En Passant

I put Barack Obama’s victory down to one thing - class.  Working people are scared.  Scared for their jobs.  Scared for their families.  Scared for the future.

US workers have had 16 years of rule for the rich from Clinton and Bush.   They’ve had eight years of foreign adventures which are or will be defeats.

The wages of low and middle income earners have not increased in real terms over the past 8 years.  The minimum wage has fallen. The reward for all this sacrifice - bailouts for the fat cats on Wall Street and more sacrifices for workers on Main Street.

Nearly 50 million Americans have no health care.  30 million are on food stamps.  Millions are homeless while 18 million homes stand empty.  House prices are over twenty per cent below their 2006 levels.

There are 9 million unemployed.  This will only get worse.  Double digit unemployment is likely.

Race and class are inextricably linked in the US.

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Australian capitalism is in trouble. And the bosses want workers to pay.

Ed Shann in a recent article (”Rug pulled from under us” Australian Financial Review November 13 page 79) argued that Australia would be severely affected by the global economic crisis.  He said that if the terms of trade fell by 10 per cent over 2009, Australian real domestic income per head would decline by over 2 per cent. He seems to think this will happen.  He ended up by saying:

Real incomes are about to fall sharply and claims that Australia is well placed to deal with the world recession are not preparing the community for the hard times ahead.

Who will carry the cost of capitalism’s crisis?  Shann assumes it is workers. Given the last 25 years of class quiescence and collaboration this assumption appears well founded.  Unions and workers will roll over and play dead as capital goes on the attack.  Or will they?

After almost three decades of union and political class collaboration, in which union membership and coverage are at historic lows, with the labour share of national income at its lowest for over forty years (despite 17 years of boom until recently) and with the destruction of rank and file control or influence over their own unions and a leadership married to the idea that what is good for capital is good for labour, the situation might appear bleak.  But there may be a lot of pent up anger among workers, unionised and non-unionised, crystallising around this economic crisis, and one spark (perhaps here, but even perhaps overseas) could light a fire that sweeps Australia.

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Professor Leonie Bronstein is an acclaimed expert in Marxist behavioural analysis in a societal and organisational context. Her speciality is the Australian public service. I spoke to her recently at the National University of Australia and asked her what she was currently doing.

“The Prime Minister funded a project for me last year on relational decision making and hierarchical inspiration. It has been very rewarding both financially and intellectually.”

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These are the notes a comrade of mine, Liz Ross from Socialist Alternative, (www.sa.org.au), did for a talk in November last year.  So it needs a little updating but the general points are timeless. And of course it was written before the current economic crisis which is seeing business urging Government not to introduce an emissions trading scheme.  The pressure from the bosses to protect profits, not the environment, will be immense.  Liz is the author of Capitalism: How it’s costing us the earth, available from Socialist Alternative.

WHY CAPITALISM IS NOT THE ANSWER

If I were to sum up this talk, a quote from the American environmental scientist Robert Newman perhaps fits the bill: “You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.”

But just taken on its own it leaves us in limbo. We have to then ask – and answer – the question: how do we get to have a habitable planet? All kinds of proposals have been put forward by different groups – everything from “Live simply, so that others may simply live”, some sort of return to an imagined pre-capitalist heaven on earth, through radical reform of capitalism itself, which, despite what Newman says, many believe is enough to save the environment. Then to the solution we in Socialist Alternative propose – a revolutionary overthrow of the current system and its replacement by socialism, a society run by the working class in the interests of the majority. A society that by its very nature can put in place the processes that begin to address restoring the earth to sustainability.

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The Australian Financial Review today (13 November) quoted P.J. O’Rourke from a November 8 article in the The Weekly Standard in the US.  P.J. O’Rourke is one of the shock jock writers for the Right in the US, but with quite a good style and turn of phrase.  The article has a scatological joke running through it and the ending plays that up subtly.  But that’s not the reason for running it.  It’s the frankness of the assessment of the failure of the right to deliver its promises that is interesting.  None of the shock jocks in Australian newspapers have had the courage to admit they got it wrong.  Akerman blames fairness, and Janet Albrechtsen has retreated into becoming a Schumpeter trumpeter, praising the creative destruction of capitalism.  (See previous Crap Corner posts here for fuller details of their delusional states. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.)

Anyway, under the heading We blew it here is what the AFR quotes P.J. O’Rourke as saying:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye.  Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone - gone with the bear market and Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected.  And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honour, trust, truth, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue or mosque?  it lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

None of this is the fault of the left.  After the events of the 20th century - national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First - anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement.

O’Rourke’s comments show us the Right is losing the battle of ideas and ideology in the present economic crisis. The King of neo-liberalism is dead. That doesn’t mean there will be a big swing to the revolutionary left.  Another pro-capitalist ideology - Keynesianism in various forms - is winning credibility.  Long live the Keynesian King.

The task for the revolutionary left is to patiently explain the ideas which we have made our own over the last decades based on great socialists like Marx and Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Tony Cliff.

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Janet Albrechtsen (”PM barking up wrong tree” The Australian Wednesday 12 November page 14) says the following about the collapse here in Australia of the nation’s major child care provider ABC Learning Centres and the Prime Minister’s comments about extreme capitalism, and shows us (sort of) the real truth at the heart of capitalism.

That business failure, though painful, is an inevitable and even necessary precursor to progress - part of capitalism’s creative destruction - has been forgotten.

Only painful?  

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The Australian Financial Review published a letter of mine today (12 November) on the Australian Tax Office and Wickenby, the multi-agency international tax evasion project the ATO leads.  (”ATO hides behind the spin of Wickenby” AFR November 12 page 67.) 

The letter refers to an article I wrote for the Public Sector Informant in the Canberra Times on 4 November called “Wickenby: Enough bang for buck?”.  That article is available from the Canberra Times and I suggest anyone interested in the issue contact them for a copy. Their switch board number in Australia is 02 6280 2122.

In the AFR letter I drastically shortened my Canberra Times article to say that after over 4 years and around $200 million so far of taxpayers’ money being spent, 3 convictions for international tax evasion looked pretty light on.  I called on the Commissioner to explain why there were so few results to date and why the instigator of Wickenby has not yet been charged.

I also suggested the ATO has a history of not taking international matters seriously.

The Canberra Times article gives a longer more thought out explanation of the issues.

Cardinal Pell in his column in this week’s The Sunday Telegraph (”Obama will need all his many talents” November 9 page 88) says the following:

As a young man, Obama mixed with some of the wildest from the radical Left, urban terrorists and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and his financial advisers include those who helped provoke the financial meltdown.

He offers no evidence for any of these claims.  The Cardinal seems to be rehashing discredited Republican scare mongering. You can do better than that, can’t you, Cardinal Pell?  Or have you joined the Sarah Palin school of political assassination?

Obama may adopt a more sensible position on climate change than his predecessor.  But from what I have read (admittedly very little so I am happy to be corrected on this) ) the debate in the US seems to be more about energy dependence (i.e. oil from foreign countries) than climate change.

Obama also has protectionist leanings  to “save” US jobs.  Thus he might be tempted to marry climate change with protectionism.

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Piers Akerman, writing in The Sunday Telegraph of November 9 (”Can Rudd stem the rise of Fortress America?”), had this to say about the economic crisis.

It was set in play by the creeping socialist tendencies of Obama’s Democratic colleagues, who encouraged US mortgage firms to issue loans to individuals who clearly did not have the means to service their debts.

He goes on to say:

They were issued to people who could not afford them under the doctrine of fairness that Obama is committed to continue.

The doctrine of fairness that precipitated the economic decline.

Presumably a big dollop of unfairness (like the trickle down theory perhaps?) is what the US needs more of, hey Piers?

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