|
Two Reports from the Murphy Institute:
|
-
"We Are the 99%": The Political Arithmetic of Revolt
By Michael Yates
The worldwide Occupy movement that erupted in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 took as its watchwords, "We are the 99 %." These words resonated with large masses of people as few others have in a long while. To understand why, it’s important to look at the context that generated it.
"We are the 99%" derived its power from the devastation experienced by so many people as a result of the Great Recession that erupted in December of 2007 and whose effects are still being felt by tens of millions of people in the United States and hundreds of millions worldwide.
Read More
-
Share your comments | Older articles
Election 2012: Is a Second Term a Second Chance for Labor?
By Gordon Lafer
Election night was sweet—the thrill of watching true champions like Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren swept into office and the at least equal satisfaction of watching Todd Akin, Allen West, and Tommy Thompson go down to well-deserved defeat. But what does it all mean?
Unfortunately, what the election does not mean is that "Americans have voted to reject the Ryan austerity agenda" or anything so hopefully definitive. A 52-48 verdict is not a declaration of the people’s will.
The election is also not a signal that we should now dedicate ourselves to "holding the President accountable." We can’t hold Obama accountable because he is not, in fact, accountable to us. He raised $1 billion for his election, and most of it was not from us. Furthermore, everyone knows we’re not going anywhere; a Republican victory would be so disastrous for the country that we know it can’t be risked just for the sake of rebuking Obama.
This was a choice for the lesser of two evils. Having won, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing it was a choice between one evil guy and one guy who, if we work him right, could turn out to be really great.
Read more
|
Mortgaging the Future: Student Debt in the Age of Austerity
By Andrew Ross
In the course of industrialization, the conflict over wages commands the stage. In societies like ours, which are heavily financialized, the struggle over debt is increasingly the frontline conflict. Not because wage conflict is over (it never will be) but because debts, for most people, are the wages of the future.
If or when a debtors’ movement comes into being, the student debt crisis will prove to have been a key trigger. Even in the immediate pre-recessionary years, when debt was regarded as a good consumer asset and decent employment was still a plausible prospect, it was easy to see that the mounting burden of student loans was blocking smooth passage of the college-educated into the middle strata of economic life. When the aggregate student debt burden surpassed consumer debt in the spring of 2011, and then reached the $1 trillion threshold a year later, public dismay about the dimensions of the problem began to surface. Talk about the imminent collapse of the so-called student debt bubble became a regular feature in the business media.
Read
More
|
Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism
By Adolph Reed
A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective Marxism’s most important contribution to making sense of race and racism in the U.S. may be demystification. A historical materialist perspective should stress that "race"—which includes "racism," as the one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a particular system of production.
Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on "natural" or essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things. Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are "known" to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.
Read
More
|
Obamacare Confronts a Fiscal Crisis: Why the Affordable Care Act Doesn't Add Up
By Marcia Angell
Author’s Note: This article was written shortly after the U. S. Supreme Court's decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and reflects my view of the situation at that time. As it turned out, Obamacare was not much of an issue in the 2012 election campaign, which focused mainly on jobs and fairness for the middle class. Still, I believe that it is extremely unlikely that Obamacare will be fully implemented, for the reasons discussed herein, and that the only way to provide universal health care at an affordable cost is through a non-profit single-payer system. A version of this article first appeared in the Huffington Post.
The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, puts me in mind of the old proverb: Be careful what you wish for. Democrats on a victory lap should watch their step, because John Roberts may have given Republicans a gift. The impact on the health system will be much smaller than the political fallout, because with or without Obamacare, the American health system will continue to unravel—quickly if Romney is elected, slowly if Obama is re-elected.
Read More
|
Marxism and Right-Wing Populism: The Case of the Tea Party
By Lee Sustar
A right-wing grassroots movement? Or a retooled, corporate-controlled vehicle for the same old Republican right? That question has surrounded the Tea Party phenomenon since its emergence in the winter of 2009. The Republican losses in the 2012 elections—due in no small part to the unpopularity of Tea Party Senate candidates—have brought that debate into the heart of the Republican Party itself.
For readers of this journal, who approach history and politics within the framework of class analysis, there are other related issues: What is the social base of Tea Party groups? Do they represent, as their proponents and some analysts claim, the authentic voice of the white working class? Is the Tea Party a classic middle-class populist movement, frustrated by government and big business but anti-worker in its orientation? Does it even fit the definition of "movement" at all? Finally, can a classical historical materialist framework help us understand the Tea Party in relation to the class structure of the U.S. today?
To answer these questions, it may be helpful to first see what those who have studied the Tea Party have to say about its political appeal and its contradictions.
Read
More
|
|
|