As a socialist, I am happy to see the U.S government, if not actually coming to, then at least approaching its senses, in undertaking a serious effort to nationalize and perhaps even plan the economy. (Not the health care part, though, only communists would do that.) As a liberal (yes, you can be both) it worries me that the effort is undertaken by people who have spent their careers loathing the very idea of government intervention, and therefore have no idea how to go about it.
Technically, socialism is supposed to be about the people (or state, working class, commune, whatever) aquiring, through purchase, confiscation, theft, or revolution, the means of production. That way, most of the surplus created by labour organized towards mass production falls to the people doing the labour, not the people organizing them. You can agree or disagree with this basic goal, and many would claim that the organizing, and the financial risk that goes into it, should be rewarded accordingly, and labourers be happy with their fixed (and therefore secure) incomes. But whatever side of this fence you find yourself falling down on, the current plans by the administration (although details of this plan are not availiable to the general public) seems to fly straight in the face of both objectives. As Senator Bernie Sanders, Benjamin Barber, and Cenk Uygur has pointed out in different but equally compelling terms, this particular public investment actually moves the risk to the workers, but leaves the surplus with the owners. [Update: After I wrote this, almost all sensible people, and Newt Gingrich, has joined the choir.] You can almost hear Marx and Orwell weeping.
I recently had the opportunity to ask the US’ ambassador to Norway, Benson K. Whitney, about how this abandonment of the most basic principle of the GOP economic policies might play out come November, and whether he thought there was a chance the libertarian candidate Bob Barr could emerge as an inverse Ralph Nader. He said that it was an interesting point, and proceeded to give, following republican fashion, a thorough non-answer, claiming that everyone agrees that the economy must be regulated, the question is just how much. In a time of crisis, he said, the rules change. Rules change, you say? Why stop there? Screw ‘em all, I say. Spend as much public money you can find on bad debts, and if the taxpayers don’t like it, they can stop paying taxes. That will, of course, lead to their arrest and subsequent incarceration, but after you’ve nationalized the prisons you can start calling them hotels, so people can go on staycations all year long. Wait, the prisons are allready owned by the states, you say? Well, then you can privatize them. Should do wonders for the economy, a little reduction in the excessive spending those darned democrats have forced the administration to succumb to, in spite of congress being controlled by the incumbent party for six of the last eight years. (This has been a crash course in “Republican Reasoning ™: Where Contradiction Equals Creativity, and Reality is Optional! Jump on the Bandwagon! Down that KoolAid! Praise the Lord! And All That Jazz!”)
Anyway, the most interesting aspect of the ambassador’s keynote lecture was the foreign policy part. Granted, he dodged the accusation of the US being somewhat hypocritical in condemning Russia’s actions in Georgia after having spent the better part of the seventies and eighties aiding and abetting military coups in their own neighborhood, Latin America. “I am no expert on that continent,” he said, ”and I don’t know exactly what we’ve been up to there.” He also said that Norway should follow American cues in the question of Russian expansionism, arguing that there are no guarantees Russia won’t come to see the Arctic as part of their sphere of interest. Well, ambassador, the difference is that the chance of a democratic revolution ticking off Russia in that particular area is slim, because no one lives there.
In his prepared remarks, Whitney offered some fascinating visual insight in America’s thinking on globalization. After displaying a map with the usual suspects — the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India and the EU — highlighted to show that multipolarity is the name of the current game, he presented the striking metaphor of the new world order as a chessboard turned into a globe, with the pieces distributed all over the place. So while the hawks can no longer hold on to a “US versus Sovjet” mentality, the “war on terror” has provided them with the opportunity to recommit to a black and white world view, Good vs Evil being the relevant diplomatic categories. Infinitely more frightening, of course, since where the USSR was a relatively stable construct (until it collapsed), just about anyone might fall on the wrong side of this new dichotomy.
The ambassador took great pains to emphasize that there are few differences in the foreign policies of senators McCain and Obama, which brings me to the larger point of what exactly those of us who have been frustrated by the Bush administration can hope for in the next four to eight years. From a left leaning European standpoint, the differences between the two candidates are indeed negligible; one party offers right wing extremism, the other a slightly less extreme, but still far right, view. So who really cares, right?
I find myself agreeing almost entirely with Steven Shaviro’s recent article on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory (not including his dystopic addendum). The argument in this piece is, in simplified form, a Kantian rewriting of Slavo Zizek’s Hegelian point, that in the choice between two morally depraved ideologies, it is necessary to support the party that at least tries to hide its abject misanthropy because, well, appearances matter[1]. As Lawrence Lessig and the good people at ChangeCongress.org has shown, corruption is rampant on both sides of the congressional aisle, but it matters that the democrats are embarrassed enough to try to hide it. That the republican ticket sticks to their talking points long after they have been exposed as blatant lies, shows that they think of the difference between right and wrong as an obstacle to overcome, while the democrats at least know that the line shouldn’t be crossed, even as they keep crossing it.
I feel, however, that there is one crucial point missing from Shaviro’s post. That point is that, once elected, the president’s foreign policy shifts gear from a theoretical outline of principles to a performance art. In other words, that both of the candidates are taking a hard-line approach to Iran’s nuclear program, neither of them coming anywhere close to conceding the point that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is, principally, perfectly justified in trying to get Iran off the oil addiction it shares with all other countries in the developed world[2], doesn’t substract form the significance of how the potential presidents address him. Substantially, they largely agree; symbolically one makes it clear that to him, a good Iranian is a dead Iranian, by joking about exporting cigarettes as “a way to kill them,” and the other simply doesn’t. Which one is more likely to motivate the clerical rulers of Iran to take that step no one wants them to take? And who is better equipped to pursuade them not to? The security of the world depends on how american voters answer that question.
[1] [Back]Zizek seems to think of Obama as a vessel for new ideas that has hitherto been unthinkable. In this view, it matters less whether he actually follows through on his rhetoric, because the world spirit will from now on be unable to ignore the thoughts he has brought into the public sphere. Shaviro, on the other hand, is more concerned with each singular act undertaken by individuals, in this case the casting of votes. It is a moral imperative, he says, that each of us make the morally right choice in every case, and vote for the lesser of the two evils.
[2] [Back] I don’t mean to say that I’m not scared of Iran developing nuclear weapons. I am. Ahamdinejad seems to be committed to a more dangerous eschatology than Sarah Palin’s, and that’s not saying little. The fact nevertheless remains that there is absolutely no hard evidence that Iran has intentions or inclinations to take their research into the realm of warfare. Along with the general alienation and the rampant capitalism threatening to eradicate the world’s natural resources, modernity has given us in the ‘western world’ at least two principles we’re supposed to believe in: objective science and the benefit of the doubt. If those only matter when we’re the beneficiaries, what’s the point?
