Words from the Left

Despite the rhetoric of the right, there is in reality very few people on the left in American politics. I count "progressives" as really centre-left, i.e. not part of a true ideological left.

Here is a bit from a talk given in Ottawa by Doug Henwood, a journalist/economic observer who writes his own journal, the Left Business Observer. Doug qualifies as a serious leftist:

Although a lot of liberals, and even more serious leftists, don’t like to admit it, there’s a deeply conservative streak in the American electorate, and not just the elite. The “common sense”— unschooled instincts imparted by upbringing and inherited ideology—of people in this country is individualist and self-reliant. You see rage expressed through polls and in the media, but, like I said, it’s mostly formless. Sometimes it’s directed at bankers, but sometimes it’s directed at immigrants and the government.

Taking us back to where we started, a major reason for that formlessness is that American radicalism has had a hard time breaking out of the populist mode. That is, it posits a virtuous People being exploited by an often-nameless Elite. But there’s no consistency in identifying the mechanisms of abuse—nothing like the clarity of the surplus value extraction of the classical Marxist model. It’s usually petit bourgeois, directed against both the rich and the poor, often against urbanity—in both senses, the citified and the intellectually polished—and against bigness itself. It often posits a virtuous past of a competitive, self-reliant small-scale capitalism that has been usurped by corporate internationalists, and assumes that even if such a thing had ever existed, it would be desirable to return to that insular world.

The individualistic common sense of the U.S., or at least its white Protestant core, has become increasingly dysfunctional. The U.S. reminds me in many ways of a startup company that’s grown so big that it needs a serious overhaul but is incapable of the necessary transformation. In the corporate example, you frequently see that the founders don’t want to turn things over to professional managers. They want to keep running the show on instinct and animal spirits. But those aren’t working anymore.

So too the U.S. The dog-eat-dog model of social Darwinism worked well (on its own terms) while the U.S. was growing rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but since growth slowed down in the 1970s, we’ve been in need of a rethink of the old model. But we’re incapable of it. Instead, we’ve tried ever more reckless applications of debt to keep things going.

The recent financial crisis looked like a major affront to that approach, but we’re now emerging from the crisis phase without things having changed all that much. The country seems to be rotting from within, but the political and ideological systems are incapable of recognizing that fact. I wish I could detach myself from the consequences and find it all amusing, in the style of H.L. Mencken. But I can’t. Now I’ve got a kid who was born into this nuthouse, so I take it all more personally. I hope we can get our act together and make this a less brutal place. But it’s hard to get hopeful. I guess this is what it’s like to live in the midst of imperial decline.

Go read the whole article if you want to learn something about the political history of the US over the last 40 years.

And here are some bits from an article by Doug Henwood on the recent hue and cry for austerity:

Having successfully avoided depression through a massive, largely coordinated, stimulus program, the world bourgeoisie now looks ready to reverse it—some because they think it a success, and others because they think it was a failure. This is a very dangerous business.

Abroad, the austerity party is led by Germany, with some neighboring allies, whose approach to the Eurocrisis is to put the depressed periphery through the wringer and cut budgets modestly at home. So far, the German economy has been holding up well, and German capital seems not to fear a hit to exports coming from a deep recession at the fringes of Europe.

At home, orthodox types across the political spectrum are now obsessing about the horrors of mounting U.S. indebtedness. Although the Obama administration isn’t embracing the austerity agenda passionately, they are taking it far too seriously.

...

It’s long been LBO’s position that over the long term, deficits do matter. Building up large stocks of debt means paying rich people lots of interest instead of taxing them to fund more noble pursuits. For the next few years, though, the economy needs the stimulus of a deficit. And over the longer term, we desperately need a new economic model—a more equitable distribution of income, so that people aren’t forced to borrow to stay afloat, and more ecologically sustainable ways of living. Taxing and spending are the only roads to that better future. Both the short- and long-term perspectives make austerity the enemy of human progress.

Henwood makes a heck of a lot more sense than the crazies on the right. That's my humble opinion.