My Journey w/ the Contraception Debate

Part 1. Left Out

When the debate over full insurance rights for employees of religious institutions began to bubble up to the surface of media waters, my immediate and impassioned reaction was quickly checked by the realization that said reaction was too far Left to matter to the debate. At Organizing Grievances we've been fond of locating ourselves on "the socialist wing of the Democratic Party," and in this instance my participation or even belonging within mainstream debates felt exactly as impossible and necessary (c.f. Laclau) as that political identity. To me, the debate was one between public health and religious autonomy: between the socialized administration of equal access for the public good and the privatized, identitarian claims for religious exceptionalism and gender-based exclusion. Can you guess which side was on? Can you see how quickly I realized that just my framing of the debate, if enunciated into a microphone of consequence, could quickly undermine the ends I championed and their Democrat proxies? It is very possible to wager that "the public good," if not "public health," signifies nothing less than statism and death panels for a swath of Americans I'd be too frightened to count. And if anything, I think Left pundits' fascination with the totally ballyhooed, mostly failed and nonetheless ongoing fits of privatization in American life obscure the extent to which the public sector, such as it's been, has never been accompanied by an ethic or an infrastructure of a public sphere as imagined by Habermas or enjoyed by other democracies. This is a consequence, I suppose, of the USA being a capitalist democracy that at all points has been more capitalist than democratic, and thus valued private property, privatization and simple privacy over the Enlightenment ethics of rationalism and secularism that shakily birthed modern ideas of pluralism, if not multiculturalism.

Generalizations aside, I imagine the US historians working in and around this blog would rightly assure me that the relative currency of each of these values have risen and fallen, zero-sum style, over the years. As an example, I suppose we could compare consequential speeches on religion by two candidates for president, JFK and Willard "Mitt" Romney. For his part, JFK is eager to assure US voters that his papal overlord will enjoy no authority over the White House; indeed, JFK asserts that religion will be sidelined in the political sphere, if not to say subjugated by it. This implies an understanding that secularism in public life actually enables religious pluralism in private life, or that a secular government is necessary, even, to protect such private practices from intolerant majorities, etc.

Contrarily, Mitt Romney, whose religion has faced and continues to face popular suspicion and government repression, delivers a speech predicated on Mormonism's shared strains with Christianity. More importantly, he posits that religious Americans of all stripes should look past their differences and recognize their common enemy, encroaching secularism. The devolution apparent in these two speeches - from religious freedom guaranteed by a secular government to religious solidarity enabled by common opposition to secularism - speaks to my suggestion that pluralism and multiculturalism emerge uneasily out of the Enlightenment values underpinning political modernity. The former is a social compact that self-governing peoples can manage through elected representation and the society of laws, whereas the latter, in its Left and Right forms, raises the stakes of identity practices and cultural recognition such that these matters may no longer be confined to the extra-political inner lives of voluntary associations and failures.

In short, the war on secularism jeopardizes the social, not at all unlike how a certain kind of postmodernism threatens the Enlightenment, among other things. The common postmodernism of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden resides in their fundamentalism of rich men's sons: a neo-traditionalism that need be underwritten by commercial capital, Yankee guns, 20th-century theology and a constructivist's avid attention to the naming and outlining of the nonexistent past to which his neo-traditionalism is willingly addressed. The Left postmodernism of French Theory, or of Baader-Meinhoff, takes socialist, social democratic and welfare capitalist variants in the industrial West as failed experiments, belied by racism/sexism at home and imperialism abroad, as well as by the very repressive and bureaucratic drabness of even a redistributive politics that takes the social as its proper object of governance. Postmodernisms Left and Right gesture away from a social and secular political imaginary. As if they were coordinating, religious fundamentalisms demand political recognition for religious agents just as philosophers and frustrated revolutionaries declare enlightenment a failed ideal and slippery slope to genocide, and denounce society as unrepresentable.

Hardly a hater of the postmodern contribution to my line of work, my mature academic provenance is nonetheless staunchly socialist-feminist, particularly in its assertion that the neoliberal assault on welfare and the religious assault on women and reason reveal deep problems with the uncritical adaptation of this side of pomo. What's more, I believe very strongly that the aforementioned unrepresentability of the social, rather than making for a dead end, is actually the starting point of political identity (c.f. Laclau). It is in this way that the allocation of contraception in religious spaces can stand in for a far greater battle over where "politics" belongs, whether public health comprises a goal worth defending, and of course if it is possible to elevate the socialized defense of women's bodies over the sacral authority of Christ on the cross and that other ritual text, the US Constitution.

Pt. 2. Left Out Again
Then I realized something plainer, simpler and truer. So much for my socialist-feminist provenance! [To my credit, I was never one for wearing "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" t-shirts, which is the White Guy with Dreadlocks equivalent of male participation in women's movements.] We've subsequently come to know that "religious freedom" argument of conservatives could be cast aside as remote and contrived as my own abstruse socialism were it not being deployed, effectively, on women's bodies. I had made a corporeal issue into an intellectual one (again.) How does a dude proceed from there? Not by pushing to the front of the people's assembly to speak for anybody. No, there's too much of the anti-choice movement's choice of angry white male avatars in that decision. And so I shut up and watched.

Pt. 3 Auto-erotic Race-Punditry trumps Women's Rights
Meanwhile all kinds of (male) liberal pundits broke ranks, couching ethnic affiliation and a contrived discourse of white authenticity in their gentle and ironic denunciations of "government intrusion" and its gloomy consequences for their President of choice. The flabby and fervent suggestions of these analysts swallowed whole the "hands off Catholicism" argument demolished by Garry Wills , just as they so often succumb to the "deficit hysteria" Dean Baker works himself silly debunking. Fucking liberals!!! Similarly, countless constitutional scholars begged to differ with the formal first amendment defense, but in the face of that criticism said pundits pivoted to the worrisome political ramifications. Should President Obama pursue his invasive defense of women's and employee rights, he might alienate Catholics, whom he desperately needs to win the Presidency. While I'd be remiss not to mention the polling data that showed that a majority of Catholics, let alone women, supported the measure, that misses the essential point of the pundits' essentialism. Silent majority, Reagan Democrats and swing voters past and present have long enjoyed a sought-after status with both parties, and analysts have featured them and their voices as steadily as academics have profiled the race-baiting characteristic of their right-left-right shifting. The demographic composition of the independent voter has long since shifted, as has the demographic nature of the nation, but would you believe that even after their vote has proven decisive, "white ethnics" dominate liberal commentary? It's no different from the "real American" construction of the tea parties, although this population appears conspicuously within an arcane formulation, "white working-class," that is as conspicuous in its use of the expression "working-class" as it is foolhardy for literally whitewashing the designation with racialized strokes of identification and exclusion.

Alas, the "white-working class" has never been a large part of Barack Obama's coalition, and will not be in 2012. Sad but true. Women, however, are quite important to the President for electoral reasons and, I'll suggest momentarily, for more substantial reasons. Much attention was paid to how Irish-Catholic Joe Biden and Catholic Bill Daley had forewarned the President of the dangers of his contraception decision, yet how a visit from leading women in government, Kathleen Sebelius and Valerie Jarret, had compelled him to move ahead with it. Now, I love Joe Biden. He was right about Iraq, right about Afghanistan, and wrong about this. Still, top liberal talkers much more sanguine about the VPOTUS' more dovish moments were assured that his admonishment about appeasing the Catholics was unadulterated truth. This kickstarted a return to an old theme: Obama doesn't connect with people (that is, with white working-class people, real people) as well as Bill Clinton did. Had old Bill been around, he'd've triangulated the shit out of this situation, including chastity belts with school uniforms and cutting welfare for good measure. That's what it means to "get over" on people, right? Well....here's another version of building support with a key constituency.

There goes that out-of-step, academic, and, uh, black President, opposing the discrimination of women which is also discrimination against workers. He dared to ignore his important dude-advisors in favor of those of women, and seems to believe in contraception. Ha! Consider the deal he struck: not only did he rob opponents of their "defense of faith" argument and leave them baldly defending the right of men to savage women's health, he also shifted from government intervening on religious agencies from government intervening upon insurance companies to lower costs, which is way closer to what Americans with and without a uterus want to see. It's sad to me that the white, liberal commentariat is too submerged in an arcane fascination with the vestiges of Richard Nixon's coalition to see how this excellent policy play was also strong politics. Worse, it's the umpteenth example of Obama's "long game" hitting political marks and backing off radical conservative advances at the same time. As I remarked to Gabba recently, I increasingly suspect a racial undertone to a narrative that paints Obama as too brilliant and removed, however occasionally inspirational. (This faint praise is the liberal analog of the conservatives' fascistic wish-dream that denounces Obama as "leading from behind" except for communist moments when he tries to deface religious traditions of white Americans.) In this narrative Obama is juxtaposed with Bill Clinton, the man of action who got things done and could talk to "real people." I wish neither to bury nor praise Mr. Clinton, but this assertion that his were "real politics" - welfare reform, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, overturning Glass-Steagall - says something about cleavage between his and Obama's coalitions. I'm not happy to see so many whites outside the D tent, but I will not confuse their section of the working-class with some kind of universal race-proletariat, especially when they haven't shown themselves to be opposed to contraception or in favor of an all-male referendum on women's organs. That's a different group, and they, of course, can go fuck themselves.

Pt. 4. Good Gals Win
So here we are: access to cheap contraception's been guaranteed, it's enemies have been given a shovel with which to keep digging themselves into the past and out of contention for office, and mark my words, the Affordable Care Act came away with something of a positive advert on its behalf. None of this is to say my issues about secularism and political modernity have been treated with any kind of soothing coos or theory balm, but in the short and medium runs these issues will remain only obliquely evoked or modified. A government which outlaws ACORN or cuts unemployment during an unprecedented economic crisis is a government which abandons poverty as a problem and society as an object. The attack on Planned Parenthood will continue from male Rs who have abandoned the legitimacy of popular support for the inference of cloudy thumbs-up from God. The persistence of the faith-based institution might be perfectly fine if its advancement in a world of withering welfare didn't signal a prostrate state seeking alms and the subjection of social welfare to whims paternalistic, superstitious and charitable.

The attendant populisms and ur-populisms of the moment make things worse. Like the tea parties' vaunted Real Americans, many liberals broke ranks perhaps unconsciously to promote a worldview in which white catholics were politically definitive and a raced (if also classed) stand-in stand in for the nation. These tactics around championing the political identity of a privileged and race- and faith-based group can no doubt nationalize society out of existence. Perhaps that fate befell the USA around the writing of its Constitution, or perhaps it really was Nixonland and neoliberalism which brought low social justice, secular authority and civil tolerance.

But is it possible to socialize, or re-socialize a nation? Not with this much culture going on, I fear. We have traded the social imaginary, as well as socialism as a political project, for the smallpox blankets and glass beads of identity. And we've been had. What we thought was identity was merely lifestyle, what we thought was symbolic was simulacra, what we thought was transgression was consumption. The film and punk rock have been great, thanks, but there are fault lines ripping, and who looks to art in an earthquake? Culture's colonization of politics and society means that one imagines identity, national identity and nationalist discourse, when they imagine political action. So too even the economic recovery is couched in patriotic tones. After politics, culture. After society, culture. Bloated, culture backslides into nationalism. And nationalism kills, Billy.

You guys think my writing is turgid?

Check out this bit from Poulantzas, as close as it gets to my personal justification for m'dissertation:

But, I repeat, the relative autonomy of the state, founded on the separation (constantly being transformed) of the economic and political, is inherent in its very structure (the state is a relation) in so far as it is the resultant of contradictions and of the class struggle as expressed, always in their own specific manner, within the state itself- the state which is both shot through and constituted with and by these class contradictions. It is precisely this that enables us exactly to pinpoint the specific role of the bureaucracy which, although it constitutes a specific social category, is not a group standing above, outside or to one side of classes: an elite, but one whose members also have a class situation or membership. To my mind, the implications of this analysis are of great importance.

Prisonship Twi-ddle-dye-dees

1. Elevated liver enzymes.
   
2. Julie Klausner on TBSOWFMU
3. My 2nd-or3rd red Stax cup from the Soul Museum, filled with sub-room temperature coffee and expired 1/2+1/2 dregs.
   
4. Having seen Thee Oh Sees, the Gories, Teenage Fanclub, Superchunk, Nobunny and Bob Mould in the last coupla months.
   
5. The Poulantzas Reader.
6. Cheaply Priced Blue Note lp reissues, such as Hank Mobley's Workout.
7. Poulantzas: "I was able to avoid conceiving of the different instances (in particular the political, the state) as being by nature and pre-existing, in essence, their meeting together within a precise mode if production." This is what he calls the "regional theory," his elaboration on Althusser's idea of "relative autonomy."
   
8. my first ever for-real toilet punk-ish, killed by desk-ish sounding song for my imaginary punk band, Thee White Vote. Lyrically the inspirations are from The Exorcist and Paul Muldoon. It's entitled, "Captain Howdy Has a Shack."
   

Laclau, "Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity"

If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocabulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of a political competition. It is this final failure off society to constitute itself as society - which is the same thing as the failure of constituting difference as difference - which makes the distance between the universal and the particular unbridgeable and, as a result, burdens concrete social agents with the impossible task of making democratic interaction achievable.

Racial Propositions (excerpt) - Daniel Martinez HoSang - University of California Press

In case you were wondering, this's what I've been thinking about lately as Advisor B and I hustle towards finally a-finishing our Tea Party papier. In addition to writing the best book about the larger cultural and racial stakes of the ludicrous initiative process that I have been able to glom, Hosang's also translated the "invisibility" of the hegemonic political subjectivity du jour into something goddamned see-able :

Political whiteness describes a political subjectivity rooted in white racial identity, a gaze on politics constituted by whiteness. This concept draws from and extends both George Lipsitz's observations about the "possessive investment in whiteness" and Cheryl Harris's critical account of "whiteness as property." Whiteness, Lipsitz argues is "possessed" both literally in the form of material rewards and resources afforded to those recognized as white as well as figuratively through the "psychological wages" of status and social recognition detailed by W.{ths}E.{ths}B. DuBois. Harris similarly describes a "valorization of whiteness as treasured property," recognized by the law and enforced by the state, which produces a "settled expectation" that its beneficiaries will face no "undue" obstacles in claiming its rewards. Whiteness, she explains, "is simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest, it is something that can be both experienced and deployed as a resource."

The concept of political whiteness describes how these norms, "settled expectations," and "investments" shape the interpretation of political interests, the boundaries of political communities, and the sources of power for many political actors who understand themselves as white. It does not simply describe the interests or politics of "white people," which after all are necessarily varied. It instead concerns the process by which some political claims and interests come to be defined as white. James Baldwin described an "American delusion" fostered by whiteness that leads people to believe "not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers."Like whiteness in general, political whiteness is a subjectivity that constantly disavows its own presence and insists on its own innocence. It operates instead as a kind of absent referent, hailing and interpolating particular subjects through various affective appeals witnessed in claims to protect "our rights," "our jobs," "our homes," "our kids," "our streets," and even "our state" that never mention race but are addressed to racialized subjects.Political whiteness is, in one sense, a widely studied phenomenon. Scholars and observers have long sought to explain the relationship between white racial identity and political behavior and action. In most accounts, however, white racial identity is viewed as fully realized and defined, constructed outside of the field of politics. Conflicts like ballot measures merely express its preordained interests. This account, by contrast, does not view political whiteness as a fixed, a priori identity that simply becomes expressed through political conflicts. Carmichael and Hamilton's argument certainly holds true: there are deep "traditions" of racism embedded in diverse institutions and structures that shape the contours and trajectory of white political identity at any given moment. But white political identity is hardly static; it also becomes transformed and renewed through struggles such as ballot initiative campaigns.

The Hegemonic Character of Political Whiteness
Political whiteness bears two characteristics that are central to all hegemonic formations. First, as cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams explains, "the hegemonic has to be seen as more than the simple transmission of an (unchanging) dominance. On the contrary, any hegemonic process must be especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposition which question and threaten its dominance" because a "lived hegemony is always a process." It must be "renewed, recreated, defended, and modified" as it is "continually resisted, limited, altered, [and] challenged by pressures not all its own."California's racialized ballot measures reveal precisely such a process at work. Taken together, they demonstrate the contested formation of political whiteness, a gaze on politics that is characterized by both continuity and change. Rather than viewing these ballot measures as primarily concerning the rights of various racialized minorities, we can understand them instead as contests over the political authority and "settled expectations" of whiteness itself.A central assertion of this book is that the political forces that opposed civil rights and racial justice policies are the ones that have best understood the malleable nature of political whiteness, and have constantly tested the ways they could adapt and incorporate new ideas, values, and experiences. Their opponents, by contrast, rarely attempted to challenge political whiteness as a fundamental identification, treating it instead as an inexorable force of political life.Williams's second point about hegemonic formations concerns the question of opposition. By definition, ballot initiatives are viewed as contests between opposing political projects, which presumably do not share similar ideas, commitments, or values. But Williams argues that the very power of hegemonic formations derives from their capacity to shape the terms on which they are opposed: "nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic: that the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture."

Not That You'd Notice From Democrats' Rhetoric, but...

Poverty Rose, Median Income Declined, and Job-Based Health Insurance Continued to Weaken in 2008 — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

News like this galls me more than 1,000 Tea Parties, to tell you the truth:

The figures reflect the initial effects of the recession. Median household income declined 3.6 percent in 2008 after adjusting for inflation, the largest single-year decline on record, and reached its lowest point since 1997. The poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent, its highest level since 1997. The number of people in poverty hit 39.8 million, the highest level since 1960.

These data include only the early months of the recession. The figures for 2009, a year in which the economy has weakened further and unemployment has climbed substantially, will look considerably worse, and the figures will likely worsen again in 2010 if, as many economic forecasters expect, unemployment continues to rise in that year. (In the last two recessions, the unemployment rate continued rising for 15 to 19 months after the recession officially ended.)

The society is becoming more unequal by the day: read for yourself, check the charts, etc. Now, who here has faith that the sitting administration can/will tinker with the political economy in a serious enough way to alleviate these most acute consequences of Reaganism's 30-year advance, let alone push back against the strucutures-in-dominance which produce them?

Frame Talk is Frivolous, Frame Talk is Fun

The Politico has really nice dish - or mebbe it's navel-gazing tripe - about the official BHO semiotics of the Frst Hndrd Days.

ps - No, I have not abandoned the for(u)m of weblogs ("blogs"), I'm just caught in a move-in bind.

pps - And how about unconditional endorsee - and example of all that is righteous in the 20-something blog-wonk matrix - Ezra Klein getting hired by the MotherfuckingWashington MotherfuckingPost?!?

Agnosticism Even in Our Anti-Capitalism

(h/t: fellow twitter-er and Edwards/Dean/Jerry Brown strategy guy Joe Trippi)

Spiegel Online re: Davos...

Davos can deliver insights it doesn't necessarily intend.

The key messages that seemed to flow from four days of speeches, panels, "bilaterals" (i.e., chatting with someone), cocktail parties, and press briefings were these:

1. Everyone stupidly failed to see the financial calamity coming except roughly four economists who now must be heeded in everything they say and all they predict.

2. The private sector has ruined the global economy and can no longer be trusted.

3. Government is ascendant, with regulation closest to godliness.

4. These conclusions are correct and will stand the test of time.

What I took away instead was this: Beware conventional wisdom and groupthink. Be skeptical of tidy explanations for complex past events. Be even more skeptical of confident predictions of future human behavior. Don't fight the last war.

All true, my "non-ideological" friend. I fear for those among us who are too hopped-up about:

1. New Deal 2.
2. "More public, less private" as an end in itself.
3. The fallacy that somehow favoring industrial capital over financial capital is an intrinsically good (or always necessarily meaningful) decision.
   

Brass tacks: be it in laissez-faire or mixed economy tones, the state always "regulates" the economy under capitalism (read your Dean Baker, or Poulantzas on the theory side.)

And to put a theoretical bow on things: on a political-cultural level, the 100% socialization of assets might somehow make our society 100% "public"...but it's not enough to undo the public-private binary that shapes the ideological playing field for social actors, social movements, etc.
Not to sound too lapsed-Catholic, but there's no getting out of the desert until the Original Sin of public-private discourse is undone, transgressed, defaced, profaned, overturned. Of course I'd rather the state administered/guaranteed my health care, and I'll go to as many informational pickets as you want in favor of it. But the state's still the (capitalist) state, in that instance.

What are you saying, Lex - Socialism or Barbarism? Well, of course I'm always at least implying that, I hope. But I'm also trying to make the more pragmatic point that there is a horizon - just a horizon right now, what with all of the totally necessary socialization/regulation/de-privatization we absolutely have to do right now - beyond which the socialization/regulation/de-privatization of capital will cease to be strategically viable aims for organized labor in particular, if not the "working class" in general. The work of agnosticism, which to me is also the work of democratic socialism, is to provide unflagging-but-contingent support for civil society, the public sphere and the state regulation of capital and capitalists, but without elevating those "empty signifiers" to the level of godheads or ends-in-themselves. These aforementioned are worthy socialist causes, but hardly the stuff of life-after-liberalism, let alone life-after-capital.

Any theologians out there interested in the question, "Is socialism capitalist?" It'd prolly make for good barroom talk if the company was right.

"Social Movement" Unionism has proven...

to be an absurd framework through which to understand labor's political identity in the 21st Century, in my opinion.

but some interesting issues come to light as one goes about taking that framework apart. par example, see Paul Johnston's Success While Other Fails; Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (1994):

This does not mean that public workers’ movements will promote a “workers’ state,” abolish capitalism or the state, and so on. Different parts of the public workforce are likely to be implicated on different sides of every great social contest. The important point is that public workers' claims are framed in certain common forms and that these workers rely on certain kinds of strategic resources; beyond that, the significance of a particular movement depends on its historical context. As they frame their interests as administrable public interests, they are perhaps the quintessential “state-making" social movement.

Prove Me Wrong...Good On You!

'Gotta hand it to Chris Dodd....'even Doug Henwood (sur le LBO listserve) gave the plan a "looks not too bad."

Between this and the FISA filibuster, if Dodd actually passes this thing as is - which I will believe only when I hold a copy of the bill in my shaky, shocked hands - I'm gonna send him a twelve of pabsts and mebbe even one or two of my rare-er seven-inches.

(ex post facto editorial addition: Krugman concurs, calculated risk hails it as a positive step and reports that CNBC reports Paulson has agreed to the bit about government taking equity in the bailed out banks.)

Prisonship Internal Memo to Congressional Dems

Memo to Dems: This is Leverage.

Dear Dems,

So, like many of you, I had a hard time turning away from beautiful geniuses like Jim Cramer (swoon) and (my life-pundit) Erin Burnett* as this last week came in with a "laissez-faire" Lehman collapse and went out with an AIG bailout, only to culminate in what Krugman et. al. are rightly (and ironically) referring to as "socialism" in our financial sector.

(Parenthetically, if you're wondering "what the eff does all of this mean, and who the hell can explain it to me?" you'd do well to check out: Jorge on the nuts and bolts of the housing market bubbles, CDOs and how we got here; Krugman on the meat of the Paulson proposal and how it "works" to solve even just the market-related problems at hand; Dean Baker, as usual, with a blueprint for a bailout that might improve things for actual fucking people; and, as pertains to the thrust of this memo, Bob Kuttner on what the Dems could do if they "strapped some balls on their dick," to use the colorful and masculinist phrase once overheard passing from the lips of my 9th grade history teacher.)

Anyway, Dear Dems,

I learned a lot about leverage in my former work as a union researcher. (It's an even-numbered year, so I will assume you remember what unions are.) In my old line, leverage was everything - you never knew where you'd find it, but you knew you'd know it if you saw it. Sometimes it's a matter of public record. Sometimes it's a matter of dumpster-diving. Sometimes it's a matter of building power and rope-a-doping your opponent into revealing her own weaknesses, then building more power in the light of that self-diagnosis, then winning.

This time's one of those times. I've studied and studied and crapped myself thinkin' on the meaning of leverage, its rhythms and habitats and metamorphoses....but I've rarely seen it show itself so plainly. Democrats, you hold a lot of power in your hands this week. And knowing you as I do, I expect nothing less than a warm-hearted, polite and ineffectual surrender.

Does "taking one for the team" always have to be synonymous with losing? Before your very eyes, not just the sitting GOP but the very legacy of Reaganism has shown its "less government in business, more business in government" ass to be a social disease, in need of an unprecedented dose of welfare. While it's understandable (to me, anyway) that our Democratic nominee for president affects something like moderation- and makes all the bullshit bipartisan calls for pragmatism of which it will be the job of people like me and the OGs to disabuse him in January - your job is to make sure that socialism does not come to Wall Street without strings.

There should be more government in business. Now is the time to trim away any compensation for the shareholders and executives we're bailing out, and to erect a wall between houses of finance and government agencies where now there's a revolving-door. For god's sake"White-collar" crimes can be as violent as any other...violent-er, even, when one in seven of our damn bridges are unsound and all our dimes are spread across Iraq and the inter-ether of Over the Counter markets. (fwiw - I will regret not living to see an Attorney General Edwards "assume the position" and enact the purge that gets us to pre-post-neoliberalism.)

There should be less business in government. The idea that, having purchased these "toxic" assets for a sum of $700 billion, we will parcel them out in $50 billion slabs and have currently functioning private financial houses resell them is obscene, insane, incestuous, and it repeats the lie of Reaganism. BHO spoke eloquently of a need to "make government cool again," a neat phrase that in many ways evokes the political and cultural stakes involved in the massive, necessary political project of undoing a 30-year ass-kicking of the many by the few. Our purpose is not served by outdoing the GOP at treating citizens like shareholders. Our purpose is served only by showing that government can and should function within a democratic polity as an agent of (downward) redistribution, and that Democratic government's version of redistribution is a lot more inclusive and a lot less violent than the alternative.

Anywho, summing up:

1. Good News! This week you have the chance to undo all of your past sins. You can work off the debt accrued by your failure to stop an evil, imperialist war by declaring the end of finance capitalism as we know it.
   
2. Bad News! We both know you'll be doing no such thing.
   
3. Don't worry, I'll probably end up voting for all y'all anyway. See you on the teevee!
   

(footnote: * Yeah, it'd seem that my MSNBC addiction is giving way to a CNBC fetish - can you blame me, with a duo like this as the Kiki Dee and Elton John/Gram and Emmylou/Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw for my shut-in vie de brain-diharrea?)

T. Frank on Public Employees

excerpt from The Wrecking Crew by Tom Frank, from the chapter entitled "The Best Public Servant is the Worst One:"

In the mythology of the American right, federal rank-and-file workers are villains whose wickedness is surpassed only by that of the Soviet Communists themselves. They have just four concerns in life, sneered the journalist Don Feder in 1985: "pay, pension sick leave and throwing around their not inconsiderable weight around. No one has to teach us to detest public workers. It comes naturally, by process of observation and experience. "

Their tendency to join unions makes these public workers even more detestable. Once organized, civil servants support liberals, both with votes and campaign contributions - and these liberals, once in office, return the favor by making generous concessions to their unionized employees. Or so it seemed, anwyay, back in the seventies wen everyone from teachers to trashmen was going on strike - and winning, too. In that unhappy decade, the conservative mind began to dimly perceive a diabolical scenario unfolding, a disastrous endgame in which its two greatest enemies came together as one: government remade as a tool of its unionized employees, who would use its tax power to plunder the hardworking businessman.

The famous "Prop 13" tax revolt that swept Californaia in 1978 was inspired at least partially by this doomsday vision, with the rebellion's leader thundering, "We're not going to permit public employee unions to run this country." The issue also spawned an obligatory bout of direct-mail profiteering, with an outfit called Americans Against Union Control of Government sending out appeals for funds to help them fend off the "very real possibility of a relative handful of unions bosses seizing control of America's government."

The vivid colors of this particular catastrophe-dream have long since faded in the public mind, but Washington conservatives never forgot. Their policy toward career government personnel has always been to club them down, and by putting it into effect they have delivered massive rewards both to their political faction and to their primary constituents in the business community.

Letter from Prospectusburg

Dear All,

'Fitting we'd be having one of those gray days today as I nestle back into overdue revisions. A very special friend re-emerged, and it has been necessary to celebrate. But things are turning nerdy again.

Taking the separation of the political and the economic under capitalism even in its present phase, as our point of departure, the state should be seen (as should capital, according to Marx) as a relation, or more precisely as the condensate of a relation of power between struggling classes. In this way we escape the false dilemma entailed by the present discussion on the tstae, betwen the state comprehended as a thing/instrument and the state comprehended as a subject.

....


But I repeat, the relative autonomy of the state, founded on the separation (constantly being transformed) of the economic and the political, is inherent in its very structure (the state is a relation) in so far as it is the resultant of contradictions and of the class struggle as expressed, always in their own specific manner, within the state itself - this state which is both shot through and constituted with and by these class contradictions. It is precisely this that enables us exactly to pinpoint the specific role of the bureaucracy which, although it constitutes a specific social category, is not a group standing above, outside or to one side of classes: an elite, but one whose members also have a class situation or membership.

...

Indeed, conceiving of the capitalist state as a relation, as being structurally shot through and constituted with and by class contradictions, means firmly grasping the fact that an institution (the state) that is destined to reproduce class divisions cannot really be a monolithic, fissureless bloc, but is itself, by virtue of its very structure (the state is a relation), divided.

From Nicos Poulantzas, 'A Reply to Miliband and Laclau'

This recent copse of days has allowed me the opportunity to engage with Poulantzas' own writings, after no less than a year spent with Bob Jessop's Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, and, shit, a whole decade ping-ponging between the works of Althusser and Laclau. Mostly known in the context of his famous debate with Ralph Miliband, Poulantzas is often (mis?)understood as a sort-of "missing link" between Althusser's crazed maoist structuralism and Laclau's always-contradictory program of antiessentialist Universalism, so as you can see I'm long overdue for this interface.

And I've had a positive experience, let me tell you. Considered alongside Laclau or Althusser, Poulantzas' theory distinguishes itself through its explicit engagement with the capitalist state as a political and social form. This is an important contribution, because serious theories of the class politics of the Liberal state eluded mainstream marxist theory - allowing for the anomalie and/or miracle that is the work of Gramsci - until the late 1960s. The politics of the state have also hounded American labor politics: Gompers' AFL wanted to maintain real distance with parties and government; Wobblies were bomb-tossing, no-contract anarchists; industrial unions made an ambitious, ill-fated run to expand the public and private sector welfare and establish a liberal-corpratist American consensus via collective bargaining and the Democratic Party. These diverse ideologies reflect unions' understanding of government, and, notably, electoral politics, as a major scene in labor politics, and one that has demanded decisive responses.

My current problem involves reconciling this broad, 20th Century labor history - "craft" vs. "industrialism," New Deal corporatism, Reagan etc - with the somewhat divergent, eruption of public employee organizing in the 1960s-1970s, and the equally virulent, counter-organization against public employee unions (and the public sector in general) under neoliberalism. Public employees enjoy a special place in the labor movement, having enjoyed relative successes in organizing throughout neoliberalism (ed - that's a bit of a generalization, but consider the neoliberal era to span 1973-now). Simultaneously, public workers occupy a place of privilege in the ideological fantasies of the activist Right. Coincidentally (or not), public employee unions trend towards a different-looking labor movement with far larger proportions of women and people of color, for example. In figurative and literal ways, this labor population leads workplace and electoral struggles in, for and through the capitalist state. Does public workers' proximity to state power, over and above many other distinguishing characteristics, make the public sector/the state an essentially different venue of political struggle than the private labor market?

We will continue this discussion of the public sector unions specifically soon with some words from Thomas Frank, but first I want to return to an important insight for marxist theory that is highlighted in Poulantzas: a generalized agnosticism when it comes to the validity of the "public-private" distinction in liberal political economy and the mainstream political culture. Even after Keynesianism has been burnt in effigy and pissed on (not unlike the flash-in-the-pan that was Althusserianism, come to think of it) by multiple sub-generations (of Democrats, even), no sane person could argue that the State is not an economic agent in the capitalist economy. Yet an overwhelming amount of blood and ink have been spilled since the 'capital-L' Liberal division of labor between politics/government and "the economy" set the table for wars, governments and social movements that mobilized their politics of redistribution and recognition around "nationalization," "privatization," of resources .

In what way are public employee unions different and the same as private sector unions? is what I'm wondering. And Poulantzas reminds me that while the public-private distinction is meaningful as a frame through which all mainstream political agents must pass, it is above all a _____________

a) Social Fact
b) Discourse
c) Structural "Effect"
d) Lacanian Imaginary

- that can be manipulated/appropriated/disrupted/undermined under certain conditions. The public/private distinction is meaningful, but also arbitrary. I'd been on to this line of thought for years - at least as long as I've been working inside public-service unions - but I've been incredibly happy to finally make this overdue journey into Poulantzas and find the distilled (if also highly concentrated dense) instance in marxist state theory.