trying democracy
I have already said - and explained my assertion - that we have yet to try democracy in this country.
I feel the poetry in my bones again. And from the perspective of the poet, the idea that the world - read 'humanity' - is about to self-destruct is just another fact on the table, another tragic-comic item suitable for lyrical weltschmertz or solemn hilarity, or for ignoring altogether in light of the ongoing tragic beauty and joy of the moment, since, in every moment the world is created and destroyed.
We go to a chain restaurant with antiques, and several times we sit at a table with a large weathered etching with a slightly twisted old oak frame - an etching of Longfellow at Craigie house in Cambridge - and, in the associations of Cambridge and New England, for a moment even Longfellow is alive and can evince a deep poignant twinge for New England and Portland and Portland harbor.
So I want to have my say and have done.
As I said in an earlier post, the southern plantation owners, one of the moneyed interests at the time the Constitution was framed, managed to skew the representation in Congress - that is, to corrupt the pretence of either democracy or democratic representation - to serve their slave-holding interests. By the time that was technically corrected through the Civil War, the nation was already engaged in the economic expansion leading to the Gilded Age, and the robber barons had found the handles of government.
Spin and media management are nothing new.
What is becoming obvious is that democracy and the rule of wealth are not only not synonymous, they are antithetical. Paul Krugman has recently run a series of op-ed articles in the Times outlining the change that occurred after World War II in this country - an event that economists are calling 'the great compression' - when FDR's New Deal policies finally kicked in - and the range of incomes narrowed and the productive power of the economy geared in to peace time commerce. The result was an economic surge that we are still living on, although the last of it is now reflected in the fading power of the dollar at the hands of the ignorant rich who cannot see the difference between credit power and production power.
Unfortunately, FDR's actions were based on cultural necessity and not on the education of the populace. The Great Depression created social, political and financial forces that allowed him to institute socially conscious policies. Even the industrialists and the holders of investment wealth understood that they were in danger personally as well as financially if they did not respond to the economic crisis in terms of assistance to individuals, although many of the wealthy and wannabe wealthy still resisted. But as soon as the apparent danger was past, they once again reverted to type, to the anti-social arrogance of their greed, justly earning FDR's epithet of 'bastards'.
When this latest cycle of 'conservatism' began, the leaders of the movement assured us, publicly, that they had learned their lessons. But of course, they hadn't. Or, rather, they had simply learned new tactics. By exporting jobs, buying and selling industries on a regular basis (with the new owners repudiating contracts) and using governmental powers, the 'conservatives' succeeded in destroying the one institutional force that stood between them and their greed, namely, the unions. The unions, of course, had aided and abetted, by using their powers as an equal instrument for greed, rather than social justice.
So now we know. When the rich are fully empowered, the rich inevitably become richer and the poor become poorer. There is no antidote with the rich.
But communism has been tried, and not only proved a failure, but proved an alternative form of rule by wealth. The corporate structure of the communist state is just that, a corporation. Power is wealth by another name. And the state itself is a player, and not an 'objective' being. The interests of the state are as unique and anomalous as the interests of the oil industry.
The utopianism behind communism made it reprehensible. The presumption that the ultimate revolution was a function of material conditions meant that once the revolution began, whatever the revolutionaries did was an acceptable necessity. The result, of course, was the absolute justification of the most radical and vicious violence in the name of raw power. Stalinism was simply the ultimate outcome of Leninism. Lenin wrote two kinds of tracts: sophisticated Marxist explications and justifications of a raw revolution in the name of power, since the 'ideal' would now be dictated by the material conditions of the revolution itself.
Any attempt to dispossess the rich by force is doomed to failure: it simply transfers the wealth to the dispossessors. Or as I once articulated it, in bumper-sticker speak: it costs too much to eat the rich.
What is needed is the universal understanding that the wealthy are the beneficiaries and not the patrons of the culture.
Again, I have already said this here, but it's worth repeating: when the wealthy gain the political handles, what they do is crank the credit. At first the commercial and industrial businessmen think that they have found the holy grail, since expensive credit is the constant sore point for those concerned with industrial or commercial capitalization or high volume inventories. But when credit is cheap, paradoxically, credit is where the profit is. In an economy with cranked up credit, the money runs too fast for profitability in businesses involving capitalization and inventories. It is not accidental that the sign of an overheated credit system is a real estate bubble. When credit is cranked up, first industrial production and then commercial enterprise lose their potency. But heated credit continuously increases property assessments - at least until the crash. And so, even after the industrial and commercial slowdowns, property values continue to rise.
The crash at the end of the 20's was just the last in a series of crashes produced by the post-Civil War industrial growth coupled with 'conservative' credit policies. The difference, of course, between the cycle of the Gilded Age and the present situation is that the Gilded Age and its sequel were largely powered by industrial growth. In fact, we could say that the Great Depression was created, in part, by production outrunning the means of distribution. Obviously, the Great Depression involved a general collapse of the credit system. But the credit system was also largely limited to the handful of producer states. It was like a mini-fall of the Roman Empire. Credit and production both had outrun the markets. But the wealthy in control tried to keep the credit expansion going. With the collapse, the whole system collapsed.
Here, the problem is largely the U.S. At this point, 'globalization' is just another name for U.S. credit expansion. Credit is about all we have left to sell. As a consequence, the dollar is falling. But now, the system is no longer closed. At the same time, the rest of the world cannot let us collapse, since too much of the international system is still based on the dollar and the residual power of the dollar. To let the dollar and the U.S. economy collapse is to let the whole collapse.
The dilemma is the dilemma of the Chinese. Holding dollar denominated instruments, they cannot dump them without destroying the value of the dollar and thus losing their investment. But the dollar is volatile and fading.
So, the question, at this point, is: are we going to try democracy? That is, are we going to take the power away from the wealthy and begin to operate on the conscious understanding of a balanced economy? This is no small question. Instruments and policies are all geared to the expansive economy. We are not entering into a 'post-industrial' era, a phrase almost as meaningless as the 'new economy' of the dot-com bubble. We are entering an era of the sustainable economy. Slowing the credit may slow the growth, but it also allows a larger participation in the wealth - a genuinely larger participation, not the illusory participation of the last two or three decades.
The alternative may not be the exact equivalent of the 30's. If the U.S. goes down, at this point it is till a strong enough economy to take down the world, in all probability. But, at this point, the world as a whole may be more than an equal, in which case the world's largest economy will stagnate in a 'Japanese style recession'. Whether that of itself would lead to any legitimate enlargement of democracy seems like a roll of the dice.
Well Done!
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