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

Tue Aug 23 17:00:16 CDT 2011

"...simply won’t survive without heavy-handed state intervention"

Now there's a novel idea.

On 08/23/11 22:56, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> *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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