Some very clear and simple facts about the class war waged by corporate and wealthy elites:
U.S President Obama's amazing speech on the 2012 budget (April 13, 2011). Let us demand that he backs up this rhetoric with action:
13.5.11
Wealth, Taxes and The Elite Agenda
U.S President Obama's amazing speech on the 2012 budget (April 13, 2011). Let us demand that he backs up this rhetoric with action:
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Hi Archive fire. I am curious: do you think Obama means what he says regarding opposing tax cuts for the wealthy? I recall that in December of 2010 he said he'd relent, then made a progressive-sounding speech in April of 2011.
To me this seems like a strategy designed towards achieving an endgame where he 'reluctantly' gives in to the GOP in the end-- much as went back and forth on the public option in 2009, to make it seem that he was, in the end, 'reluctantly' capitulating to the Blue dog dems, which he wanted to all along.
I can almost assure you that Obama will not back up his rhetoric with action. He gives very grandiose speeches, but he rarely accomplishes anything. I honestly think he has no vision.
And even if the Democrats did have a vision, and were not completely opportunistic, what would it be? Some sort of Rooseveltian new "New Deal"? Bigger government social programs and an expanded bureaucracy? None of this amounts to anything than weak European social-democracy. It doesn't even approach the level of Bernsteinian revisionism, which was at least coherent even if it was opportunistic.
The class struggle cannot be resolved within the context of our present system of government.
@Jonathan,
First off, thanks for visiting and commenting.
As for Obama, I have strong doubts that he can do anything other than tow the elitist line. With the 'Citizens United vs FEC' supreme court decision eliminating the last vestiges of democratic possibilities, Obama has NO CHOICE other than to prioritize corporate "needs" and demands.
And should he have the courage to defy his wealthy masters AFTER he (perhaps) moves into a second term i would be quite amazed. He understands quite well what happens to people who upset the plans of the elite.
I wouldn't be able to speculate on his deepest motivations and intentions, because, as I indicate above, he has little room to maneuver if he wants to be granted a second term, or if he wants to keep his life and his family safe.
John Kennedy tried to be a real president and was killed, Robert Kennedy tried to fight for the underprivileged and he was killed. Since the height of the cold war and the final ascendency of the military-industrial complex few real leaders are allowed to take office who aren't beholden to the interests of the multi-millionaires and billionaires.
The game is rigged and, like Obama, we're mere pawns.
@Ross
"he rarely accomplishes anything"
I'm not sure about that. I think he has been quite active, at least from the reports I have seen which indicate he has implemented more policy changes than any US president in history.
The issue, i think, is if these "reforms" are effective or affecting any real change at all.
So you are right if you consider actual change as accomplishing something. He certainly has not accomplished real positive change.
"Some sort of Rooseveltian new "New Deal"?"
I actually think that some sort of "new deal" (of the radical sort) is the only way we are going to make it through the next 50 years. Without some sort of coordinated collectivist effort we won't be able to engage our most serious planetary problems at the levels required.
"The class struggle cannot be resolved within the context of our present system of government."
I completely agree with you here. We are way past the point (as indicated in my response to Jonathan above) the point of democratic reform. The whole shit-house has to come down and be rebuild regionally based on a resource-oriented economy. Ideology (even post-marxist) must be tempered by a deep and affecting concern for "real" needs, and the forms of life which must be fashioned that will afford us the capacity to actually address them in a humane and sustainable way.
And, i suggest, we might think about redefining "class" along more complex lines to include the inflections of gender, ethnicity, species and more...
Michael,
It comes back to the old problem within Marxist discourse of "reform vs. revolution," a dilemma discussed at length by Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, amongst others. And the decision in this must always be as they concluded, contra Bernstein, that reform without a prior revolution can only be cosmetic, palliative, and provisional. True reform is possible only when the fundamental basis of society has been transformed through revolution.
I actually don't doubt capitalism's ability to get out of the current ecological/economical situation while still remaining capitalism; to date it's by far the most flexible social formation to have walked the earth. It can not only tolerate but flourish under supposedly "progressive" reforms, large government oversight and regulation of business, social programs, more "inclusive" social and multicultural acceptance (racial, gender, sexual orientation).
I emphatically agree with you, however, that not all issues can be reduced to class. Class conflict is real and in fact inevitable under the capitalist mode of production, but it is not the essence of capitalism. Capitalism is not defined by the "free market" or by private property, either. It's based on the hegemony of commodity production, and the relations it entails.
The demands of other oppressed groups under capitalism (racial, gender, homosexual, etc.) are quite justified, but are not necessarily radical. All they are asking for is equal treatment under the political system of liberal democracy, which should guarantee at least their formal, legal equality. But insofar as they do not call for the overthrow and supersession of liberal democracy, and its replacement by a new, postcapitalist social configuration, they are not yet radical.
Also, in my opinion, though regional restructuring will be important, the kind of transformation required has to be global. Nothing less than worldwide revolution, or at least revolution beginning in the most advanced capitalist countries, is sufficient. Otherwise, in isolation, attempts to overcome the world system of capitalism are doomed to be Paris 1871 all over again.
Please excuse the overlong and anachronistic Leninesque rant, haha.
"...reform without a prior revolution can only be cosmetic, palliative, and provisional. True reform is possible only when the fundamental basis of society has been transformed through revolution."
Agreed. Without a total readjustment of power regimes and subsequent restructuring of social life along resource-based needs the current hierarchies will only adapt and shift.
…It's based on the hegemony of commodity production, and the relations it entails.
Yes, I agree. I think the modes, means and forces of production (production in general) are crucial to the forms (relations) of life we project. Such a perspective drives my keen interest in the notion of “infrastructure” as a concept that encompasses both the base/superstructure dynamic and the nature/culture pseudo-binary, at the same time as injecting ecological and technoscientific considerations of the way we exist and cope in the world. The “mode of production” thus being a core characteristic of human infrastructures/assemblages.
And ‘infrastructure’ - in terms of access, equity, efficacy, feasibility, sustainability - is exactly what needs to be radicalized, even before our particular sub-niche differences or concerns.
But insofar as they do not call for the overthrow and supersession of liberal democracy, and its replacement by a new, postcapitalist social configuration, they are not yet radical.
Yeah, capitalist realism at its finest. Most politicized groups are focused on “rights” and playing the identity politics game, instead of looking at the root problem of living in dominating life-conditions. If we change the infrastructure we change the “regimes of attraction” (to borrow a term from Levi Bryant) and thus the very character of individual and social life.
“Also, in my opinion, though regional restructuring will be important, the kind of transformation required has to be global.”
Here, I think, we differ. Anything “global” is bound to be based on hierarchical control-bound operations, which would be anathema to building a peer-to-peer, cooperative society. Regional-participatory engagement requires attention to place, rootedness, security and bioregional capacity.
To be sure, I support “worldwide revolution” but from the bottom-up. Failing to attend to the local pressures, cultures and dynamics would be a failure to provide a healthy foundation from which to grow wider assemblages and collectivities. And I reject the idea that regional focus means isolation. I think we can grow revolutionary movements locally at the same time as carefully linking them across regions and situations. We must cultivate re-evolutionary forms of life that are deeply embedded as well as widely connected. Deep and wide.
And, honestly, I disagree with Marxists who think that revolution will come from the epicenters of capitalism. Advanced capitalism has been too flexible and far too effective at penetrating all aspects of human life. We “post-moderns” live under conditions permeated root and branch by consumerism and commodity production. Our massive technocorporate infrastructures have become much too extensive to be resisted in any normal sense. Instead, I think the only true revolutionary modes will have to be developed at the margins of The Great Machine – places like Africa and South America in particular, and among indigenous populations yet to be fully assimilated.
PS- Rant on my new friend, rant on...
Yes, I know that the orthodox Marxist position of demanding revolution in the heart of capitalism, in the most advanced capitalist countries, has become unpopular. I blame this largely on the ideology of the 1960s-1970s New Left and the 1980s-1990s "post-political" Left. During this time, much leftism fell prey to what is often termed Third Worldism, a developmentalist fetishization of the "periphery" of capitalism (if I may invoke Wallerstein). They valorize the downtrodden, oppressed, and impoverished masses of these countries, which are often largely agrarian and technologically backwards. So what sadly results is usually guerilla-style agrarian-populist revolutions peppered with pseudo-Marxist rhetoric. These typically result in backwater authoritarian regimes, when successful (like Cuba, or more frighteningly, Cambodia). When they fail, they usually turn into protracted civil wars, with the leftist groups degenerating into narcotics trading and kidnapping (think FARC). Ugh.
I also am reluctant to place my faith in "indigenous" populations. Such peoples are typically romanticized by leftish Westerners as "pure," untouched and hence uncorrupted by the soulless reality of capitalism. They believe them to possess some sort of native wisdom that can be deployed as "resistance" to the capitalist onslaught. I personally don't even believe in "indigenous" peoples; practically everyone everywhere is the descendent of people who historically displaced other populations.
Also, regarding the exaltation of the primitive, I recommend Marx's early writings on India:
These small stereotype forms of social organism [in India] have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
The only sad part is that vestiges of the wretched caste system have still survived down to the present day.
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