The quote below from Tom Engelhardt is indicative of the weird
reactionary shell shocked state of the American left after 7 years of a
black man in the White House. We are in the United States in 2016, 60
years after CIA coup in Iran installed the Shah’s torture state, 40
years after the Vietnam War ended, 30 years after Ronald Reagan’s bloody
wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and a decade after George W. Bush’s
excellent adventure in Iraq began. And poor Tom is astounded to find
that the US engages military interventions all over the world now:
And yet, true as all that may be, Washington increasingly seems like a new land, sporting something like a new system
in the midst of our much-described polarized and paralyzed politics.
The national security state doesn’t seem faintly paralyzed or polarized
to me. Nor does the Pentagon. On certain days when I catch the news, I
can’t believe how strange and yet humdrum this uncharted new territory
is. Remind me, for instance, where in the Constitution the Founding
Fathers wrote about that national security state? And yet there it is in
all its glory, all its powers, an ever more independent force in our
nation’s capital. In what way, for instance, did those men of the
revolutionary era prepare the ground for the Pentagon to loose its spy
drones from our distant war zones over the United States? And yet, so it has. And
no one even seems disturbed by the development. The news, barely
noticed or noted, was instantly absorbed into what’s becoming the new
normal.
By GOLLY! We were just sitting in our New
England town meeting, posing for the Norman Rockwell painting and
thinking of taking Suzie to the Malt-Shop after the game, when we
realized this terrible black guy Obama had unleashed the Empire Drones!
What’s a hard working white working class hero to do? Faint? Flex a
bicep? “Remind me, for instance, where in the Constitution the Founding Fathers wrote about that national security state?“
By Gad! The Founding Fathers wanted to live in peace with Native
Americans and help African Americans form labor unions and worker
collectives. The USA didn’t even fight an undeclared war in nearby
Tunisia until 1801. And now poor Tom has discovered:
It seems that if the US puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet — and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries — that’s excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the “imminent” threat of their attack.
Faith
and Begorrah! Someone fetch Father Tom a brandy. It seems as if any day
now the US will put advisers in Philippines and intervene militarily -
oh wait that was 1900 - or in Guatemala - oh wait, that was 1950 - or
Costa Rica - wait that was 1850 - or Russia (1920), or Argentina (1970s)
or Greece (1950s) or Haiti (1920) or Japan (1850s) or …
Since
Obama took office, the US Right has repeatedly pitched fits that Obama
would President while black. I would never suggest that the shock and
horror the US Left has for stuff the US has been doing forever is caused
by the same unease that having a black guy in the Oval Office has
induced in the right. I mean these are enlightened people.
I sit in one of the dives/
On Fifty-second Street/
Uncertain and afraid/
As the clever hopes expire/
Of a low dishonest decade:/
Waves of anger and fear/
Circulate over the bright/
And darkened lands of the earth, - Auden
Henry Wallace. Speech delivered at Progressive Party Rally, New York, N. Y., September 10, 1948. From Vital Speeches of the Day (October 1, 1948), v. 14, n. 24, p. 743.
Just two years ago I spoke to many thousands of you who are here tonight. I said then as I say tonight that peace is the basic issue of the 1948 election campaign. I say now that the first job of national defense: the most important job in maintaining the peace is the job of conquering hate here at home, the job of protecting the civil rights of all Americans. I had been South before—many times—and I thought I understood the plight of our Negro citizens. But I discovered last week that my understanding was only the limited understanding; the sympathetic feeling of a friend for a man who is afflicted.
To me fascism is no longer a second-hand experience—a motion picture, a photograph or the deeply moving words of a great writer. It is no longer a mere definition of an economic and political system in which freedom is stifled by private power; in which prejudices are bred and nourished; in which man is set against man for the profit of powerful and greedy forces. No, fascism has become an ugly reality—a reality which I have tasted.
I have tasted it neither so fully nor so bitterly as millions of others. But I have tasted it. And in tasting it I have reinforced my solemn resolution to fight it wherever and whenever it appears so long as I live. Last week—when I had a chance to live—to live very briefly and relatively mildly—the kind of life which millions of Americans live every waking hour, last week I learned what prejudice and hatred can mean. I learned to know the face of violence, although I was spared the full force of violence. I saw the ugly reality of how hate and prejudice can warp good men and women; turn Christian gentlemen into raving beasts; turn good mothers and wives into jezebels.
I didn’t like that part of what I saw. I didn’t like to see men and women fall victims to the catchwords of prejudice and the slogans of hate, even as the poor people of Germany were victimized by the catchwords and slogans of Hitler and Streicher.
Try this thought experiment: An evil (of course) US corporate CEO gathers with his board and proposes that to reduce labor costs and stick it to the union, they move manufacturing to China or India.
Of course, this kind of thing happened repeatedly in the USA over the last 30 years or so. But try imagining the same plot in 1960 or 1970. Move manufacturing to some backyard iron foundry in a People’s Commune or to a village without electricity in distant India? The board would have bundled Whateverhisname III off to some mental hospital right away. What happened in the late 1970s and on was a massive change in (1) technology particularly communications and transport (like container shipping) making it easier to manage production at a distance and move goods by sea and (2) more importantly, massive changes in both India and China. India, just 20 years after evicting the UK colonial administration, created an industrial base and a spectacular engineering education system that produced skilled workers in vast number. China’s revolution against Maoism unleashed giant wave of factory construction, commercial activity, and a rapid move up the “value chain” in many sectors. Those countries suddenly changed the game. US CEOs who did not seriously consider moving manufacturing or off-shoring in some way found their companies in serious trouble with competitors who did.
This story is completely different from the one that leftist anti-neoliberal theorists tell. In their telling, the wonderful social bargain of New Deal America - high wages, unionization, white picket fences, June Cleaver making meat loaf in kitchen of her FHA home, etc. - was rudely interrupted by greedy corporate elites who decided to ruin everything in order to crush the working classes. In this telling China and India are without agency to use the terminology: apparently the technical and economic advance of those countries was called into being by Western Corporate Elites - the people who really make history.
I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.
[Harvey]
For Harvey, “corporate capitalist class” means “US/European corporate capitalist class”. Similarly, many leftist theorists mean “white male working class in the US/Europe” when they say “working class”. Little Deng Xioping doesn’t appear in this narrative, let alone the Chinese peasants who organized hand labor shoe and button factories that then started making shoe making machinery or the founders of the Indian Institutes of Technology or the workers or managers of Tata. Even worse, the actions and reactions of working class Americans - the heroic long struggle of African-Americans, the violent reaction of white Americans to the civil rights struggle, the Feminist movement and its effect on economic organization and social values - none of that matters in Harvey’s tale in which all agency is located with western “corporate elites”.
And the history is made up anyways. You don’t have to go the sad glorification of Jim Crow America to see that - you can just look at the story of corporate America breaking its supposed agreement with labor in the 1970s.
With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor […] — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor. - Harvey
The search for low wage labor didn’t start in the late 1960s. In 1952, freshman US Senator John F Kennedy gave an impassioned speech about the relocation of manufacturing from the Northeast to lower wage non-unionized southern states that is still worth reading. David Nobel’s book, Forces of Production, documents how many corporations sacrificed profits and de-optimized production to weaken the bargaining position of skilled labor in early 1960s. Capitalism is an evolving system - something Marx influenced analysts used to take for granted.
Both nostalgia and conspiracy are hallmarks of reactionary ideologies. Those are the foundations of a major branch of contemporary leftist ideology. For reasons discussed here US leftism has become a right wing ideology.
Most working class Americans will vote for Hillary Clinton but white people, particularly white men, will likely remain the base of the Republicans and the right thanks to racism. The civil rights movement and the (qualified) support of that movement by Lyndon Johnson and liberal Democrats and Northeastern Republicans, generated a massive reaction. In the 1968 Mayoral election in NYC, the liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay faced a strong challenge from “law-and-order” Democrats:
Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama strongly praised the New York primary day results, which he described as “the rising up against limousine liberals,” using Mr. Procaccino’s term for Mr. Lindsay and his friends. “The people of the country are sick and tired of the breakdown of law and order,” said Mr. Wallace, who often pointed to the connection between such breakdowns and an insufficient willingness to be hard on black residents. He noted that the winning New York candidates – Mr. Marchi and Mr. Procaccino – won by making the same speeches that the Governor had made in Alabama, “except that they had New York accents.’‘ NYTimes.
Those same themes: the out-of-touch liberal elites, the limousine liberals, the breakdown of authority, and the often coded resentment of black Americans is still a staple of Republican rhetoric, except that Trump doesn’t bother to code anymore. The same themes show up in left wing and even progressive stories, except that instead of a breakdown of law-and-order we see claims of an embrace of “neoliberal” economics and a supposedly willful abandonment of the working class. But most working class voters support the Democrats, so what the “left” means is what the right means - that the important part of the working class is white. That’s a fundamental problem in the US left - its alienation from and opposition to the interests of the racially mixed US working class. Essentially the “left” has internalized George Wallace’s attacks on liberals and dressed it up in pseudo-Marxist terminology.
How does the left cope with the actual Democratic program - which is far from market fundamentalism, featuring policies like free community college, infrastructure investment, tax fairness (to reduce programs that shift the weight of taxation to poorer people), limits on predator payday loans and financial cheating of ordinary people, and the like? They pretend it’s not there or superficial or “just words” and essentially explain the appeal of Democrats to the non-Confederate working class in the same terms as the far right does - as pandering to those secondary issues of minorities. “Identity politics” is just a newer term for George Wallace’s argument that Democrats were sacrificing the well being of white people to blacks.
Even during the height of the actual Democratic “neoliberal” acendency, the acendency of New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council, and “market friendly” policies - during the Bill Clinton administration, the Democrats were a long way from market fundamentalism. Bill Clinton presided over massive expansion of EITC which is essentially reverse income tax for the working poor, SCHIP - Hillary Clinton’s child healthcare, increased minimum wage, direct lending for college, higher medicare taxes, … The worst policies implemented during Bill Clinton’s terms were those pushed by Republicans that Clinton was too weak to stop.
But this reality is too complex and too off script for our left - so we get a steady diet of “neoliberal blah blah” and out-of-touch liberal elites who fail to appreciate the down to earth world of the white working class.
