The limitations of capitalist development

Hippies

Black Panther Party Leaders

Women's Liberation Movement

Baader and Meinhof

Mao

By all historical accounts, 1968 was the apex of social movements across the world. They attacked existing political and economic establishments: the USA experienced mounting opposition to the Vietnam War, assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, riots in African-American urban ghettos, riots at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, the occupation of administration offices at Columbia University, youth activism all over America, the emergence of a women's movement and the protesting of the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Elsewhere in the world, social movements generated Prague Spring; the insurrections of May-June in Paris, France; Germany witnessed the rise of a violent left led by the Baader-Meinhof gang; student protests and building occupations occurred in Mexico City; and Mao Tse Tung sponsored the Cultural Revolution in China against the middle class.

Central to the movements of the 1960s was the middle class youth movement, which by the time 1968 rolled around, had cascaded down the social structure and had infected working-class youth as well. Also well documented was the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement out of the sexism of the middle class youth movement. Each of the movements in America had a radical anti-capitalist sector. When the African-American civil rights movement moved north in 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expunged its white members and adopted a black nationalist ideology, the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966, was a Marxist-Leninist organization. The early days of the Women's Liberation Movement sprouted a variety of Marxists-feminist/feminist-Marxist critiques of capitalist society. Among Latino populations, the Chicano movement of Mexican-Americans and the Young Lords of the Puerto Ricans adopted radical critiques of American society.

However, most anomalous of all the social movements was the middle class youth movement. The oppression of women and ethnic minorities was easily visible. Sexism and racism could be seen in every social structure in American society. So why were young people from America's wealthy suburbs and elite colleges, whom Daniel Foss referred to as "candidate members of the bourgeoisie," in rebellion? This issue has never been sufficiently answered, although Foss came up with an adequate explanation in several of his writings, including some I co-authored with him. His most comprehensive explanation was in his doctoral dissertation, which was boiled down to a book entitled Freak Culture. This is my gloss on Foss's thesis:

So what was it in the reproduction of capitalist social structure that led to the rebellion of the most privileged sector of youth: young, mostly male, white, affluent, and privileged? Marx characterized capitalism as "a system of production for production's sake." Foss noted that in today's bureaucratized world that not only was capitalism a system of production for production’s sake, it also had become a system of social discipline for discipline's sake. The generation of youth in the 1960s was the first "post-scarcity" generation. They had grown up in a time of expanding surplus; not only had the surplus expanded, but it was relatively equitably distributed, leaving such theorists as John Kenneth Galbraith identifying America as "the affluent society." In 1968, coincidentally, the Gini coefficient, the index of inequality, reached its lowest point at 38.6 in the USA.

Foss claimed, and I think rightly, that capitalism reached a limitation caused by the generation of a culture that espoused freedom, self-determination, and self-actualization in a labor system that required discipline, sacrifice, and subordination to authority in which the latter made no apparent sense other than to provide the means to consume. Young people from upper-middle-class backgrounds looked at the sterile lives their suburban-dwelling parents were living, employed as sales personnel, professionals, and managers in what the parents themselves identified as "the rat race," and what members of the youth culture identified as "a death trap." In post-scarcity mentality, life had to have some transcendent meaning beyond the mere accumulation of things. Middle-class occupations, for the most part, didn't produce anything. They were part of the service economy; many, especially those employed in sales, public relations, advertising, and so forth, were essentially hired to get people to buy things they didn't need. Their purpose was to create desire so that consumers would buy more stuff. Capitalism had evolved as a system of waste production for waste consumption. It is not an accident that the ecology movement grew out of the middle class youth movement of the 1960s.

Of the movements of the 60s, blacks, Latinos, women, and gays (which didn't really start until the 1970s) could be ameliorated in a straightforward fashion. For blacks, the striking down of Jim Crow laws, affirmative action, community development programs, integration of the public service workforce, and compensatory education turned the race issue into a class issue, opening up opportunities for an African-American middle-class. Similarly, but less so, opportunity structures were opened up for Latinos. The radical edge of the women's movement was blunted when the so-called "business community" advanced the notion of corporate feminism. They realized that jobs that didn't require upper body strength could be opened to bright and talented women who would be grateful for the opportunity and work harder than men. And why not? With the talent pool nearly doubled, increased competition would reduce labor costs. The gay community was already affluent; all they wanted was not to have their culture suppressed and not be discriminated against.

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Abbie Hoffman

What of the demands of the middle class youth movemenNumerous were numerous specific issues, such as in loco parentis regulations on college campuses, alcohol and drug use, and the Vietnam War, in which they were drafted to fight. However, the counterculture, which was certainly an artifact of the youth movement, was definitely anti-capitalist. Proponents were advised to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." In the subjectivist mentality of the new left/counterculture, Foss noted that the emergent social type, the Freak Radical, advocated "attack the rule because it exists, the policy because it is planned, decision because it is made, the process because it goes on, the power because it is there, and the system because it feels bad. Enjoy yourself. Apocalypse now…" This was the message of Abbie Hoffman in his book,  Revolution for the Hell of It.

Although it is true that the Freak Radical existed for a short period of time between 1967 and 1969, it signaled a sea change in American culture in which the body politic was no longer apathetic and could be controlled within the institutional frameworks of the American political/economic system. As a matter of fact, polls showed that in the wake of the 1960s, American institutions were suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, even though the movements had subsided. Worse, from the perspective of the accumulating class was that the rate of profit was continuing to decline, which was a three decade trend. Something had to be done.

Although Jimmy Carter decried the malaise of America in his famous "Crisis of Confidence" speech in 1979, declaiming the loss of institutional legitimacy and the "me decade" of the 1970s where people focused upon private consumption to the neglect of the collective. However, his exhortations to collectively solve our energy problems fell flat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCOd-qWZB_g

Out of the West galloped Ronald Reagan, the spokesperson for corporate America, especially his southern rim supporters of real estate, gas and oil industries, Western ranchers, and the military-industrial establishment, claiming to put America back on the right track and restore the "City on the Hill." In order to stop stagflation, Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Fed, jumped interest rates by 10% within a year, stopping the American economy in its tracks, leading to the worst recession since the Great Depression. The only way capitalism makes sense is to establish scarcity, or at least the illusion thereof.

The generation of the recession, the destruction of the social safety net, the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, and the increase in defense spending all had the same effect: to move wealth up the system. Wages stagnated or declined, the manufacturing sector of the American was devastated, especially in what became called "rust belt" industries located primarily in the Midwest that employed a unionized workforce.

From 1980 to the present, 80% of the surplus increase has gone to 1% of the population. The only time in the last 30 years that wages showed an actual increase was in the last year of the Clinton administration. The policies of the Bush II Administration mimicked those of Reagan, only more radical. The purpose was, as was with Reagan, to create a fiscal crisis of the state, thereby providing legitimation for the destruction of social welfare programs. The major sources of the current deficit was the conduct of two wars off the books, Medicare part D, which is a giveaway to big Pharma, and tax cuts that favored the rich over the rest of us. Another source of the deficit is the over $700 billion paid to the banks that were too big to fail because of the fraud allowed by the Bush Administration in its failure to regulate bank systems. However, not all the fault can be attributed to the Bush Administration. The banks have been chipping away at regulation and regulatory agencies since at least the beginning of the Reagan Administration. It was during the Clinton Administration that the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from investment banking, was repealed.

Every time politicians mention the social, political, and economic inequalities that have emerged over the past 30 years, Republicans scream "the Democrats are engaging in class war." (Which seems to temper voices within the Democratic Party.) However, it has been the accumulating class, with its associates in both parties that have been waging class war most successfully. Now that the United States is becoming economically as unequal as a state such as Mexico, the accumulating classes have effective control over the state. Any time there is a progressive effort, it is substantially negated. The last three Democratic presidents, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, were much more progressive personally than their administrations' accomplishments. As a matter of fact, the most salient achievements of the Clinton Administration have been in the interests of the accumulating class: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for the increasing centralization of media empires, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that ended welfare as we know it, and (of course) the Gramm Leach Bliley Act that deregulated the banking industry.

A number of social theorists, such as Tony Judt, have noted that societies in which there is great inequality become unstable. Those below understand that the game is rigged against them. Trust of social institutions declines. Legal but immoral activity from above stimulates illegal activity below, which requires increased policing. The police are increasingly viewed as enforcing a corrupt system.

All ruling classes pursue their narrow interests until such time as they are stopped by popular resistance. At present, that resistance is mounting, but has not attained a level of a critical mass. The greatest resistance is coming from organized publicly employed unionized workers. Although they are working toward a united front, their efforts are primarily at the state level where right-wing legislators are busy taking away their rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining, reducing salaries and pensions, and defunding social programs, all in the name of austerity due to a crisis that they themselves created. Paul Ryan, the man who fashioned the Republican anti-deficit campaign voted for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, and Medicare part D. He has no sense of irony.

The longer the accumulating classes allowed to accumulate greater portions of the surplus, control more of the government at the local, state, and federal levels, the more difficult it will be to counter their actions. For the good of the entire country, we must resist their predations.

So capitalist social relations become destabilized at the point at which the surplus increases to a point where it's redistribution generates rebellions of two sorts: those who have been discriminated against in the redistribution and who want a greater portion of the pie, and those of privilege from whose perspective labor discipline makes no sense and is, in the terms of Herbert Marcuse, "surplus repression." Capitalism is the only political economic system to run up against this limitation because it's the only economic system that has generated sufficient surplus to end material scarcity in a given social formation. The limitation at the other end is the destabilization generated by gross economic and political inequalities in which the accumulating class increasingly viewed as predatory and parasitic. This particular limitation has been the downfall of ruling classes since time immemorial and is certainly fundamental to the Arab spring revolts across the Middle East.