[Peace-discuss] Are the rich starting to get scared?

[C. G. Estabrook]

*Passive revolution: are the rich starting to get scared?
*By Jérôme E. Roos On August 20, 2011

/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?
/
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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

http://roarmag.org/2011/08/passive-revolution-are-the-rich-starting-to-get-scared/
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