President Barack Obama has vowed to put the economy “into overdrive” by 2012, as he announced the head of a new economic advisory panel.
So notes the BBC, and and a bunch of other people, too.
“In an ever-shrinking world, our success … will be determined not only by what we build in Schenectady, but also what we can sell in Shanghai,” said Obama, who has vowed to double US exports in five years.
So, as usual, the President presents a number of problems to someone on the left. As I’ve said before, I’m not disappointed in the man, because he’s doing more or less what I expected him to do, though I will say that the absolute obstructionism of the “other side” surprised me. That was my mistake. I had forgotten that that political obstructionism is, for international capital, a positive economic agenda.
The first issue I suppose is the significance of Immelt as an appointment. Very intelligent people have voiced concern. Bobswern at Kos:
Immelt’s one of the biggest financial services exec’s in the U.S.
Indeed, and he has been a tool in the broader process of financialization of US capital, and the name General Motors is only partially reflective of how GM makes its profit. Indeed, Ilych said it best:
During periods of industrial boom, the profits of finance capital are immense, but during periods of depression small and unsound businesses go out of existence, and the big banks acquire “holdings” in them by buying them up for a mere song, or participate in profitable schemes for their “reconstruction” and “reorganisation”.
Viz. 2008-present. Furthermore:
It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital [don’t confuse imperialism, which is economic, with colonialism, the actual, physical taking over of other countries, recent attempts notwithstanding], is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions.
Yes, this is Immelt’s stock-in-trade. I can’t say that I get too worked up about it, though. It has never been clear to me that Obama’s personnel decisions reflect policy choices. More likely, it seems to me, they are occasionally tactical and more often strategic, in the Team of Rivals sense. I’m not sure precisely which one the Immelt choice is, but Obama is not a triangulator. What Obama is, is a community organizer on the Alinsky model. This is about as unoriginal an observation as you can get, but it seems to me, still, in 2011, the most consistently valid method with which to understand Obama’s process. Specifically:
- You work with the system you have, not the one you want.
- You get as many people at the table you can, even if they’re awful.
- You compromise often, because something is better than nothing.
- If your adversary doesn’t compromise, you give them the rope on which to hang themselves publicly, if at all possible.
I get the impression that Obama does exactly as Alinsky suggests: you make a list of what you want, and if you get 80% of the things you want, you are way ahead of the game. Nothing on the list is so important as to become a deal breaker. You will give up anything as long as you are getting something.
The goal here is jobs, because nobody will argue in favor of unemployment publicly, even if privately unemployment and economic downturns are very good, from a capitalist perspective, for some people, as Ilych noted above. 2008 was a great year for big banks and investors, as long as they weren’t actively going under, even leaving aside the Bailout. Obama is a fundamentally political creature, which is why he had such a successful, from a legislative standpoint, first two years in office–and it was both qualitatively and quantitatively successful. Here, the game is to put Republican legislators where they are in a position where they have to oppose “jobs,” where Republicans are trying to make it a matter of opposing “spending.” I place my bet on Obama.
I write all this, and I refer to my point above, that I’m not disappointed in Obama, because he’s doing more or less as I expected him to, which is to pursue a reformist agenda. That said, there are dangers from a left perspective that are worth noting. Number one is a mistaken nostalgia for Keynesian economics. Obama is, more or less, offering a Keynesianism modified for current political realities. Keynes was all about strengthening capitalism, not dismantling or, better still, replacing it. So was FDR, and so is Obama. Many people on the left, and socialists, too, mistake statism for socialism. The two are emphatically not the same. Socialism, from a Marxian perspective, is about resolving the problem of alienated labor. As long as we have the commodification of labor, we don’t have socialism. The state acting as a stimulant to employment does nothing to change relations of production. It will make life better for many working people now un- or underemployed. From a socialist perspective, the former is the proper focus, though the latter should in no way be opposed.
Obama wants jobs, and will get them. The price will be the strengthening of both the state, by definition a means of coercion, and capital. The choice, I suppose, is between capitals: financial or manufacturing. Obama seeks to buttress manufacturing capital while disarming finance, which is most interested at this point in exporting capital as opposed to commodities–investing in China, India, and Brazil, where rates of return are higher than in the United States, Japan, or Western Europe.
The President has taken flak in some quarters for
swallow[ing] the GOP’s frame for the debate hook, line, and sinker.
The whole question of framing is problematic for me, though I will say that I do think it’s important. On the one hand, it seems to me that an obsession with framing is a way to ostensibly discuss policy without ever having to deal with practical questions about policy, about actually having to do things, which makes things much more complex than if they are simply matters of semantics. On the other hand, rhetorical limits of possibility certainly have implications in real policy, so they’re important.
I wouldn’t say that Obama is adopting the GOP frame. The GOP frame is that the market should determine everything, absolutely everything, by itself–this is at least the GOP rhetorical frame. In actual policy, the GOP is more about using the state to redistribute wealth to cronies. That said, the frame Obama is creating is that the state has a proper role regulating and steering the market. That is very different than that of the GOP. That said, it’s fairly clear that framing is less important to Obama than actual policy, and I’m inclined to agree.
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Crossposted at http://www.palaverer.com/
