Billmon:
It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there.
Back to Main
July 5, 2006
WB: A House Divided
Comments
Interesting analogy with Spain circa mid 1930’s.
Also if the red states were a country today, would their president be a faux cowboy from Conneticut?
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 5 2006 10:14 utc | 1
Interesting analogy indeed, but I wonder if it really holds. One of the reasons that the Spanish civil war became so vicious was outside involvement (Germany and Italy). In that sense, the Spanish civil war was a proxy war, and a portent of WW II. Can’t see that happening in the US.
Posted by: Printhead | Jul 5 2006 10:55 utc | 2
There is too much wrong with notions of civil war – American or Spanish. Whatever domestic conflct looms in the US it definitely will be the sound of one hand clapping. To have a civil war or even a divorce you have to have two parties. But one of the supposed dance partners in Billmon’s (or Tierney’s) fantasy of disunion is itself a fantasy. It’s a creation of the lonely hearts club that is so much the conservative movement.
Whether you call it ‘the liberals’ or ‘the moderns’ the putative opposition that is supposed to be the left is actually an animation that wells up from the pen and ink of the right’s ressentiment. The ‘liberal’ that is the object of so much derision is made to move to and fro largely from the febrile expressions of wingernutdom. The contemporary conservative hegemon is classic ressentiment: commands all branches of government, drives the public debate, reaps the winfall of the government purse – and yet it feels defensive – nay brutally prostrated in front of modern cultural and social practice and discourse. And it’s ressentiment that fuels the kind of contempt and disdain always hinting at or desiring acts of aggression. Eventually, the conservative onslaught and paranoia will devolve such that the verbal thuggery will become physical thuggery.
A lot of this ressentiment is the tumorouse growth of white racism – it certainly is fed by the long simmering grudges about racially driven social change in the last half of the 20th century. And its not surprising that classic themes of old fashioned white racism are being rehabilitated for a new place in public discourse. Mexican invasions and conquest, the Islamofascion of brown people, nerdy rationalizations of America’s racist past.
We’re not so far from that historical moment in American history where whites – and not just in the old south – burned people alive. Burned black people alive in a festival of community celebration and renewal. The sound of one hand clapping.
Billmon also follows a conventional historical script in describing the escalation of violence in American history. Race and class has driven a lot violence over tha past century and a half. In the end, it was the conservative right that lost a lot of those battles. And the wingers have a long memory.
Posted by: Gorkle | Jul 5 2006 11:53 utc | 3
I am surprised that Billmon, in this excellant essay, did not address the possible effects, on the potential for civil war, of gerrymandering. I live in a red state, but think, act and vote blue. So do many thousands of other residents of this state, including most of my friends and many of my neighbors. I suspect the same is true for blue state residents: they occupy a state with thousands of red thinking and voting people. Because of this hodge-podge, the attempt to discribe states as red or blue, and then to draw conclusions about the overall culture and politics of a given state, is not accurate or even helpful. The red-blue description flows from voting patterns, where winners take all, even if they win by a small majority, or even by a plurality. This may change, now that we have SCOTUS officially approved gerrymandering that can keep a particular political party in power for decades. If the Democrats in blue states gerrymander to keep themselves in power, and Republicans do the same in red state, as has happened in Texas, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that this country will experience a large scale internal migration of modernists to blue states and traditionalists to red. Something along the line of what happened in Spain, but without the bleeding. The long term implications of such a transformative migration for civil war in America are not so clear to me. If we are all, more or less, residing in a venue with others of like mind and sensibilities, we may all be happier and less likely to want to fight with the guys in the next state over: Live and let live. On the other hand, the tensions in Congress and the Presidency could become unbearable and not amenable to political workouts. If that happens, those living in blue states, or in red states, may decide they want a Congress and President of their own, without the bother of those retarded/libertine/unholy/authoritarian/socialistic/gay/facist/etc bastards across the river or across the mountain range. I can imagine a situation in which the hard line blues and the hard line reds actually agree upon the desireability and necessity of splitting the continent into two Nations, only to be opposed by traditional Nationalists, and the armed forces. Since this is all speculative, I do not feel the necessity to reach some conclusion as to the final outcome. Indeed, I feel most comfortable with the concept of the American nation as an ongoing experiment, based upon the very good work of the founding brothers, which may not be finally resolved, but will go on, limping along in our extraordinarily inefficient manner of doing things.
Posted by: Doran Williams | Jul 5 2006 12:40 utc | 4
Hom it might start: STACLU pogrom is a resounding success
The complaint recounts a raucous crowd that applauded the board’s opening prayer and then, when sixth-grader Alexander Dobrich stood up to read a statement, yelled at him “take your yarmulke off!” His statement, read by Samantha, confided “I feel bad when kids in my class call me Jew boy.”
Watching An Inconvienent Truth reminded be of a thought I had some years ago–that Bush’s victory over Gore was an expression of premillenial tension. Gore got painted as the dorky third-wave technocrat against the ur-American male, a glad-handing frat boy who managed to be both Northern old-money and Southern good-old-boy, a WASP redneck.
Gore really was a 21st-century candidate, a guy who’s been thinking really, really hard about the future (particularly in terms of the environment and the media, vid. his Harvard thesis many years ago and his TV channel today) for a very, very long time–which might explain his Hamlet-like demeanor to a certain extent. And I think that scared people, particularly the traditionalists, and to an extent the traditionalist within lots of people.
Excellent and thought-provoking essay about an issue that keeps popping up in the mainstream press. In addition to German and Italian influence in Spain, religion was also a factor, a point that actually enhances Billmon’s analogy with the US. But in the long run, I don’t think we’re poised for a similar civil war. More likely, we’re headed for a replay of something like the 1960s, a culture war turned violent in the streets and on college campuses. Absent from all the analysis, however, is the role of nationalism itself, especially in the face of globalization. Just as the insidious “international” dogged the nation-state in the late nineteenth century and eventually led to twentieth-century wars, revolutions, and population displacements (ethnic cleansing), it is the phenomenon that most accurately contrasts with political identity today. Internal national divisions, such as between red and blue or traditionalist and modernist reflect this contrast: God & Country versus a cosmopolitan liberalism.
Beside, we don’t have poets like Lorca anymore, so who would tap into and articulate the sublime side of the destruction? Jewel? I think not.
Posted by: hood | Jul 5 2006 14:32 utc | 7
hard to keep up w/ this new revisionism… i was always taught that there were three “america’s” – north america, central america, and south america 😉
Posted by: b real | Jul 5 2006 14:50 utc | 9
Mr. Hood. We do have poets who can tap into and articulate. Now, they are known as singer/songwriters, and you probably will not hear them on the Top Twenty, C&W, Jazz, and Oldies but Goodies radio stations. You need to go to the “alternate” stations, or shows, like KUT in Austin and San Angelo, and some of the West Coast stations, where the private and small labels are played. In fact, these song writers have something going for them that Lorca did not — melody and rhythm — which make their messages much more powerful than that of the best of poets.
Posted by: Doran Williams | Jul 5 2006 15:11 utc | 10
The what if game over what if the US had split in two has many other threads. Firstly the territorial west would have been the scene of many fights regarding which side they should give their statehood to. Only California was a state before secession I believe. All other territories might have had bruising fights about it. Existing states in the old union might have had such fights as well. It is easy to imagine even Indiana or Ohio or the southern portions of them wanting to go Confederate. Such states as well might have split up.
Assuming some sort of roubustness of the new Confederacy it is probable that it would eventually go south. Various southern thinkers envisioned a slave southern hemisphere stretching thru Mexico and Central America, even into South America itself. Mexico would have been easy picking for a war of conquest.
The success of the South especially if there had been no war to organize for is open to question. The states even had differing railroad standards so that trade between them at the start of the war was difficult. This sprang from natural rivalry and locals wanting to protect themselves from competition. Well into the 20th century the South was an economic pipsqueak and their ability to develop modern industrial economy is open to question. So too I suppose is how the North would have develped.
In any case the political and possible occasional military conflict with the south would have provided a much different set of scenarios as to how the United States would have evolved. It is difficult to imagine it would have been more Liberal, in any sense of the term. Concieveably the North could have become another Facist state in the 20th century.
Posted by: rapier | Jul 5 2006 15:50 utc | 11
I recall a map made by a college student that called the Red States areas “Jesus Land” and “Dumbfuckistan” but those are only amusing and too simplistic to really represent our current culture clash. But each state is its own red, blue and other mosaic. To create a political divide over these crudely drawn borders denies the reality of how complex America’s cultural scene really is. Generalizing the complex always results in errors. In a sense, giving in to this simplistic impulse even as entertainment encourages the Rovians who like to paint states red and run steam rollers over the millions of liberals there that still want their blue voices to be heard, considered, and remembered. It also lends an illusion of permanency to the current regime’s propaganda effort’s big lie: that current, dearly bought and paid for party allegiances are somehow permanent and not transitory. The religious right, for example, is a bitterly contentious movement even in Evangelical Christianity. It is fragmentary, unstable, prone to changing alliances, and frankly artificial. But the Rovians and that Lying Sack of Frist would love liberals and other thinking people to assume that it is an unbreakable, solid wall. Remember the fate of the Moral Majority? They went bust too and our dear Korean Messiah Sun Myung Moon not only had to bail Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College out to the tune of $4,000,000, but also bailed Falwel’s organization out of a $73,000,000 bond failure. Given time, old runs of propaganda will sputter out, graduates of Patrick Henry College will be doing what they’re really qualified for: pumpimg gas and greeting people at Walmart (instead of getting quick, cushy jobs with Cheney, Inc), and the religious and fundamentalist conservatives will go back to doing what they do best: annoying people by ringing door bells to proselytize and hating each other with undying passion. In the end, it is not the Red State/Blue State divide that’s the source of true angst. Its the take over of our political structure and institutions by faceless, cash bloated, unaccountable global corporations and their predatory lobbiests. You want a civil war? Fight these!
Posted by: Diogenes | Jul 5 2006 16:09 utc | 12
With the slaves states out of the Union, the underground railroad and other agencies freeing slaves and fomenting slave rebellion would have been free to operate, meaning that escaped slaves would have only had to make it to the nearest free state, not Canada. Further, there would have been massive internal pressure in the North not to do business with the South for various reasons, and the Southern economy was dependent on the North to buy its agricultural product and send back industrial ones. If simply left to its own devices by the North, the Southern slave economy would not have been viable and would have collapsed of its own accord. The slave states would either have had to start a war of their own accord against the North or would have had to come back to the negotiating within a few years, begging to be re-admitted to the Union under extremely unfavorable terms (from their perspective).
Thus, for the North to have simply given up the war while treating the Confederacy as a pariah state would have been an outcome the Slave State leaders could not have accepted. Hence, the repeated invasions of the North by Lee, which were undertaken not only to garner international recognition, but actually were designed to capture Washington and thus put the South in the position of being able to dictate the terms in peace negotiations. These terms would have likely included a written guarantee in the Constitution of the legal status of slavery in the slave states, fugitive slave laws in the Northern Slave states, and the future status of the territories to be left up to popular vote, if not outright plans for them to be admitted as slave states. Once this outcome of outright Southern victory was put out of reach by Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the continuation of warfare by both sides was essentially irrational by both sides and a probably a product of personal pride, bureaucratic inertia, and romanticism, in equal measure. But those are hardly unusual in wartime.
How if at all does this apply to the current situation? As in the case of the North vs. South, the Modernists are in possession of most of the good economic cards, since the Traditionalists are mostly tied to extraction activities which are on the down-slope and to highly government-subsidized activities such as agriculture, while the Modernists are responsible for most of the creative thinking and what remains of economic potential in the US. Part of what has to happen for this to translate into political power is for the Modernists to understand the situation, realize their strengths and be comfident enough in them. Unfortunately, the Modernists are too disdainful of the political process, which, after all, is messy, often inherently involves dangerous, unethical, and, boring activities (such as door-to-door precinct work), and thus are much worse at it. Also, they have trouble forging durable ties with their natural allies, the urban poor, for reasons that are the Modernists fault (insularity, being too busy and self-involved) and also the Traditionalists successes at playing up racial and ethnic divisions, fear over crime, and differences about the role of evangelical Christianity in public life.
Posted by: heatkernel | Jul 5 2006 16:25 utc | 13
tremendous essay. I wonder how the dynamics of globalism’s affect on labor reproduces some of these culturally divicive issues? The expanding service economy, fed by expanding and inflationary credit, along with the deskilling of labor even among the precious “white” collar intellectual workers, require perhaps a cultural legitimation presently unavailable. the painful “refeudalization” of labor felt in part by “native” workers who are losing jobs to immingrants, and the ways in which knowledge work is exported to southern india, china, korea, etc. combine to reshape class conflict as the more obvious antagonism between global capital and the coercively managed mobility of workers from dayton to hong kong. and yet, the old cultural tropes and their geographic saliencies fail both to legitimate global exploitation of labor and provide workers with adequate expressions of an emerging reality of global capitalist domination. what we witness now I think is the intensified crackup between the forces and social relations of production. the old workhorses of legitimation–nationalism, unionization, faith, bread & circus–no longer adequately explain the disconmtinuities and outright contradictions of globalist immiseration of workers, and therefore “culture” fails utterly to legitimate the social relations needed to sustain late capital accumulation.
to be sure, the most efficacious legitimation of power remaining for elites is to drive a wedge between workers and create existentially fraudulent divisions between rednecks and cool people. that there is so much contentiousness, and just go to any wingnut website and you’ll see, is a sign of just how fragile, tenuous this legitimation is. Rather than “do what we can” to make sure these tensions dissipate, which is the same thing as nourishing the status quo of global capitalism, we should welcome the crisis as vindication of the only conflict that matters: global class conflict.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2006 16:33 utc | 14
In the USA there is a cultural war and wedge politics is exploiting it. But, so far corporate media has kept their owners portfolios growing by depicting a rosy scenario for the US economy. But, Future Shock is coming: Humiliating retreat from Iraq, Foreigners stop buying US debt, or Peak Oil; or a Trifecta of all at once. When the economy goes south and if the current leaders are in charge, in the YOYO [you’re on your own] economy, New Orleans Redux, a Mad Max world will erupt. The only question is will the money managers see beyond their portfolios and tax cuts to support modernists like Al Gore who will at least try to insure the possibility that their families will survive the Third Revolution.
Posted by: Jim S | Jul 5 2006 16:37 utc | 15
one more minor objection, and this point is inspired in part by van crevald. the spain analogy is at best tantilizing because the crisis today is the historically novel diminution of the state as autochthonous agent. fighting it out in the u.s. as cold or hot “culture war” will not result in any benefit whatsoever to american workers. I’m not saying people won’t try. on any number of rightwing websites you’ll find a real eagerness now to murder “liberals.” yet, global capitalist class who control the means of violence will not permit such fracture and state-bounded instability of conflict intended in the end to enable regions like the american red states to opt-out of the global system. no way jose. we will have our detours of stupidity, but unlike spain, there’s no country worth fighting for. neither the salvation of workers, nor the future success of global capitalism, can any longer be found in the state.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2006 16:48 utc | 16
Billmon: Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far — those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.)
Well, lets look at this. Didn’t we have localized urban revolts in the late 19th century and early 20th century? The Great Depression was answered by the New Deal not because of good heartedness but because of the threat of anti-capitalist revolution, was it not?
Likewise, any future civil war would result from an economic collapse during which elites would still cling to their individualist ideology and corporate corruption. When they refuse to rescue the common people, the mob and the police will clash. Then the ideological right/left targeting would break out in both red and blue states.
Posted by: gylangirl | Jul 5 2006 16:58 utc | 17
Then the ideological right/left targeting would break out in both red and blue states.
or rather, there would be a greater solidarity among workers to extract surpluses from the capitalist class. this did in fact occur in the complex formula of the new deal, in which costs were socialized, benefitting capital greatly.
what I emphasize is such a local solution is no longer relevant. the magnitude of the problem requires now the global solidarity of workers. no easy feat, and certainly advantages capital whose global unity to advance its class interests is massively more developed. in any case, the solution offered by splitting up the u.s. is absurd because global capital would only permit such action if partitioning accelerates exploitation and generates adequate legitimation for capitalist domination. this will not happen in the u.s. but elswhere, in iraq, the strategy of fragmentation is for the near term a better solution for capital. but, again workers are screwed. everywhere workers turn to find a way out of this domination–ostensibly achieved in the fracture of iraq itself–will only delay the need for workers everywhere to confront global capital in toto.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2006 17:24 utc | 18
can I say one more thidng? this topic & essay are bloody interesting.
the option of fracture here is as alluded to in the piece greatly complicated by the lack geographic coherency of belief/culture. if you break the map further down to counties, the blue-red divide is wildly patchwork. no south, west, north iraq polarities here.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2006 17:31 utc | 19
@slothrop – this did in fact occur in the complex formula of the new deal, in which costs were socialized, benefitting capital greatly.
Please explain.
In Franco’s Spain, what happened to the moderate, reasonable powers that went along with the fascist program? Were they finally purged when they were no longer needed by the hardliners?
What will finally happen to our country’s moderate Republicans — both business types and politicos — if their party finally solidifies total control? Will they and their children be brushed aside, or will they devolve into hardliners themselves to survive?
Posted by: ferd | Jul 5 2006 19:20 utc | 22
I’m thinking of a moderate business Republican who might be making tons of money right now, going along to get along, but whose business might slowly die off, eventually, as the corruption solidifies and the contracts all start flowing to businesses controlled by the inner party.
Posted by: ferd | Jul 5 2006 19:23 utc | 23
I guess our founders might urge today’s moderate, honest Republicans to remember that it’s largely the corrupt bastards in the OTHER party who keep your own party in check, and who keep the corrupt bastards in your own party from eating YOU alive.
Posted by: ferd | Jul 5 2006 19:26 utc | 24
b
well, we’ve covered some of this before. just as the spanish civil war was an industrial age conflict pursued to realistically improve the lives of spanish workers and nascent middleclass, the new deal was an industrial age solution to the crisis of accumulation in the u.s. the solution was to externalize costs fettering capital (oasdhi retirement, infrastructure development, worker’s compensation, etc.). workers received benefits, but also paid for these benefits. all in all, capital acquiesced because of its, by today’s standards, relative immobility.
this has changed. far less is capital fettered by fixed costs. a new deal for capital is unneeded. capital is released globally to exploit labor by managing labor through state coersion, and if the state has efficacy now, it is for this single purpose: the creation and supervision of a global reserve army of workers.
any time we speak of the usefullness of “culture” it must be done so by acknowledging the global realities of capital class domination. doing so, I think, makes reading billmon’s entry here all the more interesting and instructive.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2006 19:29 utc | 25
Seems to me the political class, –and that is what we are talking about here- look out for their own, to a point, then ‘like rats on a sinking ship’…
Good time had by all.
The rats go underground and lay dormat, utill the next fleecing of the public treasury. See: Ford/Nixon’s cabiniet.
And re-meme-ber folks, It’s not [just]”follow the money” [anymore] but rather “follow the money and the status of the job or social position”
Hence all the stategic powerful job placements with people who have no experience other than the same ideology as the mayberry Machivellis
With corrupt power comes money with this gang of felons…
see also, :
Cheney Bets Against the Dollar …
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 5 2006 19:36 utc | 26
Had the Confederacy prevailed, there is little chance that it would have remained intact for long, it too might simply have continued subdividing itself into separate entities, the Trans-Mississippi States or the Gulf Coast States, etc., each with its own quaint petty dictators and foreign entanlements.
The same disease could even have befallen the Union states as well. I think them Yankee Federalists done did the right thing, messy as it was at the time. We would have become a passel of mediocre nations instead of one great one.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Jul 5 2006 20:07 utc | 27
@ Slothrop: The age that the west is facing is going from the industrial age to the service age with a banking monopoly that has enticed the industrial age (pensioners) to leverage on property prices to fund their kids in the service age.
Civil war………. not yet……. that might happen after the crash.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 5 2006 21:59 utc | 28
and if there are any separatist movements out there looking to peel off a few states they’re keeping it pretty quiet
last year there was the middlebury declaration vermont that kirkpatrick sale was involved with. not sure what’s happened to it now. the vtcommons website appears dead. here are a couple pages of articles/ideas on succession w/i the united states:
Secession
Secession, autonomy and bioregional politics
Posted by: b real | Jul 5 2006 22:17 utc | 30
It seems that a lot of people are confused by two quite separate occurrences one of which can sometimes follow the other but only with outside assistance and then the occurrence becomes a third thing altogether. Confusing ? Yeah sorry its early and cold so synapses are still warming up.
One occurrence called Civil War happens when the elites within a nation have a falling out, usually because there is a divergence of opinion on the best way to stay elite. Since conflict causes unpredictability in the long term, civil war is rare unless one faction of the elite determines that their survival can only succeed with the demise of the other faction.
Under normal circumstances the northern industrialists and the southern agrarians would have ‘worked it out’, but there was such a basic divergence of methodology between the old style ways of keeping production costs as low as possible, then exporting the product to wealthier nations, and the new philosophy of engaging the proletariat in the economic cycle by rewarding them sufficiently to participate, that it seemed there could be no middle ground. Without going too deep into the Amerikan civil war, there were two powerful groups of elites which fell out. They then twisted or spun the prevailing philosophy to inspire people to kill their own kind on the other side, and thereby advantaging their elite at the expense of normal humanity.
This occurrence is rare because apart from being difficult to crank up, it is a risky strategy that can disadvantage both elites.
The other occurrence that is rather more common is revolution, which occurs when elites take their position for granted. It happens when those in power haven’t been seriously challenged for generations, probably there has been little if any social Darwinism amongst the leadership of the elite.
As a result incapable leadership and very capable and hungry types among the proletariat who can use ‘brotherhood’ to inspire the normal people, who by this time will have been so royally screwed they see no alternative but revolution, to fight and replace the ‘old boss with a new boss’.
If the relationship between the elite of the nation which has just had a revolution and the elites of other nations is so close there was a state of mutual dependency, then those outside will finance a counter revolution, most usually by assisting a sub-culture which feels they have been disadvantaged by the revolution.
Such was the Spanish Civil War. The level of support is dependent on the usual economic risk/gain factor often spiced with a power risk/gain factor if there may be a possibility of the revolution spreading.
But post revolutionary civil wars are only infrequently successful unless the goal is control of a small sector of the nation in question. A diamond or uranium mine say. See Africa.
The Spanish Civil war was a successful counter-revolution because there was a sizeable sub-culture who felt they had much to lose from power being shared out to the regions such as Catalonia or Basque. That was compounded by UKus and France being concerned about contagion, and the Hitler and Stalin regimes seeing this threat as an opportunity to expand their empires.
There is no sign whatsoever of a falling out amongst the Amerikan corporate elites.
If there was don’t ya think we may have seen some resistance from the Demopublican portion of the elite toward Republocrat dominance and excess.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that revolutions are generally most effective when they are included with an internal collapse of the power structure. See the Soviet collapse. Yeah Yeah I know things got no better for Russians.
On the other hand the chaos provided ample opportunity for a lot of groups to break away from the whole and reform into smaller political units where the excesses of power are less frequent and much more difficult to ‘get away with’.
As long as Amerika remains so large this bullshit is going to continue and get worse. But if the BushCo era does end in turmoil, that would be the time for smaller regions who have had enough to break away.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 5 2006 22:54 utc | 31
Re: please explain.
From Legally Piggily, chapter 3 of R. Buckminster Fuller’s CRITICAL PATH:
[[96]] FDR said, “We want you enterprisers to ‘modernize.’ ” But U.S.A big corporate management said, in unison, “We won’t do that. It is much too risky a time to use any of our surplus.” They knew the oncoming World War II was forcing the government to see that their plants were modernized, so by holding out they forced the government to take over both the risk and cost of modernizing. Heretofore in the history of private enterprise research and development — of more efficient new plants and equipment — had been funded from the enterprise’s “surplus” earnings — i.e., from earnings prudently withheld from distribution to stockholders to ensure the continuing strength of the enterprise.
Then FDR’s U.S.A. Treasury, with all FDR’s lawyers’ advice, ruled that the large private-enterprise corporations could make their new plant expansion and equipment improvements and charge the costs to operating expenses, which expenses were then to be deducted from new earnings before calculating income taxes. This amounted, in fact, to an indirect subsidy to cover all new-equipment acquisition. The U.S.A. Treasury next ruled that all research and development — “R and D” — was thereafter also to be considered by the U.S.A. Treasury Department as “an operating expense” and also to be deducted from income before calculating income taxes. The U.S.A. thereby eliminated almost all the “risks” of private enterprise.
Posted by: Argh | Jul 5 2006 23:57 utc | 32
internal collapse of the power structure.
what distinguishes, in an ever increasing way, power is its global character. only the revolutionary impulse is internalized within states and is regulated by the state in the intertests of global capital. more and more, there is less and less confined to the geography of the state subject to inclement “collapse.” there are many, many examples how this works in reality. consider the banal example of ptt telecom deregulation. even in countries like nz sporting a vibrant well constructed public telecomm infrastructure, its deregulation was perceived as necessarily inevitable. to this day, few reasons advanced by global t-comms for such necessity endure scrutiny as so few benefits have been obvious to consumers. will the failures of tcomm deregulation cause the system to collapse in separate countries? no, because the policies of deregulation are globalized. indeed, are there any recent examples of states (not failed states) in which such internal “collapse” has led to anything other than accommodation of glabal capitalist exploitation? bolivia? sudan? I can’t think of any.
there is no way, except the madmax routine, to opt out of the global economy. there are no inherent crises within nation-states in which such options can ever be seized. only the global solidarity of workers can avert what is only a global crisis of capital accumulation.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 6 2006 0:06 utc | 33
very nice read, billmon.
a little slice of-
Fascist propaganda(color) footage re: spain during the civil war
history footage.
…the nation’s military might, much it of American military acquired in return for bases…Eighteen years of peace and rebuilding!
watch … unscripted goodness (ahem)
death in el valle (clip bottom right)
America’s so-called “premature anti-fascists”
–what a way for the US to cover its own ass way back when. Liberty League or Lincoln Brigade in the 1930s… bush supporter (or variation in give him benefit of the doubt) or “ATTACK IRAQ, NO!’ sort of like that, maybe.
speaking of Lorca, I saw a version of The House of Bernardo Alba a few years ago…by the same group that did a version of Threepenny Opera (which I liked better…the accordion player probably had something to do with that.)
–today’s protest music is hip hop, which middle-aged white folks generally ignore –one reason being the misogynist stance among some rappers and hoppers…which is too bad. not that I’m all down with the ‘hood or anything, but hiphop does have some good poets.
argh- even so, the above mentioned Liberty League conspired to assassinate FDR. stevend has a kos post on this moment.
Facts and Fascism by George Seldes, 1942:
“Only the little seditionist and traitors have been rounded up by the FBI. The real Nazi Fifth Column in America remains immune. And yet there is evidence that those in both countries who place profits above patriotism—and fascism is based entirely on profits although all of its propaganda speaks of patriotism—have conspired to make America part of the Nazi Big Business system. Thurman Arnold, assistant district attorney of the United States, his assistant, Norman Littell, and several congressional investigations, have produced incontrovertible evidence that some of our biggest monopolies entered into secret agreements with the Nazi cartels and divided the world among them. Most notorious of all was Alcoa, the Mellon-Davis-Duke monopoly which is largely responsible for America not having sufficient aluminum with which to build airplanes before and after Pearl Harbor, while Germany had an unlimited supply. Of the Aluminum Corporation sabotage, and that of other leading companies, the press said very little, but several books have now been written out of the official record.”
I’d have supported FDR, if the Liberty League was my option to actually win an election. …same as it ever was.
this is from david harvey’s take on the present form of deterritorialized global capitalist class and the limited forms of counterhegemony available to workers. reterritorializing confrontation yields quite limited reforms. this failure of “reterritorialization” of struggle adds a bit more support to the view that splitting the u.s. up is unproductive in any case. even the course of reform staked out as a global new deal reform is limited by the enormous problems of underconsumption and overaccumulation solved, as the great depression, by the annihilation of idle capital in war.
This geographical dispersal of capitalistic class power did not only apply to rentiers and financial interests; production capital took advantage of the spatial volatility and the shifting territorial logics. The large multinationals in [187] electronics, shoes, and shirts gained remarkably through geographical mobility. But then so did certain other social groups. The Chinese business diaspora, for example, improved its position precisely because it had both the means and the inclination to extract profits out of mobility. Taiwanese and South Korean sub-contractors moved into Latin America and Southern Africa and did extraordinarily well, while those they employed suffered appallingly. 1
But it was a peculiar feature of this world that an increasingly transnational capitalist class of financiers, CEOs, and rentiers, should look to the territorial hegemon to protect their interests and to build the kind of institutional architecture within which they could gather the wealth of the world unto themselves. This class paid very little heed to place-bound or national loyalties or traditions. It could be multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. If financial exigencies and the quest for profit required plant closures and the diminution of manufacturing capacity in their own backyard, then so be it. US financial interests were perfectly content to undermine US hegemony in production, for example. This system reached its apogee during the Clinton years, when the Rubin-Summers Treasury Department orchestrated international affairs greatly to the advantage of rentier interests on Wall Street, though they often took very high risks in doing so. The culmination was the disciplining of competition from East and South-East Asia in 1997-8 in such a way as to allow the financial centres of Japan and Europe, but above all the United States, to snap up assets for almost nothing and thereby augment their own profit lines at the cost of massive devaluations and the [188]
destruction of livelihoods elsewhere. This was, however, only one example of the innumerable debt and financial crises that afflicted many parts of the developing world after 1980 or so.
Neo-liberal imperialism abroad tended to produce chronic insecurity at home. Many elements in the middle classes took to the defence of territory, nation, and tradition as a way to arm themselves against a predatory neoliberal capitalism. They sought to mobilize the territorial logic of power to shield them from the effects of predatory capital. The racism and nationalism that had once bound nation-state and empire together re-emerged at the petty bourgeois and working-class level as a weapon to organize against the cosmopolitanism of finance capital. Since blaming the problems on immigrants was a convenient diversion for elite interests, exclusionary politics based on race, ethnicity, and religion flourished, particularly in Europe where neo-fascist movements began to garner considerable popular support. The corporate and financial elites gathered at Davos in 1996 then worried that a `mounting backlash’ against globalization within industrial democracies might have a `disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries’. The prevailing mood of `helplessness and anxiety’ was conducive to `the rise of a new brand of populist politician’ and this could `easily turn into revolt’ .2
But by then the anti-globalization movement was beginning to emerge, attacking the powers of finance capital and its primary institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), seeking to reclaim the commons, and demanding a space within which national, xegional, and local differences could flourish. With the state so clearly [189] siding with the financiers and in any case performing as a prime agent in the politics of accumulation by dispossession, this movement looked to the institutions of civil society to transform the territorial logics of power on a variety of scales, from intensely local to global (as in the case of the environmental movement). The prevalence of fraud, rapine, and violence provoked many violent responses. The surface civilities that supposedly attach to properly functioning markets were little in evidence. The protest movements that surfaced throughout the world were, for the most part, ruthlessly put down by state powers. Low-level warfare raged across the world, often with US covert involvement and military assistance.
Eschewing traditional forms of labour organization, such as unions, political parties, and even the pursuit of state power (now seen as hopelessly compromised), these oppositional movements looked to their own autonomous forms of social organization, even setting up their own unofficial territorial logics of power (as did the Zapatistas), oriented to improving their lot or defending themselves against a predatory capitalism. A burgeoning movement of non-governmental organizations (some of them sponsored by governments) sought to control these social movements and orient them towards particular channels, some of which were revolutionary but others of which were about accommodation to the neo-liberal regime of power. But the result was a ferment of local, dispersed, and highly differentiated social movements battling either to confront or to hold off the neo-liberal practices of imperialism orchestrated by finance capital and neo-liberal states.
…
The only possible, albeit temporary, answer to this problem within the rules of any capitalistic mode of production is some sort of new `New Deal’ that has a global reach. This means liberating the logic of capital circulation and accumulation from its neo-liberal chains, reformulating state power along much more interventionist and redistributive lines, curbing the speculative powers of finance capital, and decentralizing or democratically controlling the overwhelming power of oligopolies and monopolies (in particular the nefarious influence of the military-industrial complex) to dictate everything from terms of international trade to what we see, read, and hear in the media. The effect will be a return to a more benevolent `New Deal’ imperialism, preferably arrived at through the sort of coalition of capitalist powers that Kautsky long ago envisaged.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 6 2006 2:24 utc | 36
A focus on
The Confederacy and how it has aligned with the right wing Southern European reaction to modernism in the United States today
and
How the libertine tradition is a proven false god that has helped destroy liberalism
will lead towards the heart of the matter.
Consider the soon to be catholo-fascist supreme court. One vote away from control for two generations. It could not exist without the European Catholic response to modernism. This bullshit has been transplanted into the US recently and with horrible success.
Consider also how African American (as the identifier of descendencts of American slaves, not black Africans or even black West Indians who now live in the US) describes a culture that has clear confederacy/cavalier roots. Gangsta bullshit is just border scots all over again. Flash and violence. Find a black ghetto in America, say hello to confederate culture, ‘cue and all.
Posted by: razor | Jul 6 2006 3:28 utc | 37
Billmon’s analogy is fatally flawed. He’s
doing exactly what Neo-pol’s do: take a
bad premise, preferable one that’ll cause
great alarm in the populace, then stretch
some desirable historical framework onto it.
Taking a old fur hide, and trying to turn it
back into a live animal, using popsicle sticks.
>USA Arriviste Upper Class:
Living above former old-money upper class
Custom production cars
Custom production watches
Massively over-jeweled jewelry
Massively overpowered yachts
Multiple massively overbuilt estates in gated
invitation-only communities (Yellowstone Club)
Custom 19″ laptops.
50″ plasma screen Hi-Def TV’s
Custom Cell-PDA-WiFi-Bluetooth-Earbud (they scarcely use)
Custom suits, shirts, socks, shoes
Custom wines, olive oils, breads, cheeses, pates
Collects Social Security anyway
Wouldn’t be caught dead in a Medicaid hospice
Dates only pre-screened same-same other rico-ranks
Vacations to private estates with others of their rico-rank
Does not vote
>USA Professional and Semi-Professional Fee Class:
Living formerly US middle-class lifestyle
Over-bought suburban home and maybe urban townhouse
Over-paid low-mileage late model SUV’s, three if possible
Over-paid Cell-PDA-WiFi-Bluetooth-Earbud (they have to use)
Continuous bipolar binge-drink-eat-sex, living “large”
Eager porn surfer and strip club lap dancee.
Vacations to trendy tourist hotel traps like Vegas and Cabo.
Majority do not vote
>USA Trades Wage Class:
Living formerly US lower-class lifestyle
One step ahead of the foreclosure agent
One step ahead of the credit card company
Driving anything that’s cheap and runs
Lives in the hinterland of ex-suburbia
No use for a laptop or cell phone
Decent big screen TV and great barbecue
Would have horses and ATV if had acreage
No use for sleep, in between three jobs
Primarily only males vote
>USA Non-working Homeless Class:
Does not officially exist
Seen in bus stations and freeway on ramps
Sleeps under highway overpasses and suburban woods
Wonderfully well-dressed, thanks to foreign over-production
Does not vote because does not exist
Where in this USA trifecta + 1/100th do you see
ANY CHANCE of “civil war” ever blossoming forth?
It ain’t gonna happen. You’re just circle-jerking.
If you look to history, study the Ottoman Turks, the
Hapsburgs, Victoria-Albert-Nicholas, or Han Dynasty.
We are moving AWAY from US civil war, to WTO plutocracy.
We are moving AWAY from individuality, to collectivism.
We are moving AWAY from faith schism, to a police state.
Welcome to the gulag, comrade.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 6 2006 3:34 utc | 38
If you noticed the missing leg of the US trifecta,
then good on ya’, mate!
That missing class is the pol’s themselves.
More than half of Americans work for the State,
either directly on the public dole, or as a
civilian contractor, indirectly on the public
dole. They live in each of the other classes,
depending on their salary grade and seniority,
and most recent tax shortfall budget RIF’s.
They ALWAYS vote … they get paid time off to.
They ARE the future of America, it’s majority,
along with their sychophants and prosyletizers
and pundits and media suckups.
>US Bureaucratic Class Rules
Democracy is Dead, Long Live the Politburo.
Welcome to the gulag, comrade.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 6 2006 3:43 utc | 39
“…remember, the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, even those who went on what they thought were suicide missions, had a higher rate of survival than those who did not fight back. Never forget that.” – derrick jensen
Posted by: b real | Jul 6 2006 3:50 utc | 40
Without the small but activist Radical Republicans secession might have been delayed if not avoided and or the war might not have been fought. The common thread linking those Radical Republicans from todays version is a moral absolutism based upon a belief that the American nation has a special place in Gods plan and that the nation must serve God.
This is not an original point but the Republican Party has always been the radical party and it’s radicalism has always been based on theocratic sympathies. It took exactly 100 years for those Republicans to align themselves with their former southern slave holding enemies.
Whenever one has the chance ask any GOP branded Christian first; if God has a hand in American history and then which side he was on in the Civil War.
Posted by: rapier | Jul 6 2006 11:34 utc | 41
For Whom The Billmon Tolls
El Clodillo
Brilliant post. I grovel.
Very thought provoking posts. Actually both the American Revolution and the Civil War were elite driven succession movements. There may be another elite revolution underway. 50% of Americans working for government? Fire them and get rid of the all those pensions. More money for the elites. Russia 1991 replayed in America.
Posted by: Jim S | Jul 6 2006 19:49 utc | 43
Another interesting parallel between the Spanish Civil War and today was Spain’s long, inconclusive occupation of Morocco.
Posted by: NickM | Jul 6 2006 21:09 utc | 44
@Jim S re:15
Your comment resonates with…
Henry Paulson and the Five Circles of Economic Hell…
⋅ ⋅ ⋅
But this is exactly what Bush and Paulson and their fellow “conservatives” intend. This is the magic of “globalization” that the Heraldic voices of Thomas Friedman and others eulogize as inevitable. Globalization means liberating capital from all obligations to national well being, freeing it to pursue only the highest returns it can find, no matter where they may lie. That means seeking out the lowest paid labor and shifting all possible jobs there. That is China. Or India.
The U.S. worker and the U.S. economy will be left to their own devices. All social safety net systems must be dismantled for, given the colossal debt, they can no longer be afforded. These include welfare, unemployment and disability insurance, pensions, health care, Medicare, Social Security, job retraining, and eventually, education. The U.S. is a high cost economy in a world where, when capital is perfectly mobile, low cost wins. If capital is to be honored, then the U.S. must be ballasted, abandoned, in the way the British economy was in the aftermath of World War II. It will be milked of its remaining assets—that is what the huge run-up in debt is intended to do—and then thrown away.
The only government programs of substance that will be maintained will be police and military systems. The Patriot Act, with its massive recissions of civil liberties, is not so much directed at foreign terrorists as it is at future domestic dissidents, citizens who dare confront these putative inevitabilities with demands for democratic (as opposed to capitalist) recourses. The military, of course, is needed to carry out the nakedly colonial expropriations such as Iraq that remain the last hope of America to compete in the world: by controlling the oil, the substance without which no industrial civilization can operate.
Also see, my 29
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 6 2006 22:42 utc | 45
As things stand the differences between Red and Blue are not statistically significant, or practically important. Red and Blue are mixed all over, and Democrats and Republicans maintain legitmacy by false opposition – e.g. arabs owning ports, gay marriage, or Kerry making the brilliant move of writing to Negroponte to protest the closing of the cell that is supposed to chase and catch Bin Laden. All these things are utterly insignificant, or handled quietly behind the scenes in complete agreement; it is distractive flim-flam, designed to keep people from thinking about real issues – ever. The ersatz left-right differences in opinion will melt like snow under the sun-tan lamp once any kind of disaster comes. Right now, they are a symbol of luxury, a sweet narcissistic shadow play, an affirmation of identity that obscures world events. Lastly, the poor in the US will not rise up or rebel against their masters. They won’t be able to. And no one will take up their cause (contra Spain, which was not Spanish but European.)
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 7 2006 19:14 utc | 46