Moment or Movement
Doug Henwood has put up an edited version of his panel discussion from Left Forum on his website. In it he discusses what is currently going on, in the bowels of Washington and in the minds of revolutionaries, with regard to the banking industry. We are not, he argues, on the brink of a revolutionary moment when the banks are seized and the means of production handed over to direct producers; what’s more, we are not seemingly even on the eve of a progressive movement, if the lack of mass protest and the insipid tea party movement are any indication.
Henwood makes some interesting remarks about how the radical movements of the 60s and 90s coming at the end of long boom decades while the downturns of the 50s and today seemingly have failed to produce a broadbased movement of people angry enough to take to the streets. What we have instead, he claims, is people hunkering down and longing for the status quo ante. Oh, and tea-bagging (which I find somewhat amusing on its multiple superficial levels, but most of all the whiteness of the white faces that are screwed up into a rage over taxation without representation).
Most interesting for me however, is the point that Henwood makes at the end of his paper about a “creeping socialism.” This sort of socialism is the kind that would start with a local association, say, purchasing an apartment building, setting up a cooperative ownership framework that allows people to buy in at a fixed rate, and serves to re-enter a bit of property into a sort of commons. Similar sorts of things could be done with all manner of the things required for life, from public utilities to groceries. Henwood claims that he suggests this sort of tactic with a bit of disappointment. But I don’t see why this is disappointing at all. Give that we’re already skipping around the vast piles of shit that a post-scarcity society produces, this seems an incredibly effective way to proceed. The fact that he has to qualify it, I think, points to an older divide in the leftist tradition on the nature of historical change. One side sees the world inverting in a moment, when finally this or that idol rears its head; the other sees change as an ebbing and flowing with the gradual pooling and dissolution of individual efforts.
I think that the two articles by Geoff Mann and Robin Blackburn in the most recent NLR are indicative of these strains, and I’m going to write something up demonstrating it. Broadly, I would call the respective sides idealistic and pragmatic. But more on that in a bit.
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By Jasper, 20 April, 2009 @ 7:21 pm
Not to say that one shouldn’t engage in such things, but what if one argued that such collective ownership schemes would lower the value of labor, and assist capital in stabilising the rate of exploitation? That is, isn’t it possible that the workers’ savings on such fixed rates would be essentially handed over to their employers?
By roger, 21 April, 2009 @ 11:43 am
Interesting article. But I think Henwood is wrong to discount discontent. I’m betting that, unless the laws of math change and/or everybody on Wall Street is suddenly seized with delusions of grandeur, the speculative side of the economy is going to keep shrinking drastically. And that sector is at the heart of the mangle of inequality. It is for a piece of the asset inflation pie that the median household traded a lower rate of income increase. The estimate is, now, something like 30 percent of that asset wealth is gone. And that wealth is the very basis of the median household’s expectation that the kids can go to college, that medical crises can be taken care of, and that retirement is possible. When such things start going up in smoke in six to eight months, the first result is not revolt in the streets. All the services - education, health care, retirement - are long term ‘goods’. Unfortunately, economists aren’t very good existentialists, or they would have a better grasp of the phenomenology of the long term. This isn’t just a quantitative metric - it is a qualitative one. Taking a collective hit on one’s long term prospects is more difficult to comprehend than some short term hit - like losing your job. So the effects of the hit will be slower. But they won’t be deferred forever.
This is not a crisis like, say, the Great Depression, partly cause we live at a much higher level of opulence, partly because the institutional investment in the financial sector was of a different type - for instance, union pension funds weren’t invested in hedgefunds back then. The interlacing of interests that was part of the “Great Moderation” had an economic and a political dimension. The political dimension was that it allowed the “financialization” of the economy to go forward as a sort of communal project.
Another difference with the 30s is, of course, that not only did the 20s throw into play the most successful revolution of the century - the Russian revolution - but that it wasn’t that far from the progressive era. Wilson, after all, presided over the end of the great reforms that had brought about income tax, the whole new structure of regulating commerce, the Fed, etc. The sixties are forty years ago - the 10s were a mere twenty years from the 30s.
In any case, I think we face a whole new set of problems - which are all gathered around deficit in real innovation in the face of a collective, global environmental crisis, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, for instance. We seem to have reached the end of exploiting the tech innovations that were all laid down in the 30s and forties - computing, audio/visual stuff, medicine - and we haven’t laid the groundwork for what is necessary now, going forward. This, in a way, amazes me. The bank crisis is minor compared to other crises we face, and we are exhausting all resources to essentially bring back the dead. Time Magazine’s announcement that he bank crisis is over notwithstanding, you can’t bring back the dead.
The nationalization talk, to me, has been sterile in the extreme. Who cares? What I’d like to see is the government use the money going to dead banks differently. If the fed can loan at 1 to 2 percent to giant banks so that they can buy t notes at 2 1/2 percent, why can’t the fed loan at 1 to 2 percent to you and me? That modality, through the healthy banks, of which there are thousands, would be relatively easy to emplace. It would, in effect, revive the credit lines of millions of households, allow them to pay down debt, and start reviving the only economy that counts - that of the producers.
By JCD, 21 April, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
Jasper: While I think there might be the case that having direct access to means of subsistence lowers the value of labor-power (for instance, Arrighi argues that the ability of Rhodesian peasants to produce some of their means of subsistence directly subsidized capital in a way, by lowering the value of labor-power), I don’t think that this is really an argument against the sort of organizing that would be characteristic of “creeping socialism.” In the first case, take housing: unless it became the dominant manner of housing workers, it would not lower the overall value of labor-power. It would just mean that those people who were able to situate themselves in such and such a way would have more value to play around with.
And in the second case, I’m not thinking only of doing only housing work. Housing, markets, etc. The point is to create a parallel structure for the maintenance of life, for social reproduction, through which people can work but which does not automatically, of its nature, turn that labor against them.
I also tend to think that if people did do this sort of organizing, and it did become widespread enough to affect the overall value-composition of labor-power, or whatever else, then there would be enough inertia built up to carry the rest of the legal apparatuses of capitalism over the cusp toward socialism.
By JCD, 21 April, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
Hey roger, I think you’re hitting on something with the notion of the qualitative hit that the burst bubble signifies. I know a lot of my parents’ friends — and my parents included — have lost a hell of a lot of money through the deflating stock market; retirement prospects don’t look so hot any more, and more than a handful have lost their homes. And these are people who are generally well off.
And they all talk about this sort of thing as if it were some inevitable, evil sea change in the American way of life. It’s a moment of existential crisis. Quite true.
I keep waiting for some clever senator to propose low-rate lending either directly to consumers or through some new facility created for that. It would seem intelligent. Or fund the sort of infrastructure improvements that are drastically needed — the highspeed rail in the midwest, I think, is a step in this direction.
I was expecting Geithner to get shitcanned this year, but I don’t know. Maybe if the markets start correcting themselves, then sure. But we’ve got this amazing coked up frenzy, and it hasn’t run out of fairy dust yet. Even with dismal 1st quarter earning reports.
Oh well!
By traxus4420, 21 April, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
hey jcd,
david harvey was also on board with the “creeping socialism” bit, with his updating of lefebvre and involvement with the right to the city movement. he also suggested experiments with community credit. i should have a post on the forum later tonight.
By Jasper, 21 April, 2009 @ 11:19 pm
JCD
I don’t know, frankly. I could see things going the way you discuss, provided they were connected to some kind of workers’ movement. But the proposal as I hear it sounds like a combination between a credit union and a co-op, both of which were widespread in the early 20th century and eventually became less than even faintly reformist. The danger, it seems, is not only that it lowers the value of labor-power (which you rightly point out would require the program to be very extensive), but that it transforms those who participate into owners of capital. And capital carries with it its own ideological baggage — worries about the value of the land they own, the soundness of the investments the association is making, etc. This is what happened with pensions (not to mention their union managers) which were originally conceived along these reformist lines. Don’t get me wrong: a credit union is better than a bank, and a low-income co-op is better than paying a landlord. We should support such efforts. But I don’t think it stands a chance of “creeping socialism” unless it’s connected to an anti-capitalist platform of some sort that involves the worker’s movement, immigrant rights, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, the whole shebang, etc., and that involves those who don’t earn enough to even participate in such a scheme.
By JCD, 22 April, 2009 @ 9:06 am
Traxus: I look forward to it. David Harvey is one of my favorite people.
Jasper: You are right, completely, about the need for a broader push against the macro-structures that allow capital to function as capital. The thing that I see this sort of action, that creeps socialism like kudzu (or, more likely, King’s Lomatia), providing is a material basis for post-capitalist forms. Capitalism didn’t appear out of a vaccuum; it was the result of particular efforts by the landed classes to shift certain political frameworks, like for example the change of rent obligations from fixed to what we might call a ‘market-based’ approach. This set in motion a dynamic that, in itself, didn’t give rise to the capitalism we know and love today, but it certainly helped with the process. These ‘creeping’ forms of socialism, which, if they are going to be productive, would have to be done and arranged by the people who would initially use them, not merely fabricated in one place and then transported elsewhere, would do two things: it would teach people how to tweak the frameworks that are already there in to working toward their own interests; and it would, hopefully, provide the sort of dynamic that migght, if leveraged correctly, move us beyond capitalism.
There’s more to say about this; but suffice to say that I agree that if the goal of were merely to give workers capital, this would be problematic. But I see these things are securing vital needs outside the market. Land trusts, etc. This could not be undertaken in the absence of a ‘global’ movement, but a global movement without a local(ly controlled, fashioned and administered) one is nothing to celebrate either.
By George, 23 April, 2009 @ 12:00 am
JCD — nice post. Help me out though: Do you think the divide between the older leftists vs. the newer ones is one about strategy? If the older leftists seem to cling to a revolutionary Event, via a mass organization of the industrial proletariat, we clearly have a problem, since so much of the US has lost that industrial proletariat. Yet if the issue is strategic, and if the working classes are seen as the gravediggers for the capitalist classes, coming to terms with who exactly is the working class seems to have a lot of importance too. Harry Cleaver seems to broaden up the notion of the working class to everyone who contributes to the production of surplus value as the capitalist classes continue to control it. So issues about core and periphery rear their heads as well. Older leftists seems to mock him, contending that his version of autonomous Marxism is meaningless and wants to glorify peasant insurrections as working class organization (read: industrial proletariats), etc. They see it is basically reactionary moments of capitalist social relations. I have a hard time sorting through all this, personally.
Yet it seems to me that Cleaver’s broadening is worth considering if we want to, employing the Gramscian term, build counter hegemonic blocs: we need to analyze who constitutes the working class in the reproduction of capital and how they can be tactically and strategically organized or how they can engage in creating a “creeping socialism” as you put it. But there’s so little that I come across in this. How does one, say, organize the white collar workers who contribute to the reproduction of capital with the other kinds of workers? How does one organize teachers against the class contradictions of the university? How do we deal with the New Economy people, etc.? There seems to be very little said about this, or at least I haven’t come across any such considerations that are not outright dismissive. Any thoughts?
By George, 23 April, 2009 @ 3:23 am
I came across an article by Stan Goff that seems interesting. While I’m not sure of overall trajectory sought by Goff, he focused on something interesting in the formation of suburbia in the US: “The latter is politically significant because political power is organized spatially, with voting precincts at the most local level, followed by various subdivisions, beginning with school board districts. People are dispersed for their work, which no longer then corresponds to locally-consolidated and personally-networked political interests.”
The spatial analysis of workers is quite interesting especially of those middle class workers that are forced out of certain proximities afforded to them in order to organize. If we contrast the middle classes in America with many of the Hispanic populations and many of the lower classes working populations, many of them have been gentrified into close proximity, which makes organizing, in some respects, easier:
“When the labor movement was at its most effective in the United States, workers and working class families were concentrated both on the job and in the residential concentrations specifically built to house workers near these points of production. With the dispersion of workplaces, and the even more dramatic dispersion of living space, and the growing non-correspondence between work and residence, many solidarities were spatially disassembled. We then saw a concurrent (and I would argue, causal) free-fall of union density in the US. Certainly, other factors, such as anti-union policies and laws, as well as the dramatic off-shoring of certain manufacturing production over the last two decades, are determinative as well. But union organizing doesn’t primarily happen on the job. It happens on house visits. When those houses are dispersed over hundreds of square miles even around a single point of production, that constitutes an exponential increase in the difficulty and expense (in time, energy, and money) of something as simple yet critical as the organizers’ house visits.”
But the spatial divisions no longer offer the kind of proximal organization for many of the middle class workers in America. Many of the immigrant communities from Asia are scattered and dispersed all over the United States (with all sorts of issues tied to visas, immigration issues, lack of ability to vote, etc.) makes it harder for them to organize, given that many of them also are forced (especially after multiple layoffs) to travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from their residential areas. Many of these immigrant communities, I’ve noticed, also the ones to get the ax in their jobs and suffer many traumatic consequences that American citizens don’t normally suffer, even if they suffer similar displacements. All this makes for increasingly difficult modes of organizing, alienation amongst the workers, etc.
I think a spatial analysis of these factors might prove quite relevant if any tactical and strategic ways of organizing can be effective. We no longer have as many localized workers, situated around certain sites of work, but workers who are constantly displaced and uprooted.
By George, 23 April, 2009 @ 3:23 am
The article by Goff, btw, is here.
By Nate, 8 May, 2009 @ 1:29 am
hey JCD,
I think the time/pace of change is one way to cash out the differences in different lefty accounts of change. I’d like to suggest another difference. What do we prioritize? In the relatively short term building and maintaining self-managed forms of use value production or building and maintaining organizations to exert power against employers and the state through direct confrontations? I don’t think we have to make an absolute choice between the two (presumably people who work at co-ops can still go to demonstrations and blockades, and all people engage in some level of self-managed use value production to some degree [brushing their teeth, say] because full commodification is only asymptotic), but I do think organizations need to pick what to put the bulk of their time into. Building mass organizations rather than co-ops is to my mind by far the more important. This is also totally compatible with a creeping kudzu kind of thing like you suggest, in terms of its pace (this was basically the view of many people in the IWW in its early 20th century heyday).
cheers,
Nate