustainable legitimization of what came to be called “positive rights” at the expense of the demonized “negative rights” associated with collective, social and economic rights.

Like sheep, the Western academic community dutifully fell in line with Berlin’s shallow special pleading for classic bourgeois rights. To this day, there is no mainstream liberal philosophical critique of Berlin’s dogma. Despite the exposure of the incestuous relationship of the CIA with Berlin and many of his colleagues by Frances Stoner Saunders (The Cultural Cold War), the Berlin essay remains a standard entry in political philosophy textbooks.

As the years past, the Berlin dogma became rooted deeply and popularly in the West. Once again, the classical doctrine was enlisted in the Cold War. Human Rights organizations sprung up, capturing the activism of young people and occupying center stage in the ideological battle with the socialist countries. The familiar criticism was that these organizations only aimed their guns at Cold War foes; the US and European branches seldom if ever found human rights violations in the homeland. But deeper than this criticism was the transparent identification of human rights with only the classical bourgeois rights. I could miss a few instances, but I know of no Western human rights organization that ever seriously took up the cause of the collective right to a job, equal pay, favorable conditions of employment, trade union rights (Article 23); rest and leisure (Article 24); or an adequate standard of living (Article 25), all fundamentally collective, social, and economical rights. In truth, Western human rights groups have shown no interest in the minimal social and economic rights guaranteed by the UN Declaration.

In our time, the stripped down human rights agenda – shorn of collective, social and economic rights – remains a centerpiece of ideological struggle, serving as the first line of attack against those countries deemed hostile to EU and US foreign policy objectives. Again and again, matters of human rights in this most narrow sense are offered to justify interventions (the former Yugoslavia), invasions (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan), interference (Ukraine, Belarus, Lebanon), coups (Venezuela) and a half a century of cold war (Cuba). This is not to diminish the hard-won rights of the US’s and Europe’s revolutionary heritage – they are surely in need of vigorous defense from corporate aggression and abuse as well as domestic political erosion – but to oppose their opportunistic harnessing to the goals of our own ruling elite.

Human rights – understood as those rights enshrined by Western human rights groups, NGO’s and Western liberalism - are bourgeois rights in two senses: firstly, they are the product of historically distant revolutionary movements that liberated the bourgeoisie principally, but other classes as well, from the tyranny and caprice of political and religious lords; and secondly, they are of most use and relevance to those whose socio-economic status makes collective, social, and economic rights of little need or importance. In this regard, they are class-based rights. A successful lawyer may be prepared to fight to the death for his right to travel freely, yet have given no thought to the right to participate in a trade union. Similarly, a landlord sees the right to property as sacrosanct while failing to recognize any tenant right to a safe sanctuary.

One could write a book about human rights hypocrisy. For example, the US offered itself as a paragon of human rights – an example to the world – while maintaining racial segregation well past the mid-century mark of the twentieth century. The 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and their Families is violated daily if not hourly by every country in the EU and the US, yet human rights groups are strangely quiet on this issue. Nor do human rights organizations or NGOs hold the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in any special regard. The declaration opens with the statement: “The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights”. Surely the examples of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan violate this right. There is no exemption for cynical crusaders for human rights any more than there was one for the “civilizing” mission of the British Empire.

The same declaration affirms that “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”. Presumably that right would exclude the intervention of foreign funded media and NGOs, as well as covert operations, interventions like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Marti, the Soros Foundation, the Republican and Democratic Institutes, AID, and the CIA. Yet again, the human rights organizations show no interest in this right.

One might conclude that it is no exaggeration to say that human rights have become a matter of political convenience.

Jeremy Bentham famously called rights “nonsense on stilts”. This harsh conclusion misses the point that they are human inventions and accordingly are what we make of them. Marx, commenting on the rights celebrated in his time, wrote “none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man … an individual withdrawn behind his private interests and whims and separated from the community”. Efforts to rescue human rights from this narrow vision are not welcomed by those bent on preserving privilege, power and exploitation.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Looking Back at the 2008 Election

Two days after the 2008 Presidential election, I posted the following article with my thoughts on the meaning of the Obama victory. A friend – a sharp and critical observer of the political scene – suggested I take another look at the article to see how it stood up. I won’t posture false modesty, but I think it stands up well. I honestly believe it reflects a concrete, sober, and historical-materialist assessment of the last election that foretold many of the events that came to pass, warned of the wide-eyed euphoria of much of the left, and emphasized to the point of tedium my often repeated conviction that we need to build an independent movement challenging and pressuring the existing political institutions. To this, I credit the tool of Marxist-Leninist analysis.

I would genuinely welcome any comments or criticisms.

I have highlighted some of what I believe to be the most important points.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

The Presidential Election: A victory for the People?

The 2008 US Presidential election is behind us. A fair estimation of the results might be as follows: A clear, significant statement of the US electorate; a hollow, likely disappointing result for the people. After the euphoria of the Obama victory, it is vital that we separate these two assessments and avoid the cynicism of leftist isolationism and the self-deception of hopeful idealism. What the voters wanted was unquestionably significant change. What they were promised was change. Whether change will come from the Obama administration is - at best - questionable.

The Meaning of the Vote

The vote was most importantly a repudiation of racism and the Bush administration. White voters in working class areas cast aside crude racist appeals, put aside the three-headed Trojan horse of abortion, gays, and guns, and voted economic self-interest. They knew that McCain would do nothing for them and they wanted to believe that Obama would. A kind of reverse Bradley effect - unnoticed by the media - was operating. Many were afraid to openly support an African-American, but were comfortable doing so in the privacy of the voting booth, canceling out any lost votes from the opposite tendency. Thus, the polls proved to be an accurate, if not underestimated, gauge of the election results.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. The level of overt racism - the open, vulgar racism fostered by talk radio, shock jocks, internet slime - should diminish with the expression that most citizens are comfortable with an African-American President. Of course it won't disappear.

Also, the vote opens the door to a more unified working class. Make no mistake about it, union leaders who were lukewarm, often absent fighters for equality were forced by the circumstances of the campaign to take strong, out-front statements against racism. This is a good thing, and, though their efforts were sometimes clumsy, commendable.

Of course much work lies ahead in the struggle against racism; voting for Obama is not a free pass for racial insensitivity.

The three strongest constituencies for Obama (giving Obama the largest portion of their group vote) were African-Americans, Latinos, and union labor. African-Americans understandable took pride in the candidacy of Obama with predictable results. Latinos voters represented 8% of the total vote, siding decidedly for Obama. Both the growth of their total vote and their stronger support for this Democratic candidate mark a greater importance in electoral politics and a powerful progressive tendency. These results were duplicated in Florida, where the intimidating gusano influence continues to wane.

The election confirms the demographic expansion of the minority population and their increasing importance for anti-monopoly political organizing. The shift in the Latino vote makes the excuse for appeasing the anti-Communist Cubans in foreign policy even more lame.

The union labor vote - which overlaps substantially with the minority vote - was strong for Obama: 67% supported him, according to the AFL-CIO. Most importantly, the union electoral drive proved effective in blunting and overcoming racism and the always present distractions of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. Like the Prohibition issue in the election leading to the New Deal victories, these issues are used to deflect attention from more fundamental issues. The union electoral effort shows the potential for influencing policy well beyond the electoral arena and much more frequently than the electoral cycles. Labor activism is an untapped source, lacking only ideological clarity and militant leadership - a task for the left in the coming period.

The Catholic vote went for Obama despite the efforts of many right-wing bishops to swing the vote towards anti-abortion candidates. Protestant Obama fared better than Catholic Kerry in 2004 - another measure of self-interest trumping self-identity.

In general, the vote results show an electorate ripe for new policies, new answers and moving in a clear progressive direction. The trends exposed by the Pew Research Center's two decade long polling study ("Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes") towards social democratic policies and away from insularity and obscurantism is born out by the 2008 election.

The Meaning of the Obama Victory

There is a glaring contradiction between the wants and needs of the people of the US and the issues debated and embraced by the Presidential candidates - it is as if they existed in two different worlds. The institutionalization of the two-party system both allows and insures this fact. It is no criticism of Obama or his hope-filled partisans of change who worked with such great enthusiasm to point this out. But, by the same token, it is delusional to forecast a progressive turn in the Obama administration from this great effort. If Nader, if Cynthia McKinney, if even Bob Barr were allowed to debate the candidates before a television audience, there might well have been progressive issues on the legislative table. If... if... if... But the institutionalized two-party system does not allow for such opportunities. And it will continue to block any move leftward without a dramatic mass movement forcing it.

The political influence of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council surrounds Obama with the appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as chief-of-staff only underlining this reality. With Emmanuel as the gate keeper, the notion that progressives at least have access to the White House is even more remote. Despite the fact that the DLC is completely out of touch with the needs of the majority of the citizenry, they exercise inordinate influence within the Democratic Party. It must be remembered that they have a strong base in the South as well as the suburban bed-room communities in the North. These suburban communities proved to be the power base for sweeping away the progressive platform of the Democratic Party after the 1976 election victory.

Again, in 2008, suburban voters left the Republicans and sided with the Democrats. Despite their fickle loyalty to the Democratic Party (they respond mainly to the Party's social liberalism agenda of gun control, abortion rights, gay marriage, and other personal freedom-based issues), they are the main justification for the constant urging by the Party's pundits to tack towards the center and center-right). Their "activism" is what the Democratic Party best understands - money and power. And they stand as rivals for policy influence with African-Americans, Latinos, and labor.

On the economic front, Obama's advisors are hardly inspiring; indeed, they are a bit scary - Paul Volker, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin. Austin Goolsbee, Jason Furman, Timothy Geithner, and Warren Buffet have all the wrong corporate and academic credentials. None have stepped too far from the warm, comforting waters of neo-liberal orthodoxy. And in a world of real oppositional politics all would have been ferreted out for previous personal or policy sins. For the hope-crazed progressives, there should be some puzzlement at the absence of Krugmans, Stiglitzs, and Reichs from this group (actually Reich is part of the transition team - a rose among so many thorns).

At this early date, the names floated for key cabinet positions are largely political retreads of previous administrations and old legislative warhorses. Very few wear any progressive medals for deviation from the center, center-right agenda.

Regrettably, the electoral victory was no victory at all for the left. That is just to say that the Obama victory brought no assured policy reward for left support. At best, the Obama administration would be more accommodating to, less intransigent against any advances forced upon it by mass action. That is something, but hardly a justification for most of the left's unconditional support of the Obama campaign. The occupation in Iraq is no closer to conclusion; universal single-payer health care is no closer to being achieved; there is no plan to end the Afghan war; the Cuban embargo remains policy; Palestinians remain political untouchables; and so on and so on... And every indication is that the Obama administration will continue down the path of advancing imperial interests and privileging corporate America.

Looming over this election is the global economic catastrophe - a giant gorilla towering over all other issues. Many see a repeat of the Great Depression - a sense not completely farfetched. And many hopefully see Obama as the new Roosevelt launching a new New Deal - a sense built upon the sand of "Yes we can". In truth, Roosevelt was not the great savior of capitalism or the people, a myth that lingers in liberal theology. But the facts give no portent that Obama is Roosevelt, either. It's time for the left to put aside the comforting illusions and rebuild an independent, oppositional front that is not dependent upon the good will of the corrupted Democratic Party. We desperately need that left to forge a true people-saving agenda from the destructive gorilla.

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com