roachboy

Joe Queenan: Hands off our recession | Comment is free | The Guardian

i put this queenan edito up not because i think it particularly interesting in itself, but mostly because it reflects an obvious but interesting shift that seems to have been unfolding in the states. you see it playing out already here in the tea party thread--all of a sudden, after 35 years of trying to convince us that the wealthy are weathy because they embody all Capitalist Virtues, the right is trying to become populist. a central theme of this populism is---as it always is--questions of class and equitability of distribution of wealth.

for many years, when folk on the left would talk about class war in the united states--which has been continuous, which neo-liberalism was a cover for, an expression of---these same conservatives would talk about memes like "class envy" or, funnier still, blame the people who mentioned class stratification for class stratification, as if the problem lay not in reality but in the words used to describe it.

but now, things have changed, and changed very quickly.

what seems to have come apart is a centerpiece of neoliberalism as it was marketed in the united states, this perverse equation of (a) opposition to the redistribution of wealth, which you'd think would be understood as making socio-economic relations more equal, but which instead came to be seen as some kind of affliction visited upon the Volk by the State, which is entirely outside of society, which is where the Volk live--you know, on a good day when they're not talking about themselves and so aren't pretending they in fact live in some lockean state of nature----this has separated from (b) a fictional moral economy in which economic situation reflects inward virtue and socio-economic hierarchies are natural and capitalism is somehow the system that best enables these natural hierarchies to be expressed.

that was a pretty big deal in the states, remember?
and the thing that is astonishing to me is that the ideology was in fact as stupid as the summary makes it sound.

so now economic crisis has unwound the basis for (b).
the logic of (a) such as it is remains in force out there somewhere.
it's expression is everywhere in conservative populism. it seems to me that (a) IS conservative populism.

the right was playing with these folk for a long time, making itself into a catch-all space for the jurassic right--you saw this happening during the clinton period if you were paying attention---and now the right is having to pay the piper. they're stuck with these people.

meanwhile, at the level of public discourse, a kind of one-dimensional discourse of class war has been surfacing.
there is more to this than the collapse of the american right...but it hardly represents a sudden collective lurch into the marxian tradition of class analysis.

what do you make of the surfacing in the press, in political language, of the question of class?
how do you see it as being framed?
what is it doing? what is it not doing?

i find the queenan piece to be a good example of the superficiality of this language--but have you seen other examples?
post them and talk about what you make of them.

if i'm right, there should be examples from across the political spectrum, so it'd be interesting to see how different positions are trying to frame class as a problem for their own purposes....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

I will keep my eyes open. However, it is my understanding that American media tends to shy away from discussions of class, as though, perhaps, they fear being labelled socialists. I imagine it's just that they go about it in a roundabout way.

Are you suggesting this is changing?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

that's my basic observation, yes.

in some ways, it's obvious in the way the economic crisis has been "explained" in the us mainstream press---you get lots of references to general subjective comportments ("greed") which is then linked to a particular class fraction (the language of "the bankers" or the "wall street fat cats").

you can connect this to an institutioal interest: if the us press across the board parroted neoliberal claims (using words like "liberalization" or "deregulation") to frame information, and these terms ended up being basic conditions of possibility for the economic situation we're now moving through, preservation of credibility would require that a Problem be acknowledged but that it not be seen as structural, nor that it be seen as following from the way of framing information that the press itself integrated into its modes of presenting information.

so one trend is that you have a surfacing of the language of class conflict, but in ways that seem to make it anecdotal.
the "wall street fat cat" or the "mba financial wizards" or the "experts" in this interpretation are all versions of the "bad apple" theory...you know, the system itself is neutral, and problems are caused by a few deviations...

but i'm not sure that this is anything like a comprehensive view of how this language is working.
i thought it'd be interesting to try to put one together alongside a discussion or debate or fight about what's happening with this sudden realization that class stratification exists...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

shakran

I think people are coming to realize just how much capitalism sucks, but they can't think of anything better to replace it with, and even if they could they've been so inundated with the "non-capitalism is automatically bad, evil, and un-American no matter what" idea since they were little kids that they'd be unwilling to speak up about it. People are starting to get frustrated because it's finally becoming apparent that capitalism means some prosper, but the cost is that the more one guy has, the less someone else has. The 80's really started the backslide - as the wealthy began to gobble up more and more of the country's money, the non-wealthy were forced to choose between lowering their standard of living, or going in debt up to their eyeballs to maintain it. The idea of taxing the wealthy more enthusiastically than the rest of us was immediately and loudly dismissed, even by the non-wealthy, because people believe just about anything they read in the media as long as that media is biased toward fantasy.

By that I refer to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk who perpetuate the fantasy that we can all get rich if only we work hard enough (we can't all do it, it's completely impossible under the capitalist system), and that since one of these days we're gonna be rich we'd better make sure that once we get there we aren't taxed too highly!

In other words, as John Dickinson said during the 2nd Continental Congress, "People would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor."

While we might see trickles in the media for awhile about how terrible the wide and ever-widening gulf between the rich and everyone else is, it's going to take awhile before we see anything substantive. Even in your article, the author claims that "I understand that the wealthy pay more than their fair share of taxes" - which is patently false. They do not. They haven't for decades. And until they do, the burden will be on the middle class (which has by and large gone into massive debt attempting to live like the rich while still having to pay the disproportional taxes of the non-rich), and the lower class (who either see a proportionally larger chunk of their paycheck taken away by the government, or suffer reduced aid programs because the rich won't pay their fair share).

It's going to be a long time, if ever, before anyone in the main stream media dares to question the fundamentals of our economy, and it will be a longer time before whoever questions it can do so without being labeled a "goddamn communist."

Baraka_Guru

Okay, this is interesting.

I did a cursory search through Google News for U.S. articles containing the keyword "poverty," and what I can tell from what I came up with, the media generally considers (at this time, anyway) poverty to be something that happens either a) outside the national borders—namely, Mexico and Africa—or b) within families of illegal immigrants, who for some godforsaken reason keep breeding.

Holy shit.

I thought the U.S. had a much wider problem with poverty than this.

As a comparison, there were several articles in Canadian media that discussed issues of domestic poverty. I didn't even bother to check British media, as I'm certain I'd find more there as well.

I understand the U.S. is the wealthiest land in the world, but seriously....

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

shakran

No we aren't. Our wealth is paper-only. We don't make much anymore, we send jillions of jobs overseas, and most of us would have a much lower standard of living if we didn't borrow gobs of money. The "wealth" is built on a shaky tower of debt and fantasy.

Baraka_Guru

The overall GDP is still the highest, is it not?

This is my point: you have a high GDP, but not everyone gets a big enough piece of that pie. The media seems not to want to talk about that.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

shakran

remember that the first variable in calculating GDP is consumption, and they don't subtract anything for borrowing. So yes, our GDP is incredibly high, artifically, because we buy shit like crazy without having the money to pay for it.

Also, the last GDP figure available is 2007, which was well before the crash and burn of the sub prime mortgage scam, and while we were still in the midst of borrow-and-spend. Now that people are having a much harder time borrowing, I'd not at all be surprised to see our GDP drop significantly this year. ( a prediction that admittedly I can comfortably make since by the time we see the stats for this year some time in 2011, this thread will have long been forgotten )

Baraka_Guru

The GDP is higher than most nations regardless. This suggests to me that there are a number of wealthy people in the U.S. when compared to a great number of people worldwide. Is the media intentionally overlooking U.S. poverty issues? Or is it not an issue?

Is there no class struggle in the U.S.?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

shakran

There is, certainly, though we try to push it under the rug, and claim that anyone who squawks about it is a filthy communist, or un-american, or some other such nonsense.

But it's still a sad fact that 10% of our population controls around 90% of our wealth, and contrary to the snake oil that the republicans are trying to sell us, they aren't trickling it down to anyone.

roachboy

here's a nice little piece about the distribution of wealth in the states--the data is a bit old (through 2000 it seems, based on other analyses published through 2005 from a quick look) but it's interesting:

Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power

figure 4 is illuminating.


fact is that the statistical indices the united states generates for itself are not necessarily geared around providing a coherent basis for policy formulation, but seem to just as much be an extension of political ideology. while i happen to remember a significant number of fantasy-reality adjustments made by the reagan administration (my favorite is still inflation: want to control it? stop counting stuff that causes it...) but they're not unique to the reagan administration by any means (look into how the us does not count structural unemployment sometime)...

there is census information about poverty rates:
Poverty - Main

but there are alot of problems with it...the most recent controversies have been about the systematic undercounting of poor folk. that's one way to deal with the question: not count it.

it's not that the stats are useless, but rather that they're problematic both in their organization and content. so it's a bunch of work to figure out how to interpret them.

but it's pretty clear that there's not a whole lot of interest in generating accurate images of what class stratification in the united states--or there hasn't been during the neo-liberal period. i would hope this changes under obama and afterward, but it's not obvious that it will.

the reality of class warfare--you know, the everyday routinized violence produced by radically uneven distribution of even the most basic economic. social and cultural resources---is quite different from the language of class warfare.
both are interesting, both important--but they're not the same.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

here is a few pages from the economic policy institute's report which tracks the relation of ceo pay to that of an average american worker, and of american ceo pay relative to international averages....

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/swa08-exec_pay.pdf

o and just in case you thought this "bad apples" thing was just some random observation have a look at this article, which outlines the results of a financial times/harris poll about executive "bonus culture" and you can see it, the bad apple theory, sitting square in the middle of the polling results for the us/uk. of course, the ft doesn't use the same terminology...but see for yourself

FT.com / UK - Sharp divide in public opinion on bonus culture

control of framing is important. o yes it is.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite