Bailout free fall:

The difference between bourgeois anger and proletarian anger

October 1 2008

It's been exciting to see the U.S. House reject the bailout package for the banks and leave at least three days before a new law can pass.(1) The real class conscious proletariat in the world is wondering whether it should land more economic blows at precisely this moment.

Amerika is like a boxer in the ring. There is no other boxer in the ring, so the fighter leans over the ropes to play to the crowd, but wham, a fighter in another nearby ring also leans over his ropes and lands a punch. The Amerikan boxer is now in free fall, about to land on his back, but in what ring is the question.

On the second day into the Wall Street crash caused by the failure to pass a bailout bill, the markets recovered, again based on expectations that the House will eventually pass a bill to bail out Wall Street. Las Vegas style websites had predictions running at 80% that Congress would bail out Wall Street--before the huge Monday stock market crash.

The British financial newspaper "Financial Times" explained Amerikans' philosophy exactly right:

"Winston Churchill, Roosevelt’s partner, said: 'The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.' The alternatives are now exhausted. It is time for politicians to do the right thing.(2)

In another words, Amerikans are always wrong until by process of elimination they stumble onto something. It's a good summary statement of the evil of pragmatism.

So, on September 29, the House turned down the bailout and the Dow dropped a record 777 points and the NASDAQ fell over 9% for a stock market wealth loss of $1.2 trillion.(3) That's something Amerikans can relate to, after the fact.

In most other countries, Main Street would oppose Wall Street, because Main Street would say to nationalize the banks and the oil industry while we are at it. Some deluded U.$. democratic socialists are probably somewhere saying that the majority would support the bailout, "if only the public would get the gains from the bailout and not just the lemons." Instead, U.$. opposition to the bailout came mostly from the Republican Party on free market grounds. This is intra- bourgeois anger about "why should I have to pay for their mistakes?"

The Republican Party does not want to accept nationalization of the banks as payment for the taxpayer contribution. A large portion of the country has a view a tad left of Franco in Spain who asked for faith in the Pope while holding other ideologies being too derived from the "masses" and thus leading to socialism. Internationalism, liberalism, social-democracy, socialism and communism are all the same thing--in John Stormer's popular view of socialism. In Arkansas, the pro-Stormer Euro-Amerikans called what Bill Clinton was doing "communist" and he lost one election. People who are really on the "Left" find that almost incomprehensible.

With a very condensed view of politics, the Stormerites do not want even to open the question of bailouts. They do not want to start a discussion like that, because whatever one came up with it would be fine degrees of communism for them. Practically, it would be traumatic for a law to pass and actually end up being used, because then high schools would have to teach what happened in history. It might even be possible high school students might have to learn about how other countries handled such matters.

Pragmatism in military matters will be the same in the united $tates as how the bailout question goes. One nuclear device will explode and if it's weak enough that we survive in any form, the reaction will be "Terrible, kill the other guy." Another will explode and I don't know how many more and Amerikans will realize, "oh yeah, they bought that many?" If it is a total accident, then it will be, "oh, and we had all those hydrogen bombs lying around, really?"

After a requisite number of nuclear explosions, Amerikans would conclude that capitalism and cash are bad. Unfortunately, the species would be wiped out by the time Amerikans figure out the truth after the fact. That is why it is a 50-50 question whether the planet might as well hurtle headlong to hell via Depression--right now. Maybe we should side with Ron Paul for our own reasons.

MIM can tell the Amerikans that of course there is an ADDED risk of nuclear proliferation and war because of capitalist competition and the availability of cash, but that's just not something we can expect leadership on. If the united $tates had a hellish economic crisis, the influence toward socialism would not be so much in the united $tates as in the rest of the world reading the newspapers about the united $tates.

The problem is that as time goes on, weapons get more powerful and better distributed. That's one reason why we can agree that "supply and demand" works so well under capitalism.

MIM is also afraid of what could come from a Depression. A part of this writer says that the "subjective forces" are not prepared for a real meltdown, because the communist parties are so weak. Another part of this writer says that it's better to have an economic collapse for economic reasons now than to wait for the economic collapse caused by mushroom clouds later. It's a tough call. Take another turn in Russian Roulette with the hope that brains advance in the meantime or use the brains there are now.

So the difference between the present writer and say Thomas Friedman at the New York Times is that Friedman is afraid of this free fall of the united $tates,(4) but the present writer finds the free fall also exhilarating, because it always seemed to MIM that there is much to be afraid about with capitalism, not just at this moment.

At this moment there is more to be afraid of than usual. People are talking about "Depression" again and it might not be an accident that the neo-Nazis just won 29% in Austria.(5) Some important theory says that rich country capitalism will not produce fascism again, but it's not something we particularly want to try out for science's sake.

Anti-revisionism proved to be tough to explain even in Mao's China. The Three Worlds Theory in contrast has widespread support. Somewhere in between, but closer to the difficulty of understanding anti-revisionism is Marx's notion of "anarchy of production" and why it is connected to the militarism question. MIM does not look forward to winning a battle over that concept among Amerikans or anyone else. With there being no proletariat, the only thing we can show the Amerikans is the evil of their own capitalist competition--in environmental and militarist terms.

It might be best to have a terrible rich country Depression ostensibly caused by geopolitically neutral economic reasons. Then in a crackdown on capitalist competition resulting from popular backlash in the Third World, we can add some other measures specifically targeting military production and competition. As sweeteners, we could legalize drugs, prostitution, anything the mafia deals in and anything else people like cash for, but we would abolish cash in the midst of economic meltdown. Then it would be possible to get a handle on weapons proliferation, not to mention drugs. Prisons would empty out and the mafia would disappear.

I'm still thinking about it, but my gut says to side with Ron Paul for opposite reasons. It might be excellent to see the House shoot down the bailout bill and forget about it. People often say MIM is too demoralizing to read, but it's just that we see possibilities where others do not.

Notes:
1. http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/as-racism-wanes-colorism-persists/
2. Martin Wolf, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fa9d526-8eec-11dd-946c-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
3. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1845992,00.html
4. Thomas Friedman, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01friedman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/30/austria