I recently participated in an exchange in a comments thread. I responded to:
My understanding is the public is already ready to blame the GOP and not Obama for a shutdown, although congressional democrats get some blame as well.
i say let ’em do it. let the crazies get their way, and see how the public (including their supporters) like i when they can’t go to national parks, can’t buy a house, experience longer lines at the airport, get delays in their food stamps and medicare… f*@k ’em.
Much is made in the press of the difficulty the President has with what gets called the “progressive” wing of his party. There is a large swath of what passes for the left in the United States that advocates an objective, immediate worsening of conditions for the working classes in exchange for the possibility of a more radical improvement of policy in an undermined future.
This is a very different approach from that of the President, who gets a lot of flak from much of the left as too quick to compromise. Viz.:
At the signing ceremony, Obama said passage of the law was propelled “by the fact that tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase on January 1st.” If that had happened, “the average middle-class family would have had to pay an extra $3,000 in taxes next year,” he said. “That wouldn’t have just been a blow to them; it would have been a blow to our economy, just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession.”
Obama declared: “I refused to let that happen. And because we acted, it’s not going to. In fact, not only will middle-class Americans avoid a tax increase, but tens of millions of Americans will start the new year off right by opening their first paycheck to see that it’s actually larger than the one they get right now.”
He said he would not have signed the bill if it did not include “other extensions of relief that were also set to expire.” Among other provisions, he cited the extensions of unemployment benefits and tuition tax credits, as well as new tax incentives for businesses.
When one gets sober and starts hitting AA meetings, one hears a lot of talk about “living life on life’s terms.” The famous serenity prayer is a perfect example of this: the courage to change the things I can, accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. To be clear: anyone who considers themselves on the left who thinks it would be a good thing to have a government shutdown is thinking like an alcoholic. I should rephrase that: like a drunk.
Alcohol impairs one’s ability to see and think clearly. So, to lay it out:
- If you’re on the left, you want things to be better for working people.
- If you want things to be better for working people, you oppose things that would make life worse for them.
- If millions of working people (and those unable to work) depend on government services to get by, you want that government to keep functioning.
So, we want to avoid drunk thinking. Collapse serves the people who own enough to make it through the collapse on their own accord. It lowers the costs of labor and acts as labor discipline far more effectively than revoking collective bargaining rights would. Indeed, fear is the emotional vehicle of capitalism. Marx noted the reserve army of the unemployed without dwelling on its emotional state, surely because to do so would have, in the nineteenth century, been to belabor the obvious. Today, millions of working people in the United States–I write of what I know best–have been so conditioned as to accept the terror of insecurity as a personal flaw rather than a systemic matter. The middle classes, or middling classes if you want a laugh, are terrified, too at this point, facing as they do not a loss of life but of status, of a social if not physical death.
A prone working class is not an effective counterweight to capital. Put down the bottle, get your hands off the steering wheel, and hand me the keys. I know you feel good to drive, but people could get hurt if you do. We have a lot of building up to do in this country before we are in a position to tear down things that need tearing down. Above all, we need as leftists to make sure that people are more secure in their position as laborers. Insecure people may smash things up from time to time, but they don’t make revolutionary change. Insecure people take the first offer of security that is available, before justice and before freedom.
People have been down this road before. The famous What’s the Matter with Kansas? comes to mind. More radical in its implications but along the same lines was Lenin, in What is to be Done?:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without [emphasis mine]. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.
This passage had huge consequences as one can easily see. The Soviet experience as it happened produced a ton of misery for people, and made it difficult for people on the left who lived in capitalist societies to invest themselves fully in a study of the Russian revolutionary movements or even of Marx, because the most important example of a state that called itself Marxist was not very appealing to those who were interested in human liberation. This is a mistake. If you want to learn how to make the world better, you need to look at the people who worked for a better world before you, and nobody worked harder at it than the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The relevant discussion among Russian Marxists was the so-called “spontaneity-consciousness” debate. Should we, as revolutionaries, get behind the “spontaneous” actions of the working classes, even if at times we find their goals short-sighted? Or, rather, should we lead the working classes ourselves, and work to raise their revolutionary “consciousness” to the level of our own? Pavel Axelrod was the foremost exponent of the former, Lenin of the latter.
I’m oversimplifying the matter, and Lenin is certainly a more sympathetic figure than one might gather from that one, early passage. The views he presented in Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, which as an aside was the most beautifully named pamphlet of his career, are vastly more realistic, nuanced, and ultimately humane. He cites Engels and then continues:
“What childish innocence it is to present one’s own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!” Frederick Engels, “Programme of the Blanquist Communards”, from the German Social-Democratic newspaper Volksstaat, 1874, No. 73, given in the Russian translation of Articles,1871–1875, Petrograd, 1919, pp. 52-53)…
Every proletarian has been through strikes and has experienced “compromises” with the hated oppressors and exploiters, when the workers have had to return to work either without having achieved anything or else agreeing to only a partial satisfaction of their demands. Every proletarian–as a result of the conditions of the mass struggle and the acute intensification of class antagonisms he lives among–sees the difference between a compromise enforced by objective conditions (such as lack of strike funds, no outside support, starvation and exhaustion)–a compromise which in no way minimises the revolutionary devotion and readiness to carry on the struggle on the part of the workers who have agreed to such a compromise–and, on the other hand, a compromise by traitors who try to ascribe to objective causes their self-interest (strike-breakers also enter into “compromises”!), their cowardice, desire to toady to the capitalists, and readiness to yield to intimidation, sometimes to persuasion, sometimes to sops, and sometimes to flattery from the capitalists.
I certainly don’t blame Lenin for the excesses of Stalinism. That’s an idiotic proposition, but one which is still widespread. I don’t blame Bismarck for Hitler, either. What is true, however, and this we can lay at Lenin’s feet, is that regardless of the nuances of what he argued over the course of his career, the structure of the revolutionary party for which Lenin advocated in the work that made his name as a revolutionary theoretician became as an unforeseen consequence a repressive force, its repression, to put it sort of indelicately, based on the idea that, the Party, knew better what was good for people than people knew for themselves. In the United States, what has happened as a consequence–not only of Lenin, to be sure–is that radical intellectuals have, rather than working in or with unions, avoided contact with organized labor. Business interests in the post-WWII period have been all too happy to co-opt unions where they could, on a Gompers model of organization.
The big difference between a vulgarly Leninist concept of a revolutionary party leading the masses and the outrage, so-called (would that those most outraged at me would limit their outbursts to the written word), of those on the left who would see a government shutdown in order to make the point that the right in this country has, in fact, gone off the deep end, is that Lenin actually knew how to organize and did the work to make it happen. Much of what would be the left in the United States, having been out of anything resembling power for decades, got used to the role of a Cassandra of sorts: saying things that were true with nobody listening to them. The upshot was that too many people who could have been doing the hard work of making things better came to believe that the long reaction from Nixon to Bush II was simply the way of the world, that the way things were was the way things would be. The Obama of their fantasies was FDR, which was possible because they did not understand that FDR was FDR only because of the Great Depression and a robust, relatively radical labor movement. Obama has neither, for better with the former.
Working people do not generally need to be convinced that the right has gone off the deep end. People might phrase it differently, might need to talk about specific policies rather than political philosophies, or what have you. The most important effect of a shutdown would not be the very likely spike in Obama’s relative approval ratings, but millions of people who depend on Federal services not getting them. You don’t get to be on the side of those people if you increase their pain. Remember, the right’s goal is labor discipline and increased insecurity is its mechanism.
The point is not that radical change comes with greater difficulty and more slowly if one makes compromises and refuses to take courses of action which injure the immediate interests of working people for the sake of their medium-term radicalization. Rather, radical change is impossible without compromise and equally impossible if one purports to know better than those one presumes to help. Radical change is people helping themselves, and anything that stands in the way of that is reaction.
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Crossposted at http://www.palaverer.com/