The Obama administration's backers are cashing in their chips. Wall Street bankers have had enough banker bashing and the taxing of AIG bonuses was the last straw. The government is getting the message. Over the weekend "President Obama and other administration officials have tempered their criticism of the financial sector" writes the Wall Street Journal.
"The White House understands that to have a healthy Main Street you need a healthy Wall Street" says one banker. What has driven this shift in approach from the Obama administration is that the capitalists are still on a strike of capital. They don't like banker bashing from a government and a political party that belongs to them.
In order to get elected, Obama had to speak to the powerful anti-Wall Street mood that existed in society; the bankers recognize this but let's not go too far. Obama's top political aide, David Axelrod who not so long attacked Wall Street for being upset because it didn't get "wheelbarrows of cash" has adopted a different tone telling one interviewer recently that, "Our great challenge is to make clear that we can't have an economic recovery without Wall Street.." He went on to make it clear that such public flaunting of wealth as the AIG bonuses in dire times was making this "much harder".
What we are actually seeing here is the heightening of class antagonisms, or to use a dreaded term in the US, a heating up of the class war. The thing about elections is that they gauge mood and, as the Wall Street journal points out, polls have shown that the public hate Wall Street and blame investors for the mess wer're in. This pushed the rhetoric from the Obama administration further to the left, "Everyone but Wall Street knows the days of Gordon Gecko are over" commented Axelrod at one point.
But they're in office now and they have to defend the interests of the social force on which their party bases itself--big business.
The bourgeois are revolting we might say. The Obama administration has been trying to get them, for some time we all know, to lend money, to invest in the economy. But according to the Wall Street Journal, when administration officials began calling the Gnomes of Wall Street to discuss the next phase of the bailout, the bankers "turned tables" and had a go at them for attacking the AIG bonuses. Thie basic message, if you want private capital to end its strike "stop the rush to penalize our bonuses."
We need to draw the correct conclusion from this. If the main issue is that capital, an essential part of the economy, is being witheld by a small minority of people, and this "strike" is causing misery and death throughout the world, why doesn't the government just take it?
When Labor goes on strike they send in the troops if we don't comply with their wishes. Since 911, they have made it clear that disrupting the economic life of the country through withholding Labor amounts to terrorism. So it is evident that a political party does not exist in a vacuum, it represents class interests and the capitalist class has called in the chips; the Obama administration will comply.
We must also see capital, or their wealth as what it really is. This wealth is accumulated through the Labor process. It is accumulated by the owners of capital who buy the use of human beings over a period of time but pay less for that Labor power than the wealth that it creates. This is legal in a capitalist society just like it is legal to own a slave in a slave society and get free products from the Labor of a peasant in feudal society. Would you exchange a $20 bill for $10?
Of course not, it's an unfair exchange of unequal quantities. If you were forced to do it you would do it knowing you were being ripped off. That's exactly how capitalism works.
I had the honor of spending some time with June Reyno this weekend. She is the woman who chained herself to her home in San diego. She has been arrested twice the last couple of weeks, the second time after she broke back in to her home. But in a capitalist society, she doesn't own that home, Wall Street does. She has waged a heroic battle almost alone. She is, as an author on this blog described, ahead of her time. She has shown the way. She has lost the batle to stay in her home. She is tired but not defeated.
As myself and other authors on this blog have written, we have to nationalize, to take in to public ownership, capital itself. It is after all, our own creation. As long as we allow them to maintain the ownership of capital we can never resolve these crises.
Does this mean a revolution? Of course. Does it mean changing the established order? Absolutely. Is this utopian? Of course not.
How do you think feudalism and slavery passed in to history.
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