In the stark aftermath of the mid-term elections, this is Robert Reich drumming up hope and change: “It’s the choice of the century.” And: “Democrats have less than two years to make it.”
Haven’t we heard that before in every mid-term and presidential election for decades past? And of course we heard the even more urgent version in the run up to these mid-term elections, when Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders all got the memo from MoveOn to ask for three dollar donations. Three, not five. Yes, they asked repeatedly, urgently, earnestly. I know, because I read all the emails MoveOn sends me, and can barely believe my eyes.
Well, the “dark money” won, if we keep a narrow view of present partisan politics. Three dollar donations could not match the “free speech” of billionaires and corporate accounts. On this subject of free speech and the “free market,” even some notable civil libertarians are under the influence of the ruling ideas of the ruling class. Certainly the contradictions of capitalism percolate even into the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. As Joe Nocera noted in the November 8 issue when writing of Ira Glasser, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, “Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.”
I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, but the “free market” is eroding independent media and democracy alike. Even when President Obama spoke in favor of net neutrality, he was not simply moved by conscience but also by waves of civil libertarian protest from citizens across the political spectrum. Net neutrality is a complex issue, but the crux of the matter is keeping the internet as close as possible to a truly public sphere.
There are immense market pressures to monetize as much of the internet as possible, so that profit would once again trump the public interest. My real vote as a citizen is often cast as a message in a bottle on the waves of the internet. I have no illusions that such a vote counts much in our present Congress. But one plus one plus one adds up to a real sum even on the internet, and even a president of thoroughly corporatist convictions could not ignore public opinion in the case of net neutrality.
The Democrats and Republicans keep each other in business. That is also a contradictory story, however. Even in the degraded and anti-democratic state of American elections, living wage campaigns made strong gains among voters in the mid-term elections. Underground streams of class consciousness have sprung into daylight once again, and new class struggles already break across the boundaries of the capitalist parties.
President Obama and his party were rightly punished for their cowardly concessions to militarists and ultra-nationationalists, to those “soldiers of fortune” in corporate offices, and to those racist demagogues who wish to build a Berlin Wall of wage slavery along our southern border. The ruling class knows the drill of Good Cops Vs. Bad Cops, of course. So with one hand they hire migrant labor, and with the other hand they smash labor unions. The generosity and severity of the ruling class is a contradictory unity, but remains class rule under either aspect.
The Democrats burn incense in memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Roosevelt might as well be a mummy in a pyramid. A good half or more of Roosevelt’s courage came from a militant labor movement, and on that point Roosevelt himself had no illusions. To save the ruling class (of which Roosevelt was a member), he was willing to try a patchwork of social democratic reforms. But both corporate parties have labored to dismantle the New Deal over the past forty years, and it was Bill Clinton who was the Deregulator in Chief among bipartisan colleagues.
Campaign finance reform, anyone? Sure, why not! Though that idea remains as utopian as “representative democracy” unless we, the people, make both a political and an economic revolution.
The politicians of the Democratic Party are swinging the wrecking ball of their own careerism against all the illusions of “capitalist democracy.” This is one of the moments when the ruling class performs the labors of Hercules to advance class conscious rebellion, if only we pay attention.
In his article, Robert Reich lamented the fact that even the career Democrats ran away from their party’s leader, Barack Obama. In Reich’s words, “Some Democrats even ran on not being Barack Obama.” Yeah, they did. And they had the example of Obama himself, the candidate of hope and change who beat the Clintons at their own game of triangulation. Obama extended the reach of state surveillance, even as he extended drone wars over the globe. He even picked up a Nobel Peace Prize along the way, and gave an acceptance speech reminding the world that he is not, in fact, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Because an Ivy League hipster or a sclerotic “progressive” may have forgotten.
Reich says that career Democrats pursued a losing strategy by turning against their party’s leader, as though party discipline could substitute for ideas and principles. Surely that misses the more brutal point that the Republicans are the party of “big ideas,” even if the ideas are retrograde, and that the Democrats are the party of deadbeat futurism. Hope, change, upwards, onwards: the program of the Democratic Party is an ideological gym class, promising the endless growth of “the middle class,” if each and every one of us just gets our entrepreneurial muscles pumping.
“For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.” So wrote Walter Benjamin in 1929, and the subject of his essay was surrealism. For Benjamin, surrealism was a moment in the cultural avant-garde that bordered upon class conscious rebellion.
Reich quite correctly says that Americans are being offered “more jobs” at lousy wages. In Reich’s words, “Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere.” On that point alone he and I share a common premise, but we diverge again in all practical conclusions. Including specifically partisan conclusions.
Hope springs infernal in Reich’s heart for some new huckster of hope and change. Such partisan illusions always prove especially hellish precisely for the poor, for the working class, and even for members of the middle class furious at being proletarianized. Middle class backlash is one of the classic sources of outright fascism.
In this dangerous situation, democratic socialists do not argue that the state can pull middle class rabbits from a hat till kingdom come. No, but neither are we enemies of small businesspersons nor of the truly popular markets found round the world. A republic founded upon a federation of free community councils— namely, councils of workers, neighbors and citizens— is not a totalitarian project. The growth of democracy includes greater democracy in daily life, in the economy, and in elections.
If Obama wanted to give Reich a bully pulpit, he would have hired him. Instead, Obama surrounded himself with Wall Street oligarchs and “free market” soothsayers. Likewise, if Obama gave a damn about neo-Keynesian nostrums, he would have hired Paul Krugman by now as well.
If voters must choose between the stale dope of the Democrats and the bathtub gin of the Republicans, plenty of voters will still prefer the bathtub gin. Then again, some citizens value democracy so highly that we will reserve our vote as a peaceful weapon against the corporate state.
Likewise, hope springs infernal if we imagine that Warren (already a savvy careerist), or Sanders (the single avowed socialist in Congress, elected as an Independent), or some other eleventh hour Messiah can salvage the Democratic Party. No, life is too precious and too damn short to rehearse that script one more time. It is entirely possible, of course, that Reich, Sanders and Warren will be panhandling among “progressives” in the near future, so that Hillary (or some other Clintonista) can run in 2016. Maybe they will get really ambitious and ask for five bucks a pop. In this manner “progressives” give progress a bad name.
They will, of course, demand a “positive program” from the independent and democratic left, a program that would persuade even the gods to suspend the laws of gravity. In other words, the sleazy tactic of such “progressives” is to demand a utopian program from socialists, and then to offer the counsel of elder statesmen: We can’t get there from here. Why bother, indeed, to wave a red flag in front of “progressives” committed to the regressive class warriors of their chosen capitalist party? No, we are not obliged to deliver a manifesto to the CEOs and to the Commander in Chief. We are obliged, first and foremost, to live our brief lives on earth doing less harm to each other, and more good as we break our own bad habits.
They want a conversation? Not on my dime or my time, unless the conversation begins among friends, comrades and neighbors I trust. I do not trust the career politicians of the capitalist parties. With the great majority of workers and citizens (in any party whatsoever, or in no party at all), democratic socialists are glad to build open bridges of communication. But our mode of communication with the ruling class is an open class struggle, by peaceful means whenever and wherever possible. We do not expect any modern state to do us the favor of collapsing like the Czarist regime, nor will we do the ruling class the favor of jumping into open graves.
Any reform that is not won in a class conscious manner can also be taken back more easily by the ruling class. In the wide span of history, that is why social memory often proves to be the indispensable political capital of the international socialist movement, no matter how heavily the corporate state may depend upon censorship and on smashing labor unions.
Ruling classes of all countries, unite! That is the real program of capitalist internationalism, though all programs of “free trade” grind against each other like tectonic plates, until the rifts and fractures of the global class system surface in earthquakes, in recurrent imperial rivalries and wars. That is why the beheadings under the Saudi regime are barely worth a mention on the nightly news, whereas the beheadings by the troops of ISIS are worth drone strikes. Even within the borders of one country, the ruling class is inevitably riven by rivalries. In the field of “free elections,” however, the factions of the ruling class defend the central dogma of the “free market,” and even define democracy only within the bounds of their class rule.
When we do not vote for the parties of their choice, naturally they imagine we have nothing in mind for the future but outright nihilism. Here’s a clue, if only they might detect it: take a serious look at the program of the Green Party, which is an ecological form of social democracy. Or go for outright (small d) democratic socialism and consider the program of the Socialist Party, which is both homegrown and internationalist. Or indeed pay attention to the socialist who was elected to Seattle City Council, Kshama Sawant. Seattle voters put a deadbeat Democrat out of business, and voted for fifteen bucks an hour (and for Sawant) instead. If my vote had counted in Seattle, no red-baiting would have prevented me from voting for Sawant as well. She won fair and square by democratic means, though class conscious democracy goes far beyond any single party or campaign.
The notion that radicals have no positive and practical policies is convenient for the ruling class. But a positive program, no matter how fine the party may be, is never a substitute for the daily class conscious actions of workers and citizens against the corporate state. No friction, no traction. Class struggles can, of course, be conducted in the most peaceful forms of solidarity, within and beyond all national borders. Above all, any party program (no matter how solid, no matter how fine tuned) is worthless without the determination to live our lives in open rebellion against corporate dictators.
Not one cent and not one vote for the parties of war and empire! Before there can be any practical fruits of positive thinking, every class conscious struggle against the corporate state also demands the power of negative thinking. Congress is now the front office of the ruling class, and that cannot change in the course of the next big election. But their “two party system” has no textual authority in the Constitution, and is much less an act of God. That system is all too human, and may drag the world into a new era of barbarism, plunder of nature, and imperial slaughter.
The ruling class claims the power to command what we must think and become. Therefore we must reclaim the power to think beyond those commands, and to become living contradictions of the ruling class. When the great majority of working people overrule the ruling class, then the former rulers may also learn to earn an honest living. At every moment of resistance, hope indeed springs eternal in every class struggle. In the practical political battle against ruling class “pragmatism,” we the people have a world to win. Practice makes perfect. Begin small, begin here, begin now.
