Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Occupy Wall Street and the US working class posted by Richard Seymour

"The movement is still very young, and it’s very hard to gauge support for it. But one labor official shares with me a very interesting data point: Working America, the affiliate of the AFL-CIO that organizes workers from non-union workplaces, has signed up approximately 25,000 new recruits in the last week alone, thanks largely to the high visibility of the protests.
"Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America, tells me that this actually dwarfs their most successful recruiting during the Wisconsin protests. “In so many ways, Wisconsin was a preview of what we’re now seeing,” Nussbaum says. “We thought it was big when we got 20,000 members in a month during the Wisconsin protests. This shows how much bigger this is.”"

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Sunday, October 02, 2011

First we take Manhattan posted by Richard Seymour

Wall Street's famously chaste, humble bearing may not be the secret of its charm.  When you ask what is, you begin to realise what the Right has accomplished.  It has plausibly retailed something as banal as markets, and all the variations and derivatives thereof, as a libidinised field of popular (competitive) participation, the final source of all wealth/value (stock markets delivering oodles of the stuff like ducks farting out golden eggs), and, if this isn't a tautology, a genre of erotica.  The insurance company as an aphrodisiac.  Yet it had to occur to someone to give Goldman Sachs and allies something to worry about, a something from which they have thus far been protected.  Under the Obama administration, which treats the quack orthodoxies of investment bankers as technocratic panaceas, the politically dominant fraction within the US ruling class has rarely seemed more powerful and at ease.  In their home city, the banks and traders have colonised the political system to the extent that one of their own sons, Michael Bloomberg, can take office and actually run the city as a favour to them.  (Bloomberg declines remuneration for his services.)  This is 21st Century philanthropy.

On that very subject, it must be a felicitous coincidence that JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6m to the New York Police Department on the same day that the same department engaged in a mass arrest of hundreds of #OccupyWallStreet activists marooned on the Brooklyn Bridge.



"The whole world is watching," the protesters chant. No doubt. The question is whether any of those watching will take this as a cue to join the occupation in solidarity.  Admittedly it is already an over-worked reference, but there are compelling, if distant, echoes of Tahrir Square in New York (and now, I understand, financial districts in Boston, Miami, Detroit, San Francisco, etc.), in the sense of a nascent attempt to find a new model commune.  What the occupiers seek to create is both a rallying point for oppositional forces, and a model of participatory democracy that, if replicated, would give popular constituencies the ability and authority to solve their problems.  We'll come back to the model of self-government being debated in Zuccotti Park, but as far as rallying opposition forces and pricking the mediasphere goes, the occupation has been having some success. The critical moment has been the participation of the organised labour movement, with the direct involvement of transport and steel workers, and the solidarity of Tahrir Square protesters.  (A mass strike by transport workers in Egypt has just won a major victory, gaining a 200% pay rise, just months after the army outlawed strikes).  The context of which it partakes is a germinal revival of class struggle in the United States.  Doug Henwood, who initially expressed reservations about the (lack of) politics of the initiative, describes the situation as "inspiring".  This is why the initiative has been greeted with the predictable sequence of tactful silence from officials, followed by open hostility, police brutality, threatening murmurs from Bloomberg and, finally, last night's mass arrest - which I would imagine follows orders from the mayor's office. Bloomberg, you'll be relieved to know, is not exercised on behalf of multi-billionaires like himself, but those Wall Street traders on a measly $40-50k, inconvenienced by anticapitalist wildlife. 

As far I can tell, the occupation began with a deliberate strategy of having minimal concrete politics and no demands.  The idea was that the politics and tactics of the occupation would be agreed in the context of a participatory, open-ended symposium.  No doubt some of this is mired in what I would consider a destructive and caricatured anti-Leninism, but I can imagine it comes from real experiences and expresses legitimate desires.  Some participants reportedly argued that what was important was the process, not a set of demands.  The process itself, the decentralised, participatory system, should be the main 'demand' in this perspective.  "Join us," would be the slogan.  I can't imagine this approach being effective.  There was an early fear that this could mean that right-wing elements would easily take over the movement and distort its agenda, and indeed some of the Tea Party websites have been vocal in their support for the occupation.  Yet they aren't setting the agenda in New York.  The political messages vary from the extremely abstract ("Care 4 Your Country") to the bluntly specific ("End Corporate Personhood"); from the maximalist ("Smash capitalism, liberate the planet") to the broadly populist ("I am the 99%").  The best slogan I've seen is, "How do we end the deficit?  End the war, Tax the rich."  This has the virtue of being a popular demand, a concise point, and right on the money.

On the issue of populism, I see that Doug Henwood has reported some misplaced sympathy for small businesses among some of the occupiers.  Perhaps this would be a fitting moment to revive the old Stalinist/Eurocommunist idea of the "anti-monopoly alliance".  I'm not being completely sarcastic.  While the petty bourgeoisie is largely a bedrock of reaction, it can have its radical moments, especially when capitalism is wrecking the lives of small traders, shopkeepers, homeowners - as we've recently seen in Greece, where the lower middle class is overwhelmingly on the side of the working class and the left in this fight.  I'm just saying that while one wants ultimately to win people to consistently anticapitalist politics, a sort of leftist, Naderite populism opposing the 99% to the 1% (the people against the ruling class in other words) is not a terrible place to start.  The main thing is what the most organised and militant sections of the working class do - if they throw their weight behind the movement, they will probably lead politically.

But what I find most interesting is not the immediate politics, the tactics and the process - which I think tends to become an obsession - but what these say about the strategic orientations of the occupiers.  In the broad outline, there have been two major strategies for those challenging capitalism.  The reformist strategy has been the dominant one, and immense human capital and potential has been sunk into its promise.  It posits society as, above all, a body of intelligent, rational citizens who can judge capitalism as wanting by reference to standards that transcend the system itself - ethical precepts that are universal, rational and humanistic.  The influence of Kant on such thinking is well-known.  The goal is therefore firstly to mobilise people behind a community interest favouring the gradual supercession of capitalism.  This allows for a certain elitism, since it requires the dominance of those deemed most articulate, rational and intelligent in their advocacy of socialist values, as well as those most equipped to handle office.  Secondly, those people are to put their trust in parliamentary means, using the power of the executive to impose abridgments of capitalist relations.  Those advocating this strategy have differed immensely on the degree to which such an approach needs to be supplemented by industrial militancy and mass pressure.  But it is ultimately the parliament which asserts the community's interests versus capitalist interests.

The revolutionary strategy rests on a different analysis.  It judges capitalism by standards immanent to it, and raises socialism not as an abstract, supra-historical project, but as one situated within a specific historical moment - a technologically advanced, complex socialism has become possible because capitalism has created the material preconditions for it.  Its universalism is not abstract, but class-anchored; rather than the sane, adult citizenry being the repository of universal values, it is the working class that is the 'universal' class, since it has a direct interest in the abolition of capitalism and an historically produced capacity to bring it about.  Finally, it sees parliament not as an ideal democratic space in which socialist values can be elaborated and implemented with the authority of the executive at its back, but as a component of the capitalist state that is hostile to socialism.  It follows that the aim is to create alternative, working class centres of sovereignty capable of implementing democratic decisions made at the level of the rank and file.  Whether such a counter-power was to call itself a soviet, a commune or a Committee of Public Safety (as envisioned in News from Nowhere), its purpose would be to work as a rising alternative form of legitimate authority that would eventually be in a position to challenge the capitalist state.  Through a period of dual power, the working class would learn to govern itself, acquiring the skills and self-confidence it would need, resisting attempts by the state to suppress it, until it was in a position to win a majority for taking power.  This counter-power would logically centre on the process of production, but extend well beyond the workplace.  It would have its own media, its own budget, its own leisure, and its own pedagogy.  It would be the material infrastructure of the socialist order it sought to create.  This doesn't preclude parliamentary strategies, as a means of helping legitimise and even attempting to legalise extra-parliamentary power.

Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this?  It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy - it is neither, in fact.  To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else.  There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties 'New Left', but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective.  It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future.  At a certain point, the severity of the state's response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership.  Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression.  This was the year in which the term "police riot" was invented to describe Chicago cops' response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted "The whole world is watching".  This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders.  It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking - though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their 'community organising' schtick into the Democratic fold.  So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.

The very attempt to mimic Tahrir Square implies a goal of creating an oppositional, popular sovereignty - a goal also hinted at in the rhetoric about "being the change you want to see in the world".  It implies an aspiration, at this stage no more, to take and keep control of public spaces, conveniences, workplaces, government buildings, etc.  This is a good, radical development.  For the moment, it would be an improvement if they could march on a public highway without being arrested for it, and that is why it is so important that the movement spreads and enlarges.  To that end, the evidence of class-anchored analysis and tactics by the occupiers is hopeful. For example, Pham Binh reports that Occupy Wall Street won the support of the Transit Workers' Union after engaging in a solidarity actions with workers at Sothebys and the post office.  In this respect, the movement is already light years ahead of some of the early New Left trends, while the union movement is politically in a much better place than it was in, say, 1965.  As in Wisconsin, the fate of this movement will partially depend on how much it defers to the Democratic leadership.  I see no evidence of Obamamania or any other form of Democratic filiation among these occupiers.  Indeed, the movement arrives just as Obama's support is crumbling among all sectors of his base (despite the efforts of apologists such as Melissa Harris-Perry to reduce this to the carping of white liberals), and could work as an alternative pole for its scattered elements, much as the left and various fragments of Clinton's disaffected base were fused together into a movement in Seattle in 1999.  The achilles heels of the movement will inevitably be any tendency to exaggerate the suspicion toward centralism, which would tend to leave it vulnerable to repression, and also any tendency to over-state novelty as a virtue in contrast with the ideologies of the 'old left', which would leave it ideologically disarmed - as if any movement can do without the condensed learning and experiences of past generations facing similar problems.

At any rate, there is much to be said for the idea of an American Spring.  And beginning the arduous process of experimenting in self-government is not a bad way to herald its advent.

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Sunday, July 17, 2011

Obama's deficit wars posted by Richard Seymour

I have been trying to decipher the ongoing wars over the 'deficit ceiling' in the US.  Essentially, as you may have read, the Republicans in Congress are raising the prospect of forcing a default by refusing to raise the 'deficit ceiling', which would allow the US to borrow sufficient money to pay its bills.  They insist that they will only support an increase if the administration assents to a plan to repay the deficit with 100% spending cuts and no increase in tax revenues. 

There is precedent for this sort of conduct.  The creation of fiscal crises in order to force a transformation of class relations (as mediated through the public sector) is a mainstay of neoliberal ruling classes since, perhaps, the New York City fiscal crisis.  It's certainly how the Republicans have attempted to force through such changes in Wisconsin.  Even so, playing chicken with the government's ability to pay its bills might strike you as insanely counter-productive even from the perspective of the US ruling class.  A default would be deeply damaging to US capitalism.  And certainly, Wall Street is not happy with the Republicans' conduct, despite the latter's claim that they are merely deferring to the mighty bond markets.  It's important to appreciate just how far Obama has gone to meet the Republicans' demands.  He is quite insistent that trillions of dollars of 'savings' (cuts) need to be found over the next decade, and recently offered the GOP a $4000bn 'grand bargain', comprising deep cuts to social security and medicare - which has further alienated his base and shocked some on the left of the Democratic Party.  All the Democrats want is the ability to raise some of the money from tax revenues, and for a little bit of that to come from the richer tax payers.  As Shawn Whitney points out, there doesn't appear to be a difference of principle between Obama and his Republican opponents, merely one of degree. In fact, the strident articulation of neoliberal orthodoxy by the administration is one of the reasons why centre-left economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich keep bashing their heads against their keyboards.

There is a rumour, being encouraged by the administration, that by supporting cuts Obama is cannily positioning himself as a 'moderate' to win over frightened independent voters.  This seems superficially plausible, and feeds into the narrative, disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, that Obama is trying to steer a sensible course between right and left whose silly ideological squabbles risks destroying the economy.  Yet governments always claim a pseudo-democratic mandate for policies they intend to pursue anyway by claiming that they're beholden to the voters.  The same governments, you tend to find, are quite happy to force through unpopular policies, while claiming that the issue is too important to treat as a political football (meaning it's too important for democracy). 

Obama will probably have no difficulty being re-elected, not because he has delivered for his voters, but because he has delivered for capitalism.  Yes, capitalism is now operating at a much lower growth rate, with a larger reserve army of labour.  But profitability has made a recovery, and some of the worst has been avoided, even if this does mean that there is a glut of unproductive capital that hasn't been destroyed.  (The Hayekians in the Republican Party are particularly exercised by this).  Jared Bernstein, a former Google exec who has moved through the revolving doors connecting silicon capitalism to the White House (I am assured I'm wrong about this, see comment thread), points out that the distributive trends under Obama's watch have been as terrible for wages as they have been a boon for profits, and provides this graph:

 

Note what's happened here.  Financialization has tended to mean not the dominance of financial corporations over industry, but rather the emergence of industrial and service firms as autonomous financial actors.  They tend to fund their investments from their own retained profits rather than from bank lending, and those profits have been increasingly augmented by financial holdings.  A classic example was GM making 40% of its profits from financial investments.  So, though industry is still sluggish, productive investment is low, and unemployment is settling at a higher new plateau (notably, the Obama administration accepts that this reflects a 'natural' or 'structural' rate of unemployment), the revival of Wall Street has boosted profitability.  

The result is that the US capitalist class is rallying behind Obama's re-election campaign.  His 2012 campaign manager has recently announced that Obama raised "$86 million for the first quarter - shattering previous fundraising records by incumbents, dwarfing the totals of the GOP field, and besting the campaign's own $80 million target".  The Republicans, as far as I'm concerned, are taking a dive this time.  The candidates they are fielding are heavily weighted toward the lunatic right, and the grandees don't appear to be disciplining the reactionaries ahead of the election.  As a consequence, no matter how much Obama disappoints his own base, his well-financed campaign, unchallenged in the Democratic Party, combined with revulsion over the Bachmanns, Santorums, Gingriches and Pawlentys, will probably ensure victory.  So, I'm saying that the dance-off between Obama and the Republicans is not mainly about the election.

What's really happening is that Obama is using the Republican right as a weapon against his own base to deliver policies that his class allies favour.  Yet he has no intention of allowing the GOP to force a default, and seems to be intent on avoiding a completely cuts-based approach to the deficit.  And he has the class power of Wall Street backing him up.  Apart from anything else, there's the strange relationship with Chinese capitalism to think about.  The US hasn't completely gone down the route of austerity in the way that EU ruling classes have, in part I think because the US-PRC axis which has basically driven global growth depends on America borrowing to buy Chinese products, while China ensures a profitable investment climate for overseas capital.  Defaulting, undertaking excessive or premature 'fiscal consolidation', or hitting consumer spending too hard, would presumably put that dynamic in some danger.  In other words, I think what's happening here is a relatively sophisticated and partially choreographed example of class praxis, with the political conditions being created for the rolling out of an austerity project with a degree of flexibility and pragmatism built in.  The deficit wars, from the White House's perspective, seem to be largely about putting manners on the Republican far right while using them to neutralise popular opposition to the coming capitalist offensive.

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

The class struggle in America posted by Richard Seymour

The key class battle in the United States today is in Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker is a Tea Party reptile. He's used his position to launch an attack on local union rights. The public sector unions are being treated as pampered spoilsports, refusing to make 'sacrifices' that others Americans have to make. The capitalist media rarely forgets to shove that theme down the US gullett. And it often seems difficult for unions, who represent a small minority of workers, to fight back. Especially given the model of business unionism that has dominated in the US labour movement for generations. But when Walker cited a budget deficit to justify severe public sector cuts, he threw in an attack on union bargaining rights on a whole series of fronts, including on pensions and benefits. (Details here). As it happens, there isn't even a budget crisis. The whole thing has been contrived, it seems, at least according to data from the state fiscal office, which expects to end the year with a surplus. Nonetheless, there are real crises breaking out across a number of US states, where vital infrastructure is being sold off or left to rot. Budget cuts are being rolled out across the country, driven by Obama with only marginal resistance from Democrats. The Republicans are pushing for more. GOP House leader John Boehner, asked about the inevitable job losses that would result from the attacks, said: "If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We're broke."

But the unions in Madison, Wisconsin were not buying it, and when it became clear that unions might strike over these measures, Scott Walker threatened to bring in the National Guard. And then? "I am fully prepared for whatever may happen." The protests against Walker's plans have been tremendous. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets. Teachers and students have walked out of school to join the protests. Protesters referenced Tahrir Square. If Egypt can have democracy, some said, why can't we? So they forced their way into the Capitol building and embarked on an amazing occupation:



Now, one doesn't make comparisons thoughtlessly. It would seem hubristic to reference the revolutionary struggles in the Middle East in connection with this. Those struggles, continuing in Egypt and Tunisia, emerging nascently in Saudi Arabia, and manifest in Bahrain, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran too, are taking place in very different circumstances. But the global crisis that links them is raising the same questions everywhere. It's turning what was a chronic dilapidation and slide in popular living standards into an acute, unbearable crisis for millions. The Right's response to this is to try to rebuild their hegemony by racialising the question - it's all the immigrants and uppity black people and Muslims trying to take over. The litany goes that immigrants take American jobs, black Americans make endless claims on the Treasury and borrow irresponsibly, while Muslims threaten America's core values. And if enough people believe it, they can be incorporated into a neo-nativist, anti-socialist, counter-subversive bloc. That's what the Glenn Becks of this world are for. But sometimes it doesn't work. The attack on Christians in Egypt, countered by immediate Muslim solidarity, didn't stop the revolution. Racism and sectarianism doesn't always work. And sometimes a local struggle resonates far beyond it's immediate boundaries and becomes the stimulus for a wave of wider revolts, especially when it taps into something that is popularly perceived as intolerable and for which the ruling class is held responsible. And given what's happening in US states, I'd suggest keeping an eye on Wisconsin, because this could be the trigger for something beautiful.

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Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The class basis of US elections posted by Richard Seymour

The Democrats have lost the House of Representatives but kept the Senate by a slim margin. The Tea Party 'movement' will be credited for giving the Republicans this energy in the polls, but in fact there will be little evidence when the dust settles that anything particularly remarkable happened here. A few whack jobs got elected, quite a few didn't, turnout was probably around 40% (which will be hailed as a record high if true), and capitalism remains firmly in control of the political process. The dominant faction of the 'political class' will still comprise rich corporate lawyers, the majority of senators will still be millionaires, and Wall Street will still control the Treasury.

The Republican sweep, announcing a "seismic shift", will be every bit as flimsy as the 'revolution' of 1994. This was when Gingrich's hard right rump took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fifty years. They added 54 seats to their total in the House of Representatives (2010 equivalent: 36, with 14 undecided), while adding 8 senate seats to their total to gain the upper house (2010 equivalent, 5, with 3 undecided - and no prospect of gaining control of the upper house). But the 'Republican revolution' took place with the support of less than 20% of eligible voters, with a turnout of less than 40%. Many of the same personnel who drove that 'revolution', and drafted the 'Contract with America' that few read or understood, are now 'activists' in the Tea Party movement. The FT calls Dick Armey an 'activist', for christ's sake.

This change in the political composition of the elected chambers as a result of the 2010 mid-terms will be even less significant than the 1994 congressional elections. The GOP's 'surge' will be predicated on, again, just about a fifth of eligible voters. Bear in mind that voter eligibility is, thanks to a racist criminal justice system and voting laws that deprive convicted felons of the right to vote, biased against poor and black voters anyway. But it will be depicted as a populist upsurge against what is perceived to be a tax-and-spend administration with socialist, Muslim, Kenyan anti-colonialist roots. In fact, the Tea Party 'movement' will probably not have had the effect that the commentariat is looking for. It is the result not of 'grassroots' right-wing anger, but of class-conscious business intervention in the political process - particularly by the billionaire Koch brothers. The 'grassroots' that are mobilised tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and they are heavily dependent on the media to talk up their activities.

In reality, just as in Massachusetts in January, millions of Democratic voters will not have turned out. Obama and his supporters have relied on a strategy of condescendingly lecturing the base, telling them off for expecting too much, which is grotesque and pathetic. (He saved capitalism, you fools!) His staff, as well, have been known to insult the base, especially progressives, as idiots and morons for being furious over the healthcare sell-out. So, why would grassroots Dems mobilise for an elitist pro-Wall Street clique that treats them like dirt and tells them they should be grateful? More on this in a bit. The point is that voters, just like the Tea Party 'movement', and just like the Republican base, will be heavily skewed toward the whiter and the wealthier, and the majority of the working class will have been effectively squeezed out of the electoral system.

***

If we understand electoral politics as a particular expression of the class struggle in the US, the bizarre trends noted above can be comprehended better. First of all, the obvious. Unlike in much of the world, the United States does not have a party of labour, that is a party created by and rooted in the organised working class. The electoral system is entirely dominated by two pro-business parties. The Democrats have, since the 'New Deal', tended to gain from whatever votes are cast by the working class, and have ruthlessly and jealously guarded that advantage against all potential 'third party' rivals. But the correlation between class voting and Democratic voting declined in the post-war era. This has usually been measured by the gap between the number of 'working class' and 'middle class' voters supporting the Democrats in any given election. You subtract the percentage of the 'middle class' vote that backs the Democrats from the percentage of the 'working class' vote that backs the Democrats and you have a class voting index - the Alford Index. This is not particularly sophisticated, and tends to rely on simplistic, occupational grading models of class. But the results of applying it do disclose a trend, which is worth noting.

One study, which focused on white voters (because African Americans were for much of the relevant period prevented from voting in much of the country), noted that the gap in 1948 was 44%. In 1952 it was 20%. In 1960 it was 12%. In 1964 it was 19%. In 1968, it was 8%. And in 1972, it was 2%. This form of 'class voting' benefiting the Democrats is subject to considerable variation depending on the context. I suspect that it would have been relatively high in 2008 and relatively low in 2004, for example. But the secular trend is one of decline. And the declining relevance of this particular index of class to determining voter behaviour has been interpreted by the usual dirt - sorry, by some academics - as a decline in class voting as such. It's been tied into a broader claim about the demise of class as an important factor in American life, most notably by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset. This is just the American version of 'electoral dealignment' theory, which became popular among psephologists in the UK in the 1980s, and it maintains that as class loses its social significance, voters become more like consumers, choosing electoral brands based on the values they associate with that brand.

More plausibly, it has been claimed that since the Goldwater campaign in 1964, the Republicans learned how to use 'culture wars' effectively to win over a sector of racist white wokers. This is arguably the very effect that Republicans were unable to produce in 2008. Thus, the 'southern strategy' using a fusion of racial and religious politics, helped depress the overall levels of class voting. But it's important not to exaggerate this. Most white workers still don't vote Republican. In most cases, a majority of them simply decline to vote. Further, 'class voting' in the sense of working class mobilisation for the Democrats was in decline well before the overthrow of segregation and the onset of the Nixonite 'southern strategy'. Most of the decline cannot be explained by racism. According to Michael Hout et al (1995) [pdf], adjusting the research to take account of advances in stratification and class theory, and using multivariate analyses rather than just the Alford Indez, produces a very different picture. They build on the approach of critical psephologists such as John Curtice and Anthony Heath in the UK to suggest that 'electoral realignment' is a more plausible description of the trends than 'electoral dealignment'. Class still profoundly determines voting behaviour, and it determines it all the more if you consider non-voting one form of that behaviour.

The study shows changes in the make-up and alignment of the electorate. The number of owners and proprietors has declined - perhaps as ownership becomes more concentrated. Meanwhile the number of professionals and managers has increased. There has been an overall increase in white collar non-managerial voters, the votes of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remain steady, and the representation of skilled workers has fallen sharply. So the class structure has been recomposed, and the electorate has changed accordingly. Secondly, when you look at the partisan preferences of different class, you see that skilled workers became less Democratic between 1948 and 1992, while white collar workers went from being modestly Republican to being strongly Democratic. Professionals became more Democratic, while owners and managers became strongly Republican. Finally, on turnout, you see that managers, professionals and owners are much more likely to vote in presidential elections than workers of all kinds. The study concludes "The gap between the turnout for professionals and for semiskilled and unskilled [workers] ... corresponds to a range of 77 percent to 40 percent (using 60 percent as the average turnout)."

***

Thus, you have an electoral system that vastly over-represents owners, managers and professionals, and under-represents the working class by a wide margin. Incidentally, there's no sign that education has any impact on this. The increase in high school and college education among 'lower socioeconomic groups' has not led to a corresponding increase in turnout. Other research looking at non-voting corroborates this picture. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, looked at voting and non-voting behaviour in the US, comparing it with the UK, for the period covering the Sixties and early Seventies. They found that voters who were most inclined to self-identify as working class overwhelmingly voted for Labour in the UK, but overwhelmingly didn't vote in the US. By contrast, they found that more than two-thirds of supporters of the Democratic Party, which claims a near monopoly on all social forces left-of-centre in national elections, self-identified as middle class. Thus the perception of class, which Vanneman and Cannon show is strongly correlated to the reality of class, powerfully drives voting and non-voting behaviour.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued, in Why Americans Still Don't Vote, that the exclusion of the working class from elections is actively desired by politicians. They suggest that if politicians were interested in crafting a policy mix that would appeal to the poor, the poor would respond, and they would be able to command electoral majorities. Pippa Norris of Harvard University concurs: the evidence suggests that turnout among the working class will increase at elections if there are left and trade union based parties that are capable of mobilising them. But it is again worth stressing that the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system is not wholly voluntary. Thomas E Patterson, in The Vanishing Voter (2009), points out that the electoral system in the US has had a long tradition of seeking to exclude the uneducated and the poor, and Patterson argues that voter registration rules still work to limit the size and composition of the electorate. He notes that the US has a disproportionately high number of non-citizens among its total population (7%), and ineligible adults (10%). Thus, 17% of the total adult population at any given time is legally excluded from voting. The exclusion of so many voters is the result of deliberate projects: in one case to manage labour migration flows to benefit capital (non-citizens cause less trouble than those permitted to naturalise); and in the other case to construct a carceral state that imprisoned more poor and black Americans than ever before. On any given day, 1 in every 32 American adults is directly in the control of the criminal justice system, either through jail, parole, probation or community supervision. This only hints at the wider effects that this behemoth has on American society, but suffice to say that it deprives millions of the right to vote where it would easily make a significant difference to the outcome.

***

The 2010 mid-term elections have thus taken place not only without the participation of the majority of voters, but with the pronounced exclusion of millions of working class Americans and particularly African Americans. Don't believe me? Let's look at the exit poll results. You can see that there's a strong Democratic bias among voters with incomes under $50k, but they only represent 37% of the total vote, while making up just over 55% of the population. Those earning $100,000 or more make up more than a quarter of the vote (26%) and have a strong Republican bias, yet they represent less than 16% of the population. Breaking it down even further, 7% of the electorate is composed of those on $200,000 or more - again, strongly Republican - which is more than double their representation as a whole. In fact, I'm over-representing the higher income earners and under-representing lower income earners because I'm relying on figures for households rather than individuals. The percentage of individuals on $50k or less is 75%. Those on $100k or more make up just over 6% of the population. So, the turnout is enormously skewed in favour of the wealthy.

The two main parties will have constructed their electoral coalitions with a disproportionate reliance on professionals, owners, and managers. Their leading personnel, those who frame and carry through policy, will be bankers, laywers, and other members of the wealthy minority. Their daily consultations and coordinations will be with the industrial and financial lobbies who fund campaigns. And the "seismic shift", the "grassroots insurgency" that is supposedly propelling reactionary populists to the levers of power will have been effected principally by a relatively small shift in an already exclusive electoral system in favour of middle class and rich voters. I raise all this merely to put it in perspective. The drama of headlines, and of the vaunted new political eras, does not have much bearing on the real state of American society.

Lastly, the Tea Party. If these results are supposed to demonstrate the enormous clout of this movement, its great popular resonance, and so on, I am singularly unimpressed. They were up against a hugely unpopular Democratic Party, whose control of the executive has disappointed so many, amid a recession that has made everyone terrified. The economy is the number one issue in this election, and the numbers of voters who said they were optimistic about the future for the economy were tiny. If the Tea Party was such a wildly popular 'movement', it would not have contributed only a small fraction to the GOP's small slice of the voting age population. As dangerous as these creeps can be, as a Poujadist movement seeking to mobilise a mass base, it's a flop. And that's a key lesson of 2010.

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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Before and After posted by Richard Seymour

One of the most amusing moments from the last presidential debate before the election was when Obama and McCain discussed Colombia. It was interesting at least to see that Obama would criticise the Colombian regime for not prosecuting the murderers of labour leaders. McCain's eyebrows went fucking wild with outrage and insane bewilderment. He couldn't believe that Obama would disrespect the Family. So maybe after watching that, you were thinking, "this Obama guy might not be too bad for Latin America". Maybe. But look at his latest presumptive appointment, Eric Holder for Attorney General. Now, the Chicago Tribune article tells you many things. It tells you that Holder would be the first African American to head the Justice Department, that he worked under Clinton, that he is really a jolly top rate lawyer with lots of experience doing complex cases. What are they missing out, I wonder? Well, his support for terrorism. Namely, his work on behalf of Chicquita executives who paid "protection money" to Colombian death squads, who duly "protected" the interests of said executives. To think, there's a District Attorney out their who's ready to indict Cheney and Gonzales - and Obama appoints the number one advocate for death squad capitalism in the US.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Obama's two constituencies posted by Richard Seymour

At its simplest, Obama's electoral coalition can be expressed as comprising Wall Street dough on the one hand, and most oppressed social groups on the other, including African Americans, Latinos, women, and the poorer working class white voters (those earning less than $50,000 a year). As Socialist Worker put it last week:

Obama won huge support from the African-American population – some 95 percent of black voters backed him.

He also won two thirds of the Latino vote. This was a significant win – the Latino population favoured George Bush in 2004, and during the primaries they rallied behind Hillary Clinton.

One factor was crucial in breaking support for the Republicans among Latinos – the immigrant rights demonstrations of May 2006.

More than two million Latinos and their supporters came onto the streets to protest against a vicious anti-immigrant bill being pushed by the Republicans.

Among white Americans some 43 percent voted for Obama and 55 for John McCain. But these proportions were reversed for white voters under the age of 30.

And the Democrats registered some of their strongest swings in overwhelmingly white, rural and traditional Republican states such as North Dakota, Utah and Montana.

So there is no doubt that Obama’s appeal spanned racial divisions. But the class composition of his vote tells a more complex story.

If you divide Americans up by their income levels, the poorest households were the ones who voted the most heavily for Obama – 73 percent of voters with an annual family income of less than $15,000 backed him.

As you go up the income level, Obama’s vote steadily drops – until you reach the very top bracket, where this trend reverses.

A majority – 52 percent – of households that earned over $200,000 a year opted for the Democratic candidate.


The victorious Republican electoral coalition in 2004 mobilised quite different groups, with a hardcore of white Christian rightists among them. Bush lost every income layer below $50,000 and won every layer above $50,000. Bush won more Hispanic votes than McCain, but still didn't gain a majority. He lost overwhelmingly among African American voters. What Obama did was to win over white women, who voted 55% for Bush in 2004; he gained a larger majority among voters earning under $50,000 than Kerry had; he increased the Democratic support among both African American and Hispanic voters; and he cut away at Bush's 63% support among those earning $200,000 or more. It is also worth noting that Obama benefited from the demoralisation of a substantial sector of the Republican base. While Obama won a higher share of white voters than Kerry did in 2004, 1 million fewer turned out to vote. The increase in turnout was entirely made up of ethnic minorities.

Obama's appointments, the only major policy signals he can make at the moment, thus far reflect his commitment to the Wall Street constituency rather than to those worst off in American society. Thus, we have endless Clinton-era appointments, Senator Clinton offered the position of Secretary of State (which reports say she has accepted), Republicans offered top posts (it looks as if Robert Gates has been begged to stay on as Secretary of Defense) and a right-wing scumbag from the Chicago boss politics scene and the Democratic Leadership Council named Rahm Emmanuel made chief-of-staff. Thus far, organised labour hasn't got a look-in as far as appointments are concerned, but representatives of corporate America saturate the economic advisory board. Selecting Clinton as Secretary of State indicates that Obama intends to run a hawkish foreign policy, and it also demonstrates that he genuinely wasn't all that upset about the Clinton team's endless race-baiting and crazed smears in the primary. The vast majority of Obama's voters will already have cause for grave disappointment.

To the extent that Obama has to offer something to his majority supporters, he tends toward vagueness, and is already under immense pressure to back off from anything specific. Corporate America is getting terribly worked up about the Employee Free Choice Act, a moderate piece of legislation that they are working to ensure will either be bottled up and killed or watered down to near vacuity. Obama's efforts to 'tweak' the borderline criminal TARP plan includes redirecting some funds to help homeowners, while also protecting US auto manufacturers (to the chagrin of Gordon Brown). But so far the only concrete proposal is $25bn for the car companies. It is simply impossible to imagine that any 'bail-out' for working class households that gets passed will be remotely adequate. It will be better than nothing but, at best, like the modestly redistributive measures Obama has proposed, it will sweeten a lousy deal.

The vital question is, what are the majority of Obama's supporters going to do? For example, if those immigrant workers who marched in such vast numbers in 2006 recognise that they have not so much a friend in the White House as a brief window of opportunity opened up by a slightly more humane policy, they may well be the cutting edge of popular movements of the future. Immigrant groups are already protesting the escalation of ICE raids under Bush, and are pressuring Obama to scale them back. Any reforms they can win will enhance their ability to organise, and all indications are that they are the most militant and effective organisers when given the chance. They will drive up wages and conditions for other workers too. Similarly, if the antiwar movement has learned from its huge setback in 2004, when it subordinated its campaigns to help the pro-war Kerry to victory, then it can limit Obama's scope for widening America's brutal engagements in south Asia and Africa, and for any subversion in Latin America. Obama is already hinting through subordinates that he may be 'flexible' on withdrawal from Iraq, which means he may back off his already vague electoral promises. Given that the Sadrists are about to toss out the gradualist 'withdrawal' plan with its 'status of forces agreement', it would be an ideal point for the antiwar movement to apply pressure for rapid withdrawal with no further delays. The momentum that went into securing Obama's victory shouldn't be dropped for a second. Larry Summers, another Clinton-era revamp in the Obama administration (and former Reaganaut), is warning Wall Street backers that the administration won't be able to diminish the government's involvement in healthcare, and therefore any cost reductions will have to come from efficiency savings. The intriguing thing about this is that the emphasis for the corporate audience is miles away from the promise of increased government involvement to support universal healthcare that Obama has been touting. So, again, this is an issue on which organised labour in particular will have to be actively campaigning about right away. This is becoming a critical issue as state and city budgets plummet due to the economic crisis - so, if Obama can support a bail-out for investment banks, he ought to be able to bail out city treasuries to support existing public services, at a minimum. As it stands, threats of cuts to education and health budgets are already current.

The one advantage that the Left has now is that Obama needs his active constituents. He could not have won 'blue-collar' Pennsylvania as well as Jesse Helms' old state of North Carolina without them, and he can't necessarily repeat his success in 2012 without giving them something. So, there is an opportunity now to decisively shape the agenda of the new administration, precisely because their aim is to contain social movements and stabilise American capitalism. Silence and passivity at this point will simply be rewarded with condescending lectures, put-downs, attacks, and the occasional bit of flattery.

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Hint posted by Richard Seymour

"I was convinced we'd have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I'm a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none - a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Moral of the story: if you really want Obama to be like FDR, threaten him with revolution.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Obama and the nuclear option posted by Richard Seymour


One of the ways in which popular movements achieve their goals is by exploiting divisions in the ruling class. One such may just rebound slightly to our advantage if elements of the US foreign policy elite move to return to pre-Bush disarmament procedures. Kate Hudson of CND points out in today's Morning Star that Obama's position on nuclear weapons is aligned to that of old right-wing 'realists' like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, who favour a gradual disarmament process focused on bilateral agreements between the US and Russia. It's a grim moment when those two old blood-soaked war criminals represent the 'moderate' option on nuclear weapons, particularly since Kissinger was co-responsible for beefing up America's atomic diplomacy in the early 1970s in order to try to reverse America's declining leverage and help force North Vietnam and the NLF to accept Washington's peace terms. Yet, we have to reckon that this is indeed the situation, and those two figures have been joined in advocating such a process by William Perry and Sam Nunn, both utterly respectable specimens of the American foreign policy intelligentsia.

This is likely to be prompted by the perceived failure of the aggressive nuclear posture of the last eight years. The Bush gang systematically set about tearing up the existing structure of nuclear diplomacy from their first moments in government in 2001. Well before 9/11, one of their biggest foreign policy drives to abrogate the ABM treaty. They pressed for the development of new missile defense systems linked to 'first strike' doctrines, with China as the main target. All of this was very much a part of the PNAC doctrine of unleashing America's military might to re-order planetary arrangements and secure future US dominance. The Bush team fantasized about being co-equivalents to Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Their strategy involved fast-forwarding a new array of missile defense shields that, once put in place, would be irreversible; engineering a 'revolution in military affairs' in order to enable America to convincingly and rapidly defeat enemies; and diversify existing bases and installations, the better to encircle rivals effectively. The Nuclear Posture Review in December 2001 placed particular emphasis on the development of a new nuclear deterrent which in turn had to result in the abrogation of the ABM Treaty, as well as the continued undermining of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The published version of Rumsfeld's 'Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations' [pdf] highlighted the 'deterrence' value of a nuclear weapons system developed to capacities not seen since the Cold War. Specifically, it would "influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests". But it would also enable the US to "decisively" defeat adversaries "if deterrence fails". This document is quite explicit in stating that the US anticipates the physical destruction of civilian life, and only intends to ensure that such destruction is not "disproportionate" to "the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained." This is not necessarily new. The US has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear strikes against enemies, as Joseph Gerson's Empire And The Bomb shows in some detail. And, lest the novelty of the Bush doctrine be over-stated, it is worth pointing out that it was really an extreme variation on traditional strategy, and that the Clinton administration had worked hard to develop more advanced nuclear weaponry and elaborated its own doctrine, The Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, which expressed a commitment to terrorising potential opponents with the prospect of massive nuclear retaliation should they act in such a way as to seriously harm US interests.

Clearly, the Bush administration's entire strategy for securing future domination failed, and that failure was made abundantly apparent during Russia's assertiveness over South Ossetia. But is it realistic to expect the US to scale back its nuclear ambitions given the stupendous advantages that such weapons systems offer? Is it not more likely that realpolitikers favour the more effective management of the nuclear system, in order to prevent geopolitical rivals gaining possession of the requisite technologies? And is the US foreign policy establishment really about to turn against the 'missile defense shield'? Obama has cautiously supported the idea of such a shielf if the technology can be developed, but has been ambiguous to the point of obscurity about whether that means he supports the one being developed under the rubric of Bush's National Security Presidential Directive 23. When the Polish President Lech Kaczynski claimed on his website that Obama had assured him of his commitment to the shield, Obama's advisor was sent out immediately to repudiate the claim. It looks as if the Obama-Biden team is temporising by adhering to the 'when-the-technology-is-ready' argument for, despite confident claims about the workability of the technology, the Bush administration had to press ahead with it against a background of constant technological failure. The trouble is that if Obama seriously intends to engage in sustained bilateral agreements with Russia, then he can't also engage in a policy that the Russian ruling class won't stand for (because they know it is aimed at them). Medvedev has already sent some hard signals on this issue, threatening retaliatory measures and offering to withdraw them if the US backs off. Obama has indicated that he will not pursue any policy or diplomacy that weakens America's image. He is determined to be even more aggressive than the Bush administration has been in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He publicly supports Ukraine and Georgia's claim for admission to NATO. So, while the Obama executive may wish to forge a slightly more productive relationship with Russia, the belligerent programme that it is committed to substantially undermines this.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

What do Americans Want? posted by Richard Seymour

Universal healthcare, reduced military spending, reduced military presence overseas, higher taxes on the rich, strong state regulation of the economy, pro-union legislation, increased minimum wage, no privatization of social security, etc etc...

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Sunday, November 09, 2008

"Why I went to Grant Park on November 4th" posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Tithi Bhattacharya:

I stood outside my hotel at midnight with my three month old daughter, Shayari, in her stroller. The wind had just picked up but the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks in front of our hotel refused to be moved by the sudden chill. We were all strangers standing shoulder to shoulder waiting. It was the night of November fourth. The hotel was a block away from Grant Park. Suddenly a cheer went up from the waiting crowd. CNN had just called the election for Barack Hussein Obama the first black president of the United States. Startled by the sudden noise Shayari woke up, looked around and then her face broke into a glorious toothless smile.

Over the past few months, I must admit I have felt like a recalcitrant hack. As a socialist I have argued furiously with friends and students about why they should not put their faith in Obama. How his servile agreement with McCain about the $700 billion bailout for the very corporations that he claims to attack was a forecasting of the economic direction of his presidency. How his repeated acquiescence to the three gods of American conservatism--nationalism, religion and family—only made him a more eloquent and more intelligent version of the republicans. How can you campaign for him, I have argued with my colleague and friend who teaches queer studies at my University, when he openly opposes gay marriage on the basis of his Christian faith? How can you campaign for him I have argued with my anti-war activist student when he plans to extend this war in to Afghanistan and Pakistan? But despite my (sometimes shrill) almost Cassandra-like hectoring, scores of friends, students, neighbours and co-workers campaigned for Barack Obama. My 53 year old Jewish friend who has never been on a picket line or anti-war march tirelessly knocked on doors to urge people to vote. My neighbour from a working class background who had never once held a banner spent hours in the campaign office making them. A student who had never voted before spent her entire month's earnings on petrol so that she could drive volunteers around. And that night as I stood on Michigan Avenue, thousands of these people across the country--somebody's friend, somebody's neighbour, somebody's student--celebrated the end of their campaign by "bending the arc of history".

When independence was declared at midnight on August 15 1947 in India, thousands of people took to the streets celebrating the end of more than 200 years of colonialism. The country had just been devastated by a bloody partition where millions had lost their lives and homes. The Indian National Congress had struck terrible deals during the transfer of power including collaborating with the British to defeat a brilliant strike by sailors. So when freedom finally came at midnight the young Communist Party, heavily influenced by Stalin, declared it to be a "false freedom" (yeh azadi jhoota hai) and refused to be a part of the festivities. How hollow and historically irrelevant their pitiful slogan must have sounded to the men and women who danced on the streets of Delhi and Calcutta that night. Men and women who had lost brothers and sisters to the freedom struggle, who had risked lives and either suffered or witnessed untold brutalities. Were the Communists right in their analysis that independence would not bring change to the lives of the majority? Absolutely. Were they right to criticize and distance themselves from the mass movement that brought that freedom? Absolutely not.

I understand that there are significant differences between the long years of political struggle that led to Indian independence and the US elections of 2008. For starters, there was no armed resistance from a powerful imperial government or its police force to prevent people from participating in the election campaign for Obama. The electoral defeat of John McCain can hardly be compared to the political defeat and ousting of the two-hundred year old British colonial government. There is however something to be said for the spirit that animated the crowds on Indian streets 60 years ago and those in Chicago that night. Every single woman, man and child came out on both occasions because they powerfully felt that a major change had been achieved. I say achieved, as opposed to a change that just happened. In both cases, as in the case of countless other political victories--in strikes, campaigns or nationalist struggle—the participants experienced a confident surge of empowerment for the gain achieved was in part because of them. This feeling so common in mass movements is however rare in electoral campaigns, as the bourgeois electoral process is by its very nature a passive exercise that requires minimal political commitment from ordinary people. And this is where the Obama electoral campaign will be remembered for its uniqueness. In an economy devastated by free market capitalism, in a society torn apart by racism, at a time when the combined cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been over $3 trillion grassroot organizers campaigned tirelessly to elect a black, anti-war man who spoke openly about corporate greed. The campaigners gave the election campaign the flavour of a grassroots social movement.

This was done in several ways. As early as October 6 the much discussed Acorn claimed to have registered 1.3 million new voters. Although the NY Times argued that these numbers were vastly exaggerated the meticulous task of organizing these registration drives on a national scale, in door-to-door campaigns and campus mobilizations can hardly be denied. This process could not but have a historical resonance with people of colour in general and the African American community in particular where memories of the right to vote are still laced with violence. The usual process of voting was thus transformed in this election from the very start into a much more politicized practice.

Obama himself did not fail to see this transformation. His speeches repeatedly alluded to past social movements and more importantly to the power of social movements. "Words on a parchment" he told us in his speech on race in Philadelphia "would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage". What would be needed instead were actual people who "through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk" narrowed the gap between ideals and reality. At a large anti-war rally in Chicago in 2002 in a sharp invocation of classical left-wing rhetoric he urged us to stop "the arms merchants in our own country" from "feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe". More explicitly, dubbing the elections merely as an agitational platform in faux-Leninist fashion he reminded us that the campaign was merely "the occasion, the vehicle, of [our] hopes, and [our] dreams". Over and over during the course of the campaign words such as community, grassroots and organizing were used in a fashion that matched the fervour and the demographic of the anti-war and anti-globalization movements of the recent past. Whole sections of people roused by this call plunged into the campaign as though it were a social movement and not merely an electoral campaign. But the most important thing to understand is that their doing so actually made it such.

In my small mid-western University town the Obama campaign included old social and labour activists, young students who had never been at a demonstration before and whole sections of people, particularly women and minorities who have been actively disenfranchised not just from the electoral process in the past but from society itself. It is also significant to remember in this context that in Indiana for instance although Obama secured a historic victory for Democrats, the first time in 44 years, none of the other local Democratic candidates fared well. Indeed only 22.2% of the votes polled in my county were straight Democratic votes. A vote for Obama was thus only nominally a vote for the democratic party. It was largely I would argue a vote for a radical new direction that the voter felt he represented. The Democratic Party label became almost incidental, Obama the man and his historic significance spilled over the ordinariness of a democratic party ticket and that is the man the ordinary woman/man voted for. There was an African-American woman at our hotel in Chicago that night who had come to the rally with her 84 year old father. My partner's friend, an African American historian told us that he was "bawling like a baby" when Obama gave his speech at Grant Park. We will always remember those truly historic images of Jesse Jackson and even Oprah Winfrey crying that cold night at Grant Park. They all worked for the "movement" and not for the election of a Democratic Party candidate. So when victory was declared on November 4 th most of them were shocked to see Democratic party bureaucrats take over the floor of the campaign office and make speeches. One of my friends there told me "I was shocked to see these people. All I wanted to do was dance". . We had all apparently forgotten that this was an electoral campaign to elect the head of the leading imperialist nation.

So as President Obama surrounds himself with big-business backers such as Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker, shapes his foreign policy in consultation with former secretaries of state and ex-CIA officials what is to become of the all the people who joined the "movement"?

There is a short answer to that question, given by a young black woman in Harlem. When asked by CNN about Obama's victory, laughing and crying she said that she had helped achieve it and she was going to stay active to make him accountable. I cannot emphasize how right she is.

Again I come back to my small college town in Indiana. The context of the Obama victory in this town and on my campus must be clearly understood. In my university a very popular white male full professor seeing a young African American colleague on his cell phone commented that he thought that his black colleague was doing a drug deal. In my department when I had organized a very tame diversity forum earlier this year I received an anonymous letter which argued that all non-western (read non-white) histories and non-western historians should be scrapped from the curriculum and the department and in the field of American history we should not obsess about race and African American History. My partner who runs the American Studies program was accused by this eloquent letter writer of only being interested in historically marginalized groups. Since November 4 th graffitis saying "fuck obama" have gone up on campus and I know of at least one incident of a white male yelling "nigger" at a black student from a passing car.

And yet Obama polled 55% of the votes in my county whose population is 97% White. Despite Hilary Clinton trying to stir up racism against Obama by claiming to represent the white working class, the majority of Obama voters from Indiana was the white working class. Obama carried 15 Indiana counties compared to John Kerry's 4 in 2004. Northwestern Indiana counties, composed largely of the industrial working class voted overwhelmingly for him in this election. Workers here have been hit hard by the economy in areas like South Bend, Portage, Anderson, and south along the Wabash and Ohio Rivers in Terre Haute and Evansville. Nationally, 67% of the AFL-CIO voted for Obama. It is not the Democratic Party but Obama riding the wave of anger and hope that secured that vote. It was the movement that achieved this not the electoral process per se. It is now up to this multiracial movement—a movement that arose from homes, schools, churches, and the factory floor—to make sure that the gains of these last few months are protected. To defend and remember the racial solidarity that was the hallmark of the campaign. To mobilize in similar large numbers not just for voter registrations but to fight against all those small incidents of racism that will no doubt happen in other conservative public spaces like my campus. To demand that Obama deliver on his promises of healthcare, jobs and education. And when the time comes, and it will, to mobilize against him.

So unlike the Indian Communists in 1947, I was glad to have been there in Chicago on the night of November 4th. I would like to tell my daughter that I celebrated the movement that threw Bush out of office and elected the first Black President. I would like to tell my daughter that on that night I looked around me at the hundreds of people, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, that had lined the streets of Chicago with a true audacity of hope.

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Friday, November 07, 2008

The battle begins posted by Richard Seymour

From the FT: Corporate America is preparing for a landmark political battle with the new Obama administration and a Democratic Congress over proposed labour union reforms, while expressing concerns about the direction of trade policy, healthcare and a range of other issues.

The business community has stepped up its oppositon to the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which Mr Obama has said he supports. It could revitalise the US labour movement by enhancing the ability of unions to organise.

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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Unlikely, but... posted by Richard Seymour

What to do if McCain wins by fraud:



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Sunday, October 26, 2008

The embers of Jim Crow posted by Richard Seymour


In every country where votes are counted, even a pissant little island like this one, some votes are fraudulent. For some reason, the Liberal Democrats seem to produce people with a knack for this vocation as far as the UK goes. It is a serious problem, but hardly a defining national issue. In the US, alleged voter fraud has become the basis for a Republican attempt to deny citizens the right to vote. Predictably, these efforts overwhelmingly target black voters, and low income voters in general. Despite the fact that absolutely zero evidence of serious fraud has emerged, between 2004 and 2006 13 million people were scrubbed from the electoral rolls in 39 states and the District of Colombia. Part of this uses legislation preventing convicted felons from voting which, because of the racism structural to America's criminal justice system, and the tightening of penalties over the last thirty years (Clinton's "three strikes and you're out" laws come to mind), disproportionately effects African Americans. But, as the linked report finds, much of the purging is strictly illegal. For example: "In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary." Ten thousand voters, one week. That sort of work needs to get paid.

The recent report by Greg Palast and Robert F Kennedy Jr. for the Rolling Stone finds that in the run up to the 2004 elections, 1.1m people were denied the vote under a banned scheme known as "caging" - the local Republicans sent letters to addresses in poor neighbourhoods inviting them to confirm their address. A failure to reply for whatever reason would result in a challenge at the voting booths for providing a false address. Since then over 2.7m voters have been purged from voter rolls under new procedures signed into law by the Bush executive. In the swing-state of Colorado, the rate of scrubbing by or at the behest of GOP officials is ten times the national average. Hundreds of thousands of voters in a number of key states are affected if the details on their identification fails to match exactly those on the state's official records. Even a commonplace typo will get you purged from the rolls - and, as Gary Younge reports, in places like Wisconsin this affects one in five voters. And, of course, you have to possess a government-approved ID in the first place - a passport or a driving license, which many poor voters don't have. A number of reports separate from this now indicate that voting machines are regularly switching early votes from Democrat to Republican. So, even if you get past all the hurdles they set for you, the machines might still get you.

It is a truism among pollsters that Obama's lead, however large it is - and it has seen double figures from time to time - is misleading for the purposes of predicting the election results. Once distilled to 'likely voters' it is reduced quite dramatically, sometimes to within the margin of error. Part of the reason for this is the contempt that the US political class expresses for even the slender facade of representative democracy that the system tolerates. People complain that large numbers of working class voters abstain from elections in the US and thus guarantee disproportionate domination for right-wing politicians. In the past it might have been answered that since none of the major candidates chose to represent the working class, the working class had every reason not to vote. But there are now efforts to actively disenfranchise voters, and it isn't just a partisan process by hardened, power-hungry Republican scum. The efforts, led by the GOP but often mandated by the Democrats, are surely indicative of a desire by substantial elements of the US ruling class to force through a much more extreme programme than the population can tolerate. I am not saying that Jack Abramoff carries suitcases full of cash from the offices of Goldman Sachs to local GOP officials and tells them to get rigging. I am saying that the Republican leadership is in lockstep with some of the most powerful sectors of US capital, particularly finance capital, that they effectively express its priorities, and that when they engage in aggression against the existing legislative, judicial and executive framework, they are doing so for the purposes of fulfilling those priorities.

The vertex of this programme is the goal of privatizing social security. In most advanced capitalist states, this - the public pensions system - is the holy grail for neoliberals and privatizers. It is the largest single component of any welfare state, and the capitalist class wants it bad. The model is Chile, where - thanks to those magnificant Chicago Boys and their pet dictator - the system is entirely managed by the private sector, and funded by compulsory employee contributions. It is highly regressive and leaves those out of work without a pension scheme. It has been such a grotesque failure that the political elite is doing everything it can to shore up the system short of nationalisation - while in Argentina, nationalisation has already been effected. From the perspective of elites, however, the system was a dramatic success story, and it stands as an 'inspiration' for neoliberals everywhere. Bush has often expressed his regard for the Chilean way of slow, penurious death. Investigating the matter for New Labour, Peter Mandelson found that he too adored the system. One significant difference between Obama and McCain is that, for now, the former is committed to opposing social security privatization, while McCain is still blustering about an unfunded baby-boomer "time-bomb". Obama will, should he win by enough votes to negate the fraud, probably come under immense pressure from his backers to recant on his election pledge. But just in case he doesn't listen, it will be useful for them to have as high a representation of the GOP ultras in all branches of government as possible. A remaining mystery, albeit a superficial one, is why the Democratic leadership doesn't defend itself more aggressively against the GOP. They are not exactly wilting violets. Third Party candidates who have faced Democratic efforts to prevent them from standing and organising know how thuggish the party can be. Yet, despite flagrant fraud being exposed time and again, they have played ball. The only plausible answer, as far as I can see, is that they want to govern as centrists. They do not want to be outflanked to the left, and they don't want to mobilise a Left whom they habitually engage in aggression against. They would prefer a strong GOP, and to have a debate limited to one between moderate Republicanism and hard right Republicanism. If the rumours of a landslide victory for Obama and the Democrats are accurate, the DLC crowd actually stand to lose something from that - namely, their alibi in pursuing a centre-right programme. That is why the election of America's first black president may be marred, if not successfully obstructed, by a voting system that reproduces some of the most obnoxious features of Jim Crow.

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Thursday, October 16, 2008

Treason posted by Richard Seymour



Other billboards include one describing Obama as the 'next Benedict Arnold' (ie, in bed with foreign invaders), and another reportedly offering a sum of money to whoever kills him. Other billboards just remind voters of 9/11 and let them draw their own conclusions. This may be a sign that the reactionaries are getting desperate as the economic meltdown pushes Obama to the top of the polls. But it is also a sign that they're preparing their comeback tune: something along the lines of 'liberal betrayal', and 'stabbed in the back'. The first sign that the GOP are regaining strength in either legislative chamber will probably produce calls for impeachment.

Update:

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Friday, October 03, 2008

A different kind of bail-out posted by Richard Seymour

Corporate self-help, old-school...

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Monday, September 29, 2008

The Fix Is [Not] In [Yet] posted by Richard Seymour


They got the $700bn bailout, with one or two 'provisions' that, in fact, don't really deviate that much from the Paulson plan, contrary to some of the analysis. A few things to note when looking at the summary: they still get their $700bn, phased and with a bit more oversight than was planned (ie, more than zero) - but remember that the $700bn figure was just pulled out of thin air, a large enough number to allow maximum latitude to the Goldman Sachs wonderboy in helping out Wall Street; they won't cap executive remuneration, but they will tax it a bit more if it's above $500,000, so the inevitable bragging about zero tolerance for executive pay is unwarranted; there will be some taxes on golden parachutes, but the "era of golden parachutes" is far from "over", as Nancy Pelosi has been bragging. Finally, the government supposedly expects to make a small profit on the enterprise once it's returned to the private sector, which is how previous bailouts have worked. This will be the selling point. They will say that they have no intention of draining the public purse, and that every penny will be restored in due course. But this assumes that the bailout will have the effect of restoring these institutions as profit-making enterprises. There is no guarantee whatsoever that any of this money will be seen again. In fact, the markets are plummeting, supposedly because of doubts about the efficacy of the bailout. And it also raises the question of why the public shouldn't just own it, and keep all the profit. After all, private ownership and markets don't seem to have been particularly advantageous in the past.

This is not about economic competence, moral hazard, perverse incentive, or any of the other cynosures of neoliberal policy wonkery. And preserve us from the absurd claim that this is some kind of socialism. It is about class power. If they wanted to resuscitate the economy, here are some possibile uses for that $700bn. Think of households and public sector institutions that are failing largely because the system is failing them: they couldn't put $700bn to better use? How about just nationalising the healthcare system? All of that would certainly stimulate the economy, provide jobs and help people who really are in need, but it would also risk revivifying the exiguous social democratic constraints on the operations of capital. You give people the idea that the tax base should be used in their interests, to give them secure jobs with decent pay, public services, well-funded inner city schools, any of that, they might never be away from the till with their hands out. Greedy taxpayers have to learn that this money is earmarked for conscientious wealth creators and their warriors, not for sloths with their heads stuck in the bargain bucket.

Meanwhile, the Brown administration didn't waste any time this time in nationalising most of Bradford and Bingley, much to the chagrin of the Tories, who are just frantic - frantic, don't you know? - about the costs to lower income taxpayers. The Conservatives want the Bank of England to take over the company and run it down. The trouble is, of course, that the government are not nationalising to protect jobs, and therefore probably will run it down in muchy the same way as they have run down Northern Rock. The Tories know this. It's being done to protect liquidity, to keep the banks lending to one another. This is why even right-wingers like Vince Cable approve of the nationalisation. But the Tories, aside from once more positioning themselves to the left of the government, are being disinguous: this particular nationalisation cost millions rather than billions, and it isn't going to drain the public purse. It is almost as if the three main parties are playing a game of 'chicken', each urging the other to do least to ward off the crisis. What I suspect is actually happening is that the rules of the game are changing far too rapidly for them to assimilate it. The language of economic liberalism will survive the practise for a long while, for what is emerging is an increasingly interventionist state. Even the Tories, while talking about the virtues open markets, are pleding tough regulatory regimes. This is by no means a reversion to a less predatory form of capitalism, although resistance by workers can make it so in the short term, but it does open up the argument somewhat: put briefly, if the state can protect profits and stock exchanges, it can protect jobs and public services.

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Friday, January 18, 2008

Can you tell me how to get to K Street? posted by Richard Seymour

Because I need to kick somebody's ass. Have you seen this?

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

...

The groups believe this switch in strategy can draw contrasts with Republicans that will help Democrats gain ground in November and bring the votes to pass more dramatic measures. But it is a long way from the early months of 2007, when Democrats were freshly in power and momentum for a dramatic shift in Iraq policy seemed overpowering.

“There was a consensus that last year was not productive,” John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, said of a meeting attended by a coalition of anti-war groups last week. “Our expectations were dashed.”

The meeting, held at an office on K Street, was attended by around 20 representatives of influential anti-war groups, including MoveOn.org and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, which spent $12 million last year opposing the war.

Isaacs said he thought the meeting would be a difficult one, with an adamant faction pressing for continued focus on timelines and funding. It wasn’t to be.

“We got our heads together and decided to go a different way,” Isaacs said. “The consensus was not to keep beating our heads against the wall trying to block every funding bill — not because we don’t agree with it, but because we don’t have the votes.”

Moira Mack, a spokeswoman for AAEI, was also at the meeting. “There was a lot of agreement that this is really the way that we can best get our message across about endless war versus end-the-war and draw clear distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans. They really don’t want to end the war. This is the perfect legislative opportunity.”


This sadly reflects one of the weaknesses of the US antiwar movement - its deep fragmentation with much of the leadership composed of supporters of the Democratic Party. Since when were there "clear distinctions" available between "anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans"? The only way this fiction can be maintained is if they maintain the pretense, as they do, that funding for the war couldn't be shot down because they "didn't have the votes". The claim from the Democrats was that an executive veto, which can be issued whenever there is less than two-thirds Congressional support for a given bill, prevented them from withholding funding. It's a lie. In order for funding to be issued, Congress has to vote in the affirmative for it, which couldn't have happened without the Democrats who are now in the majority. This is an extremely costly war, and even if there is considerable troop "drawdown", the Congressional Budget Office expects it to cost a total of $2.73 trillion. To fork over this much on behalf of the taxpayer while blithering on about balanced budgets and so on is a serious commitment. The lie can only survive if people ignore the fact that Democrats already had plenty of opportunity to set withdrawal timetables and chose not to pursue it. The first time they bothered to even ask nicely was in November last year - arguably a necessary pitch before the elections - but they quickly caved in and gave Bush an extra $70bn to pursue the ongoing occupation, sans strings. But who am I to question success? The subordination of the priorities of the antiwar movement to the electoral strategy of the Democrats worked well in 2004, did it not? And the conduct of Democrats elected in 2006 has been a real blast, hasn't it? Let's have more of that, why not?

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