The great unmentionable

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The great unmentionable
22 October 2009

The past week has seen a number of worried commentaries from liberal
supporters of Obama on the state of social and political relations in
the United States.

Among the columnists who have written along similar lines are Frank
Rich, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, and Katrina
vanden Heuvel of the Nation.

All of these writers proceed from a fact of American life that is
becoming impossible to deny: the sharp divergence in the fortunes of
the banks and investors, on the one hand, and the broad mass of the
population, on the other. The Wall Street giants, the very firms that
precipitated the financial crisis, are doing better than ever. They
are planning record bonuses while unemployment continues to soar and
wages are declining at a rate not seen in decades.

The proliferation of these columns is itself an indication of the
depth of social tensions and the level of popular disillusionment with
the Obama administration. Sensing the anger that is building up, the
authors write as advisers to the administration: How can this
opposition be contained?

Herbert (“Safety Nets for the Rich,” October 20), adopts a populist
tone, complaining, “Even as tens of millions of working Americans are
struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their
families’ heads, the wise guys on Wall Street are licking their
fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar
bonuses—this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their
way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.”

Rich (“Goldman Can You Spare a Dime,” October 18) refers to the
projected 2009 bonuses of $23 billion at Goldman Sachs as compared to
the $200 million the bank is allocating to its own education
foundation. He likens this to the dimes handed out by Standard Oil’s
John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the 20th century.

Both Herbert and Rich urge that stronger measures be taken, with the
former advocating the break-up of Goldman Sachs and the latter
expressing hope for a revival of Teddy Roosevelt-style trust busting.

Underlying both columns is the concern that the Obama administration’s
promises of “hope” and “change” are increasingly perceived by those
who voted for Obama as hollow phrases. Rich complains that Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner is “tone deaf” and that “an air of
entitlement” wafts from the administration.

People are beginning to feel that they have been duped into lending
their support to a government that is unreservedly serving the
interests of the banks. To the layer of the liberal establishment
represented by Obama’s journalistic would-be advisers, the eruption of
opposition to the Obama administration would be an unmitigated disaster.

Vanden Heuvel (“Happy Days?” October 16) is perhaps the most explicit
in stating this position. “There is a growing danger that the public
face of the Obama administration’s response to this Great Recession is
the Bank Bailout,” she writes. “There is a real threat to the
possibility and promise of the Obama administration.”

Her advice to Obama is to adopt more of a left tone. “The
administration needs to switch this frame.” Following “a
multi-trillion-dollar giveaway to get Big Banks back on track for
billion dollar bonuses,” she writes, “It’s time for the Obama
administration to act with equal boldness on behalf of regular folks.”

The central aim of these figures is to prevent workers from drawing
broader conclusions about the nature of the government and the
two-party system. They are engaged in a deliberate cover-up. From the
beginning, the administration has been, and could only be, a
government of the financial and corporate elite. The administration’s
actions are determined by the class interests it represents.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration revealed that it is planning on
imposing cuts in executive pay at seven companies with substantial
bailout funds. The plan has the air of preemptive damage-control in
the advance of bonus announcements later this year—the sort of measure
that will be hailed by Obama’s liberal supporters. The steps will do
nothing to address the social crisis of the working class, and the
small number of executives affected will still receive compensation
hundreds times that of the average worker.

In their various criticisms and complaints, what all these writers
refuse to discuss is the “great unmentionable” of American politics:
*socialism*. Unwilling to address the objective basis for the social
and economic crisis and broach the only real alternative, their
commentaries remain utterly banal. In the end, they are reduced to
making moral appeals to the banks and pleading with Obama.

Michael Moore’s recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, is made of the
same stuff. After presenting a portrait of the crisis confronting
millions of working people, Moore ends his film by calling for the
replacement of capitalism not with socialism, but “democracy.”

He holds up Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal reformism as the ideal of
democracy from the past, and pseudo-populists like Democratic
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, as well as Obama himself, as its
incarnations in the present. (In a recent column, Moore pleads with
those who are angered by Obama’s policies: “Don’t abandon the best
hope we’ve had in our lifetime for change.”)

The avarice of the financial elite, the blatant inequity of record
bank bonuses and declining wages, along with the participation of the
Obama administration in this process, are invariably presented as
misfortunes.

However, the contrast between depression conditions facing the
majority of the population and windfalls for the wealthy is a
contradiction only in appearance. They are two sides of the same
process. It is through a sharp attack on living standards, jobs, wages
and social programs that the financial elite is seeking to safeguard
its wealth.

This, in turn, is inextricably linked to the private ownership of the
corporations and banks and the subordination of the economy to profit
and the interests of the wealthy—that is, to capitalism.

This proscription of socialism has a history. American liberalism long
ago compromised itself by wholeheartedly embracing post-war
anti-communism, which was the means through which it lined up behind
the global ambitions of American imperialism. With the full support of
the trade unions, socialists and militants were driven out of the
labor movement.

The rejection of socialism was bound up with the rejection of class as
the fundamental category of social analysis. Politics based on race,
gender, sexual orientation and other identities was elevated in its
stead, and became the principal foundation of the Democratic Party and
the preoccupation of the broad milieu of “left” petty-bourgeois groups.

The absolute exclusion of a socialist and class analysis has helped
lend American politics—and media commentary—its particularly
impoverished character. And it has left the working class without a
viable perspective to defend its interests.

The past year, however, has not passed in vain. Broad sections of the
working class are drawing certain conclusions. The ideological edifice
of capitalism has been discredited in the eyes of millions of workers,
who are rapidly losing confidence in the market and all official
political institutions.

The immense class anger over the social crisis and disillusionment
with the Obama administration have not yet taken an open political
form. They will, however, and as this happens, the great principles of
the socialist movement will experience a powerful revival in the
working class—in opposition to the Democratic Party and its liberal
supporters.

It is on these principles that the Socialist Equality Party, and only
the Socialist Equality Party, is based.

Joe Kishore

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o22.shtml

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