Some thoughts on International Women's Day

[Samuel Webb]

A new post on this day of celebration. Hope you enjoy the day. Sam

http://samwebb.org/

[moderator]

Below is the text of Sam's post "Some Thoughts on International Women's Day"

A couple of thoughts that International Women’s Day brings to mind. One very brief, the other a bit longer:

* To say that women hold up half the sky (and just about everything else) is a gross understatement. I learned that as a young child, and have come to more deeply appreciate it as a (much) older man.

* The notion that waged work on a “production” site and in the formal sectors of the economy set the parameters for who’s in, who’s out, and who’s on the bubble of the working class – not to mention who has a hand in the production of the economic surplus from which profits and a fresh round of capital investment are derived – is a gendered as well as a racialized and generally exclusionary concept. In earlier centuries, it left large numbers of women as well as slaves of African ancestry, indigenous peoples, and new immigrants outside the category of working class, even though their labor was commonplace, abundant, and essential to capitalism’s accumulation, industrialization, and commodification process.

Today, global capitalism continues to rely on such labor, albeit on a much broader scale and in new as well as old forms, to sustain and expand its accumulation process, But in doing so, it makes this truncated and limited notion of class no more serviceable now than it was in previous centuries. This is especially so in the Global South.

Only a wide angled framing and understanding of who constitutes the working class, along with the specific class trajectories, histories, needs, and, not least, capacities, of each constituent group, and especially the historically invisible, uncounted, and subordinate, will provide us with a sturdy basis for unity and thus the grounds for victory against the nasty coalition of the right and alt right that is threatening democracy and everything that is decent and good in our country. In the elections, an exclusivist, racialized, gendered, and nativist concept of class captured the thinking of many white workers, and thus contributed significantly to the election of Trump – a candidate who was proudly, outspokenly, and uniquely misogynist, racist, and xenophobic. This, needless to say, presents the broad democratic movement and the Democratic Party a major challenge, if they hope to congeal a united people’s movement and transform a dire situation into a new step down Freedom Road.

[John Case]

This is an interesting post. I do not agree with its "politics", which seem to be headed persistently toward some anti-Sanders celestial cornfield. But I won't argue that. 

More interesting is the advance of a notion of class as something too "wide-angled" to remain wedded to economic categories and forces, like Marx's notion, or any of the classical economists for that matter. I submit the most egregious abuses of Marx's complicated legacy have been made by those who decided to take flight from economics -- and thus miscalculated, fantastically at times,  the motions of the real economy in relation to economic policies (including the COSTS of social/political policies and practices not officially called economic.) Flights of folly, Utopia, or fantasy follow: The Stalin "command economy", the Mao "cultural revolution", WZ Foster -- "Build a Soviet America", "industrial concentration", "just make corporations coops", "I can stop war by personally living peacefully", etc, etc.

Now, its true that the term "class" was less misunderstood, less obfuscated, in the 19th century than it is today. Class, however specified in various contexts and histories,  was a category written into the laws of most nations on earth. All nations arising from feudal relations inherited centuries of "class" based culture infusing nearly every aspect of life.  With the emergence of capitalism things got a lot more complicated. New occupations, tools, forms of ownership, property, banking, money, and trade agitated all received class relations from ages before. Capitalism immensely expanded the population living via money income, either as wages and salary, or as capital. Landed wealth began its long relative decline. The economic classes of "capitalists" -- those whose income derives primarily from returns on capital investment, and "wage workers" were the new social classes.

Marx and Engels applied a fairly simple (but from a philosophical foundation of "historical materialism" not so simple) economic formula --  which always seemed to me both a reasonable and dynamic model, and which I will lamely attempt to summarize in a sentence: A person's class is his/her definite relation to a new or historically evolved role in economic production, and reproduction. Class was an active concept in the writings of most classical economists, not just Marx. Class did not only denote "income", but also the likely paths of struggle, survival and opportunity ( or lack of it) for lifetimes and generations. The spread of capitalist relations transformed the overall division of wealth mainly by its ability to grow overall economic wealth an order of magnitude faster than previous economic/social orders. Capitalism is an economic system defined by the circulation of commodities -- things produced deliberately for the purpose of exchange. Key to its development is the ability to come up with a "universal commodity", accepted everywhere for exchange. That commodity is money in any or all its forms: cash, coins, bank notes, stock certificates, bonds, derivatives, precious metals, etc. Marx, and most other economists also thought a legal framework enforcing private property rights was also key. However the rapid growth of capitalist relations in China, which has no private property law, somewhat undermines that thesis. Not all of Marx's predictions (nor those of other classical economists) have come true, and the methodologies of classical economists were necessarily largely analytical -- not data driven and math-modeled like modern economics.. Nonetheless, Marx's famous prediction about the unstoppable spread of capitalist, and cash, relations has stood the full test of time:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

No major country was more spared the legacy of European "class" legal frameworks than the United States. The American Revolution was in large measure able to destroy the marked class system of the colonial era. The Civil War completed that process with the abolition of slavery. Democracy and republicanism -- infused throughout the theses of Jefferson and Franklin in the Declaration of Independence, and in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln four score and seven years later -- championed  equality before the law over monarchy and landed privilege, and thus dealt the first great blow against the ancient class and clerical regimes of the world.

Democracy and all its associated struggles throughout US history, have strengthened a national aspiration to rise out of class, to blur and efface intrusions of it into public life, to reward merit over privilege, to despise snobbery in any form, Sexist, racist or otherwise --  as rude, uncivil and arrogant.  

"Yet, she persisted!" -- Turtle Head McConnell's would-be insult to Elizabeth Warren that blew back in his face is a perfect example of behavior that turns sour and fetid in the light of day.. 

"Yet, she persisted" is also a phrase which, ironically, can be said of the term "class" itself under American "classless" capitalism. A division of wealth so sharp and vast as now prevails has only 1914 -- the onset of the 20th Century catastrophes -- for comparison. No matter what occupation you are in, with VERY few exceptions, median income has been flat for 40 years. The principles of shared prosperity of the New Deal era --- as was practiced from WW 2 through 1973 --   have been abandoned. The abandonment has been deliberate and  aggressive by Republicans, while defensive and "with profound disappointment" by Democrats ever since Carter and Clinton's "New Democratic", steady moves toward accommodation with the rise of austerity on the Right. The theses of Thomas Piketty --- that the cycles of capital accumulation in predominantly capitalist economies have GREAT DIFFICULTY averting the very dangerous and destabilizing tendencies of accumulated wealth and accumulated political power feeding on each other --- globally gain more credibility every day.  "Class" is back and now increasingly permeates public discourse.

 This rising inequality documented and analyzed by Piketty and many others takes place alongside a no less dramatic increase in the complexity of the different, diverse, and conflicting relationships with production captured in the phrase "wage worker". Income from both capital and compensation is present in more than half the income tax returns of US wage earners. The "pure" wage worker is not the typical wage worker. Go no further than the huge rise in services relative to manufacturing, or the immense rise of intangible products and consumption, or the massive public sector in most modern economies, or the non-commercial services of retired, student, or other persons not considered part of the workforce. 

Even the term "production", inherited from 19th century's overwhelming association of value with manufactured or mined commodities, is now misleading. Production of economic value -- anything exchanged for money -- is more accurate. This has created new "production relations" which are thus, as long as we don't become dogmatic, or let our feet fly away from the real economy, new class relationships. The rise of "human capital" requirements in many fields, (by "human capital" think mainly education and training)  makes employer -- employee relations necessarily quite different than most historic manufacturing environments. New, fast evolving, divisions of labor and giant economies/technologies of global scale, in particular, have eroded the objective foundations of the 1930's laws legalizing  trade unions. How long before the expression "permanent employee" is gone from memory?

The means of life is obtained by cash in this country. Even informal economies (drugs, guns, etc) are overwhelmingly cash based. Thus there is no social issue, not a single one of the slightest significance, whose resolution does not have an economic price.  That price can be simple, like a bump in the minimum wage; or structural -- like a return to a law that reads "the united states encourages you to join a union"; or structural AND revolutionary, like the abolition of slavery, and the destruction of two social and economic classes: enslaved, and slave owner. All these changes require transfers of wealth. large transfers.

The rise of Trump, Trumpism, and fascist tendencies of every strain is driven by the accumulated -- and still accumulating -- weight of 40 years of scrambling for crumbs at the median and below in the US labor market, while the top is wallowing in wealth. The corruptions predicted by Piketty and others are on full display in the US now. There is an aspect, a part, of US capitalism in its current immense manifestation,  that is either failing, or our institutions are failing to manage, or both. I submit  this reflects new, objective aspects of modern society and its economic organization that neither old left nor old right frameworks are capturing.

For example, I assert above that Bill Clinton made accommodations to austerity. Median income got a blip out of the Clinton era tech boom, but it was not sustained. Austerity was not reversed. The new deal contract, simplified,  --- if capital gets 1% more, labor should too --- was not restored..

But this observation is NOT primarily a criticism of the Clinton presidency. I believe time has shown most critics of Bill Clinton's accommodations tend to stand with their feet firmly planted in mid air. On the war on drugs, on closing down welfare, on roll backs of Johnson or Roosevelt social contract principles, on financial de-regulation -- as evidence of "betrayal" or an "agent of neo-liberalism" -- Clinton argued that you could not win the presidency  and thus halt the rise of Reaganism, without such concessions. Obama's presidency varied this theme  some, but it  was not fundamentally refuted. In addition Clinton's economic liberalization strategy worked in high tech for a while, and loosening investment regulations while paying down debt with surpluses assisted that very important, strategic redirection of capital, despite the crazy abuses of liberalization that banks escaping from the high tech bubble committed.  

Obama was faced with a worse economic crisis than that inherited by Clinton, but adopted a fundamentally similar strategy -- alliances with liberal, high-tech, innovative capital, industries to drive growth out of the Great Recession while still beating off the Reaganite, now more openly fascist and anti-democratic than ever,  Republicans. Yet Obama's economic lift leaves the median worker in no better position than when Clinton left office, despite frankly heroic political efforts to mobilize grass roots forces to counter rising political corruptions of billionaires in the elections.

Both Clinton and Obama are brilliant politicians, IMO. Both also sought the best science and art to address the multi-dimensional emerging challenges -- yet both failed to reverse austerity and the correlated power the mostly right wing billionaires and their growing, not diminishing, stranglehold on political power. Their superior political skills alongside this failure is the best evidence I can think of that the path of accommodation to austerity, even if some modest overall growth can be obtained,  simply cannot work against the drag of entrenched wealth

Bernie Sanders is the first candidate since, Jesse Jackson, and Lyndon Johnson, to consistently call for a return to the New Deal social and economic division of wealth contract. He called it "our revolution". Having some knowledge of Bernie Sanders and his history, I am sure he does not launch a slogan like that without great care and thought, or without deep conviction. We have to consider that Bernie is right. Deeply right. That structural, and perhaps revolutionary-scale, changes and politics are becoming the only remaining options. Our American history has a bounty of both great revolutionaries, and wise statesmanship -- sometimes inhabiting the same person! We will need both traditions in the days and years ahead.

In the wake of the past election, it is difficult to find ANY path to national, popular, or CLASS unity that does not address the 40 year austerity plague. And there is no cure for the austerity plague that does not intervene directly in the billionaire/trillionaire accumulation cycle and its corrupt political consequences for peace and justice. With the erosion of the middle class, middle ground in politics is also eroding.

John Case

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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[Stewart Acuff]

Excellent!  Great!  Thank you, John!

Sent from my iPhone

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[Samuel Webb]

I don't want to reply other than to say that Bernie wasn't on my mind at and you missed my main point. That said, have a good weekend. Sam