First World Problems

Bernie Sanders is probably one of the better members of the Senate, though it should never be forgotten how low the bar is.  A lot of my liberal Democratic friends post fiery quotations from him, like the one above, or from Elizabeth Warren, which apparently make them feel good but show the limitations of their politics.

It happened that I noticed the meme above while I'm reading David J. Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Regime (Zero Books, 2013).  Blacker is a philosopher, and Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Delaware.  I hadn't heard of him until this book was mentioned in connection with the University of Illinois' firing of Professor Steven Salaita.  I ordered an e-book copy, and so far (about 60 pages in) I'm enjoying it.  The technical language might put off some readers, and I admit that at first I wasn't sure Blacker was going to deliver the goods of substantial analysis, but that changed quickly.

Let us stipulate, say, that there is greed on Wall Street.  There "greed is good," in fact, as says Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko in 1987's Wall Street.  But bankers and people in general have always been greedy.  Did they suddenly get more greedy in the 1990s when the subprime housing crisis was brewing and the many "innovative" speculative strategies were being rolled out?  It is logically possible that there was some mass alteration of human nature a couple of decades ago but this possibility seems so remote that it serves as a reductio ad absurdum of the "greed" hypothesis  [5*]...

A precondition for any Marxist [or, I would add, systemic and structural - DM] analysis of the financial crisis is that it is not ultimately caused by individual bad actors such that we could punish the culprits and/or re-regulate the banks and all will be well again ...  While deregulation certainly hastened the crisis and so is highly germane to any analysis of the late domination of the economy by the financial sector, it still begs the question, why?   Why the neoliberal zeal for deregulation or, perhaps one should say, why did this simple market idolatry suddenly become so appealing to so many? ... Why the rise of the neoliberal matrix in the first place? [59] ...

But humility also requires one to recognize the inadequacy of system-preserving proposed remedies like reining in personal greed, merely re-calibrating the regulatory parameters on finance or even redistributing corporate profits.  All of these may be fine things to do and defensible ad hoc in context, but piecemeal melioristic approaches share the unfortunate assumption that the extant underlying forces of production are static and legitimate [60].

The tendency of wealth to concentrate upwards isn't a bug, it's a feature of capitalism, along with the business cycle, bubbles and crises of the kind we saw in 2008.  My only quibble with Blacker is that he doesn't mention (I assume he knows) that these are also features of state-capitalist industrialization in nominally socialist countries like the former Soviet Union and present-day China.  The passages I quoted from Raymond Williams in these posts, along with Chris Harman's analysis in Zombie Capitalism (which Blacker cites, so he knows), pointed me in he right direction.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist, but he's the kind of socialist that Obama Democrats can get behind.  Like Warren (but also like Rand Paul from another political position), he's isolated.  He can safely denounce the corruption of the plutocrats, but if he looked to be making any real progress toward structural change, Obama himself (or Hillary Clinton, or whoever succeeds Obama) would attack him and try to bring him down, and Obama's devotees would regard him as they regard someone like Michael Moore.

*I'm not sure about the accuracy of page numbers; I'm quoting from an e-book that supposedly has "real" page numbers, so I hope that anyone who refers to a print copy will be able to find the passages I'm quoting.

If It Isn't One Thing, It's Another

Amazing how things happen to keep me from writing.  Today it was driving a friend to Indianapolis for an appointment with his lawyer.  Well worth doing, and I enjoy driving, but it did throw a spanner into my plans for the day.  But while I was waiting for him in the lawyer's office, I read further in a book I'd begun reading yesterday, Arundhati Roy's Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books, 2009).  Somehow I've failed to keep up with her books, which is inexcusable: she writes clearly, even beautifully, with lots of useful information, and the books aren't very long.  But this one slipped under my radar.  (On the other hand, her books often appear under different titles, which can be confusing.  This one, for example, has also been published with the subtitle and title reversed -- Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy.  Her fine book on the "Maoist" guerrillas has appeared as Walking with the Comrades and as Broken Republic.)

I imagine most people who've heard of Roy know her as the author of the novel The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, and perhaps they wonder why Roy hasn't written any more lovely novels.  The short answer is that she's been writing lovely but infuriating non-fiction about political injustice in India, though she situates her native country in the international system, and much of what she writes is every bit as relevant to US politics as to India.  (Which is why Ian Buruma published a scurrilous attack on her after the September 11 attacks, accusing her of all manner of all anti-American thoughtcrime and forfeiting the respect I'd had for him up till then.)

For example, "Of course there is a difference between a politics that openly, proudly preaches hatred and a politics that slyly pits people against each other" (63). She's talking about India, but she could be talking about our own Republicans and Democrats.

Or this:

As neoliberalism drives its wedge between the rich and the poor, between India Shining and India, it becomes increasingly absurd for any mainstream political party to pretend to represent the interests of the poor, because the interests of one can only be represented at the cost of the other. My “interests” as a wealthy Indian (were I to pursue them) would hardly coincide with the interests of a poor farmer in Andhra Pradesh.

A political party that that represents the poor will be a poor party. A party with very meager funds. Today it isn’t possible to fight an election without funds. Putting a couple of well-known social activists into Parliament is interesting, but not really politically meaningful. It’s not a process worth channeling all our energies into. Individual charisma, personality politics, cannot effect radical change [64].

She has some recommendations as to the way out of this dilemma, but I recommend those interested in reading them to find and read the book.  I checked it out of the library, but will probably buy my own copy eventually.