capitalist pig ripoffs

Slorg's Guide to Galactic Socialism

"Every day I drift further to the left, even though I'm standing still." -- Max Sawicky
Socialism, contrary to most everything you may have heard or seen on our corporate-run mass media, is neither dead, nor a meaningless historical relic, nor the belief-system of rabid Commie pinko mutant ninja squirrel hippies. Socialism is ANY, I repeat, ANY attempt by human beings to control, regulate, or otherwise discipline the market forces for the benefit of all human beings. Laws against pollution? That's socialism in action. Equal rights and suffrage for all? Socialism again. Jury trials and public education for all? That darn socialism. Social Security and Federal guarantees of pension fund assets? Pure socialism. It just won't go away, no matter how hard our ruling-classes try! Of course, if you press the Wall Streeters on this, they'll give you the Three Great Neoliberal Myths Argument, namely, that (1) socialism is dead, (2) unions are evil, and (3) markets know best. Each one of these claims is ludicrous in and of itself; together, they form a trinity of colossal evil, whose barely-disguised aim is the plundering of the planet for the benefit of a tiny rentier elite. Let's take a look at these arguments in closer detail:

Myth 1: Socialism is dead.

Socialism has never been more alive. Historically, the human race has experienced three great expansions of the capitalist world-system; historians generally refer to the first as liberal capitalism, the second as state-monopoly capitalism, and the present one as global or multinational capitalism. In each case, working people everywhere suffered terribly in the initial phases of each new system, but slowly learned to find their own way in the system and eventually to fight back in creative ways. The era of liberal capitalism which ran from 1815 to around 1933 saw the first trade union associations, powerful waves of pro-democracy activism visible in the English Chartist, the American abolitionist and the German social democratic movements, as well as the creation of labor parties and the first hesitant attempts to regulate working hours and factory conditions in the great urban cities of Britain and America. That said, socialist movements were tiny and weak, attracted few intellectuals or artists, and were intensely persecuted by vicious, anti-democratic Governments throughout Europe and, on a more regional basis, in America. Without any real opposition to check them, liberal capitalism pursued vicious policies of imperialism and colonization in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and eventually self-destructed in the late 19th century arms race and the horrific slaughter of World War One.

During the era of state-monopoly capitalism, mass Left parties established themselves, women won the right to vote and basic social legislation, and revitalized and powerful union movements sparked a torrent of reforms and Government initiatives which completely changed the face of society. Whereas the old and sick were mostly thrown in the trash or consigned to poorhouses during Victorian times, the welfare state brought decent health care to all via socialized insurance programs; national pension funds provided for people in their old age; and children, the elderly, and the disabled received assistance from the state; civil rights legislation was passed and expanded; workplaces were regulated by safety laws and inspected by public officials, and so forth. New types of socialist culture blossomed, everywhere from Picasso's pictorial revolution to Brecht's revolutionary theater, and from the theoretical innovations of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School to thinkers and activists such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the French Jean-Paul Sartre and the Hungarian Gyorgy Lukacs. That said, socialist movements and parties were fairly limited in their goals and elitist in their leadership and political objectives, and ofttimes didn't have much of a cultural agenda for change nor an ecological vision; meanwhile, though the welfare state improved people's lives immensely, it tended to play second fiddle to more reactionary and noxious forms of state-monopoly capital accumulation, such as American military Keynesianism and economic imperialism and Soviet military-industrialism and cultural imperialism.

Now the era of multinational or global capitalism is upon us, and while our press doesn't like to say so, socialism is being reinvented and reborn on a global scale: ecological activism and the Green Parties of the First World; the democratic revolutions and trade union uprisings of the Second World, everywhere from South Korea to Poland, and Jakarta to Moscow; multi-cultural struggles of indigenous, Fourth World and regional cultural groups; a whole new range of gender activisms, from feminism and women's rights to lesbian and gay liberation; the globalization of human rights and the struggle for independent trade unions throughout China and India, Brazil and Bangladesh, South Africa and Nigeria; etc. etc. etc. The global Left, unlike its previous incarnations, has driven and been driven by a stupendous outpouring of intellectual and cultural energies: activists and economists like Doug Henwood, Max Sawicky, thinkers and scholars such as Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson, and Pierre Bourdieu are transforming even the most dormant disciplines such as literary criticism, philosophy, sociology and aesthetic theory into zones of revolution, while artists such as Heiner Mueller, Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Bob Marley, and Jan Svankmajer are opening our eyes, ears and hearts to the rhythms, colors and drama of the 21st century.

Myth 2: Unions are bad, because only countries with low wages succeed in world markets.

Africa has abysmally low wages; why aren't they producing laptop computers? Workers in Latin America get paid practically nothing. But when's the last time you bought a car made in Brazil or Argentina? Conversely, Switzerland and Germany have some of the highest wages in the world, but are ferociously competitive and produce some of the world's finest pharmaceuticals, automobiles, chemicals and heavy electrical equipment. The fact is, high real wages are good for an economy; they force businesses to invest in labor-saving equipment, create demand for internal markets, and allow the workforce to educate and train itself to world-class levels. In short, only world-class workers produce world-class commodities, and countries which fail to invest in their workers, like the USA and UK, have experienced twenty-five years of economic and social decay. The British industrial base is basically owned by Americans and Continental Europeans; Chrysler was bought up by Daimler, the giant German auto firm; and Swedish firm Ericsson and Finnish firm Nokia are stomping Motorola's market share something awful, despite the fact that average Finnish, Swedish and German wages are higher than America's.

The bottom line is, unions are good for the economy, and in more than just the economic sense. Unions brought us health and safety legislation; they brought us decent wages; and most of all, they brought us that most treasured of all American institutions, the weekend. Yes, the weekend: unions fought tooth and nail for the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week for decades against greedhead capitalists and their antediluvian hangers-on, who insisted that a shorter workweek would result in economic catastrophe, the moral decline of the working-class and generalized pandemonium. Instead, it stimulated whole new industries, as Americans found new and cool things to do with their time, like study, read, play sports, go to baseball games, see music-hall shows and, later in our history, movies, hang out with friends -- in short, enjoy themselves as free human beings.

Myth 3: Markets are always good and the welfare state is always bad for the economy.

Is it now? Then why are the countries with the plushest welfare states on the planet, namely Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy, kicking America's ass in global corporate competition? The dirty secret of the attack on welfare for working people is that corporate welfare -- porkbarrel deals, Government subsidies to corporations, tax breaks and other pro-business scams -- eats up far more of the Federal budget than welfare payments to the poor. The nonprofit group Citizens for Tax Justice estimated that total tax breaks and other subsidies to corporations amounted to about $150 billion in annual lost tax revenue throughout the Nineties; compare this to the $50 billion or so which gets spent on welfare programs per se, or to that truly monstrous boondoggle, our $270 billion annual military budget. Martin Marietta's profit margins are simply more important than adequately funding American schools, don't you agree?

Wall Streeters make much of the wisdom of the marketplace. Leaving aside obvious counter-examples like the great financial panics of the 19th century and the Great Depression of our own century, what about the meltdown of Asia today? In 1995, the World Bank, the IMF, and the assembled bankers and financiers of the world economy gave their unmitigated blessing to Southeast Asian countries; these latter deregulated their markets, liberalized their capital flows, and ruthlessly cut social spending. They did everything and anything the global financial elites said they should. The result? An investment boom by US and Japanese firms, but no corresponding boom in Southeast Asian consumption; since noone could buy all the goods being produced, the result was a hideous crash and near-Depression levels of economic contraction and unemployment in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and South Korea.

So much for the magic of the marketplace. Note further than when the shit hit the fan, the global banking system was forced to arrange a $155 billion IMF bailout to the region; the alternative would've been a global chain reaction of credit crashes, debt defaults and spiraling bankruptcies, as Southeast Asia defaulted on its roughly $1 trillion of debt. But the IMF now has the gall to heap stupidity on stupidity, and to claim that only further privatization and deregulation will solve the crisis! In other words, at the exact moment that Southeast Asia desperately needs fresh consumer demand and massive re-regulation of its markets, to ensure that future capital inflows don't get wasted in unproductive investments or speculative binges, and to protect local banking systems, the IMF is insisting that they turn a nasty recession into a hideous, decades-long Depression, by making the same mistakes which got them into this mess in the first place, only on an even bigger scale. Such vision, such insight, such clarity of purpose from the postmodern Bruenings and Hoovers of our time! To paraphrase Brecht, what's the crime of looting a Pacific Rim bank compared to looting the entire Pacific Rim banking system?