[The typical family] has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can’t manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance.
That is the portrait of the median American household as painted by the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Such findings might represent a rude awakening to those still starry-eyed about the vaunted “new affluence” everyone was until recently talking about.
But how does capital deal with this problem? In the way you have seen all over the place: cutting back on wages and benefits, laying off workers, or simply moving to a remote location where labor can be paid a pittance and where neither humans nor animals nor nature do or will enjoy any protection. (The output is then cheerfully sent back to the more affluent—but shrinking— developed world, where extravagant profits are made, except that here, too, the crunch is inevitable because average income, in real terms, is dropping relative to production.)
In the more developed world, especially Europe, where citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of politics, and larger self-defense organizations than in the USA, governments have been obliged to apply some bigger band-aids to the crisis—read a measure of tangible social welfare. But the issue remains: the social vessel is listing badly, making water from many holes and infinite patches and now requires a serious overhaul, if not rebuilding altogether.
An outside observer, say an interplanetary traveller who never set foot in America, might deem such conditions deranged. And why not? Is it sane to live under a system whose ruling elites openly decry a rise in employment and living standard for the masses? And, conversely, isn’t it bizarre that, on Wall Street, supposedly the barometer of society’s economic health, when multinationals lay off workers by the tens of thousands, or shut down facilities, or abandon communities for an overseas location in pursuit of bigger profits for the few, the stocks go up amid wild celebration, and the executives in charge get fat bonuses and other rewards?
In a sane, truly democratic, not to say moral, society such behavior would be hidden from view, like the plotting of common criminals. But in this society, long inured to the reigning disease, Wall Street reactions are not hidden from view at all, they’re bragged about, as they remain safe behind an elaborate national brainwash that teaches Americans to accept such conditions with the tolerance we assign to the whims of nature.
The crisis of overproduction represented by humanity’s new technological capabilities is here to stay and can only be resolved by a far, far more equitable distribution of the product of human labor, on a world scale. This means serious, dramatic revisions of the current social contract—”the terms of agreement”—between two utterly conflicting social interests. Or the abandonment of such an injurious contract entirely.
I hate to quote one of the bogeymen of the American psyche, Karl Marx’s longtime collaborator and friend, Engels, but he put it admirably in 1886:
[If] there are three countries (say, England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the world market, there is no chancebut chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required.That was written in the 19th century. Multiply that by a thousand to begin to approach the contours of the current crisis.
DARKER BEFORE DAWN—IS IT TRUE?
The sense of despair that many activists feel these days, battered on all sides by this truly monstrous regime–monstrous in its immorality, cynicism, hypocrisy, self-righteousness and sheer evil–and its all-enveloping prostituted cheer-leading media, is shared amply in this quarter. In a sense, and without going too far afield, the present situation is the inevitable outcome of several realities which have defined this sick society for quite some time:
(1) The absence of a workers’ party, and by that I mean nothing so “alien” to the American mind as a bolshevist vanguardist party, but simply the absence of a real movement and party expressing and articulating the needs and visions of the average person, whose needs are clearly anchored in a “working class reality.”
Parties in a class-divided society, which the US surely is (business propaganda aside), are supposed to represent the interests of the various classes constituting the social pyramid. But since both Democrats and Republicans stand first and foremost for “free enterprise,” i.e., the polite coinage for the national and international bourgeoisie, what we have here is a single party cynically masquerading as two. I’m sure this is scarcely a revelation to most moderately sophisticated American audiences. (The obvious question then is, why is such a fraudulent state of affairs tolerated?)
Ferociously centrist, some might call them “extremists of the center,” liberals, frequently the embodiment of the petit bourgeois element in a nation, have never been and never will be real leftists because their entire class orientation and economic interests, which, as is true for all classes, largely determine their mindset, is anchored in the upper, propertied sector, which they tend to ape. This limits their vision and political actions. They are for endless tinkering within the system, while never daring to go beyond its egregiously restrictive limits. Their systemic solutions are therefore stillborn, quilts of pitiful patches with the problem itself often dictating remedial policy! (Witness, for example, Hillary Clinton’s health plan reform initiative, whereby no Naderites, or the Harvard Independent Health Reform Study Group, or similar authentic healthcare system critics were invited to the discussions, but the AMA, the Hospital chains, and the pharmaceutical lobbyists were. When was the last time that the disease found a cure for itself?)
(3) The rise and (momentary) triumph of corporate propagandaThe system requires the illusion of options, the illlusion of some sort of political balance. And as democracy instinctively struggles to survive and deepen its roots, against great odds, corporate power, especially through its media and political assets, works tireslessly to confuse and derail the effort. Still, the propaganda apparatus necessitated to negate obvious realities, to inject and maintain a pre-emptive consumerist consciousness among the masses, and to sow escapist notions as a complementary venting valve for gathering tensions, is an enormous and sophisticated machine, precisely what we witness today in modern America. In fact, the rise of such a disinformation machine was foreseen more than 80 years ago, as the growth of corporate propaganda was anticipated to match, blow by blow, the extension of democracy.
Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that only liberals are heard in this country when it comes to shaping national debates. Reflecting the so-called two-party system, which provides us with a rump political spectrum of choice, the media, too, take care not to admit people to the left of what is regarded as “mainstream opinion” or what some also quaintly define as the “loyal opposition” (loyal to what? to whom? That’s never spelled out with any precision).
True radicals (those that go to the root of a problem) are ruled out as “extreme” from the word go. (When the national debate commission not only prevents Ralph Nader from attending the debates, but threatens to throw him in jail for exercising his right to do so, we know we are living in a country where the word democracy is a joke.)
In this regard, for those who will surely protest with alacrity that America is still the land of the free, I will say only this: The freedom guarantees of any bourgeois democracy can only be tested when that society’s power-holders feel they are under attack. The record so far is not pretty, and I refer you here to any number of episodes and incidents in American history showing that the American upper class is extremely manipulative and paranoid in the defense of its privileges. The trip wire is indeed very close to the ground in this nation. But, folks, who needs widespread repression when the masses can be so successfully controlled by a pervasive 24/7 brainwash? Why show the jackboot and the truncheon, when we can launch massive invasions with relative impunity, under transparently hypocritical motives, and appear every day on the boob-tube with the photo-op of the day, claiming to be the last defenders of human sanity and decency on earth? Why indeed use the mailed fist and give away the system’s true fascistic nature when ubiquitous sound-bites and torrents of idiocy on the tube will suffice? I repeat: The true test of whether this or any nation is a reliable “free” democracy can only be approached with the rise of a mass movement seriously bent on replacing the rotting structure with something deserving of the word “representative democracy.”
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