The Wall Street Journal this weekend starts an article on the economy with the following: "American consumers' long running love affair with with debt is on the rocks. And as they repent for their credit driven Bacchanalia, the foundering US economy is left to pick up the pieces."
But people don't love debt; we hate it. Debt is stressful and a form of slavery we know that. But our society is set up in such a way that we cannot hardly get the bare necessities without it. Shelter, education, health care, food even. "No", say the pimps of capitalism in the media, "..people are living beyond their means, they buy things they don't need and that they can't afford." This is the standard, "blame the victim" line. They spend billions, no trillions of dollars convincing us that we need this or that item to be successful, or liked, or to have any self worth at all. Sure we should resist this if we can, but the pressure is relentless from the day we're born, especially here in the US. If human consciousness was independent of society, if our ideas of the world and our place in it were solely our own independent possession it would be one thing, but human consciousness and our ideas do not exist independently from society.
If it was not possible to influence human thought the capitalists would not invest trillions of dollars trying to do just that. That WSJ article never raises that the class that owns the media and the productive forces in society which means they own the products society produces, encourages us to get in to debt while it is built in to the system of production that we don't have enough money to buy the things we need and those things they convince us we need but really don't. They have to sell these products though to realize or obtain the value contained within them that are the product of unpaid Labor and the source of their wealth. They have to throw their accumulated capital, or a part of it, back in to the sphere of production in order to continue to accumulate this wealth, this product of human Labor power for which they paid no equivalent, or wages. Debt helps them do this.
But there is the real world and in the last analysis ideas have a material base. The crisis has changed the way people think. "My life is so much better not having that haunting debt" one successful worker tells the WSJ. In the US household debt has fallen, through default or paying it down, by 8.6% in the last two and a half years, that's $1.1 trillion. Things are looking bad, US consumers are saving.
But all this saving and paying down debt is hurting the economy. The Labor process, the only source of wealth creation, must continue and the worker must buy the product. If you don't want it; they'll bombard you with enough air time and social pressure to convince you that you do. But we shouldn't underestimate the change in consciousness the crisis has brought. "I realized I had been fooled by people having me refinance my house several times." says one woman who has been paying extra on her mortgage, "I fell for their blandishments" she adds.
The violence, wars, starvation and insecurity that dominate our global society is never explained as the result of an economic system of production, of the way human society produces, distributes and exchanges its collective needs and the relations that arise from this. It is human failings, character flaws and simply "greed" in the abstract. This view is strengthened by religion. But some time ago, a study was done asking women what they want most from a sexual partner. Their answer was overwhelmingly "kindness". We ask the same question we asked back then: Where are the magazines and the TV programs pushing kindness? We are inundated with ads about what we should wear, drive, smoke or drink to attract a partner, but kindness is dodgy, kindness leads to solidarity, collective thinking and strong bonds between those in the same economic conditions; it strengthens class unity. Capitalism stresses individualism, selfishness, the struggle for superficial material possessions and if you do not have these you are a failure. That a global poll could bring such results shows the tremendously powerful human desire for justice, solidarity and human cooperation. We are inherently collective social creatures.
Consciousness tends to lack behind events as people struggle to figure out what is happening to the world around them. The lag can be greater in the absence of a subjective force a united mass movement and political alternative that can explain the nature of the system and why it goes in to crisis. In the US we lack that subjective power at the moment but affects of the crisis have altered the way most Americans look at society and our country and capitalism itself. Most people do not like what is but are not sure what can replace it. For socialists, this is an important task, introducing socialist ideas as we struggle to resolve the crisis that effects us concretely, housing, security, education of our children and a healthy environment. Racism and sexism and other social divisions are explained away as individual human traits that are social in nature rather than institutionalized in society and integral to it. In this way they are used by the ruling class in society to divide and weaken us as when we are driven in to struggle against their system we tend to seek class allies; as Malcolm X said, "You can't have capitalism without racism."
I just had to get this off my chest.
Tuition at private and public colleges climbed steadily over the last decade:
Tuition, 2000-2009 (in thousands)
Deeper in Debt
The amount that students owe quintupled between 2000 and 2011.
School vs. Shopping
In 2010, for the first time ever, Americans' outstanding student loans exceeded their total credit card debt:
Sources: College Board; Mark Kantrowitz, Fastweb.com
No comments:
Post a Comment