Part: IV The Costs of Creative Destruction: Wendell Berry vs. Gene Sperling

PART IV: The American Left in the 2nd Great Crisis of Capitalism, 2008…????

But the shift from left to right in ideological intensity aside, you ask, why spend so much time looking at the economic world of the 1930’s, since our economic world is so vastly different, if not in its basic, still hyper-capitalist ideology, then in the physical forms it takes, since the shape of the capitalist firm has changed, in David Harvey’s terms, “from Fordism (Keynesianism) to flexible accumulation?” I look at the left of the 1930’s and its responses to the crisis in capitalism, then, because that was the last time the left demonstrated a passionate, coherent and (arguably) systemic response to economic breakdown. It was unable to present anything close to that coherence in its response to the crisis of the 1970’s, when Harvey says that there was not only a great earthquake in capitalism but also a major change in its interactions with cultural forms, a corresponding but complex shift from “modernism to postmodernism.” Why wouldn’t someone looking at the weakness of today’s left in confronting the timidness of the Obama Administration – essentially abandoning serious policy remedies for unemployment and foreclosure – and leaving the alternatives in the hands of Ben Bernanke – be interested in an era with more compelling responses? And at the same time he is watching the “left” shifting its focus to the distant organic processes involved in the slow evolution of the “co-operative” economy as presented not only by Wendell Berry but also Bill Greider and Gar Alperovitz, processes which don’t seem to be exerting any policy pressure on the terrible and immediate realities facing citizens caught in “the indifference of the grinder to what it grinds?”

For all the admiration I have for Berry, and those who are sincerely trying to invent a new and better political economy, I still have to register more than a bit of exasperation at Berry’s dry and detached observation that “you can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency…and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.’” Unfortunately for the unemployed, the AFL-CIO has adopted a similar policy towards the Obama’s administration and the Democratic Party’s policy preferences: if they can’t find direct political backing for a public jobs program, for example, for an updated CCC or WPA, then they’re not going to push the idea. They’ll bide their time and forget that they’ve already gone through three similar historical cycles under three different Democratic presidents - Carter, Clinton, and Obama – with no improvement for their old constituency, or in the prospects of their search for a broader one.

Has there been something cultural in the air of postmodernity since the 1970’s, that shrinks the ambitions of those on the left, that severs the links in the chain of continuity to its history, and that seems to leave it always stranded amidst the policy fragmentation demanded by the ever narrowing, “politically possible” present? I found some passages from Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity compelling in helping me to understand our troubles:

“We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of self from which to be alienated…If, as Marx insisted, it takes the alienated individual to pursue the Enlightenment project with a tenacity and coherence sufficient to bring us to some better future, then loss of the alienated subject would seem to preclude the conscious construction of the alternative social futures.”

While that may still sound pretty abstract, let’s try bringing it down to earth with some American popular culture contrasts that spotlight the disappearance of the worker as a subject for serious consideration, even if it occurs in situation comedies. Stop and think about two famous ones from the 1970’s, the decade of disaster for the American worker, and the beginnings of a serious “time-space” compression for capitalism as a whole, according to Harvey: All in the Family and Sanford and Son. While we can argue for a long time about the ultimate point of view in these shows, they without question had workers and poor black urban people in the center of some very political material. Now compare them with what some have called the most popular situation comedy of all time, Seinfeld, which ran for the first eight years of the “Wall Street Nineties” and was notable for its total lack of serious social, much less economic commentary, set as it was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where parking rights loomed as a major issue. Looking back at it from 2008-2012, it now seems an even better commentary upon the intellectual substance of the Clinton years in office, when American business reluctantly conceded some types of family leave without pay.

In that passage above, Harvey is following the work of Fredric Jameson, of the comparative literature department of Duke, from some essays he wrote in the 1980’s, when many commentators were joking that critical economic and social theorizing had been reduced to verbal brawls over literary texts in English Departments. Jameson was one of the few who were trying to trace the connections between changes in capitalism and changes in the world of culture, both popular and “high.” So here is Harvey’s translation of some very difficult work done by Jameson:

"The reduction of experience to ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents’ further implies that the ‘experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and “material”…the image, the appearance, the spectacle can all be experienced with an intensity (joy or terror) made possible only by their appreciation as pure and unrelated presents in time. So what does it matter ‘if the world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscope illusion, a rush of filmic images without density?’…The immediacy of events, the sensationalism of the spectacle (political, scientific, military, as well as those of entertainment), become the stuff of which consciousness is forged." (My emphasis.)

As I read that passage, I couldn’t help but think of the 1997 film Contact and its very convincing portrayal of just such a spectacle as the crowd gathers to witness the launch of the “contact” vehicle, where science meets politics, the military and religious fanaticism – in a public circus – even as the film itself gloried in “overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’” special effects, ones which now seem mild in comparison to those that have subsequently come to dominate all else in popular cinema. Perhaps fittingly for a 1997 work, released during the Clinton administration, it is the cultural and religious issues which dominate the film. A clear sense of the political economy is missing; it is silent background, although a shadowy and somewhat sinister wealthy industrialist plays an important structural role in the plot and could fairly been seen now as foreshadowing the emerging role of private capital in taking over the exploration of space. And the rest of the workforce, the blue collar workers? In this film, they’re scientists, and because of their important discoveries, they’re pushed around by politicians and the national security state.

And then there is the important matter of memory and history under the cultural “regime” of postmodernism, a topic very close to my heart. Harvey says that “eschewing the idea of progress, postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory, while simultaneously developing an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present.” And isn’t that a fitting charge, as we have already seen, to hurl at Amity Shlaes’ revisionist history of the New Deal, where fragments of historical figures pop in an out of the narrative, and events, like the coming of rural electricity are completely distorted to fit the ideological needs of the “government vs. the private sector” morality play of 2007? Harvey’s summary also fits all too well as a description of some of the most popular contemporary cable and public television shows, such as The Antiques Road Show, Pawn Stars and American Pickers. Here history and memory are at the service of – chiefly – fixing a date and price, there is very little context added and no continuity, since “you never know what is going to walk through the door.” I would argue that the audience learns more about the power of “the firm” to control the price compared to the poor owner of the object, than about its history. There is not much traditional “pawning” going on at Pawn Stars, which made its debut in July of 2009, eight years after The Antiques Road Show started on PBS. Perhaps that’s because dealing with interest rates would be too complex, and too “sensitive” a topic in these times. So you bring in your Civil War musket, which you don’t know the price of, and Rick, the owner of the store calls in his own outside expert, and he says it’s worth $3,000, which is what the customer now wants. But Rick throws cold water on that right away, says he has to make the house profit, he sells retail, but buys like it was wholesale, figuring in all his costs, so “the house,” just like a Las Vegas casino, always wins, and he offers the somewhat dazed customer $1,200, plus a little haggling. And so it goes.

Actually, it’s hard not to see Pawn Stars as the blue-collar version of the very middle to upper-middle class Antiques Road Show. The Harrison’s who own the pawn store sure sound blue collar to me; however, they are now entrepreneurs and they set the price to customers, who seem to be carefully screened so as not to appear as desperate as one might expect for strangers walking into a Vegas pawn shop: they never say “I just lost $10,000 at the tables and I have to sell my grandfather’s portrait.” The “old man,” his son Rick who manages, and his son Corey (“Big Hoss”) and hapless “Chumley” are blue collar all the way, yet the three Harrisons are both family and owners, and so Chumley is literally cast in the uber blue-collar role (although I suppose it’s a “white collar” industry, technically, though they don’t dress that way) as almost pure “employee.” He is just barely able to converse with customers, is grossly overweight (as are the others, with the exception of the “old man”) a “slacker” by nature, and I can’t help but think that since he is always getting dumped on and looks so distraught, that he will come back some day with an automatic weapon and go “postal,” and settle up the scorecard. Now that would be “reality” programming. Am I reading too much into him to say that he is unwittingly cast to play the fate of the “old” working class, even as his fellow blue collar store owners, the Harrison’s, ride up the entrepreneurial escalator? Some working class hero he’s playing. Most of the time he looks like a working class straw man drawn up to fit the measurements supplied by Tom Friedman: roadkill. Ritual humiliation is not very pleasant to watch, even on reality TV.

I guess that’s why we have Ice Road Truckers, Swamp People and Ax Men to pick up the slack on the “History” Channel, although I don’t recall ever hearing the word “union” or “organizing” uttered, but I also admit that I haven’t seen nearly as many episodes of these shows as I have of Pawn Stars, which has a peculiar, post-crisis, late, “late capitalism” air about it, despite its attempts to always be upbeat. (Most of the customers who have just taken a 70% house write-down of their price expectations go away good sports and “satisfied.”) And come to think of these other shows, all aimed at blue collar audiences, two out of the three feature the protagonists struggling in head-to-head competition with other small firms, harvesting lumber or alligators, so there’s even an entrepreneurial message and business aura cast over them as well. Working class is in some transition, I would have to say.

Should we be surprised at this spread of entrepreneurialism into blue collar “neighborhoods?” David Harvey doesn’t think so, and he acknowledges it as a main feature of the economy under postmodernism values. He disputes the claims that neoliberalism has won this extra respect and space for entrepreneurs by dint of good economic performance, because that philosophy has “strong negatives of high unemployment, weak growth, rapid dislocation, and spiraling indebtedness…offset only by control of inflation.” (That was a very big “only” in the U.S. in the 1970’s.) But he concedes that the old working class norms in blue collar neighborhoods have been displaced since the late 1960’s by “a much more competitive individualism as the central value in an entrepreneurial culture that has penetrated many walks of life…entrepreneurialism now characterizes not only business action, but realms of life as diverse as urban governance, the growth of informal sector production, labour market organization, research and development, and it has even reached into the nether corners of academic, literary, and artistic life.” He concedes that “it has undeniably generated a burst of energy that many, even on the left, compare favourably with the stifling orthodoxy and bureaucracy of state control and monopolistic corporate power.”

I don’t think Harvey or anyone else should underestimate the power of this combination under postmodernism and neoliberalism to have re-shaped politics in the West, and in the former Soviet bloc as well. Unions have been on the defensive at least since the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. They have come up with no convincing answers to the problems posed to them by the geographical dispersion of business and the hyper-mobility of capital. Small business entrepreneurialism has stepped into the vacuum left by the shortcomings of the few collective institutions of the left, and even Keynes’ biographer’s own political biography – Lord Skidelsky’s - is testimony that British economic life needed a free enterprise infusion by the late 1970’s. Economic life since then, however, has taken many turns down some truly frightening dark streets, so that we are looking at almost the inverse ideological situation compared to the late 1970’s. Now it is the Right which offers us only a hyper-intensified version of the dominant ideology which brought on the great crisis we are now living through.

Harvey does, however, concede some positive outcomes from other aspects of postmodernism besides its coincidence with that late 1970’s turn towards the entrepreneur:

"Postmodernism has been particularly important in acknowledging ‘the multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender and sexuality, race and class, temporal (configurations of sensibility) and spatial geographic locations and dislocations.’ It is this aspect of postmodernist thought that gives it a radical edge, so much so that traditional neo-conservatives, such as Daniel Bell, fear rather than welcome its accommodations with individualism, commercialism, and entrepreneurialism.” (My emphasis.) Editor’s Note: He’s quoting from A. Huyssens’ 1984 essay, ‘Mapping the post-modern.’ Daniel Bell died Jan. 25, 2011, age 91.

Before we depart from David Harvey’s peerless The Condition of Postmodernity, which has made intelligible some of the most jargon filled and impenetrable academic writing about postmodern culture and the demise of the working class ever written, I want to explain what he means by the term “time-space compression.” It’s important in itself, and also because I have spent some considerable “time and space” myself writing about Wendell Berry’s estimation of the “collateral damages of an inhuman rate of technological change.” Harvey says that under western capitalism, we have experienced three major periods of changes in the time-space dimension. Crudely put, they are speed ups in product turnover, in making things, technological changes shrinking the amount of time it takes to travel, or communicate, preceded and foreshadowed by new ways of seeing and imagining. The first occurred in the Renaissance, in the 14th and 15th centuries, when conceptual changes in map making and navigation led to shifts in perspective in art and architecture, and of course, human travel. The Renaissance was also a time when most of the “modern” features of capitalism burst forth, in accounting, finance and banking, trade and manufacturing. The pace of life of the Italian city states speeded up as capitalism threw off the religious restraints of the Middle Ages. For all the increased commercial wealth, elevation of the gifted individual and prodigious outpouring of lasting art, the price paid was a violent, ceaselessly competitive struggle between city states. One might even say there was a speed up in the cycling of government types, leaving us with, among other things, our classical republican “virtues,” threatened by commercial special interests. Of course the pace of change speeded up under the Industrial Revolution, particularly after the 1850’s, but there was an especially intense burst of change, and time-space compression, near the turn of the century, in the years 1900-1914. We all know what followed. (Noticed also by Carl E. Schorske in his powerful, eerie, ominous even, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1980, and by Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914, 2008.) And the third dramatic instance came in our “own” time, the 1970’s, when American businesses were losing their profit margins and the nation its gold standard, a decade that has come under intense historical scrutiny in the search for clues as to what has gone wrong since the end of the golden years of the American Century, 1945-1973.

Harvey says there have been three basic responses to this last intense speed up of life, which has only kept accelerating through the 1980’s, 1990’s, right up to the present. The “first line of defense” is one of “withdrawal into a kind of shell-shocked blasé or exhausted silence” acknowledging how far things are beyond anyone’s control. This includes the remedy for “excessive information…one of the best inducements to forgetting,” further eroding any sense of historical continuity. The second great line of defense is to vastly oversimplify the overly complex world by the use of slogans, and here I thought that Harvey was anticipating advertising’s own later turn to “branding”, leading to Naomi Klein’s No Logos exposition in 2000, and some might extend the concept to OWS’s own facility in the art. Finally, there is the third response, which sheds considerable light upon the fault lines running between the different “fragments” of the left today:

"The third response has been to find an intermediate niche for political and intellectual life which spurns grand narrative but which does cultivate the possibility of limited action. This is the progressive angle to postmodernism which emphasizes community and locality, place and regional resistance, social movements, respect for otherness, and the like…It is an attempt to carve out a least one knowable world from the infinity of possible worlds which are daily shown to us on the television screen. At its best it produces trenchant images of possible other worlds, and even begins to shape the actual world. But it is hard to stop the slide into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the face of the universalizing force of capital circulation. At worst, it brings us back to narrow and sectarian politics in which respect for others gets mutilated in the fires of competition between the fragments. And, it should not be forgotten, this was the path that allowed Heidegger to reach his accommodation with Nazism, and which continues to inform the rhetoric of fascism (witness the rhetoric of a contemporary fascist leader like Le Pen.)" {My emphasis.}

So this was written in 1990, and the pace of change, the time-space compression driven by technological innovation has only intensified since then, now capped by a deep economic crisis in the West, and likely to spread further. Perhaps it’s not pure coincidence then, that I read of one of Le Pen’s National Front supporters asserting the “the sacredness of French soil” just before the May, 2012 elections which turned President Sarkozy out of office.

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In trying to make sense of the American political economy as it stands in the late spring of 2012, and the left’s response to the great crisis still engulfing us, I am going to follow the ideological twists and turns that manifest themselves when we think about our predicament in terms of Austerity vs. Abundance. These are terms which have challenged us ever since Marx saw a better future emerging from the transition out of capitalism’s great but oppressive powers, or as Wharton School-University of Pennsylvania economist Simon Patten suggested with his 1907 evolutionary contrast, “that a ‘pleasure-economy’ had replaced a ‘pain-economy’, that an ‘age of deficit’ had given way to an ‘age of surplus,’” (says James Livingston in Against Thrift). It is there right in the title of Herbert Croly’s 1912 book The Promise of American Life, and is the main topic of Keynes’ almost famous 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. They surfaced too in FDR’s Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace’s 1934 comments about the AAA’s crop reduction program: “‘only the merest quarter-turn of the heart separates us from a material abundance beyond the fondest dream of anyone present.’” (From Leuchtenburg: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal).

Well, here we are in 2011-2012, and one of the best economic minds of our day, the man who has consistently and correctly called the course of our disaster, Nouriel Roubini, has stamped our world economy as one “beset by a glut of both labor and capital.” I would not be exaggerating at all to say that even the leading economists and politicians of the Republican Right see an age of abundance and economic plenty just around the corner, one that we will turn just as soon as the “job creators” of the private sector are freed from the chains of governmental debt, deficits and regulatory impediments. (On talk radio, President Ronald Reagan would be invoked at this point.)

There are several very big qualifiers, however, to this neoliberal view of the future age of abundance. To get there, many of us are going to have to go through a new regime of unspecified length, one called austerity. By this is meant, in both Europe and the United States, that the public sector must be vastly scaled back, except for defense. Its services, if still wanted or needed, will be turned over to the private sector, which will provide them more efficiently, of course. The former government workers will be added to the additionally reformed and now even more “flexible” labor markets, working longer for less pay and most likely, for fewer “fringe benefits” under that tough private market supervision. Let us be clear, when the Right, and the Center talk about “the cure” for the periphery in Europe, those with the bad Southern Mediterranean work habits, they really mean that individual workers will bear “the collateral damages of an inhuman pace of technological change,” just like in the U.S. In addition, to get to this abundance, the talented innovators and job creators will have their Bush tax cuts restored, and whatever else it takes – in their opinion – to create the climate where their animal spirits are surging once again. In this sweeping view, there is nothing wrong with capitalism; there is no “glut” except in the barriers presented by environmental regulations and the financial barnacles of the welfare state. By extension, it was not the innovations rising from the fires of creative destruction on Wall Street that brought us so low, it was the liberal heart inflamed for the ill-housed poor, demonstrating for all the world to see that it does not “all turn upon affection.” Austerity’s remedies then, are more competitive individualism, harder hearts and even hotter flames of creative destruction. As proof that these remedies will work, neoliberal conservatives can now point to the technical innovations which have led to the abundant new domestic gas and oil supplies, which have stopped the construction of additional coal fueled plants and are delivering all sorts of other good economic benefits by lowering the cost of energy – all without the misguided cap and trade policies.

If the Right’s answers to the economic problems of the ship of capitalism that brought us to the present crisis are to double down on its main features, to open the throttles of creative destruction to “full speed ahead,” the centrist Democratic response, as we have seen from Gene Sperling, is a pretty timid one. They want to increase the budget for the Keynesian sick bay, add a few more regulatory lookouts and lifeboats, and hang a plaque reading “We’re All in This Together” over the navigators’ cabin. They too want additional stokers in the boiler-rooms to keep the innovative fires burning hot. That’s not much consolation, however, to the passengers watching the waters rise above the foreclosure and unemployment decks. They are confused by the course steered by the captain and the navigators: one day they are tacking towards the Austerity Islands, the next day heading towards the Stimulus Peninsula. On some days they even claim that they can follow both courses simultaneously. Meanwhile, some of the more observant passengers say they are close to heat stroke from all that creative destruction down in the boiler room, and from the carbon dioxide that’s pouring out as well. They say that the ship is no longer seaworthy. But the captain and the navigators are very leery of more drastic course changes. They know that it’s the owners of the ship, and the owners of the ultimate destination, the twin Islands of Boom and Bust, separated by the treacherous Speculative Channel, who really set the course, and who hire the crew; the passengers are merely being taken for a ride. That’s why some want to get off, and set sail in a different direction, towards the Green Coast of Sufficiency, in a lifeboat named the “Alternative Economy.”

I wish it were that simple, but you get the general idea for the Democratic Party centrists. Over on the left, things are not much better. For the first time since the 1970’s philosophical challenges to growth, there is now an epic environmental crisis proceeding alongside a major economic one, and so far, both the extreme and more modest versions of capitalism are not coming up with convincing answers. That’s the message from critics like Donald Worster, James Gustave Speth, Wendell Berry, Herman Daly, Wes Jackson, and Naomi Klein, and they were pronouncing the mortal threat to nature (and to human society, with varying degrees of emphasis) from capitalism’s great productivity, and Olympian abundance (no matter how unequally distributed) even before the system nearly crashed in 2008-2009. Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World said it well: all the compromise environmental reforms to mitigate the economic impacts upon nature since 1970 have done some increments of good, but are being overwhelmed, dramatically, by the system’s spread to billions of new consumers, and by its cumulative growth impacts over time. It is furthermore a system which can’t say stop, or slow down: it has to have growth of a certain level or it stalls, and then even worse happens. And in American capitalism’s snarling and aggressive reaction to even market friendly attempts to mitigate global warming since 2000, these critics have received strong confirmation for their views that he entire system must be reworked: assumptions, processes, outcomes, location, scale and purpose.

Naomi Klein’s essay from November, 2011, Capitalism vs. the Climate, appearing in The Nation, is perhaps the most powerful summary of this position, starting from her premise that the Right knows exactly how great the economic stakes are in the attempts to stop global warming, while environmentalists do not. Almost in deference to Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture from April 23, 2012 and to our closing theme of “Austerity vs. Abundance,” Klein makes the stakes very clear:

"The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal – and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence."

But Klein, like David Harvey, is attuned to the cultural fragmentation of postmodern culture. While the climate crisis has handed the left “the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’” and, quoting from the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “ ‘the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen,’” it has been unable to take advantage of the opening: our joint crisis “… calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single ‘issues’ to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGO’s.” (My emphasis.”)

Klein is a harsh critic of both the major environmental groups and what I will call the economic left for failing to come together in a new movement that will directly challenge the nature of contemporary capitalism, which has caused both the climate and the economic crisis: “Half of the problem is that progressives – their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars – tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy).”

But Klein never specifies the composition of those groups on the economic left “taking on the failures of capitalism.” That would have to include unions, wouldn’t it, although she never mentions them? And she doesn’t spend any time on the history of recent attempts to create a blue-green alliance (there is now a group called just that, the BlueGreen Alliance, with major individual unions and environmental groups here at http://www.bluegreenalliance.org/ ). That history would have to include the anti-globalization street demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, and all those who were part of Van Jones’ attempts to create the “Green Collar Economy.” Yet these were very much moderate reformist efforts, trying to work with progressive entrepreneurs like Paul Hawken, in the powerful postmodern cultural climate of hyper-entrepreneurialism we have just seen David Harvey describe for us. And when the golden opportunity looked like it had finally arrived in January of 2009 with the election of Barack Obama, almost all these progressive groups ended up deferring, with varying degrees of protest, to the new administration’s sense of timing and priorities; and by now, you know exactly where that has left us: with climate policy in worse standing with the public than before 2008 and the unemployed and fore-closed upon still struggling below decks. Any close and fair look at how the AFL-CIO has behaved – and fared – not only for their own key goals – union voting reforms, card check – but their bridge-building efforts on what should be the Ur issue for the economic left – full employment - should leave us with no illusions.

There is no powerful and coherent “economic left” out there, the efforts of OWS, now in eclipse, notwithstanding. The refusal of the AFL-CIO and most of the other reform groups encompassed by Klein’s vague notion of the “economic left” to construct a bold jobs policy built upon FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and the growing but very recent efforts by the Kansas City School for guaranteed public employment (the work of Randall Wray, Pavlina Tcherneva and Marshall Auerback and others at the Levy and Roosevelt Institutes) and then to stand outside the Democratic Party and the Obama administration and demand action on it – has been nothing short of a tragedy for the American people.

Those forces on the “economic left” which have, by their vision and actual work on the ground placed them furthest from the floundering traditional neo-Keynesian solutions to the dual crises – the cooperative enterprises – written about and celebrated by William Greider and Gar Alperovitz (and I include Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson in this general direction) tend to be apolitical and mild-mannered by temperament: they’re not going to be putting the heat on the political process very directly. Which is why it was so courageous for Berry to have spoken as he did; the indications are it was a very difficult address for him to write.

I can’t leave this survey of forces on the economic left without saying something about how little those forces have to show for their efforts despite having some of the best economic minds of our times leaning in their general direction. I’m thinking here, of course, of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Simon Johnson, Nouriel Roubini, Jeff Madrick and Robert Kuttner. Most have (with the exception perhaps of Simon Johnson, who focuses most on breaking up the Wall Street banks) called for, at one time or another, some form of public job creation to meet the unemployment crisis. And most, have, by now, in mid-2012, grown silent on that issue, with James Galbraith having explicitly said that he has been unable to breach the wall of opposition, and so has shifted to calling for a dramatic increase in the federal minimum wage, to something in the range of $12.00 an hour, as the best way to meet the inequality and lack of demand crisis.

Yet I have to ask, other than for their calls for a more massive stimulus program, or greater scope of action by the Federal Reserve, how much their policy prescriptions actually demand major structural changes in capitalism? Yes, I have cited in previous writings James Galbraith’s call for a revival of a federal role for “planning” in his book The Predator State, a function Naomi Klein agrees is crucial to addressing the twin crises, (and planning at the state and local level as well; given the communication speed and options we have today, there is no reason why planning cannot be both directly participatory and democratic) but I think it is fair to say that none of these economic thinkers directly challenge the centrality of creative destruction, relentless technological change, and the human costs of automation the way I have approached them in this essay. In those major senses, I have to question how much they would differ on these key core processes of capitalism from the worldview of Gene Sperling and the rest of the Center-Right economics profession. Certainly few have addressed the major fault line I am tracing, following Wendell Berry and Naomi Klein and others, of Austerity vs. Abundance. For most of them, austerity is a terribly miss-timed anti-Keynesian policy, which may well prove catastrophic in its intensity and timing for Europe, but which, once the economy recovers, we can apply in appropriate doses to get governmental debt and deficits under control (Roubini and Krugman are closest to this view; Galbraith has worried the least about debt and deficits and perhaps the most about the failures on the unemployment front). Correspondingly, abundance is the dominant vector outcome of the historical processes of capitalism, and once we have the right policies in place to get us through this crisis, we will return to our usual relationship with it: give us “more,” to use the words of Samuel Gompers.

It may help to clarify where most of these “progressive economists” stand, and how accepting they are of most of the dominant features of the economic system, by understanding what the phrase “structural problem” has come to mean in today’s economic discussions. Paul Krugman’s column of May 11, 2012, “Easy Useless Economics,” offers a pretty good illustration of the problem here at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/opinion/krugman-easy-useless-economics... It begins with a discussion of a paper claiming that America’s high unemployment rate “had deep structural roots in the economy and wasn’t amenable to any quick solution. The author’s diagnosis was that the U.S. economy wasn’t flexible enough to cope with rapid technological change.” It turns out the paper was from 1939, and the complaining economist was against unemployment insurance and thus the term structural problem had already taken on its current usage in economics: that labor markets and workers weren’t being flexible enough; the economy needs skill “X” but workers have skill “Y.” Krugman goes on to shred the idea that there are structural unemployment problems of this type in his usual way, by stating that if this were true, we would expect to see “a, b and c” - but we don’t - steering his column to the grand refutation that there weren’t structural problems either in 1939 or 2012, because the old ones, like the alleged current ones, were symptoms of inadequate demand, and were rapidly cured – in two years – by the proper, massive scope of Keynesian demand creation, the military preparations for World War II.

But what Krugman doesn’t tell his readers about is the historical shift of the context surrounding the term “structural problem.” Once the term was central to the vocabulary mainly of progressive critics of capitalism, even here in the U.S.: the populists of the late 19th century and the progressives of the first decades of the 20th. It’s close to the heart of the message of Alan Brinkley’s book about The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995). Brinkley is drawing a contrast between the ideas circulating in the early New Deal, and a major shift that emerged after the recession of 1937-38, which turned into a more resigned attitude to the flaws of capitalism, and which sought to contain them by working the levers of fiscal policy rather than intervening directly in its structures. Here’s what the original meaning was:

"One broad assumption was particularly important to the early New Deal notion of reform, just as it had been of special importance to most American reformers since early in the twentieth century: the assumption that the nation’s greatest problems were rooted in the structure of modern industrial capitalism and that it was the mission of government to deal somehow with the flaws in that structure. Chief among liberal and progressive complaints about the flawed structures of capitalism were its strong tendencies to oligopoly and monopoly, its overproduction and imbalances between demand and supply (almost always too little demand) and imbalances between sectors, as I have been stressing in this paper, and the sheer chaos released by creative destruction and technological change, to be countered by planning and co-operative structures – and public employment programs like the CCC and WPA, and whole regions where these efforts were pulled together in vast public works programs, mainly in the South and West, like TVA and the rural electric co-operatives."

I have argued in this essay, implicitly at least, that we ought to consider the impacts of technological change, including automation and its displacement of the work force, and its psychological demands and stresses upon individuals and communities, as one of the main structural faults of capitalism, walking just on the other side of the street named “abundance” from the positive effects of greater efficiency and new technologies. I believe that most mainstream economists, including many of the progressives I have listed just above, underestimate it scope and impact, hoping, and believing, that sufficient demand can overcome its effects without the type of interventions that the early New Deal offered, or the sweeping change in processes, scales and goals being called for by Klein, Berry, Daly, and before them Christopher Lasch (See his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, 1991). In several ways, then, these progressive left economists could benefit from the insights and questions raised by the most sophisticated Marxist analysts, like Harvey, who can see structural problems in the very glories of capitalism’s most sacred interior processes. So here he is in The Enigma of Capital, reminding us of some of the contradictions and dangers, including the strains placed on the labor force:

"Such waves of innovation can become destructive and ruinous even for capital itself, in part because yesterday’s technologies and organizational forms have to be discarded before they have been amortized (like the computer I am working on) and because perpetual reorganizations in labour processes are disruptive to continuity of flow and destabilizing for social relations…Social and educational infrastructures find it hard to adapt quickly enough and the perpetual need for ‘retraining’ several times in a worker’s lifetime puts stresses on public resources as well as private energies. The production of chronic job insecurity through deskilling and reskilling is backed by technologically induced unemployment (about 60 per cent of job losses in the US in recent years are attributable to technological changes while only 30 per cent are due to the widely blamed offshoring of jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere)."

So over on the left side of the environmental movement, with thinkers like Gus Speth, Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, and Herman Daly, the pursuit of abundance through greater Keynesian demand will only intensify the environmental crisis, especially global warming, if the actual processes and mechanisms of that growth don’t dramatically change in character. Their worries on this score are magnitudes higher than most of the economists I’ve cited. I suppose one can argue that the Apollo Project, the Green Collar “economy” and all the similar blue-green alliances were meant to meet these objections: more growth and more jobs in sustainable, energy efficient and renewable ways; and the technological frenzy of innovation was also supposed to be a least partly re-directed to give the United States the edge in all matters of cleaner energy production. But it hasn’t worked out that way, not at all. What went wrong?

First, there was never enough synergy or political punch in the blue-green alliance to overcome the long standing “fragmentation” and single issue problems on the left. Thus the stimulus was not large enough, green enough or job intensive enough as nearly everyone underestimated the depth of the crisis, at least those in the economic decision making positions in the administration, with a reluctance to have an all-out battle with the Republican Right opposition right out of the gate (remember: the dominant outlook of Obama was that too much policy intensity and inflexibility would be for the moderate independents he was courting.) So we had the moderate stimulus first, then the health care debate (with labor’s acquiescence), while the cap and trade legislation was struggling alongside financial reform. Add in the very mixed signals on the debt and deficit worries (The “Commission”), the debate over the Afghanistan surge, the placement of gay marriage on an unhappy back burner and you have a Democratic administration heading into its second term election with far less public support than FDR did heading into 1936 for the understandable reasons that the public has not seen enough effective, decisive action to address the nation’s problems.

As I have tried to show with the help of two of David Harvey’s books (The Condition of Postmodernity and The Enigma of Capital) there are equally important but deeper reasons behind these failures as well. First, there’s that fragmented postmodern cultural landscape that affects the causes on the left just as it does the rest of the culture. Second, we have had, since the 1970’s, the shift in the worldview of the political economy to stress entrepreneurs, not left leaning governmental action, as the preferred choice to solve problems in the economy. It is not the working class, the broader “citizens of the middle class,” environmentalists or scientists who are the leading voices in our democracy. It is the entrepreneurs who have the first whisper into public policy makers’ ears and the dominant hold on campaign contributions.

If it is true that labor relations and “relations” with nature form two of the major structural “contradictions” in capitalism, and barriers to its chief tasks, then capitalism has overwhelmingly solved the labor one by demolishing labor’s primary institutions - unions and community solidarity. This is not without major problems, not just for labor, but for all of us, business included, as the trend has continued since the 1970’s, because the increasing maldistribution of wealth and therefore the diminishment of demand go hand-in-hand with this achievement.

Third, neoliberalism, aided by acquiescent Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have conceded the Right’s case against government to such an extent that by the time the implications have been fully ripened in an economic crisis which can’t be solved without a powerful role by an innovative government, it is too late, as President Obama has found out. He is able only to deliver good speeches about how government has a significant role to play, but all his legislative efforts have been undermined by the 30 years build-up of powerful currents pushing in the opposite direction.

And here the “libertarian” trend of the past 30 years comes in to play a significant role. They might serve as allies of temporary convenience with the left in breaking up Wall Street, prying secrets out of the Temple (the Federal Reserve) and slowing overseas adventures, but on matters of combatting unemployment, foreclosures and planning for an alternative energy economy, they are unlikely to be allies at all. Indeed they will prove to be the better allies of competitive entrepreneurialism, and their overall stance on the political economy will be about as progressive as the positions taken by the small business lobbyists on the great economic questions of the day: anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-demand creation deficits and fanatics on debt reduction. I think their strong presence and influence inside OWS was a major factor in its inability to come up with a Second Bill of Right-Jobs for All platform, a major and revealing failure; it would like the New Deal without an AAA for agriculture and a CCC and WPA for jobs and public works.

One of the major problems on the left right now is the lack of a critical and sustained dialogue between its conflicting fragments. Of all the thinkers on the left, David Harvey has perhaps the greatest imagination and comprehensive of all these fragments of postmodernity. He writes with the sweep of Marx’s scope, but without Marx’s spite. Like Marx, he doesn’t want to ever go backwards in terms of the human pursuit of technological innovation and abundance, but unlike many of the more traditional liberal economists, he realizes that we may indeed face environmental barriers that we can’t overcome. That’s an open question, because he reminds us that capitalism has leaped those barriers before; after the 16-18th century had stripped much of Europe of its ancient timber stands, coal became the energy source to fuel the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of our most threatening environmental danger today. But I don’t sense that Harvey is willing to go as far as Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, and Chris Hedges in accepting limits, more austerity, and radical decentralization, if the sacrifice of abundance was the price of capitalism’s transformation. But that’s something that the left should hear them debate, not in an hour or two, but in a series of extended encounters, moderated so that someone can lend them the necessary structure: to highlight the differences – and convergences. We need a genuine left version of Charlie Rose and Buckley’s old Firing Line.

James Livingston, the author of the probing and provocative Against Thrift, should be part of the discussion, since his positions on this abundance-austerity line, consumer culture and the lack of Keynesian demand will prove to be especially challenging to the austerity Greens and the “tax cuts for more investing” business types. I think we could all benefit if Gar Alperovitz, William Greider and Naomi Klein could also be participants, along with a more traditional economist like Paul Krugman, and perhaps someone speaking for labor directly, although I don’t know who that would be today; Richard Trumpka has been so cautious that Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers has been the most prominent face for labor in its outreach to the rest of society.

I think that if we have learned anything from the OWS movement, it is that good slogans and media-street savvy are not enough. The stakes are very high, the shape of a whole culture and economy are at issue, and our society deserves to hear some of best minds we can find debate the remedies and directions in a disciplined and systematic way. And we’re not going to have this debate in the regular channels we now use. The shocking and revealing absence of debate in the wake of Wendell Berry’s Jefferson lecture is proof enough of that.

I’m going to end this essay with an ominous passage, and a warning of what can happen under similar cultural and economic circumstances, what has already happened in the history of Vienna and Austria – well before it happened in Germany in the 1930’s. David Harvey cited what I have in mind in his The Condition of Postmodernity when he quoted from Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), I book I read several decades ago, trying to make sense out of the wreckage of liberalism in 1980’s America. Here’s the fuller passage from Schorske’s Introduction which I think speaks most directly to our present troubles:

"In what seemed like ubiquitous fragmentation – Nietzsche and the Marxists agreed in calling it ‘decadence’ – European high culture entered a whirl of infinite innovation, with each field proclaiming independence of the whole, each part in turn falling into parts. Into the ruthless centrifuge of change were drawn the very concepts by which cultural phenomena might be fixed in thought. Not only the producers of culture, but also its analysts and critics fell victim to the fragmentation. The many categories devised to define or govern any one of the trends in post-Nietzchean culture – irrationalism, subjectivism, abstractionism, anxiety, technologism – neither possessed the surface virtue of lending themselves to generalization nor allowed any convincing dialectical integration into the historical process as previously understood….Indeed, the very multiplicity of analytic categories by which modern movements defined themselves had become, to use Arnold Schoenberg’s term, ‘a death-dance of principles.'"

This is not the outcome that I hope or wish for. My fondest hope is that the leaders of American business would begin to recognize the fault lines and limitations of the system of creative destruction that they guard so jealousy, fanatically fending off alterations even as the future of the climate itself is at stake. They don’t seem to realize that the system they promote and defend now has no practical use for 15-25% percent of the population – except as perhaps an even cheaper reserve labor force. Therefore, under their present worldview, there is no need, and no room for a new New Deal, a modern American version of Social Democracy that would honor the work ethic by creating the jobs the private sector either cannot or will not deliver. And indeed, there is not much room in the current arrangements for the discussions, debates and vigorous democracy necessary to mobilize these changes. But we’ll certainly have a lot of new “aps” to play with.

Bill Neil
Rockville, MD

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future