A Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left

[blindpig]

The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left

LESSON # 1: BEYOND LAISSEZ-FAIRE MYTHOLOGY: STATE POLICY FOR WHOM?

The Left Hand vs. the Right Hand of the State

Over the last generation, dominant U.S. neoliberal ideology has set up a fantasy struggle between the allegedly evil state and the supposedly virtuous (and supposedly free) "free market." At the radical extremes, the reigning ideology's proponents have proclaimed a desire to "starve the beast" and "cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" (Grover Norquist). Beneath quasi-libertarian discourse about the epic conflict between "stultifying government bureaucracy" (bad) and "free market" capitalism (good), however, neoliberalism's corporate sponsors and beneficiaries have unfailingly sought to wield and profit from government policy of a particular sort. Consistent with a state-capitalist Western profits system and corporate order that has always relied heavily on government protection and assistance, they have only targeted some parts of the public sector for malnourishment.

snip

LESSON # 2: WHAT IS SOCIALISM?

A second and intimately related lesson Left progressives can seize upon in the Age of Obama pertains to the definition of "socialism." As capitalism's high priests and policymakers have scrapped more than three decades of neoliberal orthodoxy to save and stabilize the profits system, "socialism" has moved into the nation's mainstream political discourse for the first time in a generation. On one hand, the Republican right and its still ferocious media machine (primarily FOX News and talk radio) has preposterously "smeared" Obama, Inc. as a "socialist" (a key component of the McCain-Palin campaign's case against the Democratic presidential ticket). On the other hand, mainstream "liberal" pundits and experts have come to the defense of "socialism" by proclaiming the need for a "new era of big government" in the wake of "free market capitalism's" crisis. Last February, the leading news magazine Newsweek published a cover proclaiming that "We Are All Socialists Now." <14> Last fall, of course, U.S. voters elected as president a man widely accused of being "a socialist."

snip

LESSON # 3: THE BIPARTISAN NATURE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE AND INEQUALITY, INC.

Among the different reasons to be glad the Democrats won the elections last year, one merits special ironic consideration. It is that the Democratic Party (once aptly described by former Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips as "history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party") is best exposed as a leading institutional agent of empire, inequality, and "corporate-managed democracy" (the late Alex Carey's useful term) when it holds top offices. Democrats find it easier to deceptively and co-optively pose as the "party of the people" <20> and a progressive alternative to corporate-imperial rule (and the Republicans) when they are out of power. They are more clearly revealed as disingenuous and inadequate tribunes of the ordinary working people they so passionately (during campaign seasons) claim to represent when they hold the balance of elected office and then (quite naturally given the corporate and military's domination of the political and policy processes in the U.S.) fail to deliver on popular hopes and dreams they've ridden and/or raised on the road to office. They are less able to hide their essential identity as the other business and empire party when they sit atop the political system. That's when the hot rubber of their populist- and peaceful- sounding campaign rhetoric hits the cold pavement of corporate-imperial governance. As the clever Marxist writer Doug Henwood noted in the spring of 2008: "There's no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world - more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He'll deliver little of that - but there's evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed." Further:

snip

LESSON # 4: THE DEEPER RACISM

The Age of Obama also promises to deliver related teach-able lessons on the maddening persistence of racism in American life. It creates a potentially fertile moment for understanding racism in the deeper institutional and socioeconomic sense in which the actual Left has generally always understood it.

snip

LESSON # 5: THE "URGENT TASK" BEYOND THE MADDENING CORPORATE-CRAFTED CANDIDATE-CENTERED QUADRENNIAL ELECTION TRAP

The depressing but predictable - and predicted <23> - corporate, imperial, and race-neutralist record of the Obama administration is also a graphic object lesson in the limits of the what the noted left social critic Charles Derber calls <24> "the election trap": the belief that serious progressive change is mainly about voting for the least objectionable candidate in the nation's corporate-run big money narrow-spectrum candidate-centered election spectacles. Wrong. Such change is more fundamentally about the difficult work of building and expanding grassroots social movements and capacities beneath and beyond the fake egalitarianism of U.S. "dollar democracy" and its carefully staggered, highly staged ballot rituals.

http://www.antemedius.com/content/dawning-age-obama-potentially-teach-able-moment-left

Plenty more there, I've just posted the 1st paragraph of each point.

[clear eye]

1. Norquist is neo-conservative not "neo-liberal".

As unpleasant as the neo-liberal philosophy of untrammeled global capital is, it does not include drastic shrinking of gov't. I don't know who Paul Street is, but seems to me he needs to study up a little more before he attempts to teach others.

His main contentions aren't exactly earth-shattering either, and have been made prominently on DU a number of times in the past: Two parties both captive of mega-corporations; change will have to come from w/o. I always hate false dichotomies in activism. When two important things have to be done, it only squelches precious energy to start a battle w/ those working on one of them by saying, "What really has to be done is --------". (Fill in the blank w/ whatever the other crucial item is.) In this article Mr. Street discards election integrity reform and claims that only outside social movements have worth (as though the two were mutually exclusive).

The latest thing is for everyone to make up their own term for something that already has a name in political science. He calls it corporate-imperialist rule. The actual term for this is "fascism", and it doesn't need another, less-offensive name. Speaking of names, the term "socialist" has lost its sting in places like Vermont, but Street is way out of touch if he thinks that Obama was elected nationwide b/c people in most of the U.S. no longer fear it. This may come about in the future as people become more desperate, but what happened in the last Presidential election is that most folks rightly thought calling Obama a "socialist" was just electoral hyperbole.

I'd be more interested in reading about the nitty gritty of activism and what comes next, than a rather lame rehash of the problems.

[Romulox]

2. I see *zero* evidence that neocons are concerned with shrinking of government...

The distinction you attempt to draw exists exclusively in rhetoric. Bush/Cheney did not shrink the government one whit, nor did they make any attempt to do so.

You might argue that neoconservatism is more bellicose than neoliberalism, but the Obama doctrines tends to strongly negative that argument, too. Face it: neoconservatism and the form of aggressive neo-liberalism practiced by modern adherents are indistinguishable.

[readmoreoften]

6. Neoliberalism is just another term for laissez-faire capitalism. It has nothing to do with

social policy "liberalism"; as far as I understand the term and how its been used for the past decade, it's referring to liberal (laissez faire) economics. The neocons are all neoliberals, just a particular strain.

[Romulox]

7. Actually, that's not entirely correct...

It's not right to say the two senses of the term have nothing to do with one another; the terms are historically related, but there has been a divergence.

"as far as I understand the term and how its been used for the past decade, it's referring to liberal (laissez faire) economics."

The second part is correct, the first part is not; the sense of "liberalism" meaning "laissez faire" considerably predates the use of the term to mean "leftist".

"The neocons are all neoliberals, just a particular strain."

Right, but the "New Democrats" are also uniformly neoliberals. There's a great deal of preoccupation on this site to try to find any distinction between the "New Democrat" ideology (dominated by a singular focus on neoliberal economics) and "neoconservatism". My point is that the newfound bellicosity of the "New Democrats" erases much of this distinction. So while the "neocons" are a specific variant of war-like neolibs, so are "New Dems".

[amborin]

8. well neo-liberals advocate no gov't interference in markets....

[blindpig]

3. kick

[maryf]

4. K&R

Excellent!

[maryf]

5. Another kick

worth it if 5 more people see it!