What? He's your liberal hero of the century?
Why?
The people who marched and struggled and bled for the eight hour day, the weekend, minimum wages, and an end to child labor were unionized laborers. FDR did what he had to to preserve the system as much as he could given the immense amount of social unrest in light of capitalism having begun to crumble. And it was a victory for the elite.
How? The welfare state.
And now we find ourselves with the second great economic collapse in the history of Capitalism. And despite what the media might have you think, the reasons are clear:
Productivity is the amount of "stuff" made per hour. If you understand that in order for Capitalists to make money, that stuff cannot just be produced--it has to be purchased. Ultimately, wage-earners in the United States are expected to buy up most of that stuff (and they mostly did during the "Fordism" era of Capitalism). But when you have wages plateau and productivity continues to rise, the workers can no longer afford all that stuff. If workers cannot afford to buy up all that surplus stuff since the 70's by relying on their wages, then how is it getting bought up? How is the inevitable drop in aggregate demand avoided?
That's a 2 part answer: debt, and the State. Mostly everyone is familiar with the former of these answers and the mumbo jumbo that goes with it: credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, credit cards, etc. But few seem to understand the latter, especially among liberals and the left.
When each worker produces this much more than can be affordability consumed by society, it leads to a whole lot of junk left over that is sitting in a warehouse somewhere and a whole lot of labor that isn't being translated into capital for the boss. This is what Marx termed "overproduction" or "over-accumulation." When this happens, the capitalist needs 2 things to happen,
(1) Some productively employed people need to stop producing for society, and
(2) The level of consumption needs to be preserved.
If only (1) happens, then the amount of people taking in cash to be able to consume drops even more, which leads to a further drop in aggregate demand. If only (2) happens, that is, if people are just given more money by the boss so that they can consume more, then the cut the bosses get from increasing productivity goes to the workers instead. So what does (1) plus (2) equal? The state, buying a lot of stuff for people who are kept unemployed, or unproductively employed.
(1) Some productively employed people need to stop producing for society, and
(2) The level of consumption needs to be preserved.
If only (1) happens, then the amount of people taking in cash to be able to consume drops even more, which leads to a further drop in aggregate demand. If only (2) happens, that is, if people are just given more money by the boss so that they can consume more, then the cut the bosses get from increasing productivity goes to the workers instead. So what does (1) plus (2) equal? The state, buying a lot of stuff for people who are kept unemployed, or unproductively employed.
Below is a graph of US government spending. It's almost creepy how much this graph has in common with the one above:
Liberals like to pretend that all this spending is helping us. You know, social safety net, make the poor not as poor, pay for it using all that wealth of the rich.
Except the more "social spending" we seem to do, the bigger the gap between the rich and the poor becomes. So who exactly is all this spending helping? You might expect a group of people who crash land on a desert island would have a higher quality of life then the people being "helped out" by our urban projects and welfare roles. And then you have success stories like education:
And then you have all the countless government jobs, the kind that add nothing of value to our society. I am not picking on the unfortunate souls who happen to find themselves in these jobs.
So what is the real effect of all this spending? The real reason is there's is a lot of stuff out there that the leisure class needs to be bought up, and they are happy to have the government to buy it for us when we're not able. That's why we've built fighter jets that the melt in the rain, "bridges to nowhere," and why we've subsidized for corn that gets thrown in a barn somewhere to rot. People act like federal spending is somehow charity for "lazy social leeches" or, the liberal alternative, "those poor people who just can't seem to be able to help themselves." But you don't make anyone richer by buying them food, prescription drugs, or even DVD players. The people who get rich from all this are the people who get paid: capitalists.
There is no better example this then the prison-industrial complex.
Angela Davis wrote "Are Prisons Obsolete," in 2003, aiming at prisons as the next major focus of American abolition. Michelle Alexander's recently published "The New Jim Crow" demonstrates the undismissable links between our racial caste system and the emergence of our prison state. Experience, for those who have it, and simple reflection for those that don't, tells us that the term "corrections" is laughable given the contemporary prison system. Our system is not about treatment or rehabilitation. It is not even about punishment (though this is often how it is sold to the more fearful or zealously law-and-order types among us. It is about profit.
Prison combine the two most important functions for government during overproduction. It prevents workers from producing, and it leads to huge amounts of consumption.
It costs more money to lock up someone for a year in New Jersey then to send them to Princeton. Check out this great graphic, which describes the outrageous bill that the State is willing to pay to "protect" us. From whom? Non-violent drug offenders, mostly of color, mostly poor. Alexander lays out in horrifying detail the policing practices that turn a social problem that effects every race almost equally (drug use) into a "war" that is a form of racialized social control not unlike Jim Crow. It is this racist system that leads to such high rates of imprisonment for people of color: in 2007 the rate of incarceration for white men was 773 per 100,000, for black men 4,618 per 100,000, despite the fact that rates of drug use and sales among whites and blacks are more or less the same.
The left in this country has been off track for a long time. They have come to believe that the state will protect the vulnerable from the excesses of capitalism. They have confused a workers' state with a welfare state. But the state's role in capitalism, regardless of the form of that state, is not to protect us; it is to serve the rich. Administer the affairs of the ruling class. And in a welfare state society like the United States or Europe, the state is meant to protect consumption when it is threatened by capitalists' own avarice. Not seeing this, many on the left have embraced state charity, instead of helping to organize working class people to take care of their own needs, resist their oppressors, and find empowerment. They have looked to above for salvation instead of working to build it from the ground up. And they have been complicit in giving the rich the biggest possible tool--in the form of the state--to use against us all. And it's getting bigger all the time. Think about it: if a big state could or would protect us from capitalism, then why is corporate power, and the gap between the rich and the poor, worse now then ever?
So what is the real effect of all this spending? The real reason is there's is a lot of stuff out there that the leisure class needs to be bought up, and they are happy to have the government to buy it for us when we're not able. That's why we've built fighter jets that the melt in the rain, "bridges to nowhere," and why we've subsidized for corn that gets thrown in a barn somewhere to rot. People act like federal spending is somehow charity for "lazy social leeches" or, the liberal alternative, "those poor people who just can't seem to be able to help themselves." But you don't make anyone richer by buying them food, prescription drugs, or even DVD players. The people who get rich from all this are the people who get paid: capitalists.
There is no better example this then the prison-industrial complex.
Angela Davis wrote "Are Prisons Obsolete," in 2003, aiming at prisons as the next major focus of American abolition. Michelle Alexander's recently published "The New Jim Crow" demonstrates the undismissable links between our racial caste system and the emergence of our prison state. Experience, for those who have it, and simple reflection for those that don't, tells us that the term "corrections" is laughable given the contemporary prison system. Our system is not about treatment or rehabilitation. It is not even about punishment (though this is often how it is sold to the more fearful or zealously law-and-order types among us. It is about profit.
Prison combine the two most important functions for government during overproduction. It prevents workers from producing, and it leads to huge amounts of consumption.
It costs more money to lock up someone for a year in New Jersey then to send them to Princeton. Check out this great graphic, which describes the outrageous bill that the State is willing to pay to "protect" us. From whom? Non-violent drug offenders, mostly of color, mostly poor. Alexander lays out in horrifying detail the policing practices that turn a social problem that effects every race almost equally (drug use) into a "war" that is a form of racialized social control not unlike Jim Crow. It is this racist system that leads to such high rates of imprisonment for people of color: in 2007 the rate of incarceration for white men was 773 per 100,000, for black men 4,618 per 100,000, despite the fact that rates of drug use and sales among whites and blacks are more or less the same.
"Our research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men." -Human Rights Watch
The left in this country has been off track for a long time. They have come to believe that the state will protect the vulnerable from the excesses of capitalism. They have confused a workers' state with a welfare state. But the state's role in capitalism, regardless of the form of that state, is not to protect us; it is to serve the rich. Administer the affairs of the ruling class. And in a welfare state society like the United States or Europe, the state is meant to protect consumption when it is threatened by capitalists' own avarice. Not seeing this, many on the left have embraced state charity, instead of helping to organize working class people to take care of their own needs, resist their oppressors, and find empowerment. They have looked to above for salvation instead of working to build it from the ground up. And they have been complicit in giving the rich the biggest possible tool--in the form of the state--to use against us all. And it's getting bigger all the time. Think about it: if a big state could or would protect us from capitalism, then why is corporate power, and the gap between the rich and the poor, worse now then ever?
