The
Current Economic Crisis, the General Election and Beyond
Anthony Mansueto
Seeking Wisdom
Neoliberalism is over. We stand at the beginning of a new
period, one full of uncertainty and of promise, in which the underlying
contradictions of modern civilization will stand exposed as never before, and
in which the demand to address these contradictions will be addressed to all
who claim to lead, across the ideological spectrum. The advent of this new
period is marked, on the one hand, by the current economic crisis and, on the
other hand, by the emergence (or rather the re-emergence) of civilizational
centers in competition with the West, and by the election of Barack Obama as
President of the United States. These events signal that we can expect not only
an end to the neoliberal regime of accumulation, but the emergence of a new
ruling bloc which will govern using a new legitimation strategy, and a
fundamental change in the relationship between the modern West and what Samuel
Huntington has called “the rest” : China, India, Russia, Dar-al-Islam, and Latin America.
In order to understand correctly the
significance of these events they must be considered together, and in the
context of the broader, long term trends which define the current situation. We
have argued in other contexts that the current situation is defined by the
early stages of a civilizational crisis
(Mansueto 2004). More specifically, we live in a period during which the modern
ideal of divinization by means of innerworldly civilizational progress, be it
scientific and technological or philosophical and political, has been radically
called into question, but no new ideal has emerged to take its place. This is what is generally called the
“postmodern condition.” At the same time, this civilizational crisis has not
been accompanied by a corresponding structural
crisis. Its underlying internal contradictions notwithstanding, in other words,
capitalism has not been seriously called
into question, at least since social liberal regime of the postwar period
collapsed in the 1970s and the neoliberal regime emerged to take its place. On
the contrary, for the past thirty years we have been living through a period during
which the dominant regime of accumulation has favored privatization,
deregulation, the free flow of not only goods, services, and labor but also
capital around the planet, and in general a radicalization of defining
characteristic of capitalism, the commodification of labor and capital. Resistance
to the neoliberal regime has, furthermore, come not primarily from the socialist
Left, though recent years have witnessed a resurgence of both the populist and
the modernist socialism in Latin America, but rather from the Right, from the
extractive and low wage sectors of Capital, which have attempted to legitimate
resistance to the global market by means of a cultural strategy centered on
religious fundamentalism. This has, in turn, created a complex constellation of
forces at the geopolitical level in which both “secular” neoliberal and
Christian fundamentalist forces have been in an uncomfortable alliance against
fundamentalist Islam. This alliance defines the conjuncture which began with the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and which is now also coming to an end,
along with the longer standing neoliberal regime of accumulation.
The characteristics of the coming
period are just now beginning to take shape, but the following trends are
already apparent: 1) a serious confrontation with the ecological crisis, 2) a global
crisis of underconsumption leading at the very least to protracted stagnation
and possibly to global systemic collapse, something which will only partly be
ameliorated by public investment in infrastructure, “green technology,” health
care reform, and redistribution in to support Western wage rates, 3) an end to
US military adventurism in favor of the effective use of “soft power,” a serious engagement with challenges of
global governance, and a concomitant recognition that it is not the United
States but rather the global market and modernity itself which his holding back
human development and civilizational progress, and 4) a new ideological dynamic,
in which the polarization between fundamentalism and militant secularism which
has defined the past decade will partly give
way to an emerging politics of meaning and hope in which diverse and still
competing systems of meaning and value inform a pragmatic and open-ended search
for solutions to the challenges facing us as a civilization and as a species.
The overall effect will be an
attempted, but most likely unsuccessful, “transition by reform,” in which the
underlying contradictions of modern civilization are addressed, at least in
part, by members of a new ruling bloc without revolutionary upheaval, long term
decadence, or civilizational collapse. The attempt at a transition by reform will be
unsuccessful because those leading it –primarily the progressive information
and high technology sectors of Capital-- while profoundly aware of the
contradictions of neoliberalism, cannot see beyond modernity and capitalism,
which lie at the root of the current crisis, while the working classes remain
largely unorganized and without effective leadership of their own. What the
attempt will accomplish will be to
organize and galvanize the progressive sectors of Capital, currently scattered
among countless corporations, think tanks, and philanthropic organizations,
increasing the likelihood that, even in the context of a transition by
revolution or decadence, more of the positive heritage of modernity will be
conserved.
This new situation will call for
significant revisions to our political strategy as we engage the possibility,
for the first time since the 1930s, of an alliance with the ruling bloc –i.e.
of an authentic popular front— while finding new ways to advance those aspects
of our agenda which that bloc does not share. Before we can draw out their
strategic implications, however, we need to analyze in greater detail the
dramatic and startling developments of the past two years.
The Background to the Current Crisis
The Crisis of the
Neoliberal Regime of Accumulation
It is possible to understand the current economic crisis only by
situating it in historic context. The
underlying economic contradiction of capitalism is the tendency, as the system
becomes more capital (technology and skill) intensive, for the rate of profit
to fall and for capital to be redeployed to low wage, low technology
activities. This was the dominant tendency throughout the later nineteenth
century, and created the structure which Lenin called imperialism, in which
advanced capitalist states competed for control of underdeveloped peripheries,
to which they then exported their capital. This dynamic was the basis for the
two great wars which defined the first half of the last century. It also
created a global tendency towards underconsumption which led ultimately to the
Great Depression.
The restabilization of the capitalist
system required state intervention to shore up demand. Specifically, military
expenditure subsidized the higher technology sectors of the economy, while transfer
payments and the institutionalization of collective bargaining ensured that
wages rose with productivity, setting in motion a long way of growth led by
housing and the consumer durables sector which lasted from 1945 – 1968.
Each attempt to resolve the
contradictions of capitalism however, creates new contradictions of its own.
Specifically, throughout the postwar period, it continued to remain more
lucrative for capital to invest in low wage, low technology activities in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America than to modernize aging industries in North America,
Europe and
The neoliberal regime which has been
in place since roughly 1978 (the date when Margaret Thatcher came to power in
the UK and of the “right turn” in the Carter government in the US, as well,
incidentally, of Karol Woytila’s ascent to the papacy), resolved this crisis by
attacking wages and transfer payments, and by breaking the back of the Soviet
bloc, something which not only opened up new territories for investment, but
also weakened the working classes and allowed the imposition of a global system
of free trade and unregulated capital flows. This was reinforced by the
development of new information and communication technologies which facilitated
the nearly instantaneous transfer of capital from one activity to another
around the planet. The result was a long wave of growth which lasted (cyclical
downturns notwithstanding) from the early 1980s until roughly 2006-2007.
The difficulty, of course, is that
this neoliberal regime resurrected global tendencies towards underconsumption. Monopoly
rents on skill and innovation and higher wages in the skilled information,
technology, and allied finance sectors created sufficient demand to provide a
market for the new consumer goods and services produced by those sectors
roughly up through 2000, when those markets began to become saturated. This
dynamic was reinforced by larger demographic trends, as the Baby Boom
generation reached its peak years of earnings and expenditures, supporting
demand across a much wider swath of the economy.
As this dynamic of growth began to
expend itself towards the end of the 1990s, the ruling classes faced a
fundamental choice: enduring a period of contraction and austerity while new
investments in infrastructure, education, research, and development, expanded
the upper middle strata and created new products and new opportunities, or
short term measures intended to extend the expansion artificially, both
temporally and to wider sections of the population. By a close decision, the
extractive and low technology sectors of Capital, supported by those sectors of
the working class and petty bourgeoisie which felt “left behind” by the
expansion of the 1990s, chose the latter route. Capital, however, had learned
the hard way that high deficits could lead to higher interest rates and to
difficulties with capital formation. And unions were already too weakened to
force a redistribution of value added in favor of the working classes. The Bush
government, therefore, kept interest rates artificially low, pushing the
population to consume on credit, while borrowing the necessary funds from the
emerging economic powers of Asia, and from
Just why the bubble burst when it did
and in the way it did has much to do with the specific ways in which credit was
used to support demand for housing in the US (a critically important sector in
a country in which home ownership provides much of the social safety net for
the working class and middle strata) as well as with the development of exotic
financial instruments (“derivatives”). But the financial crisis simply exposed
much deeper economic contradictions. This is why the infusion of capital into
troubled financial institutions by the state has done so little to mitigate the
crisis or catalyze renewed growth. Consumption on credit, unmatched by an
equivalent in value added, cannot be sustained in the long run.
The effect has been to expose long
standing global underconsumption tendencies which were actually reinforced by
the neoliberal regime and to reinstate the structural crisis which had emerged
in the 1970s and which was only covered over by neoliberalism.
The Crisis of the
Second Neoliberal-Social Conservative Bloc
Periods are generally defined by regimes of accumulation,
conjunctures by shifting constellations of political forces. Broadly speaking
the neoliberal era can be divided into three conjunctures: 1) the period of the
assault on the working classes and on the Soviet bloc, which corresponds
roughly to the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush years, 1978-1991, 2) the period following
the final collapse of the Soviet bloc, corresponding roughly to the Clinton
years, 1991-2001, and 3) the period following the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001, which ended this autumn.
Neoliberalism generally has pursued
two strategies of legitimation. The first, associated with the moderate
neoliberalism of Blair and Clinton, argues that free markets really do allow
the best –understood as innovators and problem solvers-- to rise to the top,
and promises to open up the opportunities for access to monopoly rents on innovation
and skill and significant capital ownership by investment in education for the
declining “rust belt” working classes –promises which never led to anything more
than funding for a couple of years at a community college. The second,
associated with the Right, links neoliberalism with social conservatism and
religious fundamentalism. This was, of course, the strategy Ronald Reagan and
also that of George W. Bush. But there is a subtle difference in the way the
strategy was deployed in the first and third neoliberal conjunctures. Under
Reagan, neoliberalism and social conservativism were linked together by the
claim that both the market and traditional social institutions, including “old
time religion” were manifestations of a spontaneous organizing process and had
proven themselves over time. Socialism and rationalism generally were attempts
to substitute the limited vision of a single mind or small group of minds for
the wisdom of the market and of the ages. This was the ideology of F. A. Hayek
and marked an ascendant neoliberalism which promised –and within limits
delivered— real economic results. Under Bush, on the other hand, the Right
pulled away from a pure neoliberalism and sought increasingly to protect
backward extractive and low wage, low technology sectors from the growing power
of finance capital, the information and technology sectors, and the nouveaux riches elements the latter had
brought to power under
The centerpiece of this strategy was,
of course, an attempt to set in motion a “clash of civilizations” between the
liberal and/or Christian “West” and the Islamic, Hindu, and Confucian “rest”
which would legitimate a partial slowing of globalization and protection of the
backward interests represented by the Right. The most backward elements in the
Islamic world, which had been pursuing a parallel strategy for some time,
obliged with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, so that for the past
eight years, while the underlying fundamentals of our economy have been
weakening and we were, in effect, borrowing our prosperity from the Chinese, US
geopolitical grand strategy has been focused on an internal struggle between
“Christian” and “Islamic” elements in the extractive sector.
This strategy has now spent itself,
not because there are no longer sectors for whom it has a significant appeal,
but because the underlying economic strategy it sought to legitimate is also
spent and the deeper, underlying realities of the current global situation,
which very little to do with a struggle between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, are beginning to assert
themselves. Let us look more closely at those realities.
The
Current Situation
The Economic Crisis in Civilizational
Perspective
When we say that the present period is not defined by a clash of
civilizations, this does not imply that there is no civilizational dimension to
the current crisis. Indeed, there are two ways in which the current economic
crisis raises broader civilizational issues, , and we ignore both at our peril.
First, as the ecological crisis deepens
and we approach peak oil and other resource depletion thresholds, the weight of
fundamentally backward extractive sectors will increase and contradictions both
within the extractive sector (which is by nature tied to the land in which its
resource base is located) and between the extractive sector and the rest of the
economy will intensify. As we have noted elsewhere, it is in the extractive
sector in particular that religious fundamentalisms find their principal base.
This is because an extractive economy requires very little in the way of
creativity and critical rationality and because religious fundamentalisms
provide a way to legitimate resistance to globalization without empowering the
working classes. To the extent that we face a clash of civilizations, it is not
between the West and the rest, but rather between the fundamentalists
(Christian and Islamic) and the rest (including both secular modernists and
advocates the emerging politics of meaning).
Second, the West faces a very real
threat that, but one that is economic rather than fundamentally cultural or
religious. The “West” has been defined in many different ways (Catholic,
Protestant, liberal, socialist), but one constant has been the extraordinary
value placed on the cultivation of the individual human being. This is a value
shared by the full spectrum of Christian traditions and by both the liberal and
socialist variants of “secular” modernity.
(Modern and humanistic scientific socialism, we should remember, unlike
the poor peasant populism with which it
has often been allied, argues that capitalism is flawed not because of its
“individualism” as such but because it misunderstands the social nature of
individuality and holds back the full development of individual as well as of
broader civilizational capacities.) But ideas, as Mao taught us, do not drop
from the sky. And they do come with a price tag. The West has been able to
afford to value the individual because, since at least the middle ages, it has
pursued a “high wage” strategy in the global economy.[1] At first this was simply a
function of the relatively sparse population of
It is precisely this high wage
strategy which is threatened by the rise of
This is not a “clash of civilizations”
in the sense that
Now there are, in the final analysis,
only so many ways to support wages above world market levels, and only one of
these is economically sound in the long run. The value of labor power is
determined by the average socially necessary labor time necessary to reproduce
it. This, in turn, a function of the level of investment in education and
training embodied in the labor time on the one hand and in technology on the
other hand, and is reflected in higher levels of productivity. Wages (the price of labor) can be driven above its
value by trade union activity or below it by surplus population and political
repression in the service of superexploitation. But in the long run either
departure is temporary. Wages which outpace the value of labor power will lead
to a capital formation crisis and wages which fall below it will lead first to
underconsumption tendencies and ultimately to the long term degradation of the
work force. Only higher than world market levels of productivity can sustainably support higher than world
market wages levels.
The critical question at present, of
course, is whether Western labor (including that of intellectual labor) is
over-valued or under-valued. On the one hand, wages have not kept pace with productivity in recent years, largely due to the
pressures of globalization and the defeat of the Western labor movements in the
1980s. This means that the wages of
workers in the West have not been able to compensate for the global tendencies
towards underconsumption which are a structural feature of capitalism, as they
did during the postwar period. Thus the need to support demand through credit. On
the other hand, this does not mean that Western labor is under-valued in the strict sense in which this term is understood
by a dialectical political economy. If
similar goods and services can be produced at lower cost in
Are such increases possible? This
cannot simply be ruled out. The introduction of new information and
communication technologies in the 1990s did lead to dramatic growth in
productivity. Investments in new, ecologically sound energy sources, in public
mass transportation and ecologically sound automobiles, and in emerging
technologies which are now just on the horizon might do the same. But short of truly exotic technological
advances (safe and cheap fusion or new technologies which might emerge from an
effective unification of physics, which now seems unlikely) they will not be
sufficient to justify (within the terms
of the law of value) the wage differential which exists between the West and
the rest. And these technologies are likely to be adopted by China and parts of
India and Latin America as well, where surplus populations will hold down wages
not just locally but globally, ensuring that most of the new value added goes
to profits rather than to wages.
It is, of course, possible to
restrict the operation of the law of value and support individual
self-cultivation outside the wage
relationship. This was, of course, the principal rationale for socialism. But
we have seen that while socialism is very good at supporting scientific and
technological activity, which is not threatening to the party, there is a
fundamental contradiction between the political monopoly of the Communist
Party, which is the condition of a real break with the law of value, and the
cultivation of the rational autonomy which is the ideal of humanistic
modernism. It is also possible to support the cultivation of human capacities outside the ordinary economy. This is
the monastic ideal. But what has defined not only the modern West, the West
generally, going back to Hellenic democracy and the mystery cults, is precisely
the opening of self-cultivation to the laos.
And so the current economic crisis
really is a crisis not just of neoliberalism, not just of capitalism, and not
just a crisis of modernity; it is a crisis of the West itself. Our task in this
crisis is to find a way forward for the human civilizational project which
conserves what is best in the Western tradition –and especially the ideal of
making self-cultivation and especially rational autonomy accessible to the laos. Just how we proceed depends in
large part on a correct estimate of just what we can expect from the new ruling
bloc in the United States and on what the emerging civilizational centers will
contribute.
China’s “Coming Out,” the Democratic
Victory, and the New Period
All of which brings us to the events of this autumn. We have
already analyzed elsewhere the significance of China’s liturgical grand
entrance on the world stage in August. After a long period of preparation (and
in spite of serious ongoing challenges) China is now trying to enter the global
stage with a new civilizational ideal deeply rooted in the Confucian tradition
but radically transformed by the experience of more than a half century of
socialist construction. This is the ideal of socialist spiritual civilization.
The precise content of this ideal
remains unclear. Its Confucian roots should
mean that it cannot but value self-cultivation, and excellence in reasoning
regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, in particular. But the
reality is rather different. China has
invested heavily in cultivating the intellectual capacities of its people, but
primarily in science and technology. And the principal social value currently
being promoted by the party is harmony.
Concretely harmony seems to mean, on
the one hand, an effort to address the ecological degradation and the economic
polarization which has accompanied the rapid growth of the past 25 years, while
restricting the expression of social contradictions in the public arena. This
suggests that what China is really doing is trying to bid for global leadership
based on an ability to produce high technology goods at low prices while
retaking the moral high ground on questions of ecological integrity and social
justice.
This said, there are long term initiatives under way to strengthen liberal arts
education and to rebuild the humanistic tradition in China. And the next
generation of Chinese Confucian scholars is likely to be overwhelmingly female,
leading to a major new advance in that tradition. So it is possible that
“socialist spiritual civilization” may mean something more than a thoughtful
late modernity after all.
But it is not only China which is
entering the global stage. India is also exercising growing influence, though
it is proceeding differently, through the gradual diffusion of a broad cultural
tradition rather than through state driven action in the cultural sphere. Witness
the growing influence of Hinduism and Buddhism in the West, in the explosion of
literary activity on the part of Indian and Indian immigrant writers and, of
course, in Bollywood. Even popular television shows in the US such as So You Think You Can Dance? have begun
to feature Indian cultural elements. If China is attempting to put a moral face
on late modernity (where, it argues implicitly, the West has failed), India is
reveling in the flux of meaning which characterizes the postmodern condition,
at once enjoying the pleasures and power it offers and reminding itself and the
world that nothing is permanent and that the highest end is not pleasure or
power or even justice, but rather liberation and enlightenment.
Russia and Dar-al-Islam present a very different picture. Both had adopted a
reactive stance to neoliberalism. In the case of Russia this amounted to a
reassertion, after a brief flirtation with free markets and democracy in the
early 1990s, of its historic option for state-led development, albeit shorn of
the progressive “westernizing” ideologies to which this vision was sometimes
attached (Enlightened Despotism, Socialism) and re-articulated in a language
which draws Nationalism and to a lesser extent on Orthodox Christianity. The
real question for Russia will be whether or not it uses its petroleum revenues
to recover and build on the very real scientific and technological advantages
enjoyed by the old Soviet union, or focuses instead on rebuilding a territorial
empire which allows its elite to live off of mineral rents.
Dar-al-Islam presents a broad spectrum of
alternative projects, from the Wahabi fundamentalism of the Taliban and its
“lite” version in Saudi Arabia, through various attempts to integrate a
conservative Islamic identity with respect for pluralism (the Justice and
Development Party in Turkey and the pluralistic Wahabi states of the Persian
Gulf), up to the remaining bastions of secularism such as Syria and some of the
states of the Mahgreb. None of these alternatives recapture the original
dynamism of Islam, which was centered on the project of joining truth to power
and of actually creating a just society, if only because none have confronted
the internal contradictions which undermined that project in the first place.
The dependence of so much of Dar-al-Islam
on an extractive economies further increases the weight of reactionary
forces and gives space to projects which would otherwise not be viable. Islam,
in other words, while very much a player in global civilizational struggles,
has yet to define a project which is actually attractive to the vast majority
of its own people –much less to outsiders--
and is will thus continue to play primarily a reactive and oppositional
role.
Latin America –site of the last proxy
struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States— is the principal locus
for the resurgence of projects in continuity with historic socialism, which are
vying for hegemony a dying neoliberalism. Here two principal alternatives are worth
noting: populist, redistributionist
socialism which has emerged in Venezuela and the Andes (supported
primarily by extractive and agrarian economies) and the modernizing social
democracy which has found its most intense expression in Brazil, which has
become an emerging global economic power.
Africa, finally, remains very far
from entering the global arena. Its populations crippled by HIV and by decades
of ethnic conflict masquerading as ideological struggles, most parts of Africa
are not even attractive as agro-export platforms. It will be some time before
this continent finds its voice(s).
Where does this leave the West?
Europe, which over the course of the past few decades showed itself wiser than
the United States in its more prudent energy strategy, its more moderate
implementation of neoliberalism, and its commitment global governance and
multilateralism, has reached a fundamental impasse. On the one hand, Europe needs immigrants if it is to support its
aging population and remain economically vigorous. On the other hand, these
immigrants call into question long-held Christian and humanistic understandings
of European identity. Europe has no easy way to resolve this question. Indeed,
the terms of the struggle around European identity which were set during the
debate around the failed EU constitution –a struggle between the Vatican, which
has insisted on the Christian nature
of European identity and most liberals and socialists, who see Europe as secular—fundamentally excludes the possibility of a solution.
Both definitions leave out both the historical role of Judaism and Islam in
shaping Europe and the role of the Jewish and Islamic heritage in defining
modern secularity.
Against this backdrop Barack Obama’s
victory in the 2008 US General Election signals that, 30 years of reaction and
stupidity notwithstanding, the leadership of the West still belongs to the
United States. More specifically, it means that the United States has something
powerfully attractive to offer what will increasingly be an Asian world. In
order to understand this, however, we need to analyze carefully the composition
and strategy of the new ruling bloc.
Our analysis of the 2004 General Election
focused on campaign finance data, election data, and exit polls. This year a
purely quantitative analysis yields only hints of the change which has taken
place. There has, to be sure, been a shift within the ruling classes
themselves, away from the rapacious strategy of the past eight years. This is
reflected in campaign finance data which shows that several sectors which
supported the Republicans in the past two election cycles have shifted their
allegiance to the Democrats., including defense (especially defense
electronics), health care, mortgage bankers,
automobile manufacturers, and clothing manufacturers. Similar shifts
have occurred among some sectors of the petty bourgeoisie, including physicians
and the clergy. The Republicans retain much of their base in commercial banking,
the extractive sector, and most low
wage, low technology manufacturing.
At the level of constituencies, there
has, similarly, been a significant but basically incremental shift. As in the
past two elections, the biggest single determinant of voting patterns is
urbanization, reflecting the enduring polarization between those who are able
to engage the global market and those who are “left behind” and who represent
the core of the Republican base and the principal objects of Republican
strategy. Indeed, Obama lost some
ground among white rural voters in Appalachia and the Upper and Middle South by
comparison with Kerry and Gore. And where he gained: among Catholics, Latinos,
suburban voters, etc., the gains were solid but incremental rather than
dramatic and transformational. In short, the numbers do not point to a dramatic realignment.
But unlike established patterns,
turning points are difficult to analyze quantitatively. Or, to put the matter a
bit differently, campaign finance data and election results suggest a
continuous metric; the actual outcome of elections, and especially of turning
point elections like those in 1860, 1932, 1980, and, are quantum in nature.
So what makes this a turning point?
First, the incremental shifts both in
financial support from various sectors of capital and the petty bourgeoisie,
and in the election results themselves, in
combination with the current economic crisis suggest, as we have already
indicated that
1) neoliberalism and especially its
most rapacious variants and
2) the neoliberal-social conservative
alliance which has governed for most of the past 30 years
are both spent, and that broad sectors of both Capital and the
people are looking for a new alternative.
Second, both in terms of the
political perspective of its leadership and its political strategy, the
Democratic campaign represented
something fundamentally new. The new President himself represents a political
tradition which is only now beginning to articulate itself and emerge into the
public arena. While recent Democratic standard bearers have not been the
militant secularists that their Republican opponents claimed them to be, but
rather believing and practicing Catholics and Southern Baptists, their politics was essentially a moderate
secular neoliberalism. Concern for social justice was part of a larger ethical
imperative to do good. Barack Obama, on the other hand, represents and emerging
politics of meaning rooted in America’s diverse religious
communities. This politics is not in any sense confessional. It takes pluralism
for granted. But it embraces a theology of liberation in the very broadest
sense that it meets God first and foremost in the struggle for justice. And
President elect Obama comes from a very specific wing of this movement. Formed
politically as an organizer on Chicago’s South Side, he brings an understanding
of how justice is won which is more Tocquevillian than either liberal or
socialist. It is the work of local communities, informed by diverse values, and
organized in local congregations, civic organizations, trade unions, and other
organizations of civil society –not the work of either the market or the
state. Markets form the seemingly unavoidable context in which this work is
carried out, and the state plays a critical role in facilitating it (through
regulation and through centralizing and allocating resources for activities
which the market and private philanthropy will not or cannot adequately
support), but both are, in the end, secondary players in the human
civilizational project.
The Democratic campaign strategy
itself, can best be summarized as follows:
1) Aim the main blow against nihilism
and despair.
2) Organize, using both traditional
door-to-door and emerging internet tactics, and mobilize. tapping into the best
traditions of the civil rights movement.
What this strategy has done is to
energize, mobilize, and organize vast layers of the population which were
either passive participants or abstainers (or even trended Republican) in the
several two election cycles. These sectors can, of course, be described
demographically: the young, ethnic minorities (immigrants as well as African
Americans and Latinos), Euro-American industrial workers, etc. But they are best understood as a sector
which was rendered invisible by the “Red/Blue” paradigm which dominated the
strategy of both parties for the past 20 years, which pit those who have
benefited from globalization (the information and technology sectors) against
those who have not (above all those in technologically backward industries away
from major metropoles). Obama engaged those who have, in many ways, been left
behind by globalization because they lack the specific (financial and
technological) skills favored by the global market, but whose identity –and
indeed whose understanding of what it means to be American-- is foundationally
cosmopolitan, and who were thus immune to fundamentalist-social conservative
cultural politics. Many of these people did
vote Democratic in the past two elections, but Obama moved enough of them
to not only win but to begin to redefine the political landscape.
These are just precisely the forces
which most likely to demand and benefit from a serious engagement with the
ecological crisis, investment in green and other infrastructure which will
support wage levels, restriction of the law of value to allow support for
self-cultivation outside the wage relationship (the “redistributionism” which
drew such attacks from the right during the election campaign), a principled
realism in foreign affairs, and a rupture with the secular/fundamentalist
polarization of the past three decades –without the sort of statist turn which
will re-energize the Right.
The impact of the Democratic victory,
furthermore, extends beyond an electoral realignment; it is a redefinition what
it means to be an American and of the way the United States is regarded
abroad. Specifically, the election
affirms the emerging American identity as a multiethnic polity in which diverse
traditions can pursue their own, distinctive civilizational ideals within the
common framework of an open, pluralistic, and engaged civil society and in
which the public arena is constituted
by deliberation around fundamental questions of meaning and value. It also renders
far less credible the view common throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America
that America is only an Imperium, in
fact the Evil Empire and suggests
that the relationship between the North American people, the United States as a
political formation, and what the Leninist tradition has called imperialism is
far more complex than the global Left has hitherto acknowledged.
Now the coalition which elected
Obama, to be sure, includes many elements which want nothing to do with this project.
The Democratic Party includes a broad political spectrum which extends from
moderate fiscal and social conservatives in the
South (the so-called “blue-dog Democrats), through moderate neoliberals
(the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party), and traditional social liberals (the
Kennedy-Kerry wing), up to left populists, social democrats, and beyond. And,
as Obama’s cabinet choices show, the moderate neoliberals still dominate the party.
But in the course of governing
President Obama has the opportunity to crystallize the new alignment of forces which
emerged in the election, and advance to a position of hegemony in the alliance
of which he is, at present, only the very charismatic titular leader.
A Strategic Estimate
What difference will this all make? The answer, unfortunately,
is sobering. This is not because the new Democratic government will fail to
advance and enact a wide range of progressive policy initiatives. On the
contrary, we can expect to see real movement on climate change, investment in
green and other infrastructure, a real commitment to shared global governance
and multilateralism, and a softening of the ideological polarizations of the
past decade. We may also see health care reform and a revision of the global
economic architecture to include at least some ecological and labor
protections. In short, Obama may well do everything
a US president could reasonably be expected to do.
The difficulty is that the current
situation requires the unreasonable and perhaps the impossible. As we noted
above, resolution of the civilizational crisis in the West presupposes a
resolution of the crisis of the West’s historic high wage regime. We must either find a way to sustainably restore that regime or else
restrict the operation of the law of value and support the cultivation of human
capacities outside the wage relationship. And we don’t know how to do either
one of these. The first depends on technological innovations which still lie
far beyond the current horizon, the latter on a resolution of the
contradictions of historic socialism which are at least as dramatic as those in
capitalism. These include 1) the tendency towards a scissors crisis in which
productivity declines as incomes are delinked from work and investment is
redirected from the production of consumer goods towards civilization-building
and 2) the contradiction between the universalization of rational autonomy,
towards which socialism aims, and the hegemony of the Communist Party, which is
the precondition for the restriction of the law of value and the redirection of
surplus towards core civilizational aims.
What we can expect from the Obama
victory, in other words, is a kinder, gentler civilizational crisis in which
progressive forces generally (including both progressive sectors of Capital and
the working classes) are given more scope and the power of the reactionary
extractive sectors and their political-theological agents (the various
fundamentalisms) are radically restricted, but in which we are also forced to
come to terms with the fundamentally intractable character of the problems we
face. Obama will be remembered as a Marcus Aurelius or a Julian, not as a Solon
or a Pericles.
Strategic
and Tactical Implications
What are the implications of this
analysis for our own political-theological strategy? Let it be said, to begin
with, that the current situation presents dangerous temptations for the Left.
Specifically, there will be a temptation to simply push Obama to adopt a more
radical stance than he can sustain politically or to take up the role of a
“left opposition” arguing that because his vision is inadequate to certain long
range tasks facing humanity he is not worthy of our support. That represents a
very serious error. What Obama can do
–to lay the groundwork for what we have called a “kinder, gentler”
civilizational crisis,” and to break the neoliberal regime of accumulation and
the hegemony of the neoliberal-social conservative bloc, which in its more
radical manifestations had taken on fascistic characteristics-- is of profound significance.
It is, furthermore, possible to advance our own agenda of more fundamental
change while maintaining a stance of strong support for the Obama government.
How do we do this?
On the one hand, we do need press
Obama to remain faithful to key aspects of his program –but only those which
are actually integral to his vision and widely supported by broad elements in
his constituency. These certainly include a serious engagement with the
ecological crisis, investment in green and other infrastructure, at least modest
redistribution in the direction of the working classes, and a principled
realism and commitment to shared global governance in foreign policy. They
probably also include health care reform and some significant revision of the
global economic architecture to include ecological and labor protections. But
we need to press these issues by building the still tenuous base of support
they enjoy within the Democratic Party and the people as a whole. This means
strengthening trade unions and especially interfaith community organizations
while strengthening the already strong organic links between them and the Obama
government so that they can pursue coordinated strategy and tactics.
On the other hand, we need to make our
own the Tocquevillian element in Obama’s politics without losing sight of our
broader critique of the modern civilizational ideal and the market system. We
need to work, in other words, within the space of civil society to construct a
new civilizational ideal and the institutions which will carry it while
patiently but insistently pointing out why generalized commodity production is
an obstacle to the next steps in the human civilizational project and may
ultimately threaten human civilization as a whole.
The work of articulating a new
civilizational ideal is complex, and involves not only philosophical and
theological reflection and deliberation, but also the creation of institutions
which can cultivate visionary leaders –the “prophets like Moses”— who can
actually found a new civilization. While
we do not need a single great leader (and are better off if the transition is
lead by many rather than one) we do need leaders with a profile which is rare
today: philosophical and theological innovators of world-historical
significance who are also able to organize and mobilize the people as a whole.
The international communist movement thought
or pretended that it had found such
leaders in Lenin and Mao, but in reality they remained trapped in the illusions
of modernism and lacked the sane spiritual core required of the Prophet or
Legislator.
Needless to day, the modern
university, which has become focused on specialized research and training
skilled intellectual labor-- is not cultivating such leaders. We need to take
up the task.
Second, we need to gradually and
cautiously build out of the organizations of civil society the seeds of what
amounts to a global dual power which exists side by side with states, intergovernmental
organizations such as the United Nations, and international financial institutions
as the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. This amounts to deploying on a global scale the strategy of
institutionally based organizing which Obama deployed on the South Side of
Chicago, modified to take into account the diverse forms through which the
people pursue their aims under different economic, political, and cultural
conditions. Such a network may already be emerging in the World Social Forum,
but any organization which hopes to be effective on a global scale must go
beyond being a voice for the global South and take seriously both the struggles
and contributions of the West and the voices of those in India, China, the
Russian para-imperium, and Dar-al-Islam
who are not best understood as part of the South either because they are experiencing
such rapid economic growth, often in advanced (information and technology)
sectors, or because they operate in the context of polities with an extractive
(petroleum based) economy.
At least for now, this network should
not so much attempt to challenge states or international organizations as to
act as a governing power in its own right sponsoring economic development
initiatives, building an alternative global financial structure, providing
global support for the struggles of the working classes and mediating and
adjudicating conflicts among the people, while leaving open (because it is open) the question of what the
international political authority which we need will ultimately look like.
Third, we need to target for
organizing efforts those constituencies which are likely to be left out or left
behind in the next regime of
accumulation, especially subsistence peasants, marginalized urban populations, workers
in technologically backward or declining sectors of the economy, and the
sapiential and humanistic intelligentsia. Our task with these sectors is
complex. On the one hand, we need to prevent them from become a base for
anticivilizational movements, whether of the Right (religious fundamentalisms)
or the Left (poor peasant/marginalized intelligentsia movements such as the Khmer Rouge or Sendero Luminoso). But these sectors also form a potential core
constituency, in the way sectors linked into and benefiting from the global
market (under either the old neoliberal or the emerging regimes) do not. Partly
this is for economic reasons. Lacking attractive alternatives within the system
they will be most inclined to try something new. But partly it is because they are
precisely the sectors of the population for whom questions of meaning, value,
and community are most important. And that is what we have to offer. We offer
it, furthermore, on the basis of a rationally grounded deliberation which will
allow these sectors to engage the modern world and conserve what is best in it
---especially a commitment to the values off rational autonomy— while
undertaking the difficult task of building something new.
Finally, we need to actually develop
the postindustrial synergistic technologies (and the sciences on which they
will be based) which can permit continued civilizational progress while
conserving the integrity of the ecosystem.
At the center of all efforts must be
the prospect of authentic individual self-cultivation outside the wage
relationship, and not only for the senior intellectuals leading the movement
but for everyone. This means developing
a network of self-supporting small businesses and cooperatives which both
engage the most dispossessed sectors of the population in high value added
economic activity and set aside a significant part of the surplus generated to
support the cultivation of the capacities necessary for life as a free human
being and a citizen (the traditional liberal arts) and, for those who so
choose, for the cultivation of more advanced spiritual capacities.
Even in a kinder gentler crisis, in
other words, organizing to conserve and advance the human civilizational
project remains our principal task.
None of these things are in
contradiction with giving to the Obama government the strongest possible
support, even as it governs from the center and takes time to keep some of its
promises. Indeed, we have an historic opportunity to win over or much of the
center and center right, or at least convert it into a soft, constructive
opposition, and to thus isolate the hard right and the rapacious sectors of Capital
it represents once and for all. And this will be easiest if Obama governs from
the center, includes Republicans in his cabinet, and works hard to hold much of
the center and center right as possible.
In short, we are indeed, at the
beginning of a new period. But this is not the millennium, but rather just a
new phase in the unfolding crisis of modernity and of the West. We will make a
more constructive contribution to the next steps in the human civilizational
project if we remember that.
[1] There
was, to be sure, an earlier strategy for supporting the “mass” cultivation of
individual capacities: chattle slavery. This was the strategy of