Bernie, Hillary, and the Legacy of Socialism

By Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel,  Feb 23, 2016 Part II of V

The Legacy of Michael Harrington, Hillary Clinton, and the Marxist Critique

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1962, Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, which basically identified the causes of poverty and inequality in the United States as the result of unregulated free market capitalism. This book in turn had a significant impact on the thinking of John F. Kennedy and the role of government in promoting greater social justice. But it was the Johnson Administration and the War on Poverty programs (Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Expanded Social Security Benefits, etc.) that followed the Kennedy Administration’s lead. What the Johnson Administration did was address the issuesfacing The Other America, such as the fact that the economic system in the United States had created two parallel Americas: one in which socialism existed for the rich; and where individualistic capitalism existed for the poor. Harrington further argued that this bi-polar arrangement was destroying not only the foundations of the US economy but the very foundation of civil society. And it was MLK, influenced by Vincent Harding and James Cone, who echoed this in his 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, arguing that racial justice and economic justice must not be separated from the other in promoting global social justice.

In The Other America, Harrington drew on three major sources to support his argument on two Americas: statistical analysis of current trends in poverty; critiques of the market economy by way of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; and the penetrating historical analysis by historian Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a penetrating critique of the Gilded Age. But what people did not know at the time of the publication of The Other America, was that Harrington was a socialist – a “democratic socialist” – and founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA argued that the Democratic Party was held captive by its clientele, the wealthy and elite in America, and that it had become unresponsive to the rights of labor, increasing poverty, inequality, and racism in America. In fact, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were becoming increasingly similar according to the DSA. Yet, it was Harrington and others on the New Left, such as the scholars at the New School for Social Research, and the critical social theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, and Marxists such as Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran and Harry Magdoff, who argued that the structural nature of capitalist arrangements fomented class conflict and class warfare. In fact, Harrington, along with these other scholars, argued that intrinsic to competitive market capitalism is an ongoing struggle between labor and capital, profit maximization over labor, and the liberal right to private property to the exclusion and marginalization of labor. Systemic poverty was no longer a random phenomenon beyond human understanding, and Harrington had made this form of economic analysis de riguer within academic and journalistic settings. Even in his appearances on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, Harrington consistently argued not only for the moral grounding of a just economy but also its sound economic sense. And all of this had a huge impact on a young Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is one of these DSA styled socialists, not the type that promotes a state run system that owns and controls the means of production and every aspect of people’s lives. Far from the raging Bolsheviks and Trotskyites at the turn of the twentieth century, Sanders has explained his version of DSA style socialism on numerous media outlets over the years. So the media know well what he is all about. He has a public record. His position is clear, and his untiring explanation of his DSA position is basically a repeat of The Other America, which calls for economic rights in a democratic society, exactly what FDR called for in his Economic Bill of Rights. And if the market cannot accommodate these rights, then the government of the United States, or any democratic government for that matter, has a moral duty to provide fundamental human needs as economic rights. This is exactly the same form of social democracy that has developed in the Scandinavian countries, Canada, New Zealand, etc., and it is amazingly similar to what the Catholic Church prescribed in 1965, at the end of Vatican II in a document titled Gaudium et Spes (Church in the Modern World). Jesuit Theologian Daniel O’Hanlon and Vatican observer Gary MacEoin have argued that Harrington’s The Other America not only influenced Pope John XXIII, who commenced the Vatican II Council in 1962, but also Pope Paul VI, who concluded the Council in 1965. What an interesting parallel between Harrington of the DSA, and some savvy popes who understood that the common good on a global scale demanded a social mortgage.

Fast forward to 2016

As a result of the Great Recession in 2008, most Americans today have literally struggled for their economic lives in one way or another. The manifestations have been felt painfully in wage-reductions, job loss, depleted 401K accounts, raided pensions, short sales on homes, foreclosures on homes, survival credit card debt, financial bankruptcy, healthcare bankruptcy, family financial stress, repossessions, economic and emotional scars of the phony war in the Middle East, soldier deaths, wounded veterans, etc. At the same time, billionaires and the 1% have been doing better than ever with record economic growth, publicly funded bailouts of corporations, and multibillion dollar tax breaks to boot. In contrast, the pain that everyday people have experienced is real. But the only political candidate today that seems to have identified this devastation and translated it into real political issues of substance is Bernie Sanders. He has tapped into this pain and has thus been able to pound away on some of the most pressing policy issues of our time. Sanders has continually repeated the chorus of injustices that people have experienced as a direct result of the billionaire conquest of our democratic society and the financial destruction of the middle class. Suffice it to say, the poor and underclass in America have almost completely slipped under the radar. The result of this has been that two different Americas have re-emerged, and the use of the term “re-emerged” is intentional here because this has all happened before in the history of the US.

Not a single-issue candidate

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n addition to the class conflict-warfare theme underlying Bernie Sanders political campaign (which is really what Citizens United and campaign finance reform is all about) are several other related issues. Bernie Sanders opposed the Iraq War Authorization, Wall Street Bailout (TARP), Patriot Act 2001, Patriot Act Reauthorization 2006, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Death Penalty, Keystone XL Pipeline, Border Fence Legislation 2006, and Offshore Oil Drilling. He supports: breaking up big banks; reauthorizing Glass-Steagall; and rescinding Citizens United and the corporate takeover of democracy in the US. He opposed the Brady bill simply because it made owners of gun shops criminally liable for guns they sold to non-criminals. But the key point is this: Sanders understands the human economic tragedy suffered as a result of the 1%. Bernie Sanders has a movement going that will not be stopped, regardless of whether or not the media provide a shallow analysis of his campaign. Even if he is not elected president of the United States, his influence will carry on because the issues are like raw wounds, compounded by Citizens United undermining of legitimate democratic governance. What constitutes illegitimate governance is corporate money paid to congressmen, congresswomen, and senators, in order to do the business of big business as a priority, not the people’s business.*

A bully and an opportunist demagog of the worst sort that rivals Obama, Christie deserves every bit of trouble coming his way.

What the establishment elites and media want desperately to avoid is the class conflict-warfare theme underlying all of this. Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie mentioned at a recent Republican debate, February 8, 2016, that raising taxes on millionaires is “a failed idea and a failed policy; it’s class warfare.” Imagine that! The rich are now being oppressed! So the establishment plays victim and wants to avoid any historical narrative of actual life-and-death struggles that took place throughout the history of the United States, resulting from class conflict-warfare, and tragically, to which the United States is reverting. This narrative is becoming uncomfortably reminiscent. Big business, government, military, bureaucracy, and the money media (military-industrial-bureaucratic-media complex) do not want a systematic analysis of the economic issues and the underlying causes of poverty and inequality taking place in the United States. After all, why would they jeopardize their profit margins?

Their bottom line is profits, and they want to make sure their profit margins are steadily increasing. They do not want a systemic analysis of stagnant wages by American workers over the past forty years or trade deals leveraged on developing countries and fast-tracked fascist style through Congress as is the TPP. Yet, imagine if The Other America, “war on poverty” safety nets were missing when the Great Recession hit. Robert Reich has argued that the reason it was a Great Recession, and not another Great Depression, was precisely because The Other America, “war on poverty” “socialist” public policies were in place. Absent these socialist strategies, the economic damage would have been catastrophic. Other economists, such as Richard Wolff, Stephen Resnick, and John Roemer, argue that the safety net might already be a thing of the past. The ironic tragedy is that this has a boomerang effect on the rich themselves if workers themselves are unable to purchase or consume. Henry Ford understood this effect. Workers need to spend. If not he would soon be out of business. Hauntingly, Marx and Engels’ prediction in the Communist Manifesto has become increasingly significant in that the bourgeoisie produces “its own gravediggers.”

So, what is really the heart and soul of The Other America? What are the underlying principles that made this analysis by Michael Harrington, and embedded in Bernie Sanders, so incredibly insightful? To start, it will be helpful to draw on some economists and their conceptual frameworks as the foundation for The Other America. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith and Robert Heilbroner have argued that since capitalism has become an oligopoly, the entire system was in essence “too big to fail.” That is where that idea originates. Failure was not an option since the system would collapse on everyone. New Left critics like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse have argued that the “market” invariably tends toward crisis, which is only satiated in warfare. Could this be why some US military generals are calling for women to now register for the draft? Marxists further argued that the fundamental tendency built into the very nature of capital accumulation is toward the crisis of overproduction and under-consumption, forcing the economic system known today as market capitalism to invariably work against its own interests. The result: economic collapse. John Maynard Keynes argued that this could be prevented and effectively managed through public policy; however, Harrington was not convinced of this at all. His vision was one of a democratic economy where workers were co-owners of the means of production, not simply as a right in that they create the “surplus value,” but that it also makes good economic sense for workers and business in maintaining a healthy economy. The operative presupposition: the more workers make the more they spend to keep the economy healthy. Higher financial returns to shareholders do not necessarily guarantee this.

* See some of the relevant research published by Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age, Princeton University Press, 2008; Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality, University of Chicago Press, 2009; Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, 2014, 564-581; and Edward Martin, “Oligarchy, Anarchy, and Social Justice,” Contemporary Justice Review, 2015, 55-67.

By Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel Part I of V

The Legacy of Michael Harrington, Hillary Clinton, and the Marxist Critique

“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.” – Pope Francis I, Laudato Si  

Democrats and Republicans, and all those who hold fast to the divine status of the market, clearly do not want a national discussion about free markets, capitalism, and those for whom free markets are really designed to serve. This is why the richest 1% in the United States is alarmingly concerned about Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who has gained serious political momentum in electoral politics with his success in Iowa and New Hampshire. What elites fear is that the problems associated with capitalism, and the rationale for their elite status, will reveal that the outcomes of the unfettered market result in class warfare. And all of this has captivated America’s youth, who remain transfixed on Sanders’ message of radical inequality and the subversion of democratic governance through Citizens United.

The media spin Bernie’s popularity amongst young voters as merely symptomatic of youthful inexperience. They paint Sanders as a slick politician who promises pipe dreams of free college tuition, student debt modification, and free universal health care. But what the media and elites truly fail to address is the fact that even the parents of the young voters ask, “Why not?” The elites fail to acknowledge the feelings that young voters and their parents have when together they recognize publicly that, if all major industrialized countries have such social benefits, then so should they.

Just as we all must pay for our mistakes in life, Bill Clinton is paying the price for his mistakes right now. His laundry list of follies includes the likes of Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham, and all the lunatic elites who have facilitated the hijacking of the US—those who deregulated the economy by abolishing the Glass-Steagall, and thereby creating fraudulent financial investments based on financial derivatives (betting against you own investments) which they then replaced with economic collapse, short sales on homes, foreclosures, job loss, wage cuts, underemployment, wage stagnation, survival credit card debt, usury level student loans, and the longest war in the history of the US. The 1% has provided an apologetic for the continued free market and economic massacre. They blame Obama even though the economy has improved modestly, and yet, the aftermath is still personal devastation, even with the help of TARP funds, HARP funds, and Obamacare.

None of this affected the 1%; their stock portfolios boomed. In fact, the 1% claim they would like to improve things even more by cutting social security and replacing it with a private Wall-Street-funded pension. How’s that for generosity? Nothing to be afraid of since the new Dodd-Frank legislation has fixed the problem… Right! Maybe the 1% can explain how Goldman Sachs recently settled a 5 billion dollar lawsuit over fraudulent mortgages without any executive having to serve jail time.  So much for reform and breaking up the big banks! Dodd-Frank did nothing! Other gestures of generosity include increasing the age for retirement to 67, as well as growing the economy on the backs of workers by demanding 4% GDP growth to fix the sluggish economy—just like the old command economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. What remains unstated is that, to do this, workers will need to work longer and harder without the overtime, compensation, or benefit packages that should come with all of this. The problem here is not about capital, competition, and the profit motive. It is not about the threat of a socialist workers’ utopia where the state owns everything and redistributes wealth based on need. The problem is about political corruption and elite actors being held captive to big money and corporate interests so as to legitimize pure avarice wrapped in free market dogma.

The rest of us? We are expendable. Any discussion or question regarding the equitable distribution of wealth and workers’ rights and their creation of surplus profit is essentially verboten. Nor will the 1% allow any discussion in this regard, whether media, elite academics and universities, or corporate financial apologists. Such discussion is easily shut down by simply writing it off as socialism, the new “s” word. And what CNN (TimeWarner), MSNBC (Comcast), and FOX News (Ruppert Murdoch) want is for no one to seriously trace the money. If they do, they will find out that the 1% invest their money, not only in Wall Street, but also in NASDAQ and other markets around the world. And these markets reciprocate with great loyalty. 

To be fair to the capitalist class, they have no real fear of the “s” word as such, or Bolsheviks and anarchists. After all, they believe the Bernie Sanders is not electable as a socialist even though the country and economy has been held together for the past seventy years by socialist programs and policies to mitigate, in microeconomic terms, market failures. What the 1% dread at a visceral level is that their bourgeois existence, justified through the impartial microeconomic laws of the universe, will be exposed, not by a rival economic theory such as socialism, but by the deeper levels of existential human suffering that have finally crucified the middle class and poor at the most fundamental level—their economic existence. Who can argue rationally against this? When personal concrete experience contradicts the sacred dogma of economic theory, the theory needs to change. This Marxist concept, coined as “praxis,” needs to be understood and utilized as the intellectual sledge hammer to undo Citizens United and the power-elite who want to desperately conceal the rift between people’s personal economic tragedies and things economically “sacred.” Go ahead and thank Antonio Gramsci (Prison Notebooks), Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), and the entire movement of critical social theorists of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas), jailed, imprisoned, or banished because they dared to question the divine status of the market and the nature of authoritarianism that kept liberal markets in place.  

The middle class and underclass had no real chance to organize against this since they had no power or effective community organizing efforts like those of Saul Alinsky. The union movement made a go of it in Europe and the United States, but the unions in the US soon became victims of their own success. In other words, they had it so good that they no longer wanted to “rock the boat” for greater economic rights. But it is radically different now because the middle class is starting to feel it slip away – their economic well-being – toward a new address on skid row. The 1% dread this revelation, and it is frankly too late. The new skid row middle class know they are expendable. There is no denying it. This is the reason why the electorate in 2016 will turn on establishment Wall Street democrats and embrace Bernie Sanders. This is why Hillary and Bill, Republicans and libertarians, media freaks like Chris Matthews, write off Bernie Sanders is just a youthful fad. The truth that they want avoided? That the liberal market economy is only for a few, as in the 1%. And all of this undermines market shares for Comcast, Time Warner, and Fox News.

This can all be changed with a socialist avant-garde demanding an economic bill of rights to make the economy accountable democratically to all citizens as “the peoples economy.”  

A shameless narcissistic hustler and part-time social imbecile, Trump has recklessly fanned the flames of a neofascist movement in the US. [CC BY-SA by Michael Vadon]

Insofar as it manifests itself today in the US and around the world, capitalism is “on trial.” This will no doubt entail an analysis questioning the underlying causes of poverty and inequality and this may lead to questioning the liberal notions of the private ownership of capital and the priority of capital over labor. Naturally, liberals and Keynesians will talk about managing the problems of the market through tweaking public policy, etc. They will argue that the boom-bust cycle and the downward pressure on wages that results from private capital investment does indeed result in outcomes such as unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and all the assortment of health-related maladies that accompany these disasters. This is arrogantly dismissed as an acceptable transaction cost on the way to an eventual bull market, understood in terms of the most efficient means known in the world today for allocating scarce resources through the free market. Yet, Bernie Sanders is relentless in focusing on the issues and has not lost sight of the real outcomes of the billionaires getting richer, the middle class disappearing, and the poor, left in the dust. 

The mixed or regulated economy since the New Deal and Great Society programs were supposed to solve the problems of liberal capitalism. These remedies, based on socialist strategies implemented in Northern and Western Europe, have worked well to stabilize economic conditions in these European countries, even in the midst of Europe’s current “great recession.” We argued above, nevertheless, that socialist remedies have always been in place in the US, going way back to the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Yet, if both theories, capitalism and socialism, are understood as flexible models that can work harmoniously, it should not be a problem at least as both have been applied intelligently over the past two centuries. In industrialized and post-industrialized countries, capitalism has been able to take on a variety of forms, socially, culturally, politically, and ethically. As an economic system, it has been able to morph into a Scandinavian model, Western European model, Australian-New Zealand model, Japanese model, Chinese model, Russian model, English model, Irish model, and US model. All of these are different versions of capitalist development and for that matter socialist development. But without public sector support and public financial investment, the capitalist system on its own will collapse, according to Nobel economists Simon Kuznets and Kenneth Arrow since extensive public infrastructure investment is needed to maintain the entire system.  

We argue here, that capitalism is dependent on public financial support without which the entire system would collapse. Public infrastructure investment is imperative, and this above all includes education, understood as a public good. What is needed to make capitalism work better in the US in particular is more public funding in providing free health care, free public education, public financial support in housing, etc., since markets tend to provide these “commodities” to a shrinking pool of consumers as Kuznets and Arrow have argued. The remedy is regulation of the capitalist system and prioritization of public financial support to maintain a healthy economy. Whether defined as democratic socialism or social democracy, the market economy that we know needs to be understood as an entire public good, or as Elinor Ostrom describes it, a “common pool resource.”  The market needs to be understood and dealt with as a public resource, not a private enterprise subject to the laws and rules of traditional private property and is too important as a strategic economic asset to place in the hands of individuals seeking their own rational interests often at the expense of others. Not all is a zero-sum game, but too often economic matters result in this relationship. This is one of the major themes of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, and why the Bern is a very dangerous man. The Friedman-Greenspan School of libertarian thought has only undermined capital development by undermining the public infrastructure to support its development, regardless of the nomenclature as capitalist or socialist.