US Capitalism Worried Ocasio-Cortez is Stirring up the Hornets Nest.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

You have to give the strategists of capital and worshipers of the so-called free market a pat on the back. When it comes to combining arrogance and treachery they are masters at it. Grace-Marie-Turner’s column in today Wall Street Journal is classic. 

Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a right wing pro-market think tank affiliated to the State Policy Network (SPN). SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party. Wiki.

The Galen institute and SPN are connected to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) closely linked to the right wing corporate agenda of the Koch brothers and other extreme right wing sections of the US bourgeois. Galen is fiercely anti-union.

Turner introduces her commentary with praise for Ocasio-Cortez qualities as  an,“All American Socialist”.  “We are fascinated by her personal success—the way she transformed herself almost instantly from a bartender to an international political star.”, writes Turner. 

But this is short lived. Turner continues, “Yes, this self-identified Democratic Socialist is ignorant of the ways of government. She thought she would be headed to Washington in January to get “inaugurated” and that she’d “start signing” bills immediately, in a Congress with three chambers. And her policy proposals are outrageously unrealistic and expensive—$100 trillion at least—and would destroy our economy. Yet many people see the 29-year-old Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and think: If she can do this, so could I.” ( My added emphasis)

Turner points rather condescendingly to Ms Cortez’ “adeptness with social media” showing her supporters and many of them young women, how she makes “macaroni and cheese”.

Turner admits that “millions” of people agree with her views such as socialized medicine and ending our reliance on fossil fuels, what Turner describes as “radical”. She refers to Ocasio-Cortez’s ”Outsize influence in the public debate” as another way of discrediting her ideas much like the boxer who offers a half sickening grin after receiving a powerful blow from his opponent who is not fooled by it.

Unable to openly condemn her ideas that tap in to the public mood, basic reforms that many other countries adopted decades ago like socialized medicine, she attacks her for “killing” 25,000 Amazon jobs and then gets to the heart of the matter, defense of capitalism and the market. She is more cultured and more insidious than the likes of Alex Jones who would focus on Ocasio-Cortez' choice of clothes or how much her shoes cost.

The “tragedy” is her disregard for the “system” (capitalism) that allows Ocasio-Cortez to do all this. She can pay her aides a living wage, (generous with taxpayer money) and has a better wage herself than in her old job.

And on top of this, “She leads a generation of young people to take pride in their ignorance—of the laws of nature, of history, of the Constitution, of the eternal battle for freedom—and still succeed.”

I would have to ask what laws of nature Ms Turner is referring to?  As for the US constitution it was written by men, the rising US bourgeois that were also slaveowners and under pressure from the emerging working class in the former colonies of the British Empire.

As for the “eternal battle for freedom” working class people are well aware of that if we study our history, something we have to search out as it is not taught in the main. Freedom means different things to different classes of people. For capitalism freedom is “….anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market. The economic inequalities that result from these “private” activities are intrinsic to capitalism.” The intrinsic freedom for capitalism is the freedom to sleep under a freeway underpass if you want to and, as we witness, many, many people want to.

Marx revealed the hypocrisy of so-called freedom in capitalist society. He explained how the use of human labor power through the labor process, produces not only a finished product, another use value in the form of a commodity, but also surplus value, value above the wages of the worker that the capitalist pays nothing for. This arrangement is maintained through coercion and violence and the capitalists (the purchasers of labor power in use) control of the state.

And here’s the rub. If the worker takes some of that surplus value back, or uses the time during which surplus value is created for their personal activity, she is violating what is referred to as the law of the exchange of commodities of equal value. This, when some of the value the workers labor power produces that keeps the capitalist in luxury is unpaid. Put this way, if the worker were to pocket the difference between the use value (wages) and exchange value of their labor power they are committing a crime under laws the capitalist makes.

How often have workers heard from the boss how our laziness, or taking too long to do a job or, taking too much time at the water fountain or not working fast enough is hurting them?

The Feudal lord to the peasant:

“I treat you fairly but you really know how to hurt me don’t you”

Slaveowner to the slave

“I treat you fairly but you really know how to hurt me don’t you”

Capitalist to the worker

“I treat you fairly but you really know how to hurt me don’t you”

All for taking back your own time they have stolen from you, legally in their system of production. It was legal to own a slave in total and pay no wages at all. It was legal to take the surplus in kind from the peasant and sleep with his betrothed on the first night just to let him know who was boss.

Turner ends with a chiding of Ms Ocasio-Cortez who has “…soared because of the freedom and prosperity her policies would destroy.” Turner warns her class that giving her too much coverage, that attention to her, “….fuels her celebrity and therefore her ideas.”, and warns her class colleagues, the liberal wing of the bourgeois and the power in the Democratic Party especially to, “….get over our fascination and move on” And truth be told, the freedoms some people, and classes have, need to be sent to the dustbin of history.

Capitalist or bourgeois democracy is not the same as feudalism or slavery. It requires a free human being. Free in the sense that the worker owns no means of subsistence of their own, we are free to sell our labor power to anyone that will buy it. That is why the British peasantry had to be driven from the land. A human that can produce their own food and clothing is not easily forced in to the factory or the mill, is not desperate enough to sell their life activity to a capitalist if they can eat. Workers are free in that we are paid wages for the use of our labor power. We can leave the individual capitalist(s) that purchase it but we cannot escape capitalism, only overthrow it.

It offers certain individual freedom and eventually even universal suffrage. In the US only white men of property were eligible to vote. Native Americans never won that right until the middle of the 20^th century.

Workers were shot, deported terrorized for trying to form unions. Capitalism came in to being drenched in blood. In the US it had to drive the Native people off their land and in to camps or reservations; a conscious effort to destroy their major source of food, the buffalo slaughtered million of these animals. US capitalism did the same to the Vietnamese attacking their food supply with chemical warfare. It imported the poorest of the poor from Europe and Africans were dragged from the continent by slavers like Europeans under indentured servitude but mostly to work as slaves in the Apartheid south.

As a woman, a Latina, a brown skinned person and working class, Ms Cortez would have been denied most basic freedoms for the greater extent of this nation state’s history and these obstacles were raised by the capitalist class on whose behalf Turner is writing. Everything, every benefit and piece of social progress working people have gained came from our own efforts and in the face of the most ruthless ruling class in history, the system and class that Turner wants to claim as our benefactors.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not even a socialist. She champions Franklin Roosevelt the astute bourgeois who saw the writing on the wall in the period immediately after the Great Depression as the industrial working class in the US rose to its feet. Hundreds of thousands on strike, factory occupations, three general strikes in 1934 and the Flint occupation in 1936-37, this and thousands turning to radical forces led Roosevelt to make some concessions. And even then, and with an even deeper slump and capitalist crisis in 1937, it was WW2 and the deaths of over 50 million people and destruction of existing value that saved capitalism. Capitalism is a system of war.

The leadership of DSA is not helping Ocasio-Cortez negotiate this minefield she is now in. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t point to the working class as the force for change in society. She points to the liberal capitalist class and FDR and we are in a different era. She doesn’t talk of the means of production and the need for the commanding heights of the economy to be taken in to collective control and ownership and set in to motion based on human needs not profits.

Despite the call for these basic reforms and socialists who do not threaten capitalism, the capitalist class is very concerned. They are much more tuned in to the militant history of this country than most workers and certainly the trade union hierarchy whose ideology mirrors that of the capitalist class only a nicer version, one that doesn’t exist. They, consciously or not,  are representatives of capital in the workers’ organizations.

These recent developments and the ending of an era during which two capitalist parties dominated US society are what is driving all the talk of socialism in the media. They are not afraid so much of Ocasio-Cortez but that the ideas reflect the mood and aspirations in US society and that can go further than even Cortez imagined. Further than capitalist society can accept.

As Broadus Mitchell wrote in his book Depression Decade, the more astute sections of the US ruling class would prefer that, "If those who had long made excuses for capitalist shortcomings were to be infected with collectivism, they preferred catching chicken pox from Keynes rather than smallpox from Marx. “

And here we are again. 

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