NOTE: This text was mostly written prior
to September 2001. The events of September 11th, and the response to
them by the American state, completely changed the reality of what this text
had concerned itself with. In fact, the events that unfolded after September
2001 thoroughly hastened many of the tendencies analyzed in this text, and,
indeed, went far beyond them. The text remains unfinished, and from my present
perspective, it will remain so indefinitely. In any case, though, I thought
some people might still benefit from reading it. My apologies for not being
able to complete it. --WSX
Mainstream
politics (in reputedly liberal democratic states) is changing significantly.
Within the realm of parliaments, legislatures, and congresses, there is
increasingly no principled political opposition or dissent. All actors, all
parties, are increasingly "on board" the neo-liberal, pro-free
markets (privatized and de-regulated) bandwagon. Their fundamental doctrine:
the free market will solve all social problems. The increasingly concentrated
mass media are fully complicit in this process. The ordinary "citizen" is thus led to
believe that Politics, in the sense of principled--some would say
"ideological"--opposition between different parties representing
different social groupings or classes, has ceased to exist; that is, that we
have reached the END of political history. Neo-liberal, democratic capitalism has
permanently triumphed, end of story--or so they would like us to believe.
But not everyone seems to have accepted, or resigned themselves, to this sorry state of affairs. Principled political opposition to the dominant, neo-liberal paradigm still exists. However, it has been forced out of the legislatures and the mass media, and into the streets and the "new media", primarily the internet. In a sense, it been forced to go "underground", as the dominant forces within the state and the media have attempted to de-legitimize it, and thereby lead to its "withering away" into permanent obsolescence. As the vast majority of "citizens" are dependent on the mass media for their understanding of what is happening in the world, they will gradually forget about, and give up on, any kind of principled dissent to the dominant perspective. Or so those behind this shift are pinning their hopes.
It
sounds like a conspiracy, but when you are talking about a whole class--the
ruling capitalist class--trying to eliminate any trace of public opposition to
its class interests and agenda, you are no longer speaking about a few old men
working out a conspiracy to further their own narrow private interests and
power, but rather a whole social class attempting to permanently squash all public
expression of opposing political perspectives. THIS IS THE CLASS WAR, and the
capitalist class is acting as if we are now engaged in the final, decisive
battle, the battle for permanent, total ideological control. If this battle is
won, even if, let's say, the working class refuses en masse to accept
what capital deems it necessary to impose upon them, their
"opposition" and resistance will remain within certain strictly
circumscribed limits, limits which are carefully determined to preserve the
existing order and its status quo as much as is possible. Is such
"permanent" domination really possible though, or is the ruling class
just dreaming here?
The
aim is to get everyone to voluntarily accept that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE
(TINA) to the existing order, and thus everyone acts accordingly, strictly
adhering to the impositions and concessions the system demands of them. If workers accept that capital
calls all the shots, that they can only peacefully express their interests and
hope they are listened to, that they must resign themselves to accepting
whatever capital provides them with, then the class war will finally be won,
and social peace will be assured for eternity. Such are the pious hopes of the
bourgeoisie today.
Which
sort of "opposition" was it that has been pushed to the sidelines of
the political arena? Essentially, it was Social Democracy and Stalinism, which
between them I consider to cover all the varieties of “Labour”,
"Socialist" and "Communist" parliamentary parties, as well
as "leftist liberalism" in the USA. These left-wing political
ideologies are distinguished by the fact that they claim to represent the
interests of the working class, the poor, and the rest of the
"disadvantaged" in society. (It should be noted that these interests
are clearly distinct class interests from those of the ruling capitalist
class, regardless of whether or not those political factions were in fact ever
genuine defenders of them.) Without a doubt, these political ideologies and
practices have failed on their own, they have clearly shown their own
bankruptcy both as defenders of the interests referred to, and as competent
managers and directors of the "ship of state" on the rough seas of
worsening global economic crisis, not to mention the imperialist (or “international”)
arena. And so the mass media have not had a difficult time convincing most
"citizens" that these parties and their ideologies are historically
bankrupt. But by discarding them in the manner as has been done, we
"citizens" are left with the impression that there is no longer any
political expression of popular interests separate from those of unfettered
capital. Thus, before ruling class ideological hegemony has been fully
cemented, we are finding growing popular resistance to the increasing lack of
“legitimate” political expressions and options.
This
popular resistance has manifested itself in the last couple of years, atleast
within the richest countries of the “West” and the “North”, represented by the
G7 (and the OECD), in the form of the "Anti-Globalization Movement".
In fact, it is impossible to understand what has been happening in the
"political arena", and in social reality more generally, over the
last few years, and why it has been occurring as it has, unless one
takes account of both the role of the new technology and the trend to
neo-liberal globalization in the context of, and more importantly, as responses
to, the worsening global economic crisis of capital.
Originally,
in the 1980s, neo-liberalism was merely a policy option defended by a new
political faction of the ruling class, the so-called “New Right”. It was a
policy in the sense that it was an alternative to the then prevailing social
democratic (“mixed economy”) consensus, a consensus that spanned the spectrum
from left to right. Over the past twenty years, as the global crisis of capital
has deepened, neo-liberalism has become “The Only Alternative” for the ruling
class. They—including the various leftist factions—simply haven’t been able to come up with any viable
alternative that has a hope in hell of staving off slump, as well as inflation,
without burying the economy in a mountain of debt. It was that critical
reality, first felt in the early ‘80s, which prompted the rise of
neo-liberalism in the first place. All factions to the left of the “New Right”
have had 20 years to come up with an alternative to neo-liberalism. At this
late date in the evolution of the crisis, it is fair to conclude that no other
paradigms are forthcoming to save global capitalism from collapse. Thus,
neo-liberalism has become, especially over the past five to seven years, i.e.,
since the formation of the WTO, the New Orthodoxy. All factions, especially
social democratic formations, that have failed to adopt the new orthodoxy have
more or less collapsed as viable political alternatives, since no one can take
them seriously any longer on economic issues as potential governmental teams.
Some—leftists—may
argue that this wholesale shift to the “New Right” is simply a result of a
“con” pulled off by the (obviously) right-wing corporate media, in order to
gain even more power and wealth, at the expense of the rest of us. Supposedly,
according to this view, all of the politicians on the neo-liberal bandwagon
have simply been “bought off” by the corporate lobby. But such a conspiracy theory doesn’t stand up to the light of
day. For one thing, it completely ignores the reality of the economic crisis.
These leftists see nothing but “greed” behind the trend to neo-liberalism.
Since they don’t understand the necessity for capital to grow or else collapse,
they see no compelling need to adopt the neo-liberal strategy for preventing
that collapse. (Maybe they actually are anti-capitalists, as many of
them claim to be, whose aim is to run the economy into the ground, thereby
accelerating the demise of the system! But seriously … for most of them,
“anti-capitalism” consists in opposing corporate power by championing state
power, as a state controlled economy is, in their view, a “socialist”, or
atleast a “non-capitalist”, one.) But they can’t explain why the state owned
media has also adopted the neo-liberal consensus, as well as many leftist (or
atleast formerly leftist) intellectuals, not to mention a number of social
democratic parties themselves (such as the British Labour Party and the German
SPD and Greens). Such a conspiracy theory just doesn’t hold up, just as their
denial of the reality and the gravity of the economic crisis, and their
inability to come up with a way of dealing with it, make them simply irrelevant
to the vast majority of those citizens who choose to vote for their governors.
The new technology is significant to what has been happening on the globalization front because it has greatly facilitated its rapid development. There is little doubt that the (personal) computer and its related technologies have completed transformed the global marketplace, both in terms of the mode of exchange and circulation, especially so in the financial markets, and also simply as commodities themselves carving out new massive markets for their producers, over the past ten years or so. The ease with which global communications have permitted a global financial and economic network to develop, and the lagging behind of the state in attempting to keep up with these developments, let alone to effectively regulate (and potentially tax) them, has led in an astonishingly short period of time to the globalization juggernaut we face today.
But does that mean that the states of the various nations involved in the globalization phenomenon can, eventually, catch up with it, regulate and tax it, and thusly harness it in order to “serve the public interest”? (Such would presumably be the aim of many social democratic and neo-stalinist opponents of globalization.) Or is it that all of the politicians today have been “bought off” by the corporations, as many anti-“corporate globalization” activists would have it? In fact, it’s neither of these alternatives. The fact of the matter is that globalization, as we have witnessed it over the past decade or so, has created some much needed breathing space for global capital to accumulate profit, that is, to expand, which is exactly what it was critically facing a shortage of for a number of years up until that time. And the most successful governments and political parties have been those which have supported “free trade” and other neo-liberal “policies” because those “policies” have been seen—via the media’s lens, of course—by the voting public as the reason for the (relatively) robust growth most “developed” countries experienced throughout the ‘90s.
Although most of the world’s states aim to regulate globalization through the WTO, they aim no less to foster it, rather than strangle it with excessive regulations and taxes. Such a course of action is the new consensus for preventing the world economy from sinking into stagnation, which is a mortal danger for global capital. Even though many of these political factions defended in the past the welfare state, and would still do so today if they thought it was affordable, they have come to accept the consensus that the global economic crisis necessitates the reduction of corporate (and other) tax rates to such an extent that the tax base required for a welfare state is no longer attainable.(1)
Thus, at least up until the recent descent into global recession, the neo-liberal consensus has been accepted by all of the more successful political factions, and so also by most of the voting public. And those parliamentary factions which have not bent to the neo-liberal agenda have been abandoned to the point of near marginalization. The result of this appears to many as a creeping totaliarianism, some seeing even a neo-“fascist” state around the corner.
This creeping totalitarianism, however, merely reflects the lack of options facing the ruling class as it tries to find its way out of the crisis of its economic system. As the reality increasingly hits home for them that the crisis just won’t go away, fewer and fewer strategies for coping with the crisis maintain any credibility. The result is the abandonment of past failed strategies and their ideologies and political support. Increasingly the capitalist class tends towards a unification behind one central politico-economic strategy; atleast as long as that strategy is widely agreed upon as the most effective at dealing with the crisis. And as long as the crisis deepens without respite, and as long as more past strategies continue to fail, this tendency towards politico-ideological unification and centralization of the capitalist class intensifies itself. It mirrors the tendency towards monopoly and global integration of capital units, as marxist revolutionary theory enunciates.
Corresponding to this movement towards unification of the ruling class and totalitarianization of the state/capital complex is the decreasing middle ground for reasonable, coherent debate between the two extremes of pure (market-centered) pro-capitalist ideology and (more or less) pure (pro-revolutionary) anti-capitalism. The emerging, developing reality of the crisis, and the capitalist class’ efforts to manage it, determine this situation, in which previously obscured relationships and factors are laid bare. In particular, the viewpoint of critical defense of, or “loyal opposition” to, the system is becoming increasingly untenable. Such a viewpoint characterizes what used to be of the “liberal” left in the U.S. and the social democratic and Stalinist left in most other countries. Increasingly, as G.W. Bush has recently put it, in another context, “You’re either with us or you’re against us”. You either clearly defend the system, and refrain from raising your voice in opposition or protest, or else you do so raise your voice, and so openly announce yourself as an enemy of the whole system. Not that we’re there yet, but the tendency clearly in that direction is rapidly unveiling itself.
Common sense would ask: how can you have a political system that is both democratic and totalitarian? The dominant bourgeois democratic ideology is so hegemonic that merely the idea of a political system that is both democratic and totalitarian is inconceivable. It is, supposedly, a contradiction in terms, an “oxymoron”, as popular parlance would have it. That’s because Democracy is supposed to signify pluralism, political diversity and full freedom of political expression and association. Whereas Totalitarianism is supposed to signify the absence of all of these, in the face of an all-controlling, omnipotent state apparatus.
Such a conception of Totalitarianism, based on previous cases in history, especially those that arose in Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s, is completely inadequate in the face of today’s reality. What is really increasingly dominant and most coercive to most ordinary people in today’s world is primarily the capitalist MARKET, the confluence of exchange between commodities and money that is necessary for their subsistence (and that of their children), and those massive capitals that dominate world markets. But today’s market, the sphere of circulation of commodities, and the transnational capitals that dominate global markets are not in any way opposed to, or separate from, the state, as neo-liberal ideology would have us believe. While the state has modified its role in the functioning of the economy, and while the market – really, the law of value – has reasserted its primacy as the ultimate regulator of economic activity, the state and the market, including all its dominant ‘players’, are thoroughly intertwined. This much should be obvious to everyone who follows the mainstream news media, especially the American news. And even more so during a time of war. How do you separate the US state and its military apparatus from CNN and Conoco, for example? Or Enron? It’s really all one interconnected whole, comprising corporate managers, public bureaucrats, accountants, politicians, lawyers, judges, and cops, union leaders, religious leaders, tycoons, journalists and intellectuals. Every organization which wields any degree of power in this society is implicated in this network, this complex – what I have in previous texts referred to as the State/Capital Complex. This is the ruling class of today’s capitalist order, not the bourgeoisie of Marx’s time, or the Comissars and Party leaders of Stalinist Russia.
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(1) Let’s try to
explain it simply as possible. The Welfare State has been gradually dismantled
over the past twenty or so years in almost every country where it previously
existed, as a result of governments’ fiscal inability to fund such state. But
why did governments ‘suddenly’ (15 or so years ago) become unable to fund the
Welfare State? Because they have had to drastically scale back their
expenditures, and they have had to do that for two different reasons. Firstly,
the crushing weight of public debt and the interest payments required to
finance it, as a result of previous years of governments’ deficit spending, and
secondly, the pressing need to significantly lower corporate and (upper
bracket) personal income tax rates in order to retain sufficient capital
investment, and the highest valued skilled workers, needed to provide a basic
level of economic growth in order to stave off recession and possible collapse.
The accumulation of enormous levels of public debt was the result of earlier attempts by governments, acting under the precepts of the then hegemonic Keynesian ideology, to stimulate economic growth, that is, to prevent the economy from falling into a serious depression. And the reduction in the level of taxes was the result of the same underlying cause, namely, the inability of the economy to grow at an acceptable rate; in other words, the decline in the average rate of profit, as a result of an overall level of effective demand insufficient to meet to overall supply. Over-supply and over-productive-capacity relative to effective (productive) demand causes capital to devalorize, which means the average rate of profit declines (potentially) to the point at which productive investment becomes unattractive, and consequently is shunned in favour of speculative (i.e., non-productive) investment. The result is massive layoffs of productive workers, which leads to a significant decline of productive demand, and thus further economic decline.
When this
happens—in the accumulation cycle of developed capital—the state comes to the
rescue of the economic system by doing what it can, what it must, to stimulate
growth, that is, to create the conditions in which capital investment in
increased production and new productive means and capacity becomes attractive
enough to initiate such investment, such capital spending, resulting in a
“recovery” of adequate rates of expansion. In the era when Keynesianism
predominated, the state tried to stimulate the level of consumers’ spending,
thereby attempting to raise the level of demand to meet that of supply. But
such artificial stimulation does not increase productive demand. So
demand does indeed increase, but at the cost of either (or both) increased
inflation and increased levels of public debt or increased taxes, which eat up
profits. The ultimate problem with Keynesianism, however, is that it does
nothing--outside of the conditions of open warfare-- to stimulate capital
spending and investment, resulting only in prolonged stagnation.
In the era of Neo-Liberalism, the state rather attempts to create the conditions for higher rates of growth and profit by reducing its own burden on those rates, by lowering its expenditures, which thereby permits it to lower taxes for capital investment, as well as reducing state regulation of such investment and eliminating barriers to “free” trade, making it easier for capitals to produce more profits This strategy is the now preferred one for staving off economic decline and (potential) collapse. This results in the elimination of the Welfare State and the reduction of the working class’ “social wage”. Such, in rough outline, is the state of the economic crisis of capital today.
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To be continued
……….
Wage Slave X
2001