[Peace-discuss] Guest Commentary

[David Green]

This commentary was in the News-Gazette this morning. Please pass it along to other relevant listservs.
 
DG
                                 Social progress is not the result of technology, but democracy
David Green
>For society to make general progress, gains in economic
productivity must be translated into a broad rise in the standard of living.
This can take place through increased wages, consumption, and services,
decreased work weeks, expanded education, better healthcare, old age pensions, longer
lifespans, and more. Nations become developed partly by investing surplus
wealth in government programs and services, and by employing those individuals
whose labor is no longer needed due to increases in workplace productivity.
Most government programs enhance the general standard of living; moreover, government
spending counters the cyclical downturns in employment and demand that
characterize industrial, corporate, and financial capitalism and their destructive
monopolistic and speculative practices.
>But for the rich to continue to get richer, the poor to get
poorer, and the middle class to remain marginally satisfied with its relative
levels of consumption, indebtedness, and overwork (described as “lifestyles”), the
majority of Americans have to be convinced by the ownership class that our
collective economic world is not and cannot be of our own democratic and
purposeful making, especially regarding government spending for the public good
and necessary—indeed desirable—taxation policies.
>As a corollary we must also believe that our individual
economic circumstances are largely the result of our own personal choices in a
“free market” that—in spite of radical economic inequality, high unemployment,
and ongoing institutionalized racism—somehow mystically incorporates “equal
opportunity.” If character cannot defeat circumstance in America, then so much
the worse for character.
>The mainstream media, major think tanks, and large parts of
academia are thus utilized to spin tall, alarmist, and self-contradictory tales
of ruthless global competition, technological determinism, demographic
catastrophe, generational conflict, school and parental failure, personal
irresponsibility, governmental corruption, public debt, entitlement bankruptcy,
and inevitable public scarcity and necessary sacrifice (except for the rich).
In the meantime we are sold the latest smartphone, violent video game, and next
phase of our ongoing, endless, Orwellian wars. After all, we’ve still got an
economy to run.
>Usually conspicuously absent from this laundry list of allegedly
implacable realities and morally urgent reckonings are the very real threats
(to the species) of environmental degradation, climate change, rampant
militarism, and nuclear war. Honest recognition of these might be disruptive to
both capital accumulation and the American pursuit of global military
hegemony—admittedly two sides of the same coin. Science and reason are to be applied
to some things (hedge funds, drones) but not other things (publicly-owned
banks, disarmament). Moral judgments applied to single mothers cannot be
applied to either Wall Street or the national security state, which by
definition promote and protect our “freedoms” while not endangering “family
values,” foreclosures and homelessness aside.
>The individuals who so ably perform this intellectual service
of mystification and distraction, from “respected” political pundits to college
presidents, rarely settle for low six figure remuneration. They are therefore
avid in their willingness to accept the above conventional crisis wisdom, which
pleases their much wealthier masters. They are relentless in their suppression
of the normal intellectual curiosity that is visited upon those of us who,
through conscience or necessity, would like to better inform ourselves of the
verifiable possibilities and limits that might shape intelligent personal and political
choices. Critical thinking has gone too far if it questions the ideal goodness
of the system for all of us, whatever the unpleasant real consequences for most
of us, not to mention those in other lands.
>Because our freedom under capitalism is abstractly axiomatic,
pragmatic violations of individual rights can be justified, dismissed, or
ignored. Thus a former Provost at the U of I and current Chancellor at the
University of California at Davis, and someone strongly affiliated with the
military-industrial research establishment, countenanced the macing of silently
and non-violently protesting students unwise enough to identify with the “99
percent.”
>The phony crises that dominate our political discourse, from
fiscal cliffs to social security insolvency to educational test scores, are
obfuscations of and distractions from genuine and ongoing structural crises in industrial,
corporate, and financial capitalism. Capitalism historically has proceeded from
crisis to crisis, including the Great Depression. These crises are generally
characterized by increased competition, falling rates of profit, increased financial
speculation (including in land and the stock market), and the bursting of
speculative bubbles that destroys wealth, investment, demand, and employment.
>While fortunes may be lost, the most profound effects fall on
the working class. The working class now includes most of what is called the
middle class, and is comprised of both the employed and unemployed, many of
both groups living in poverty or what is now gently called “near poverty.” Capitalists
destroy workers’ ability to produce, and then demand they “sacrifice” in terms
of wages or employment, as well as public services.
>During the postwar era, organized labor insured that
workers’ wages generally reflected increased productivity. In the 1970s, owners
and investors fought back, famously labeling falling profits, greater general
prosperity, increased civil rights, and intense popular opposition to the
Vietnam War as a “crisis in democracy”—as in too much of it for the likes of those
who own the country. Since then, while general workers’ productivity and per
capita GDP have continued to increase, median family income has stagnated.
While 2/3 of wage gains have gone to the top 10%, the remaining third is left
to the bottom 90%, many of whom have either seen no gains or their wages
effectively lowered.
>It is by choice, strategy, and policy—as well as
subterfuge—that American workers have been put in competition with foreign
workers while most professionals are protected; that American manufactured
goods are “uncompetitive” due to the intentional over-valuation of the dollar; that
technology is used to eliminate rather than create jobs; that short-changed workers
go into debt to acquire the goods and services that they produce; that students
go into debt to acquire the “human capital” that will allow them to be exploited
by a financialized and low-wage economy; that state and local governments are
beggared, government services reduced, and public employee unions vilified,
while investment bankers whose Ponzi schemes have grievously and repeatedly damaged
the economy are bailed out by the Federal Reserve, their coffers now full with
uninvested “liquidity” and labeled “too big to fail” and “too big to
prosecute.”
>It is in this context that federal deficits to stimulate
demand and create jobs are attacked as irresponsible and “unsustainable” (even
when interests payments are historically low as a percentage of GDP), and workers
are told they must “sacrifice.” And while “bankrupt” Social Security largely meets
the demands of strict and separate accounting for decades into the future in
spite of the regressive nature of payroll taxes, the Pentagon and its
subsidiaries are under no such demands on even a monthly basis. Why should
elderly individuals living on minimal incomes be excluded from these egregious
double standards, especially double standards that have the added advantage of
being inhumane on both ends of the stick?
>Social progress is not naturally fore-ordained by
technology, productivity, so-called free markets, or self-interested rational
choices; no less by exorbitant profit incentives that reward unethical behavior.
The notion of general “sacrifice” is meaningless if not perverse in a context
in which basic standards of equality, cooperation, fairness, and justice have
not been established. The present system and its media maintain authority by suppressing
and subverting democratic processes that might establish such standards for the
governance of economy and society. In turn it is only through democratic movements
reflecting social solidarity and rational discourse that the moral illegitimacy
and inherent inhumanity of the current greed-driven system can be exposed and challenged.
This was learned a half-century ago; apparently it has to be learned again.
>David Green (davidgreen50 at gmail.com)
lives in Urbana; he regularly contributes to News from Neptune on Urbana Public
Television.
>
>   
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