Sunday, December 30, 2007
(12:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Hope in the Coming Year
I don't make a conscious effort to recycle. If a bin is nearby, I use it, but I don't separate out recyclables, despite the fact that my ward offers curbside recycling. Part of this is laziness, but the ethical justification is that the personal righteousness attached to recycling (for instance) is meaningless. A single corporate executive could, in one stroke, do more to "reduce the use" than I could in my entire lifetime -- for instance, by cutting in half the 40 lbs. of packaging that surrounds the average phone. To focus on individual choices and "awareness" is sheer illusion; the change needs to be systemic.Under neoliberalism, however, any positive systemic change seems to be impossible. The balance is absolutely in favor of nihilistic corporate power, which is now governed by an ever-shrinking horizon -- the next quarter results, the next episode of a stock-picking TV show, etc. The long-term simply does not exist, which renders the traditional apologetics for capitalism even more ridiculous than they would've been under Fordism -- it makes intuitive sense to say that companies won't produce poisonous products out of a concern for their reputation, but by the time the poison is detected, the profit has already been made and looted by some executive or other. At the time when mass investment in infrastructure and the accompanying massive restructuring of our way of life are the only way to ensure any kind of future, neoliberalism is not simply a "bad" ideology, but exactly the wrong ideology.
With its stranglehold on our political and media elites, however, it seems impossible to dislodge. In the neoliberal frame, politicians can display political acumen approaching genius -- for instance, Bill Clinton or Chicago's Mayor Daley -- and nevertheless still produce only "less bad" results. Meanwhile, the plain fact that neoliberalism is bad for virtually everyone except for the increasingly small elite class seems to call for a populist uprising -- yet neoliberalism itself has destroyed the social solidarity that would make such an uprising viable. I love John Edwards' populist rhetoric. I love that a mainstream candidate is daring to speak out against corporate power. Yet assuming he entered into office, he would be facing up against a concentration of power that is unprecedented in human history, and not only on the level of propaganda.
People worry about irrational Clinton-hatred, but the machine could just as easily be turned against Edwards, whom the media already hates for his "phoniness." And there would be no comparable power to take his side -- other than a "netroots" community that is largely content to congratulate itself on its correct political opinions while collectively procrastinating from office work. Our public life -- our real, physical public life -- is dominated by a fear of state violence and a corresponding desire to demonstrate obedience. Even on the level of the idiotic security regulations for air travel, this is more than obvious. Mass civil disobedience would overwhelm the system and make the petty and pointless rules unworkable. The much-lauded American "common sense" and "rugged individualism" are apparently unable to overcome our collective Stockholm Syndrome, our desire for more and more rituals to demonstrate our innocence of any terrorist leanings. The protests against the criminal war in Iraq displayed the same blind obedience -- well-dressed people eager to "express their opinions" in the designated areas. Populism can't work when there is no "people."
The days of the 9/11 attacks demonstrated that social solidarity can still happen. Take, for instance, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. In previous hijackings, cooperating with the hijackers was the safest bet. Once the suicide attacks had happened, however, the passengers were able to band together to prevent further loss of life. A rational government with some degree of trust in its citizens would not have implemented ever-more-humiliating security measures, but would trust that in the unlikely event of another attempt at a 9/11-style attack, passengers would immediately rise up to prevent it. One wonders if the approach taken by the Bush administration was directly intended to break down this kind of spontaneous solidarity by replacing it with a pseudo-solidarity of obedience and fear.
Barack Obama, despite his background as a community organizer, appears to be offering only a solidarity of the elites -- a solidarity that is already only too strong, as the bipartisan support for the Iraq War demonstrates. The only "hope" that I can now hold out for Obama is that his rhetoric is all an elaborate ruse. But the very fact that he brings up such idiocies as the "Social Security crisis" and echoes right-wing critiques of socialized health care demonstrates that his bipartisan rhetoric is bound to be in service of yet more triangulation -- and if we're to get triangulation, why not cut to the chase and go for Clinton herself?
I'm on the verge of directly opting for Clinton, as a strategic matter. Under current conditions, Edwards -- and it pains me to say this, as it would be through no fault of his own -- would almost certainly be a miserable failure, which would result in pushing the Democrats further to the right. Clinton is not positively good, but she may be the person best positioned to stave off the worst for a little longer, to buy us a little more time.
