The Cedar Lounge Revolution

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1. LeftAtTheCross - August 20, 2010

It’s probably true to say that the impact of the depression is not as great on ordinary people, or at least not yet. Unemployment is growing, but compared to the 30′s there is a welfare state safety net this time around. Austerity measures will erode that over time. It’s also true to say that people are not as politicised, whether by nationalism or by left/right ideologies. We may not like it, but the slumbering masses are thus far still relatively content to snooze their waythrough this depression. How long the anaesthetic of crap TV and shopping will last as austerity reduces the breadth and depth of the padding around fragile lives, that’s the big question.

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2. fergal - August 20, 2010

LATC there is some movement going on among “the slumbering masses”.Thousands marching in Letterkenny,Roscommon and Clonmel fighting to maintain their hospitals.Despite some of the participants(FG) this is very positive,marching for the common good.
There have been fight backs from below eg Waterford Crystal,Visteon,Thomas Cook workers where ‘crap Tv and shopping’ were the last things on people’s minds.Unfortunately the union bureaucracies will always go for the status quo(partnership,consensus,hat tipping to the bosses etc)
The OAPs also put manners on the govt. over the medical cards.There is also a deep sense of hatred,however demagogic against the parasites in the banks.
Drugs,TV,shopping,alienation and even a certain Catholic guilt will do for the lower classes.
Those in the lower middle class(teachers,nurses,guards) of a certain age are completely’in the system’ as landlords and speculators and are probably hoping for the storm to pass.
More hope will come from our immigrants who only have their labour to offer and know what it’s like to struggle and fight back.

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LeftAtTheCross - August 20, 2010

Fergal, of course there are instances, all is not lost, but the point is that we’re nowhere near 80′s levels of discontent at the moment, let alone that of the 30′s. The class stratification thing you mention is certainly one factor, the working class is more fragmented than it was in the past.

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3. Hugh Green - August 20, 2010

The new economics editor of the Irish Times has cast his cold bespectacled eye across the broad historical sweep of events and concluded that -quelle surprise- capitalism has won the day because people have seen good sense, and the fact that what happened in the Great Depression hasn’t happened yet and isn’t likely to happen, well, it probably means history has ended.

And the three reasons adduced are: one, Europeans generally aren’t poor enough, two, there’s no respectable political alternative to democracy (i.e. capitalism), three, democracy (i.e. capitalism) breeds tolerance. To which my initial response is, to one, oh, so that’s ok then. To two, if there’s no ‘respectable’ alternative to the continued strengthening of the power of capital over labour, and no ‘respectable’ alternative to the impoverishment of the broad working population to guarantee the continued enrichment of a small minority, where does Dan O’Brien get his sense of respect from? And to three, if any tolerance and reason is to be found in, for instance, M. Sarkozy’s roundups of Roma, proposed burqa bans and the general demonisation of Muslim populations across Europe, or the EU’s vast network of internment centres, then it’s a tolerance for the reason of racist demagoguery.

Dude’s a clown. Screw these guys.

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4. Pope Epopt - August 21, 2010

Mr. O’Briens triumphalism on behalf of his clients, is, I suspect, a little premature. We’re about in 1931 so far, and I think it was David Harvey who noted that the real political pressure for change did not come to a head before 1933.

…despite the failure of finance, Joe Higgins-style anti-capitalism still sounds as ill-conceived today as it did in 2007.

Am I the only one to have experience people – who one suspects never had a radical opinion in their lives – wondering allowed about a complete overhaul of the financial system? Perhaps this pervasive disillusionment doesn’t reach Mr. O’Brien’s circle of acquaintances.

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5. Pope Epopt - August 21, 2010

experience=experienced
allowed=aloud

Sorry – no editing permitted.

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6. Crocodile - August 21, 2010

To O’Brien’s three reasons, add one of which he is himself a part: a unanimously right wing media. A generation has been taught that economic conditions are as inevitable and beyond their control as the weather. It’s the economist’s (and ‘The Economist’s’ worldview) and, arguably, as anti-democratic as anything promulgated by ‘extremes’ in the thirties.
I had a wry smile at a Polly Toynbee article in The Guardian last week: she fears that public sector workers in the UK are beginning to be demonised, as a precursor to job and wage cuts. Really, Polly? How shocking.

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CMK - August 21, 2010

Polly Toynbee!!??!! Does anyone still take her seriously? She was jubilant prior to Gordon Brown’s coronation in 2007 that Labour were going to veer in a seriously social democratic direction once Gordon was in charge. And that didn’t, surprise, surprise, happen.

But I recognise that wry smile. I think it provides an insight into the self-importance of the Guardian columnist: ‘it has only really assumed importance once the Guardian devotes column inches to it or asks me to write about it’. Like, reaching the conclusion that ‘demonisation as a prelude to job and wage cuts’ is hardly cutting analysis, by any means. Not enough to justify the undoubtedly handsome retaine Toynbee has with The Guardian.

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7. Pax - August 22, 2010

“Many well-meaning people saw anti-democratic creeds as the future, and lent their support.” …”But the worst of the recession appears to have passed, and even the weakest democracies have pulled through. Grinding austerity may be thin gruel, but all the signs are that Europeans can swallow it calmly.”

Dan O’Brien of the Economist. O’Brien who, prior to the recession, advocated an unregulated market in practically everything, that will price and allocate efficiently. The old democracy and capitalism conflation again, the democracy of happy wage slaves, calmly swallowing their gruel! The logic of the free decision to “work for a boss or else”. Coming from the capitalism of shock, of private tyrannies, of Pinochet, of US and EU chambers of commerces who support Chinese capitalists, Honduran coups etc it sticks in the craw.

Re the protectionist point. Business are the main supporters of such policies and it’s not something newly created in the 30s. Protectionist policies were prevalent throughout the history of capitalist development and many international capitalists (and their media…) supported the likes of Mussolini say, in the constraining of Italian democracy. That’s not to say protectionism is necessarily bad, developing nations should protect infant industry, agriculture etc. Industrial planning should be done democratically and such protectionist measures are authoritarian only when not done by the powerful .

As regards, economic crisis not bringing change part. I would agree with the media being a huge barrier raised above. Years of media propaganda does have an effect. Also, an economic crisis does not necessarily bring change we would like to see. The class war can result in O’Brien Bankers class winning. Which is what we’re seeing.

But I don’t think we need to rely on crises. Having a tight labour market, in tandem with more equality and an expanded empowered and educated working class (otherwise conflated with a middle class) can also create conditions for genuine change. Hoping for capitalist crises to bring change is an old Marxist-leninst crutch that is not really all that positive. It can also be used by the TINAs of this world, O’Brien amongst them, to quell any hope of change.

here’s an interesting quote from “The Crisis of Democracy” a Trilateral Commission book length report looking back at the 60s and deciding what is to be done about this dangerous excess of democracy

“The 60s were an excess of democracy, related relative affluence and economic expansion. This led to a breakdown of traditional means of social control a delegitimation of political and other forms of authority, and an overload of demands on government”

here a good piece by Chomsky on this promotion of a reduction in democracy and participation. (you could swap Carter for Obama)
http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm
“….In short, Huntington is well-qualified to discourse on the problems of democracy.
The report argues that what is needed in the industrial democracies “is a greater degree of moderation in democracy” to overcome the “excess of democracy” of the past decade. “The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

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WorldbyStorm - August 22, 2010

That’s spot on pax re crisis not delivering outcomes we would like. Btw, doesn’t what you quote strongly lock into a sense of democracy, of the very citizens themselves, being an irritant. That a technocratic approach doesnt need and doesnt want them. That was one of the reasons I found myself enormously ambivalent about Lisbon despite years of a strongly positive view of Europe.

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8. Pax - August 22, 2010

I think it assumes a scarcity of a professional managerial skill in order to justify a technocratic approach. self-justifying myth in other words. The capitalist cousin to Lenin’s submission to a single will and all of that…
Those that use such an argument as a lack of participation to justify a bureaucratic technocracy brings this quote by John Milton to mind, “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”
Furthermore, the people that make the decisions never bear the consequences of them. And mentioning the EU that’s even moreso the case as it is a photo-copy democracy. Tony Benn had a good line about the postman not voting for Mandelson directly, that I thought was very good during Lisbon, and used it personally with people. It’s an intrinsically top-down approach.

Saying, one person will have much more of a say than another person – that’s the ways it has to be. It’s a slander on the human condition, almost akin to saying women, or other ‘races’ cannot become doctors or lawyers or members of the technocracy, or professional managerial class. Or that those without property should not vote. It assumes basic managerial skills are scarce outside of a 20 percent. The masses cannot participate, self-management is sundered. That’s rubbish, in the same way that self-management is only kept out of the workplace to break solidarity. It’s a dangerous technical innovation to introduce it properly.
And everyone is an expert on their own preferences. Expert testimony can be taken, but no expert should have more of a say (under normal circumstances) than anyone else, beyond that testimony. i just think there’s no efficiency or moral justification for any of this.
although there’s noting new in the insight…

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” – Marx

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WorldbyStorm - August 22, 2010

And it’s not restricted to managerial skills, though that’s often the line. It’s above everything. It’s a default position that assumes the majority of people are incapable.

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