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<b>Passive revolution: are the rich starting to get scared?<br>
</b>By Jérôme E. Roos On August 20, 2011<br>
<br>
<i>Warren Buffet wants to tax the rich, Forbes warns about a global
class war and Nouriel Roubini says that Marx was right about
capitalism. What’s going on?<br>
</i><br>
It was a week of opposites. As stock markets around the world
continued to nosedive into financial meltdown, the world’s third
wealthiest man told US Congress to stop coddling the super-rich;
Forbes, the ultimate magazine of the rich and famous, warned about
the “coming global class war“; and Nouriel Roubini, one of the
world’s leading economists, told the Wall Street Journal that Karl
Marx was actually right in saying that capitalism is doomed.<br>
<br>
And as if that string of radical comments from some of the world’s
least radical sources weren’t enough, Business Insider piled onto
the scrimmage stating that “Karl Marx is hot” and TIME Magazine
called on the West to “heed Marx’s warning” and realize that
capitalism simply won’t survive without heavy-handed state
intervention. Even on Wall Street a specter was haunting investors,
with several leading analysts quoting Marx favorably in important
research notes.<br>
<br>
What’s going on here? Why this sudden mainstream interest in issues
that the radical left has been crying out about at the fringes of
the political debate for the past 20-30 years? Certainly these
capitalists didn’t turn into revolutionary socialists overnight?
Indeed, all of them make it very clear that they disagree with Marx
on the crucial issue of socialism. They just believe he “might have
been right” about capitalism’s tendency to self-destruct.<br>
<br>
In other words, the sudden (superficial) interest in the work of
Marx points at the growing sense of fear among the ruling classes.
As Business Insider put it, “you know it’s a real panic when
everyone’s trotting out the old guys, and even capitalists think
Marx got the endgame right.” In an op-ed, Roubini pointed out that
“Karl Marx was right that globalization, financial intermediation,
and income redistribution could lead capitalism to self-destruct.”<br>
<br>
But it’s not just the fear of financial collapse that’s driving
Marx’s comeback. Apparently, the ruling classes are fearing an
imminent rising of the masses. As Fortune wrote, “the riots that hit
London and other English cities last week have the potential to
spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England;
in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that
threatens to undermine capitalism itself.”<br>
<br>
The only “logical” conclusion for the more enlightened bourgeois
press, therefore, is old-fashioned progressive liberal reformism.
Consider TIME‘s conclusion: “capitalism can be saved from the
excesses that Marx warned would be its downfall, but only through
the sort of state intervention that has become almost as politically
unfashionable as Karl Marx himself.” In other words: capitalism
needs socialism to survive — but we still want to keep capitalism!<br>
<br>
Stefan Stern, a professor in management at Cass Business School in
London, just echoed a similar conclusion in the Independent: “Marx
said that while interpreting the world was all very well, the point
was to change it. If capitalists want to keep their world safe for
capitalism, they need to face up to what is wrong with it, and
change it, fast.” But is changing capitalism to save the system
really the same as “changing the world“? It certainly doesn’t seem
to be.<br>
<br>
Indeed, what we are witnessing here is the ultimate case of a
“passive revolution“. As Antonio Gramsci (wiki), the great Italian
philosopher, wrote in his Prison Notebooks, Marx was wrong to put so
much faith in his “economic determinism”. Capitalism, Gramsci
observed, did not rule merely through force or oppression. Neither
would its internal contradictions automatically lead to a socialist
revolution. Instead, Gramsci accorded a major role to culture.<br>
<br>
For Gramsci, the ruling groups in society maintained their position
in two ways: firstly, through the traditional Marxist form of
physical and economic oppression; and, secondly, through cultural
hegemony, which operates via ideological consent. Thus Gramsci
opened up a major new battlefield in the revolutionary process:
civil society. There, outside of the realm of the state or the
economy, ruling groups clashed with subordinate ones in a discursive
“war of position” to gain or retain popular legitimacy.<br>
<br>
It was this brilliant theoretical innovation that allowed Gramsci to
explain capitalism’s resiliency to an all-out popular revolution.
When their dominant position came under fire, Gramsci observed, and
the ruling classes were about to lose the crucial consent of the
people, they could always accommodate for the concerns of the masses
by going against their own direct short-term interests in order to
retain the dominant social order in the long-term.<br>
<br>
In this respect, while we may feel an intuitive moral appreciation
for the seeming selflessness of Warren Buffet or the sheer frankness
of Nouriel Roubini, we have to realize that these enlightened
capitalists, for all their “Marxian” rhetoric, are even more
dangerous than the blunt ones like Lloyd Blankfein or the Koch
brothers. For it is the Buffets and Roubinis of this world who,
through their passive reformism, will allow the latter to keep
controlling the rest of us.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://roarmag.org/2011/08/passive-revolution-are-the-rich-starting-to-get-scared/">http://roarmag.org/2011/08/passive-revolution-are-the-rich-starting-to-get-scared/</a><br>
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