Posted: February 10, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: analysis, anticapitalism, current events, socialism, the economy | Tags: bankers, crisis, labor, labor union, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy, socialism |
In a twist that will surprise no one, Caterpillar has laid off the CAW workers they locked out in London, Ontario and is moving the work to an unorganized facility in Indiana.
After locking out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 27 in London, Ontario, Caterpillar decided last Friday to close its 62-year-old locomotive facility there and move production to newly “right-to-work” Indiana, where American workers will work for half of what Canadian workers would make. Caterpillar’s decision to close the plant after workers refused to agree to major wage concessions has provoked outrage across Canada in light of the fact that Illinois-based Caterpillar made a record $4.8 billion in profits in 2011.
CAW members, who have already been blockading a completed locomotive from leaving the London plant, have vowed to continue blocking any products from leaving there as they attempt to extract a better severance from the company. The CAW local is also considering occupying the plant. “The CAW has occupied workplaces when employers have shown disrespect,” Canadian Auto Workers Union President Ken Lewenza told Bloomberg. “It’s a tool. It’s an option.”
As I reported last week, under the Investment Canada Act, foreign companies taking over Canadian companies must demonstrate a “net benefit” to Canada. Critics claim that the government allowed a foreign-owned company (Caterpillar) to buy a Canadian company without having any intention of providing any “net benefit” to Canada.
I really hope the CAW follow through with that occupation, because fuck Caterpillar and because Stephen Harper won’t stand up for them. They might not be able to save their jobs, but they might be able to make this a Pyrrhic victory for Caterpillar.
In addition, don’t think that the recent dues freeloading law passed by Indiana has absolutely nothing to do with this decision by Caterpillar, because it has everything to do with it. Caterpillar is staggeringly profitable, and the wages paid at this plant aren’t insane. They are decent, skilled-labor wages, but the environment in the US is conducive to a race to the bottom, the jobs go away and lives get just a little better for those in Muncie and a whole lot worse for those in London.
This whole sad story yet again proves exactly how morally bankrupt the existing economic system is. This plant closure will ruin people’s lives. It will unhome people, it will impoverish people, it will cause a whole swath of societal ills that won’t be addressed because of Mike Harris’ public sector cuts in the nineties. I remember very clearly supporting my teachers’ picket line in 1997 because of what Harris was looking to do was so repellant. What’s happening in London is the inevitable continuation of that neoliberal effort. There is literally no reason, none at all, to do any of this aside for sheer naked avarice.
The Liberals will probably try to make hay over this, but they have supported similar efforts in the recent past under Martin. The only party that’s in a position to really slam Harper and the Tories on this is the NDP, recently ascendant to the Official Opposition after the last election. However, I fear that the leadership vacuum within the New Democrats after Layton’s passing will leave them unable to really go after Harper for allowing and even supporting this kind of asset stripping. If Layton was still alive, they would have easily been able to absolutely shellack the Tories on this bullshit, but with their leadership election taking up all the air in the room, it will be an afterthought at best.
In the end, I’m hoping for the best, but I don’t think this turns out happy for the CAW workers. It’s really fucking sad. I hope someone burns down the house of Caterpillar’s CEO.
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Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, politics, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, labor, labor union, neoliberalism, occupy wall street, organizing, privatization, public policy, reformism, socialism |
I didn’t write this but I really, really wish I had.
On the other hand, perhaps this generation can still come out as good, proper kvetches. Witness this popular parable making its way through corridors, water-coolers, pubs, and internet boards about Generation Y’s situation on today’s job market:
The older generations told us: “Study hard in high school, because you need to go to college. You don’t want to be stuck flipping burgers when you get older, do you?”
Well we studied hard in high school, took out loans, went to college, and graduated.
Now the older generations tell us: “Get to work flipping burgers, you spoiled brats!”
This at least comes closer to identifying the real issue: everyone from the upper-middle class downwards has found themselves reduced to just doing whatever it takes to get by and pay their bills at the end of the month. With full irony intended, this is supposed to be how the poor live! But now everyone is poor, and Gen-Y’s 85% rate of moving back in with our parents post-graduation can only hide this fact for so long.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
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Posted: January 19, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, socialism | Tags: anticapitalism, civil liberties, civil rights, creative commons, intellectual property, organizing, PIPA, privatization, public policy, socialism, SOPA |
Hey, you know how when work enters the public domain you can do whatever you want with it? About that…
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.” (PDF)
The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods.
With the whole uproar of PIPA and SOPA, it’s important to not lose sight of the fact that there are other efforts to subvert participation in the media landscape by the bulk of the population and not just media conglomerates. Bet your bottom dollar that this new power for Congress will inevitably get abused, as public domain works can get recopyrighted and sold to private hands. This is a bad decision, and one that is a further effort to preserve an intellectually bankrupt idea a little while longer.
Since the tie between content and its physical container has been severed by the computer, the concept of intellectual property has become increasingly obsolete. It is the artificial imposition of scarcity on an item that can potentially be perfectly copied infinitely. Copyright (and patents) are like trying to charge for breathing. As Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when he released the method of making his vaccine into the public domain, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” His decision not to exercise his intellectual property rights prevented profiteering and by doing so probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Understand that I’m not saying artists shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work, because that’s literally as far from where I’m coming from as one can get. What I’m saying is that we need to come up with a new method of compensating artists than the methods we have right now, because the system we have isn’t working. As a stopgap, though, we should resist attempts by groups like the MPAA and RIAA to bulwark this system through legislation like PIPA and SOPA and court decisions like this, because it will only make whatever new method to compensate artists we develop more difficult to implement.
And for maximum irony, the lead plaintiff in this case won’t be able to play Prokofiev and Shostakovitch due to licensing fees costing too much. Yes you read that last one correctly, and yes it’s that Shostakovitch, the famous Soviet composer. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.
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Posted: January 18, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, labor, labor union, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy, socialism |
Richard Trumka boycotts the White House Jobs Council and releases a critical statement of the council’s latest report.
Trumka, one of two union leaders on the council, said the body is too narrow to provide recommendations to President Obama that are balanced between the interests of business and other groups such as labor.
He specifically took issue with the report’s calls for lower corporate taxes and fewer regulations, saying they would not lead to more jobs.
“Overall, I disagree that reforming our regulatory system and reducing the statutory corporate tax rate are crucial elements of ‘competitiveness’ for the United States going forward, nor does empirical evidence support the claim that significant net new job creation would result from such ‘reforms,’” he said.
Maybe there’s hope within the AFL-CIO yet. Substantively speaking, the AFL-CIO is going to fall in behind the Democrats come November, but that they are willing to shoot a raspberry at Obama and lambast the Jobs Council’s neoliberal idiocy is an encouraging sign. This combined with Trumka talking about the split within the labor movement around the Keystone XL pipeline and not taking a federation-wide stand on the project, the AFL-CIO seems to be recovering from its moribund centrism and is charting a more aggressively progressive course.
If I were Trumka and wanted to build on this, I’d invest my resources in both new organizing and modernizing the AFL-CIO. Part of the problem is that the labor movement has waned in relevance to most people, and the only way to change that is to increase the number of people affiliated with the unions and to open up the AFL-CIO’s decision-making process. My generation is starving for this kind of progressive advocacy, and the labor movement is the logical group to push for these causes. If they don’t take up the banner, then some other entity will come into being to do so.
The pessimistic side of me wants to say, “no, nothing will happen, death is certain,” but I hope Trumka realizes that if he doesn’t get the unions moving soon they will cease to be relevant. He’s not a dumb man and managed to carry off one of the more militant strikes in modern American history when he ran the UMWA, so I think he realizes the necessity of breaking the unions away from the establishment as much as possible. In any event, it’s good news and I hope more comes of it.
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Posted: January 14, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, politics, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, organizing, politics, privatization, public policy |
The State of Arizona sold its parliamentary building in 2009, and is now looking to buy it back.
State governments have taken a number of different steps to balance their books in recent years. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (remember him?) proposed a new tax on strip clubs, for example, and a Utah state rep. suggested saving $60 million per year by abolishing the 12th grade. But no proposal struck as much metaphorical gold as Arizona’s decision to sell off the state capitol (and a whole bunch of other state properties, such as maximum security prisons) for $735 million in 2009. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed off on the deal, and the state now leases the House and Senate chambers from a private real estate company at a considerable long-term cost.
The best part? Arizona sold the building for $81 million dollars and is having to buy it back for $105 million. So, not including the money they spent on leasing the building from the private company they sold the capital to, Arizona’s highly right-wing government just gave $21 million dollars to this company and gained precisely nothing for it. This story is a microcosm for privatization of public services overall: it always costs more money and you don’t get any better service in return for the extra money spent. Oh, and it’s also worth noting that this government’s run by the hard-right wing of the Republican party, y’know, the ones that are supposed to be ‘fiscally responsible’.
Privatization doesn’t save tax payers money whether it’s prisons, schools, or health care for the elderly. A prime example of what the public sector can do is the closure of I-405 in LA in July. The I-405 closure was done by state and municipal authorities and finished under budget and ahead of time. Compare that to the I-540 loop here in North Carolina, where you have several contractors fired over the years and the project so staggeringly over budget that twenty years on from when ground first broke on the project the government is going to have to switch the rest of the expressway to a toll road to pay for finishing it. Of course, they’ve already selected a company to run the toll collection system, because trusting the private sector to do public sector work has gone so well on this project already.
I defy anyone to find a single successful example of privatization of a public service, with success defined as either saved money while maintaining service or improved service while costing the same. If you find a success, let me know in the comments. I’ll be waiting.
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Posted: January 10, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, politics | Tags: anticapitalism, anticorporatism, neoliberalism, occupy wall street, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy |
Man, Wall Street and the wealthy having power are even less popular than the media leads you to believe.
Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents hold this view; a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans do as well. For historical perspective, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view in a 1941 Gallup poll.
Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say that the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy; just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents share this view. In contrast, a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.
This poll combined with the polling on socialism I wrote about a couple of days ago says to me that the declaration of Occupy’s death by the media is premature. I mean, it’s not entirely surprising that a media that’s so thoroughly dependent on advertising money from big businesses has been studiously ignoring Occupy actions, but it is kind of shocking exactly how hard it’s been dropped despite significant stories continuing to emerge nationwide, like Occupy protestors reinforcing a picket line, arrests for spurious reasons, and other legal bullshit like making protestors take free speech classes, especially when you contrast it with the way the media still talks about the Tea Party as a going concern.
Even if the media is right and Occupy is on its way down, it means the movement is coming off the field having not finished its work, which means there’s an opening for further efforts to emerge and take shape. Income inequality and the enthrallment of the political system to the employing class aren’t issues that have been resolved. Even if Occupy is flickering out and lacks sufficient support, these polls mean that Occupy’s organizational shape was insufficient for the task ahead of it and not that there isn’t a sizable amount of agreement with the general energy behind the movement.
As I’ve said before, Occupy is, to me, a transitional form. It might have been impossible for it to be a permanent structure, but Occupy is a fantastic way to get the discussion going right now about the past twenty-five years of neoliberalism and how it has ruined lives. The organizations that start to chop down the problems choking our society will have to, at least initially, take relatively conventional forms like industrial unions and (to a lesser extent, in my opinion) political parties. This won’t always be the case as society is changed to be more participatory in nature, but at the start it will be absolutely necessary because these organizational forms have a proven track record of engendering change.
In any event, I’m waiting to see how the media covers these polls and what it will mean for the political campaigns ahead. The answers to those questions are probably, “they won’t,” and, “nothing,” but a man can hope.
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Posted: January 5, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, politics, socialism | Tags: anticapitalism, Congress, labor, occupy wall street, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy, socialism |
Not to sound like a broken record, but reformism is basically a way to delay the needed changes to our shared economic lives and hope such notions of systemic change eventually go away.
This is the most significant danger to hegemony. When a material crisis becomes an ideological crisis, the elite pay attention. There are two ways to deal with a crisis of legitimacy. One is repression, censorship, and outright ignoring the problem entirely- omission. The first two have significant drawbacks. Repression and censorship often strengthen the opposition by increasing curiosity and the “forbidden fruit” effect as well as solidifying the conviction of radicals. Whats more, the US simply cannot afford to tighten information flows given the nature of the service economy. As a consequence, omission also becomes impossible at both the level of information and material reality. You can’t ignore unemployment (although you can hide it), and you can’t ignore the faults of economic dogma when you’re face-to-face with its contradictions.
That leaves one other option: co-option. This method has become the primary means of maintaining ideological hegemony, at least in the core states. By absorbing the opposition and reframing it’s critique into something more edible, the system consumes dissent and embodies it- without the harsh, radical element. Opponents become reformers, and radicals are sidelined.
The whole piece is worth a read-through, though I think the examples raised by the author lend themselves more towards obfuscation of what Marx says and not actual co-opting of Marx’s ideas.
The system is built to protect the people at the top from the people at the bottom, and no amount of obfuscation by some jackass in the Economist about the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ will change that. And more than that, the system is built to absorb radicals and turn them into reformers. By doing this, the system makes them into advocates for a system they would scorn and fight against before they gained power. Look at the caricatures of themselves most “left wing” parties in the West have become if you doubt this.
To paraphrase Lucy Parsons, the employing class won’t let you vote away their wealth. It doesn’t matter how good a candidate is on paper, the only way shit changes is through people taking action that directly addresses the injustices that they are fighting. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were magnificent pieces of legislation, but they tailed the March on Washington and Montgomery Bus Boycott and the other brilliant actions that resisted Jim Crow South. Without courageous direct action like the Selma to Montgomery Marches, the CRA and the VRA wouldn’t exist.
Power has always rested in the hands of the people and not the parliament. If the system we have doesn’t work for us anymore, then it’s time to build a new system that does and ignore the old one.
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Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: analysis, anticapitalism, politics, socialism, the economy | Tags: labor, occupy wall street, organizing, politics, PPACA, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy, socialism |
This Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll is, on the surface of it, very conventional. However, if you dig down, you’ll find some interesting tidbits.
- 49% of people polled aged 18 to 29 view socialism in a positive light, with 43% viewing it negatively. Compare that to 46% viewing capitalism in a positive way, with 47% viewing it negatively.
- African-Americans and Hispanics polled viewed capitalism negatively (51 and 55% respectively), but only African-Americans viewed socialism positively as a majority (55%).
- Conservative Republicans polled viewed socialism far more negatively (8%-90% positive negative) than they viewed capitalism positively (66%-29% positive negative).
- Liberal Democrats views on capitalism are virtually tied (46%-47% positive negative). Their views on socialism heavily favor a positive perspective (59%-43% positive negative).
- Finally, supporters of Occupy are more likely to be pro-capitalism than they are to be for socialism, 45% to 39%.
I think there’s a few things going on here. One, there’s been a long-standing obfuscation inside American political thought as to what socialism actually is. I mean, you have Republicans calling stuff like PPACA “socialism” when it’s pretty clearly center-right social democratic (i.e. capitalist) in orientation. I think if people actually knew what socialism looked like and how it could operate (I wrote a little piece about that for DemandNothing yesterday), the numbers would look way different than what Pew got in this poll. Two, the generations of people who grew up during the Cold War have a much stronger negative reaction to socialism than people of my generation. I think this is because by the time we were in elementary and middle school, the Cold War was over and there was no real need to keep the anti-Soviet propaganda flowing hard and fast. As such Millenials have been able to reassess these ideas in the wake of the latest economic crisis and come to a different conclusion than our predecessors, who were figuring things out with the aid of an education that was heavily slanted against left-wing thought.
Finally, I think it’s absolutely fascinating that while the true believing GOP members HATE socialism, they are much less enthusiastic about their support of capitalism. Some of these folk might be victims of the latest crisis, put out of work for no good reason and struggling to survive. They cleave to what they’ve been told and despise socialism, their own experiences show them that capitalism isn’t as wonderful as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh say it is. It might be possible to bring these people around to a different perspective through framing their experiences during the latest crisis in an anticapitalist fashion. Paradoxically, it might be easier to talk to them about socialism than some left-liberals. More on that later.
At any rate, there’s a couple of bright spots in this poll for me, but the one that I haven’t addressed yet is this one: despite how heavy and thick the rhetoric against left-wing thought has come from the Establishment, despite the lack of discussion of left-wing economic thought on news channels and talk shows, despite all of the howling and baying by the Koch-financed Tea Party about Obamacare as socialism and how evil socialism is…nothing has really shifted. The neoliberals running the show haven’t made any more inroads against the idea of economic democracy despite a concerted effort. As such I think it’s possible to start pushing back against them. It will take some time and it will be hard work, but I think by 2014 or 2016 at the latest you’ll see a significantly different political discussion taking place in society, one that includes genuinely left-wing thought.
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Posted: January 3, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, socialism, the economy | Tags: canada, caterpillar inc, CAW, labor union, organizing, politics, public policy, socialism, UAW, union |
Hey Caterpillar is highly profitable with a well-paid CEO there’s no reason for it to fricassee its employees.
Electro-Motive Diesel, which makes diesel-electric locomotives in London, Ont., has locked out more than 400 unionized workers after they refused to take a 50 per cent cut in wages and benefits.
The collective agreement between EMD and the Canadian Auto Workers Local 27 ran out at the end of 2011, and picket lines were set up at 6 p.m. Sunday.
EMD is owned by construction-equipment maker Caterpillar through its Progress Rail subsidiary. Caterpillar has a reputation for being tough on unions and waiting out long strikes.
Like virtually every bit of suffering the employing class heaps on the rest of us, this measure is totally unnecessary. Caterpillar has been astoundingly profitable for the past couple years, making $2.7 billion dollars in 2010 and it’s on track to obliterate that mark for 2011. There’s precisely sweet fuck all reason to do this other than naked profiteering and a desire to fuck over the poor. This is borne out by the motive for the lockout being a plan to move production back to the US at a shitty wage, an unorganized factory, and to take advantage of Buy American policies.
The real comedy of this farce comes from Prime Minister of Canada (and arch-rightist extraordinaire) Stephen Harper may have actually paid Caterpillar to buy this company through the Investments Canada Act only for Caterpillar to whip around and bite him in the ass by moving production out of country. If this is the case then this whole sordid story is another nail in the coffin of the public-private partnership as anything other than a transfer of wealth from the public sector into private coffers.
Good luck to the locked-out workers. I hope they beat these bastards.
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Posted: January 2, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, authoritarianism, commentary, politics | Tags: authoritarianism, economics, EU, europe, European Union, eurozone, organizing, politics, public policy |
Hey remember how one of the most repellant parts of authoritarian communism was forced labor? No? ME NEITHER!
Hundreds of thousands of jobless Hungarians could soon be told to dig ditches and sweep the streets under new government plans to tackle unemployment.
Gyozo Bara and his team start at 7.30 am.
A dozen men wielding chain saws are told to clear a dirt track leading from the village of Rozsaly to the Ukrainian border.
As trees and brambles are pulled back, discarded wood is thrown into large metal trailers dragged by tractors.
This is Hungary’s answer to unemployment.
Under a plan backed by parliament, thousands more jobless Hungarians could soon be told to do this kind of manual labour. If they refuse or don’t work hard enough, there will be no benefits to fall back on.
This is the kind of program that could work without coercion. Include training programs in it and up the wages to the prevailing wage, and I’d bet that they Fidesz government would struggle to have sufficient places in these kinds of programs, and it probably wouldn’t cost much more than what it already does, and it would skill-up the work force while pumping money into the economy at a level that’s necessary. It could be a great program, like the Civilian Conservation Corps was for the US. It could provide employment while building permanent infrastructure like flood control lakes or fire lookout towers that will provide benefits for Hungarian society for decades. It could do all of these things.
Instead, because Fidesz are reactionary antidemocratic authoritarians, it’s a weapon against the poor in Hungary. The thinking behind it, that people are culturally falling away from work and need to be forced back into the job market, is bullshit. People are falling away from work because there isn’t any work. It isn’t a cultural thing, it isn’t that these people are refusing to work and just sitting on public benefits because they are bad people, it’s that they don’t have employment and need money to feed their themselves and their family. And that some jumped-up prick supervisor can fire you from this forced labor job and deny you access to benefits by doing so brings this whole scheme to a level of disgusting that is shocking.
The kind of rhetoric that’s getting tossed around on the right whenever these inevitable crises come about is insane. It’s as if these people believe recessions are caused by a sudden increase of laziness in the culture and not, you know, by actual economic crises like a housing bubble popping or a sovereign default. I think they do this because they want no one to actually understand what causes recessions. Instead, parties like Fidesz (and the GOP) blame the victims of the recession and hope they get away with it long enough to victimize them even more by taking an axe to what tattered remains of welfare states there are left. It’d be funny if it wasn’t creating so much human suffering.
As I’ve said earlier, this act of war on the poor isn’t unique: it’s happening all across the West. Almost simultaneously to this, the Cameron government in the UK is looking like it’s trying to provoke rioting over lack of affordable shelter, either intentionally or unintentionally, and because like in Hungary, the opposition has no courage, it’ll basically go unanswered. So long as people remain at home, think they share any interests with the wealthy of their nation, and believe the existing political structures exist for any reason other than to help manage the affairs of the employing class, nothing will change.
So much for what hope I had last night. That didn’t take long.
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A Brief Reminder That Reformism Doesn’t Work
Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, politics, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, labor, labor union, neoliberalism, occupy wall street, organizing, privatization, public policy, reformism, socialism | Leave a comment »I didn’t write this but I really, really wish I had.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
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