[Marxism] The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(posted to LBO-Talk by Doug Henwood)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-18th-brumaire-of-barack-obama/article1179757/

The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama

The means of production are being seized – though for the sake of the 
ruling class Ian Brown

 From Saturday's Globe and Mail, Saturday, Jun. 13, 2009 08:22AM EDT

When I announce that I am a socialist, I guess it is no surprise because 
we are all socialists now. We just bought General Motors … The fact is 
that we now have Marxism realized. We own the means of production and we 
did not have to fire a single shot. It is really quite phenomenal what 
went on today.

– Pat Martin, NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre, in the House of Commons, 
Monday, June 1, 2009

Leo Panitch knew that Marxism was back, brothers, when he was asked by 
AM640 (“Home of the Leafs”), a sports-mad radio station in Toronto, to 
talk about the GM deal. The Canadian people suddenly own a few levers of 
the means of production, and some of the comrades wanted to know what 
they’d gotten themselves into.

The financial collapse has been manna for Marxists. Most Canadians don’t 
realize York University’s Professor Panitch is one of the world’s most 
prominent Marxist thinkers, a contender for the mantle of E..P. 
Thompson, the founder of the British New Left and, like Mr. Thompson 
before him, editor of the Socialist Register. This is a huge deal among 
Marxists, who wear their sense of history the way the rest of us wear 
underpants.

But the money meltdown has pushed Prof. Panitch to centre stage. Last 
month at Ryerson University, he delivered the Phyllis Clarke memorial 
lecture, in which he explained why Marxism is more relevant today than 
ever. A version of the speech is the cover story of the latest edition 
of Foreign Policy magazine, the bible of the Washington political 
establishment.

In Germany (where they’re thinking of nationalizing banks), sales of Das 
Kapital, Karl Marx’s masterwork, increased tenfold last year. (To over 
1,000) More copies of Prof. Panitch’s Renewing Socialism have sold in 
the last four months than in the previous seven years. The London School 
of Economics – the once-leftist school where the professor did his 
doctorate, although he complains it now offers nary a course on Marx – 
has invited him back to a conference. Title? “Revisiting Marxism.”

FROM BERLIN WALL TO WALL STREET

To top all that, last week Prof. Panitch lit out for Moscow to take part 
in Russia’s version of the Davos forum on global economics. He was 
invited by none other than Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s President, to 
discuss whether the financial crisis could reinvigorate socialism as 
much as the fall of the Berlin Wall collapsed it. “Political systems 
with state capitalist elements seem to have advantages over countries 
with a pure liberal model,” the conference’s literature points out, 
before concluding that “liberal capitalism … obviously heads towards its 
historical end.”

“They’re flying me business class at a cost of $4,000 because I have a 
PhD defence Monday morning in Toronto,” Prof. Panitch says. “It’s 
ridiculous. Marxism seems to be the flavour of the month.”

CEOs aren’t abandoning their bonuses for worker committees and the power 
of the people. But Prof. Panitch and others point out that Marx 
predicted this collapse – right down to credit default swaps and other 
kinky tricks of finance. Marxism, they say, is a powerful tool with 
which to understand the mess we’re in – so powerful it will make us 
question the system that produced the crisis in the first place. Prof. 
Panitch has zero patience for the leftish wimpdom of the New Democrats 
or of Bob Rae, whom Prof. Panitch refers to as a “moral dwarf.”

He saves his deepest scorn for Stephen Harper. The spectacle of the 
Prime Minister, a free-market economist once bankrolled by the insurance 
industry, admitting that governments had no choice but to take over the 
North American car industry was rare redemption for a Marxist.

“What does that say? What it indicates is that these huge corporations, 
while they may be legally private, are incapable of operating as private 
institutions. And if they can’t function without being public, then the 
state has to maintain order.”

Canadian taxpayers and the Canadian Auto Workers now own more than $10- 
billion worth of GM stock. But neither the union nor taxpayers have a 
real voice on the board, and GM executives in Detroit are still 
pretending they own the joint, refusing to disclose financial details 
and vowing to close 2,500 dealerships, regardless of whether they’re 
profitable.

“That shows you how bizarre it is,” Prof. Panitch says, “that we call 
ourselves a democracy, but we have all these ‘private’ corporations that 
control our lives. Who owns them? The shareholders? Who are the 
shareholders in this case? Who owns GM? What’s being taken over by whom? 
And the fact that that question hasn’t been asked is frightening. 
Really, it has nothing to do with being a socialist. It has to do with 
being a democrat.”

Like Marx, the radical left insists capitalism brought these problems on 
itself. The tumultuous late 1970s – the last time organized labour had 
any power, when politicians still bragged about “mixed economies” – were 
followed in short order by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who 
managed to kidnap the affections of working people. Free trade, 
globalization, the near-death of trade unions, slashed social spending 
and the erosion of the economic power of the middle class ensued.

That, the Marxists say, is why people have been forced to overuse their 
credit cards and dive into debt – a situation then inflamed by the 
profligate, irresponsible behaviour of Wall Street.

And don’t expect Leo Panitch and his ilk to be heaping praise on your 
man Barack Obama: The new President is just part of the problem. Paul 
Street, a leftist historian in Iowa City, hammers out blogs and essays 
for Z Magazine, an influential new fount of leftist thinking in the 
United States. Mr. Street calls Mr. Obama a “fake progressive.” He likes 
to point out – when he isn’t lamenting how ignored Marxists are in his 
country, where they have an even lower profile than they do in Canada – 
that the finance, insurance and real-estate industries contributed 
$38-million to Mr. Obama’s election campaign, including a $900,000 chunk 
from Goldman Sachs. No wonder the Obama administration hasn’t thrown 
Wall Street to the pigs.

“The left has been immobilized by Obama, for the most part,” says Mr. 
Street’s comrade Doug Henwood, a Manhattan Marxist who produces the 
popular Left Business Review and hosts a weekly radio show with 
socialist sympathies in New York and California. “A lot of people think 
the country’s being run by a left-wing radical.” But in fact Mr. Obama 
is “a kind of centre-slightly-left politician” overseeing the resale of 
America’s financial assets at fire-sale prices to the same private 
interests that screwed them up in the first place.

(Mr. Henwood cites Old National Bancorp, an Indiana bank that sold stock 
warrants to the U.S. Treasury Department in return for bailout money. 
ONB recently became the first bank to get out from under the Troubled 
Asset Relief Program’s executive compensation restrictions by buying its 
warrants back for $1.2-million – about 20 per cent of what they may 
eventually be worth. Those larger profits could have gone to taxpayers, 
or so the Marxists would have it.) “The irony,” Mr. Henwood says,” is 
that, if Bush were still president, there might be more anger.” In his 
critique – every Marxist has one – “Wall Street, or the financial 
markets, are the institution through which a ruling class is 
constituted. Stepping on their toes is a no-go. And the contrast between 
Obama and Roosevelt is telling in that regard. The fact that Roosevelt 
came out of the aristocracy himself made him much more comfortable about 
stepping on their toes when he had to. The fact that Obama came out of 
the middle class and the meritocracy makes him much more reluctant to do 
so. I think he wants to do what they want.”

REFRESHING JARGON

The ruling class The aristocracy When was the last time you heard that 
ringing cry? Marxism has been out of favour so long, even its jargon 
sounds refreshing.

Marx would be unimpressed with the West’s handling of the biggest 
calamity since the Depression, Prof. Panitch says, because we haven’t 
been bold enough. “No ambitious vision for enacting change has resulted 
from the current financial crisis.” Financial-transaction taxes? Taking 
stakes in outmoded car companies? That’s thinking inside the box.

But the Marxists see encouraging signs. “The failure of my generation,” 
Prof. Panitch says, “has been that we haven’t been able to produce 
parties or social movements that go beyond social- democratic parties. 
If you’re not speaking to people through the mass media, you’re not 
speaking to people.” The Internet (and the success of Internet-fuelled 
inventions like microfinancing) may change that: Z Magazine is packed 
with provocative ideas about participatory economics, and Marxists in 
Canada and Europe are being picked up again by the mainstream media. 
Public anger over executive bonuses, collapsing pensions and trenchant 
unemployment is simmering on the gas – to say nothing of the coming fury 
if interest rates explode because of the bailout.

Even mainstream economists are now making radical, Marx-like noises. 
Willem Buiter, an economist at the London School of Economics, last week 
proposed socializing and nationalizing the entire banking system, given 
that it can’t keep itself afloat as a private enterprise. That, Prof. 
Panitch says, is the kind of opening

Marx wanted the organized masses to use to seize control. For a Marxist, 
the revolution is always just around the corner.

And even if it isn’t, Marx has his uses. “The point of still being a 
Marxist today,” Prof. Panitch says, is to think ambitiously, “to recover 
the spirit of the revolution.” Karl Marx, a freshman of 19 at the 
University of Berlin as his brain began to explode with ideas, sent his 
father a letter. “There are moments in one’s life that represent the 
limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new 
direction,” the young genius wrote. “Every change is partly a swansong, 
partly an overture to a new epic that is trying to find a form in 
brilliant colours that are not yet distinct.” Surely one can be forgiven 
for seeing a little pink in the sky.


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