Re: [Marxism] The elephant in the budgetary room

["Ruthless Critic of All that Exists" <ok.president+marxml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:53 AM, Aaron Aarons
<aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> While I wouldn't lose any sleep -- except in celebration! -- if a mob of 
> angry middle-class/working-class people without anti-imperialist 
> consciousness were to string up Paulson or burn down a few banks or Federal 
> Reserve buildings, I maintain that the job of 
> anti-imperialists/anti-capitalists is to use the present crisis to advance 
> anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist consciousness among a modest segment of the 
> U.S. population, not to demagogically build a movement on the basis of 
> appealing to the self-interested side of the actively or passively 
> pro-imperialist consciousness that exists.
>
>  - Aaron

Zizek on the bailout:

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v00/n03/zize01_.html>

"The standard 'trickle-down' argument against redistribution (through
progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer,
it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently
anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the
current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get
better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are
not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed
is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will
automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall
Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you
want people to have money to build, don't give it to them directly,
help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to create
genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely distributing money
to the needy at the expense of those who create wealth.

"It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a
hypocritical defence of the rich. The problem is that as long as we
are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of
Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers. That is why the
Democrats who supported the bailout were not being inconsistent with
their leftist leanings. They would fairly be called inconsistent only
if we accept the premise of Republican populists that capitalism and
the free market economy are a popular, working-class affair, while
state interventions are an upper-class strategy to exploit
hard-working ordinary people.

"What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its
operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real
dilemma is not 'state intervention or not?' but 'what kind of state
intervention?' And this is true politics: the struggle to define the
conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals
with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and
economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle."

Full: <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v00/n03/zize01_.html>

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