My favorite Christmas carol

Anecdotes

The vertebrate brain seems to operate as a device tuned to the recognition of patterns. When evolution grafted consciousness in human form upon this organ in a single species, the old inherent search for patterns developed into a propensity for organizing these patterns as stories, and then for explaining the surrounding world in terms of the narratives expressed in such tales. For universal reasons that probably transcend the cultural particulars of individual groups, humans tend to construct their stories along a limited number of themes and pathways, favored because they grant both useful sense and satisfying meaning to the confusion (and often to the tragedy) of life in our complex surrounding world.

Stephen Jay Gould- "Jim Bowie's Letter and Bill Buckner's Legs"

Understanding Europe's Debt Crisis

Generally, I am not in favor of reducing things to their most digestible. We live in a complex world and reducing things to "good vs. bad" is rarely helpful. Topics take time to sift through and understand. This is only natural. Although, I also agree, sometimes a step back to the fundamental issues at hand is helpful. With few notable exceptions (Alan Woods, Martin Wolf), commentary surrounding Europe's debt crisis has been muddled at best and purposefully confusing at worst. If you aren't fluent in the technocratic economic vernacular of the various talking heads, things can get a bit distorted.

First off, it should be noted the crisis in Europe is not simply an "economic" crisis. It is a crisis of a certain kind of economics- a certain way we produce and distribute goods. It is a crisis of Capitalism. What started as a banking crisis in the United States has morphed into a national debt crisis in Europe. This has been complicated further due to the strange economic union European nations have, both formally and informally. The fact that many sovereign nations have given up some amount of sovereignty in order to share a common currency magnifies the woes of a certain otherwise fairly economically insignificant nation.

While there are many specific areas one could follow up on in that last paragraph, let us step back to recognize the inherent crisis. We hear a lot about confidence. Consumer confidence; business confidence; market confidence; etc. (One would think the world is made up of a bunch of teenage boys afraid to cross the dance floor and ask for a dance from the equally unsure teenage girls gathered on the other side.) Consumer confidence is fairly straight forward. Working people are less likely to spend money when they are not so sure they will have more money in the future. For some time credit masked this crisis of consumer confidence, but now that has largely dried up. Business and market confidence, however, are a bit different. Their confidence is more about making certain margins that will satisfy shareholders than any sort of tangible concern for the material needs of their future. They are concerned they can not bring back a certain amount of profit from whatever it is they produce, be it a securitization or a toothbrush. If consumers are timid with their ever increasingly limited finances, profit margins start to decline. This leads us to one of the central, and tragically hilarious, contradictions of Capitalism. What we have is a crisis of overproduction.

We have too much stuff. Not, mind you, too much stuff in the sense that everyone has food, shelter, and security. These needs are not met, not even close. We have too much stuff in the sense that those who own industry can not make a large enough profit off of what is already produced. This is the tragically hilarious part. We have people starving while food rots in storage bins. We have people sleeping on the streets next to perfectly good homes wasting away unoccupied in foreclosures. If someone from another planet was to look at how we produce, distribute, and consume resources, they would probably conclude we are not an intelligent lifeform at all. (Perhaps this is the reason we have yet to be contacted by any extraterrestrials?)

Further compounding this central comedy/tragedy is the inability of the bourgeoisie to work together, even to save their own economic system. Their desire, and objective need, for profit has made them paranoid to an alarming degree. No one is to be trusted. Really, from their perspective, the crisis isn't too difficult to at least find a "working" solution. Either you bail Greece out or you don't. Either you take some of your massive accumulated wealth and invest it, as the Americans did with TARP, in saving your current structure, or you do not. Allowing a default, whether "orderly" or not, did not work with Lehman Brothers and it will not work with Greece. An "orderly" default is completely nonsensical. This is like allowing a glass bottle to fall to the floor and trying to guess where each one of the broken pieces will end up. It simply can not be done. The soap opera over the various half-hearted agreements the leaders of the Eurozone have come up with has been much more confusing than reassuring. This furthers the uncertainty the market hates so viciously.

Regardless, a "working" solution does not resolve inherent contradictions. In the United States this is most clear. The bank bail-out may have stopping the gushing blood, but the disease is still flowing throughout Uncle Sam's veins. Slow growth, high unemployment, and high sovereign debt are obviously issues that don't escape us here in America. Even with this so-called solution, things can not go back to what was normal.

The victim is blamed. The "lazy" Greek worker. The "entitlement culture" working people across the advanced Capitalist countries have grown accustomed to. The bourgeoisie tells us in order for their system to work again, our living standard must be brought down. The post-war boom is over. Austerity is the new "working" solution.

Here is where our confidence, that of the ninety-nine percent, is most needed. This is the confidence we need to gain. It is not the same confidence we hear pundits garble on about, however. It is a confidence in our collective strength. It is a confidence in democracy. It is a belief that those who actually produce the goods and services we all rely on should control them. In reality, the one percent are the lazy ones. They are the ones who do absolute no work which could be considered socially necessary. They have developed an entitlement culture that assumes they deserve massive profits because a piece of paper says they own a factory. They can barely hide their disdain for democracy. (Notice the reaction to the proposed, then rescinded, popular referendum on the bail-out agreement in Greece.)

We need the confidence, and leadership, to intervene in our own history. This is the only solution that really works for the ninety nine percent of us.

Where are the jobs?

After the debt ceiling debacle, focus has now shifted on how to grow the economy. More specifically, the issue is job creation. What can be done to create jobs? Why aren’t businesses investing in new employees? Both the Democrats and the Republicans seem to be on opposite sides of this debate. Much is made out of this partisan divide. Republicans want less bureaucratic regulations so businesses can feel confident in the economy and start hiring people. They also want to ease the tax burden, primarily on the wealthy, because the more money people have the more they will spend. Democrats agree, but want to boost the economy with some limited government spending and tax millionaires at a higher rate. This mild difference has been highlighted in near hysteria.

The debt debate is also never far away, as Republicans are quick to scream “bloody murder!” at any increase in government spending proposed by Democrats. For their part, Democrats usually cave in three fourths of the wave and hold their ground on one fourth of their argument. But this is all, of course, relative.

Fundamentally, despite the tone of the debate, Republicans and Democrats are in complete agreement. We have a huge amount of debt we must pay off; we are in this together; we must protect our interests at home and across the world; we need to stimulate the economy. Undoubtedly this means a bipartisan attack on the everyday person’s standard of living. Within their narrow constraints, within the rules of their economic system, they are, at least to a degree, correct. Right now, under Capitalism, as poverty in the United States rises to record levels, we are living too well for our own good.


Tax the rich!

In order to fund his latest jobs bill, President Barack Obama is attempting to rally many of the people who supported him initially but are now quite disenchanted with his performance. Dubbed the “Buffett rule” after billionaire investor and somewhat eccentric personality Warren Buffett, Obama is proposing a tax on millionaires (even though they, scared of the right-wing pundits it would seem, call it a “rule” instead ). This tax is to be focused on the income they receive off of dividends and capital gains, that is the money they get for having money stored in a place deemed profitable by the whispers, snickers, and electronic data coming from Wall Street. Although we agree the rich should be taxed more, this move by Obama shows the limitations of this demand. Right now, believe it or not, we have a progressive income tax in this country. Sure, there are a ton of loopholes, but it’s our country’s policy, like most others, to tax the rich. We end up doing it at a lower rate because people who make seven figures, and well over, typically don’t make that money by set salaries and certainly not by hourly wages. They’re often offered compensation in the form of stock options and/or similar securities based payments. In other words, the rich obtain their wealth off of the work of others. This creates undue influence and privilege.

We see privilege best represented by the Republican Party. While the Democrats love to tug on the heartstrings of liberals with short-term memories, Republicans push the boundaries of sanity from questioning the tenants of basic science to flat out rejecting years of hard economic data. Congressional Republicans will publicly throw a tamper tantrum over any social program spending at the same time the Bush tax cuts for the rich they championed, which were extended by President Obama, are adding some 36 billion dollars to the deficit this year alone. While economists generally acknowledge the failure of “trickle down” economics to produce anything other than a few good jokes, Republicans would be more likely to sacrifice their first born to the God of Abraham than raise a single dime of new revenue through increased taxation of their beloved “job creators.”

So yes, of course, there is plenty of room to tax the rich.

But the underlying question is much more interesting. Instead of talking about “taxing the rich” (which they can, have, and will do), we should ask, quite simply, who creates the wealth? Is wealth created during exchange or production? While pundits and analysts spend hours and hours trying to figure out what will please the god of market exchange, not much thought is given to production. A human’s labor power is seen as just another commodity. But every so often, every time our labor power is strategically withheld for example, production catches a few headlines. Then it becomes clear, when the store shelf is as empty as your stomach, who really creates wealth and what really has value. There is little need for a subjective analysis. Wealth is created by human labor interacting with nature. The rich have been, in effect, stealing the profit created by hired labor.


Government spending or government interference?

It is often said we are in the midst of a “financial crisis.” Or, better yet, the “economic crisis,” as if economics itself was in crisis. Really, we have a crisis of one specific way to produce and exchange goods. That is, we have a crisis of Capitalism. What was a bank default crisis is now a nation state default crisis. Public money bailed out the banks in 2008, but there simply isn’t enough left to bail out all the countries that now need it. (Of course, a large chunk of this debt is owned by banks, who again are looking to get bailed out by the public.) But what is more important regarding job creation--paying down debt and securing confidence, or spending money and growing the economy?

At first we heard stories of us spoiled people and our “entitlement culture.” Big government had sustained this hedonistic lifestyle far too long, and it was time to cut it down to size. It was time for some “efficiency.” Us slackers, particularly the Greeks, were dead set on spending our golden years at home with our families instead of wiping down fast food restaurant tables and greeting strangers at ridiculously huge department stores. The nerve! At this time it was open season to attack all the gains the working class had made at crafting somewhat of a decent existence over the years. The word “austerity” was the plunged into our everyday vocabulary. But it wasn’t so easy. Believe or not, people like spending time with their families, not to mention being able to eat, and fought back hard against austerity measures. In the Arab world, despite the on-paper economic growth of many of the countries, we saw, and are seeing, a revolutionary sweeping away of the old guard only a few of us imagined. Many of the intelligent bourgeoisie, from the Financial Times to the Economist, were caught in a dark room with their pants down. They had no clue what to do or say. Their plans didn’t quite go as planned.

Others have been advocating growth promotion through government spending. While certainly the government can spend money and create jobs, there are a few problems with this. First off, where does this money come from? Right now there is a huge Federal deficit, and while bailing out banks is “act first and think about it later,“ coming up with money for jobs is a much bigger Congressional fight. All of the sudden politicians become extremely concerned with our collective pocketbook. Many economists have argued for more spending by pointing out more jobs will create more tax revenue through economic growth. This is true, but we simply haven’t seen that sort of growth, and it is unlikely we will for the foreseeable future. The United States looks more like Japan than China in that we will be saddled with high debt and confined to low growth for a long period of time. This is the nature of most advanced economies. 

The other major worry about more spending is inflation. The more dollars out there, the less they are worth, limiting our purchasing power and disrupting the entire dollar-based global economy. Except for recently, the Federal Reserve had basically limited its economic role to fighting inflation.

They’re both right and they’re both wrong. We can’t simply cut our way out of a crisis, as growth will slow until we are back in the negative side again. We also can’t spend our way out of this, as our massive debt creates market uncertainty (as the S&P downgrade reflected) and inflation. They have no solution. In the end, our living standard is attacked. We can’t get a decent education. We can’t find a job.


The audacity of planning

Objectively speaking, there is a whole bunch of work to be done. It isn’t as if we woke up one day and there just wasn’t anything for a chunk of our society to keep busy on. There are basic needs, as well as wants, that still need to be taken care of. Right now corporations are sitting on more profit than they ever have. Productively is through the roof.  They still aren’t hiring. While they mumble about “uncertainty,“ we have to realize WE ARE THE JOB CREATORS. Those who own industry are unnecessary. They’re leeches, sucking the economy dry. There are too many cars so we don’t need any more people employed in that industry. This has often been said. But there aren’t too many cars because people no longer need transportation. There’s too many cars because someone can’t make a large enough profit selling them. With a rationally democratically planned economy, this wouldn’t be an issue.

While having a plan is usually the sign for someone who is well prepared, when it comes to the economy the idea of coordinated national, and world, economic planning is met with fierce resistance. Really, if we stop and think about it, businesses all have a plan. They all have a strategy. The problem is their planning and strategies are geared towards competing against each other in order to generate the most profits. This might garner large profits for some, but it stifles the abilities of others. This competition eventually creates its opposite, a monopoly. A relatively small amount of companies effectively control the economy. As a result, today we see very little innovation from the private sector. As Apple and Microsoft fight for market share, they rely on a publicly created internet. Imagine if the intelligent people working for these companies, as well as other blue chip corporations, were working together for a common goal. The potential is nearly unlimited.

Capitalism has played its part. Just like Feudalism, Capitalism had a historical role to play but that role is now exhausted. This current crisis shows that more than anything. Capitalism is failing us, we aren‘t failing Capitalism. Now it is up to us to end it. Unless we inject democracy into the decisions we now leave up to the market, we risk nothing less than our existence.

"The Class, the Party, and the Leadership"

The Spanish Revolution is in many ways a how-to-guide for how not to take power and implement a revolutionary workers’ democracy. Actually, it is studying the Spanish Revolution that convinced me personally that revolutionary Marxism was correct and revolutionary Anarchism, at least in practice, didn’t exist.

As we know, the Spanish Revolution failed and we saw Fascist reaction not only gain control of Spain, but ultimately most of Europe. So why did the Spanish Revolution fail? Was this a failure of leadership, or were the workers simply not mature enough to carry through a revolution?

In this document [The Class, the Party, and the Leadership] Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky answers that question by verbally body-slamming the editors of Que Faire (What To Do), which was a left-leaning bourgeois intellectual paper published in Paris. It is interesting that Trotsky made sure to write that the paper itself was of no importance, i.e, it wasn’t going to do much other than give a few left liberal types a venue to write their muddle to share amongst themselves (which I think we can draw numerous parallels with today). He was of the opinion that it was of “symptomatic interest.” In other words, it was characteristic of much of the reasons given by those who Trotsky called “puesdo-Marxists” on why the Spanish Revolution failed.

The beginning of the document starts with a quote from Que Faire’s review of a pamphlet entitled Spain Betrayed by Casanova (which was the pen name of a Polish Marxist named Bernstein who was in Spain during the Revolution). At first glance they might seem to be offering an interesting criticism of Casanova’s argument that the leadership of the Communist Party in Spain followed the wrong policy. Instead, Que Faire argues the workers simply weren’t ready for a Revolution and those like Casanova had to blame boogeymen like Stalin and inept Anarchist leaders to cover for the workers’ failure. The following is taken from Que Faire's criticism of Casanova's analysis (via Trotsky's piece):

Why was the revolution crushed? Because, replies the author (Casanova), the Communist Party conducted a false policy which was unfortunately followed by the revolutionary masses. But why, in the devil’s name, did the revolutionary masses who left their former leaders rally to the banner of the Communist Party? ‘Because there was no genuinely revolutionary party.’ We are presented with a pure tautology. A false policy of the masses; an immature party either manifests a certain condition of social forces (immaturity of the working class, lack of independence of the peasantry) which must be explained by proceeding from facts, presented among others by Casanova himself; or it is the product of the actions of certain malicious individuals or groups of individuals, actions which do not correspond to the efforts of ‘sincere individuals’ alone capable of saving the revolution. After groping for the first and Marxist road, Casanova takes the second. We are ushered into the domain of pure demonology; the criminal responsible for the defeat is the chief Devil, Stalin, abetted by the anarchists and all the other little devils; the God of revolutionists unfortunately did not send a Lenin or a Trotsky to Spain as He did in Russia in 1917.

Under closer examination, however, we see that Que Faire’s criticism is nothing but empty rhetoric. (It is quite ironic they refer to Casanova's central argument as a "tautology.") Why were the workers not ready for Revolution? Because the Revolution failed. Why did the revolution fail? Because the workers were not ready for the Revolution. In the end, we are left no closer to understanding what happened in Spain than when we started.

Trotsky goes on to give concrete examples of the “immature” workers being correct and their leadership being wrong. Trotsky writes:

In July 1936, the Spanish workers repelled the assault of the officers who had prepared their conspiracy under the protection of the People’s Front. The masses improvised militias and created workers’ committees, the strongholds of their future dictatorship. The leading organizations of the proletariat on the other hand helped the bourgeoisie to destroy these committees, to liquidate the assaults of the workers on private property and to subordinate the workers’ militias to the command of the bourgeoisie, with the POUM moreover participating in the government and assuming direct responsibility for this work.

Trotsky points out, which I think is extremely important and interesting given this is still a belief held by many Anarchists, that the beginning logic of the “the workers aren’t ready” argument is that there will come a point when the workers will be so ready that they won’t need any sort of leadership. They will simply wake up one day and all decide to take power. When and how this develops under capitalism is left unsaid. I suppose we can assume it is done mainly been reading periodicals such as Que Faire?

Trotsky anticipates the question of “why would the workers subordinate themselves to poor leadership?” and answers it with more concrete examples of the workers not at all being subordinate to their leadership, and in some cases actively fighting against it. He brings up the well known fact that the CNT leadership actually refused to take power, and then bragged about it in several publications. This most certainly wasn’t the wish of the masses who fought, and often times died, for such power. Unfortunately the Spanish workers were unable, in the middle of a war, to produce new leadership that corresponded to the demands of the Revolution. Not just the Stalinists and Anarchists, but also the POUM.

To fully answer the subordination question, we also need to take on the old myth that “people get the government they deserve.” To the social evolutionist liberal, society moves in a straight line from despotism to freedom. Trotsky takes this on quite well and I think it is worth quoting at length. He says:

The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing ‘maturity’ of a ‘people’ but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc. arise.

This same dialectic approach is needed when dealing with leadership. Again from the text:

A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may ‘tolerate’ for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unaware by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.

In Spain, as mentioned, the working class was able to move far beyond their leadership, yet they were not able to actually replace them.

As we can see by the example of the Russian working class, workers’ maturity is not unchanging. At the beginning of 1917, it was basically just Lenin who had a revolutionary understanding of the moment. Many of the other Bolsheviks were scattered around and not sure what move to take next. This highlights exactly how important it is to have revolutionary leadership during revolutionary times. The maturity of workers is relative to the situation and can change rapidly. The same Russian working class who overthrew the Tsar also allowed a bureaucracy to rise from within its ranks and betray the Revolution.

Que Faire goes on to ask why the revolutionary masses, who left their former leaders, now decided to follow the Communist party. Trotsky points out this is a false question. They didn’t leave their former leaders, but they did rally around the Communist Party and its popular front strategy largely because of the authority the Comintern had gained by carrying out the only successful workers’ revolution. It isn’t as simple as the working class going window-shopping for new leadership. Tradition and loyalty play a large role in the decision. It is only through their experiences that workers move to new leadership, and new revolutionary parties can grow very rapidly given the right circumstance mixed with the right policies.

The POUM, while being the left party not linked to Anarchism, refused to reveal the bourgeois nature of the other parties. This was the only way to move the POUM forward, but they refused to do it. Trotsky noted of the POUM, “It participated in the ‘People’s’ election bloc; entered the government which liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising.” This, however, isn’t simply a reflection of the Spanish working class; it is a reflection of concrete events. The working class was more revolutionary than the POUM, who in turn was more revolutionary than the bourgeois leadership they subordinated themselves to. Why did the POUM leadership subordinate themselves to the leadership of the bourgeois state? As we can see using a dialectic approach, the leadership had risen above its class and subject to pressures of other classes. When the degeneration of the POUM leadership became known, the working class, in the middle of a revolutionary struggle, was unable to replace them.

It is clear the central point the folks at Que Faire were trying to make is that the workers simply weren’t ready for a revolution. We can see similar arguments today in places like Venezuela, where despite the people being far more revolutionary than their leaders, many academics have blamed the slow pace of the revolution on the maturity level of the workers. We also see shades of this in the United States as cynical liberals berate workers for being stupid and backwards. The left sects abandon mainstream unions because of their poor leadership with some questioning whether developed economies even have workers. This is why we study things like the Spanish Revolution, as events today take such a similar course. The folks at Que Faire liked to think they were Marxists, and they did that by throwing in phrases like “condition of class forces” and “condition of social forces.” This, they thought, gave them a material basis for claiming the workers simply weren’t ready for a revolution. The same goes for countless organizations today (all more or less ignored by your average person). Trotsky addresses this with extreme clarity by saying, “Naturally, the ‘condition of class forces’ supplies the foundation for all other political factors; but just as the foundation of a building does not reduce the importance of walls, windows, doors, roofs, so the ‘condition of classes’ does not invalidate the importance of parties, their strategy, their leadership.”

Que Faire and their present day equivalents won’t tell us how we will know when the working class will be ready for revolution. Someday, off in the distant future, we will all just wake up and spontaneously decide to take power; a divine rapture of sorts. That has been proven to be absolutely ridiculous. We must work to build a political structure that can directly confront the bourgeois state. Working within state structures in order to destroy them is a contradiction, no doubt, but understanding contradictions is central to achieving, and wielding, power. And that is what this is all about- growing and crafting correct, democratically accountable, leadership of the world's working class.