Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Occupy TCNJ Talk


Last February we all viewed with amazement the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which quickly spread to other Middle Eastern nations such as Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The protesters were united by their common desire for human rights and democracy, putting an end to authoritarian dictatorships that had held them down for decades, and in the hope that their children might enjoy a better future. Another important theme of these protests was economic inequality, unemployment, and the lack of hope on the part of the young that economic conditions would enable them to prosper. The Arab spring represented the awakening of a social movement of citizens who were tired of waiting for these political, social, and economic conditions to change -- they decided to take matters into their own hands and force them to change.

Now we see popular protests taking place here in America and around the world. These protests are also led by young people and are also a response to injustice and inequality.  The American autumn is an awakening of a populist movement which is tired of waiting  for a corrupt and dysfunctional political system to address the real problems of this country: unemployment and underemployment, the debt burdens of families and students, the lack of real opportunity for many, and the concentration of wealth and political power among the 1% -- the rich men who rule the world -- the plutocrats who have taken control of the Republic  and have deployed the resources of both the State and the Market to entrench their own wealth, privilege, and power.

In a poll conducted the The Hill nearly three-quarters of the respondents said that income inequality is a problem in the United States (The Huffington Post, 31 Oct 2011). The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the income of the top 1% of the income distribution has increased 243% from1979 to 2007, while that of the bottom 90% grew by only 5%. The top 10% of Americans control two-thirds of the wealth, and the richest 400 Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of households, while at the same time 46 million Americans, or 15.1%, live below the poverty line, and half of those who do have jobs earn less than $27,000 a year. The most popular slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, “We are the 99%” is obviously a reference to the fact that most of us are not among the super-rich. But it also expresses the truth that we the people are also the democratic majority. If so, how did we get to this place?

The answer is that in America, and much of the rest of the world, we live in a plutocracy, that is, under a system of domination and exploitation in which the richest also control the levers of political power of the State. This combination and concentration of wealth and political power we see among the plutocratic ruling classes in contemporary societies is not a new phenomenon; has been seen many times before in history.

In Athens of 594 BC, according to Plutarch, "the disparity of fortune between the rich and poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances…..seemed possible but despotic power" (The Life of Solon). Things began to get tense in Athens with the poor preparing to revolt and the rich preparing repress them with force, but in this case, violent class warfare was avoided by the election of Solon who eased the burden on all debtors by devaluing the currency; “he also reduced all personal debts and ended imprisonment for debt, cancelled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest, decreed that the sons of those who had died in Athens wars would be educated at government expense, and he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay twelve times that required by the poor” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History 56). The poor complained that he did not divide the land, and the rich whined that he had confiscated their property, but by redistributing wealth Solon averted a revolution and ushered in a Golden Age.

Whenever the poor begin to complain about wealth and income inequality, the representatives of the rich ruling class accuse them of engaging in “class warfare”. The progressive magazine The Nation recently had a cover proclaiming that Wall Street invented class warfare. But, in fact, class struggle that sometimes erupts into class warfare is much older than that.  If you want to know what class warfare is really like, reflect on how the historian Barbara Tuchman described what happened in 1358 when the Jacqueries revolted against the lords of the Oise Valley: 
At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her. (A Distant Mirror)
Now that is class warfare! Anyone who has ever visited Versailles understands immediately that the main cause of the French Revolution was social injustice and in particular the inequality and wealth and political power.  But the French Jacobin’s Reign of Terror made liberal use of the guillotine, and the revolution ended badly, ushering in the Napoleonic wars. Things went somewhat better on this side of the Atlantic; the American Revolution succeeded in throwing off the yoke of the British aristocracy without lopping off a lot of aristocratic heads.

But, observing the French and American revolutions Karl Marx concluded that their chief results was not greater wealth and income equality, but rather the transfer of wealth and political power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Marx was among those who understood that these cycles in which wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, which produces a backlash of popular discontent and revolution, are recurring features of human history. He made it the basis of his theory of class struggle and saw the competition between classes as the main driver of history. But Marx also thought that the class struggle could be ended by a communist revolution leading to the final victory of the proletariat in which the ownership and control of the means of production would be shared democratically among the workers themselves.

But things have not turned out that way (except perhaps in a few cooperative, employee owned enterprises such as Spain’s Mondragon). Instead, in the late twentieth century capitalism was triumphant.  In the former Soviet Union, and in post Maoist China, capitalism destroyed communism. In America, and much of the rest of the world, capitalism is now destroying democracy. This is why we are now experiencing another cycle in which wealth and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Unlike Marx, I do not believe that these historical cycles of concentration and redistribution of wealth and political power can be eliminated entirely. But I do think they can be managed more rationally and peacefully than in the past. I see these cyclic oscillations in terms of systems theory as features of a regulatory process that involves both positive and negative feedback loops. Wealth and power in society tends to get concentrated in the hands of a few because power can be self-reinforcing; the wealthier and more powerful some people become the more they are able to use these advantages to preserve and enhance their own power and privilege. Small and temporary differences in power can thus be amplified over time into large and permanent ones.

We have understood for a long time now that in order to compensate for this tendency it is necessary for human societies to institute a compensatory negative feedback loop that works to equalize power and wealth in society. In the modern era we learned to do this through democratic institutions that provide for equal basic rights and equality of opportunity, as well as through programs and agencies that provide all citizens a degree of economic security. We have these institutions not only because of the requirements of justice and fairness, although that is one important reason why they exist, but also because we know that greater economic and political equality is conducive to social peace and economic prosperity.  

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Rutgers University economic historian James Livingston presented evidence that shows that private investment is not in fact the thing that drives economic growth; rather it is consumer spending and government spending (“It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid” October 25, 2011). Between 1900 and 2000 real domestic product per capita grew more than 600%, but during that same period, net business investment decreased by 70%. Contrary to the “common sense” peddled by conservative economists and most Republicans, corporate profits are not the real source of prosperity. The argument that we should cut corporate taxes to jumpstart economic growth is bull-pucky; it is a lie used by the plutocrats and their apologists to justify the transfer of even more wealth from the poor and the middle classes into their own pockets. As a result of these kinds of lies and deception, the USA now ranks 27th among OECD countries in measures of basic social justice, just ahead of Chile, Mexico, and Turkey (Social Justice in the OECD: How Do Member States Compare? Bertelsmann Siftung, 2011).

So the question we face is how will this crisis of social injustice and economic inequality be resolved? Will we elect wise leaders, who like modern Solons will broker some kind of moderate plan of wealth redistribution which dilutes the power and privilege of our plutocrats, or will the rich men who rule the country (and the world) use the police and military power of the State to repress popular discontent?

We saw these two approaches in the responses to the Arab spring uprisings earlier this year. Given what happened to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who is now on trial, and also the fate of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who is now resting in an unmarked grave, it looks like Tunisia's Ben-Ali was the smart one who got out while the getting was good. On the other hand, in Syria President Assad is deploying his military and secret police to kill protesters by the thousands and is getting away with it.  Repression of popular dissent does work, but only for a while. Once it is used on a large scale, the prospects for violent civil war or revolution increase markedly, and history suggests that popular forces are usually ultimately victorious, but often at an enormous cost in human death and suffering.

Here in America we are already witnessing the potential for the Occupy Protests to be violently repressed by the police, as recently happened in Oakland California, Denver Colorado, Atlanta Georgia and elsewhere. On the other hand, in many cities, the local officials are following a more moderate and tolerant course of action, and in Nashville the ACLU has successfully defended the first amendment rights of the protesters and forced the city council to rescind a curfew law designed to remove the Occupy Nashville protest camp.

Because of our first amendment freedoms, there is some reason for hope that here in America that the current crisis of inequality and social injustice will be resolved peacefully through political compromise and equitable wealth redistribution that will reduce the current vast inequalities of wealth and power that we now have in this country. But I think that the only realistic hope for will be if we all, and especially young people like yourselves, occupy the voting booth. Don't let your friends vote for fools and demagogues. Don't buy into the economic dogmas and lies that many politicians are peddling.  Don't let the "money power" in American politics overwhelm the "people power." Let your elected representatives know what you think, and why you are angry.

But, let me say, that I am really quite worried that the deep corruption and dysfunction of the American political system will prevent any meaningful compromise solution from emerging. Our political system is deeply corrupted by the money power of the plutocrats, and the electoral system is rigged in their favor. But, the longer we go on not addressing the real problems affecting our nation, the more the popular pressure for radical change will build.  We the people are tired of waiting for Republicans and Democrats to get their acts together and govern this country responsibly. Many of us no longer believe that President Obama is the agent of change some people were hoping he would be. We no longer trust the Supreme Court to decide justly when so often they side with the plutocracy and the corporations against the people.

The 2008 election popularized the slogan "We are the people we are waiting for." Let me suggest that the slogan for the 2012 election should be, "We are the people. We are tired of waiting, and we are the 99%”.