David Seaton's picture

    The Asymmetrical Revolution

    By David Seaton on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 3:19am |
    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) -
    Between the end of the Chatterley ban
    And the Beatles' first LP.
    Annus Mirabilis - Philip Larkin

     

    As the English poet, Philip Larkin proclaimed, sexual intercourse "began" in the 1960s. Of course it  didn't really or humanity wouldn't exist, but Larkin was a poet and there is "poetic" truth in what he says. The availability of reliable contraception  -- controlled by women -- meant that for the first time, one of the most traditional progressive utopias, "free love" was a practical reality and the intercourse part of sexual intercourse could take on its full meaning.


    Larkin mentions the end of the ban on D.H. Lawrence's book "Lady Chatterley's Lover", with its graphic sex scenes and liberal use of the most descriptive Anglo-Saxon. Taboos came crashing down. The Greenwich Village "Stonewall riots", marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.

    The 60s was a decade which also saw the civil rights movement in the USA: people of color took their place in the sun. People became freer then. Anyone who came to consciousness in the 1950s knows that we are freer now than we were then. Freer than we ever have been before.

    It was also a time of great prosperity in the western democracies, with full employment, good wages and in most western countries, liberal social nets.

    Freer from worry, plenty of work, plenty of money in their pockets, plenty to spend it on, freer to speak, freer to love... we are still living on the fading glow from that period.

    But today things are looking rather grim.

    The money is being taken away, the social net is going in the same direction.

    What happens when free people who have been led to think that they have a right to be happy, who thought that the system they support gives them that possibility, begin to see that this system cannot or will not continue to provide the means to be happy?

    That is going to be the question that defines the coming years.

    There is an idea prevalent among many commentators that the "markets" are something immutable, some God-given law of nature, like the law of gravity. This is part of the "end of history", pensée unique, business. In fact the markets are just human social constructions like any other... that is to say they are political. What human beings have arranged, human beings can rearrange.

    Admittedly the human animal can continue to flourish in conditions where any other self-respecting mammal would stop breeding and go extinct, but even so, if you oppress them enough, they turn and bite. That is what is about to happen shortly, certainly in countries with long traditions of taking things to the streets.

    The welfare state is not socialism, but rather something created to stem the rise of socialism. The skimmed milk of social democracy was concocted in the first place by the middle class (Bismark created the pension system, Roosevelt created Social Security, remember) to protect itself from violent revolutionary movements.

    The reason we even had the recent subprime mortgage crisis in the first place was because a political decision had been made to make home owning possible for the savings-less working poor through easy credit -- by giving away money -- because the real incomes of everyone but the rich had either stagnated or had been in decline for decades.

    Home ownership is considered socially stabilizing, the entry point to the prudent middle class. Politically it was thought positive to get  poor people (NINJAs) into houses they thought they owned, even if they really didn't and could never have afforded, if the lenders had been using traditional credit evaluation procedures.

    Thus a fiction of prosperity was created through politics. The increasing inequality and impoverishment of the lower middle class and working class, brought on by decades of Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher-ism was papered over by easy credit and now the money is being shut off. Changing metaphors, root canal work begins after the anesthetic wears off.

    So making endless cash available was a political decision to defuse social tension, but now it has been decided that politics must bow to the markets... we are expected to believe that the markets will decide the fate of nations, will decimate health care, education, pensions... and everybody is just going to resign themselves to that and say "Amen". People who believe this should take their eyes off the Bloomberg screen for a moment and read some history.

    We have finally come to a major debt crisis because it has never been politically possible in democracy to ask people to resign themselves to poverty. It still isn't. They tend to rebel, especially when they see that those who are telling them to "live within their means" are drawing huge salaries and bonuses. Any ruler should know that if there is nothing left in the larder to throw to the "wolves", the wolves will break inside and feed at will.

    The revolution of 1968 was about the freedom enjoy one's body as one wanted. At that time we had plenty of money, plenty of jobs and a good social net.

    We now are freer than ever in history to make love as we wish... now they want to take all the rest away.

    What is being cooked now is a huge social conflict... like 1968, but this time without the background of full employment; less festive, more "bread and butter", more widespread and more violent.

    The question will be can democracy survive it?

    Crossposted from http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Comments

    "...never been politically possible in a democracy to ask people to resign themselves to poverty"

    As Bert in the "Down East" series might say, "you caught a whoppah theya, David".

    More later, have to go out to a major american corporation's drive-through and consume faux food, and no godammit, for the last time, I don't want no frappe for breakfast.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:49am

    As I mentioned the other day I'm always perplexed by low economic sorts yelling "class warfare" in response to arguments about top heavy wealth distribution and it seems visceral more than ditto head prompted. And I think there is some kind of truth in the reaction even though they seem to be going against their own interests. I'm thinking the wealth distribution argument brings out the obverse, that wealth distribution is irreversible, and especially for them, they're out of the game and know it. Thus Democrats have confirmed their low economic situation. Also the double whammy that anyone really pitching the idea that their lot could change is immediately seen as a phony.

    The Republicans on the other hand are doing more scapegoating than saying they can change the situation. At least the scapegoating make them feel better.

    Of course you could say that the Democrats are scapegoating the rich. I don't know, just musing.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:47am

    There's a lot to agree with here David, but I think you need to adjust your storyline in one area - your idea that the crisis grew up around "the savings-less working poor," or poor people (NINJAs.)

    There are a lot of interests who want to focus this story on the working poor. But. A lot of the buildings which were hit initially, and which had taken out these wild mortgages, were multi-unit... and a lot were second homes.... In the second wave, as people began to be unemployed, it's not just working poor being hit, but a lot of families which massively overbought, and as one adult lost their job or saw their income hit, fell far below their ability to repay. Remember the locations of the great real estate busts. Nevada, Florida, Arizona and California lead the way, and not all of these in working-poor areas.

    I get a little irritable as this story - hitting the working poor - moves over into Democratic territory and takes hold. Because a lot of this stuff isn't about families buying their first home "who never should have bought," but are rather families moving up "whose eyes were bigger than their head."


    by quinn esq on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:50am

    I very much second that. The working poor might have been a part of this but the crisis was exacerbated by straight out gambling, people who had the means and took the risks and in many cases bought multiple houses. 


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 12:27pm

    Clarification:

    I don't blame the crisis on the working poor, you might say that I am more concerned on how it affects  them than how it affects wealthier people who were just having a flutter on the housing market.

    Another thing that is important to note also. There are a lot of people who are in fact working poor or who are about to become working poor, but who are not yet conscious of this fact. When and if they catch onto their true condition we might see some changes in the way things are done in the USA.

    Trying to keep people so excited about everything (terrorism, immigration, POTUS's birth certificate) except their true condition is one of the major roles of the media today.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 12:57pm

    That's a very good point, Quinn.  The other problem that I see is that David continually insists that we're about to see a wave of violence and totalitarianism, usually likening the present moment to Weimar Germany.  He doesn't do that here, but he does insist that violence, by which I take to mean civil unrest, is imminent in the U.S.  Like the thin Weimar analogy, there doesn't really seem to be much to this claim.  When was the last time there was any kind of serious rebellion in the U.S.?  Shay's rebellion?  The Whiskey rebellion?  The Civil War?  Probably the most salient example in recent history is the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but that was a rebellion that was largely executed by the means civil disobedience rather than direct violence.  To the extent that violence was used as an instrument of rebellion, this was essentially restricted to groups like SDS and the Weather Underground - mostly middle class white kids pursuing certain ideals.  But these were far from widespread uprisings on the part of the impoverished.  Even the Black Panthers made more of a show of force than actually employing its use.  And MLK was gunned down before he had much of a chance to pursue his goal of broadening his movement into a broad push for economic equality.

    One useful exercise might be to look at France right now.  Over a million people striking because Sarkozy wants them to retire two years later.  That's it and the trains stop, everyone out in the streets.  Obviously, for whatever the reasons are, Americans are a whole lot less prone to this kind of action presently.  The thing that looks the closest is the Tea Party, but those people either have no idea what's going on or they merely insist upon what's been the GOP platform for decades.  And they don't really do a whole lot other than scream next to incoherent signs.

    But I do think there is a salient question that surfaces in David's piece, which is what democracy means in an environment where money seems to be of increasing importance.  Many people are already too cynical to believe in an instrumental notion of voting.  What happens if and when the money game gets so awful that people don't even imbue voting with any symbolic meaning anymore?


    by DF on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 12:31pm

    I'm not worried about open, public, violence. At this point. I am worried about more and more people falling into some form of economic - and life - misery, whether counted by the statisticians or not. Also worried about what comes with that - despair... domestic violence... mean-spiritedness against "others." Not sure the Hard Right needs full-on violence, nor that it'd be easy/possible to do. As it is, they get to govern, outright, for 8 years, then manage their way through a completely bought off "Party of the People." Meanwhile, their wealth goes global, knowledge goes global, and the nation slides further into a pit. We've seen dozens of nations and regions fall down this slope before, but we're not really attuned yet to what it looks like, other than in its most violent and hysterical mode. That is, we may just see the sorts of decline that affected, say, the Industrial Cities of Northern Britain. Put another way, many many Detroits. 


    by quinn esq on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 2:28pm

    I think you're reading too specific a scenario into David's prediction of civil unrest, DF. He foresees doom and gloom, and a transformation of the existing social order, but not necessarily armed rebellion that topples the government. As I've said here before, I think his Weimar analogy is pretty accurate. There was plenty of violence in the German streets, but that wasn't how Hitler came to power. His party won the most seats, and he was constitutionally appointed chancellor. He even browbeat the Reichstag into letting him rule by decree. After that, of course, he dropped any democratic pretenses. My point is that it all had the veneer of legitimacy.

    That's why I share David's concerns about the deteriorating level of political discourse, of Glenn Beck and his ilk, and of the tea party. Things are being said and done that are openly hostile to the country's constitutional underpinnings. In Germany's last free election, the Nazis took only one-third of the votes. But their opposition was weak and disunited, so that didn't stop them. Look at the level of support the American Crazy Party already has, factor in a stalled recovery, soaring personal and government debt, loss of jobs and homes, a devalued dollar -- and tell me exactly where we should draw any optimism.


    by acanuck on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 5:58pm

    First of all, I don't think I'm reading too much into Seaton's doomsaying.  The record there is thick enough that I don't have to exaggerate it unless, of course, this somehow represents a departure from previous posts.  If it does, it's not really apparent.  And as for specifics, he's provided them himself: He thinks the present moment is exactly analogous to Weimar Germany - to the point that he actually parrots the same shit Beck says about this, replete with innumerate hand-flailing about imminent hyperinflation and all - and that everyone (read: the current middle-class) around the globe will be living in the equivalent of Brazilian favelas just outside of lavish gated communities for our plutocratic overlords.

    That's all straight from stuff he has written consistently and recently.  As for this post, all he said was "violence" so there's no really solid way to know what he meant.  I'm guessing that he'll be typically absent when it comes to responding to critiques of his work, so I'm not expecting clarification on that point.

    As for Weimar, I don't think it holds water at all.  Almost nothing about present-day America is similar to Weimar Germany.  It was a parliamentary democratic republic founded in the wake of WWI.  It didn't last twenty years.  Germany was under the heavy burden of reparations at the time.  They lacked a modern central banking system, which wouldn't even arrive in the US until the Depression.  They experienced one of the most significant hyperinflation events in recorded economic history.

    None of this is true about the US.  Our republic is over 200 years old.  The debts we're burdened by are our own, but they aren't even close to historical highs.  We have a modern central banking system that, while flawed, is capable of responses that Weimar Germany just didn't have in their toolbox.  We're fighting deflation, not inflation.  And there are far more differences.  We have a huge land-mass that Germany didn't.  We're not centered in the middle of Europe.  We have the Internet.  So many things are different that it's hard for me to understand why people who aren't Glenn Beck and Peter Schiff (and they both have very sound, self-interested reasons for scaring people with the boogieman of Weimar hyperinflation) actually think the parallel is sound.

    Just about the only thing that is similar is some of the rhetoric, but the reason for this is Ed Bernays' theory of propaganda, much loved and praied by Goebbels, is loved even more by modern American marketers.

    And while the American Crazy party has more support than I'd like, they can really only count on about 20%.  A great majority of the new-breed of supposed right-wing superstars are faltering as we speak.

    I think recent American history has much more to say about what's happening and where we're headed than does a brief period of German history from the last century.  I also think people get hung up on the atrocities that followed.  None of that stuff was even a necessary consequence of the shift that occurred in Germany, which is always the implication of the Weimar analogy - namely that we're on the verge of becoming full-blown Nazi Germany, Round Two - whether it's made explicit or not.

    If we want to look at a troubling period in the history of a foreign country for clues about what is happening in America, I think you'd find much stronger parallels in examining Japan's lost decade than Germany's Weimar Republic.

    As for optimism.. at least we're not battling the Plague!


    by DF on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 6:49pm

    Not yet!

    Agreed, you can take historic parallels only so far. America isn't pre-war Germany. And my fervent wish is that David is totally wrong, because if the U.S. goes off the rails a lot of other countries (specifically mine) are going to be in the crapper.

    But there are object lessons to draw from Weimar. One is how the corporatist elite fooled themselves into thinking they could ride the tiger of extremism, or keep it on a short leash. They failed. Another is that a civilized society that developed over centuries can be thrust back into barbarity in the relative blink of an eye. It happened.

    History doesn't fore-ordain anything -- not that the U.S. follows the German path into totalitarianism, slaughter and genocide, but also not that any of those things are impossible. I'd love to believe that's true but it's not. When society's institutions fail, you're thrown back on the resilience and character of the population. Americans are going to be tested. You obviously have faith they'll pass the test; I hope you're right.


    by acanuck on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 7:44pm

    at least we're not battling the Plague

    That will be next year's story to keep people's minds off of downward social moblity


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 1:17pm

    I think we are looking at what may possibly be something totally new and outside American cultural reference: a long period, stretching far into the future of low or near zero growth in any way relevant to the way the majority live, with rather frozen social mobility... Where every new generation lives a little worse than the one before.... then you could see some real violence.

    If you don't think Americans are capable of social violence, and the American government ready to employ as much brutality against Americans as against Iraqis (or Panamanians or Filipinos), for example, to repress it, than I think you should study the history of the American labor movement.

    Things have been quiet for a long, long time. Credit driven consumer capitalism and the Cold War created an artificial calm that has lasted so long that people have come to see it as normal.... Stay tuned.

     


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 1:10pm

    Well this is an interesting take on things.


    by Richard Day on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 1:38pm

    What is that saying about the 60s?  that if you remember them, you weren't there?  Maybe that was the 70s.  I certainly remember the 60s better but not exactly like you, David.  And I certainly have very few fond memories of so-called free love and the sexual revolution which often turned out to be more like what is described in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  Maybe it is a gender thing but I doubt it. 

    So Larkin was 42 when he first got laid? 

    Funny how I did not have to google Larkin to know that.  It is a consequence of the major paradigm shift I experienced when I learned that the author of 'This be the verse' was the same age as my father. :)

     


    by EmmaZahn on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 12:04pm

    It could be gender... I had a wonderful time myself. The Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar says that those were times when the only bad thing you could get from making love was a broken heart. I am glad to have been young then.Innocent


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 1:14pm

    "The Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar says that those were times when the only bad thing you could get from making love was a broken heart."

    Yeah, maybe not gender but definitely a difference in consequences for the sexes.

     


    by EmmaZahn on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 2:17pm

    I think because of the pill, women controlled the physical consequences of sex for the first time in history. This was liberating. Also abortion became more widely available too. Now obviously the chances of what Almodovar calls a "broken heart" grow with the multitude of opportunities. Are women more vulnerable to having their hearts broken than men? That's not for me as a man to say, or perhaps even to speculate about.

    However, if I had a young daughter today I would probably tell her what my granny would have told my mom long ago, "men only want one thing, honey" and if I had a son I would tell him, "if you can listen to her talk long enough you can bed practically any woman in the world"... and I would be often wrong on both counts... but right often enough for it to be serviceable advice.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 3:26pm

    If you are not worried, you don't understand what's going on. The American government is rife with fraud and financial crime. From the FBI, CIA to the founding families, the treasury is looted, Ft.Knox is empty and Wall Street is full of derivitives with no underlying value, and flash trading between computers.

     

    What passes for commerce is selling paper back and forth and weapons systems to state enemies. The rule of law is gone, the crimes are huge and no one is even investigated let alone indicted and tried and convicted.

     

    The prisons are full of drug users, who were arrested for using drugs, but are now in prisons where drugs are cheaper than on the street. Every prisoner costs the tax payers 35,000 dollars per year in incarceration costs, not to mention lost tax revenue.  Drugs are illegal, because the CIA needs a blackmarket to jack up prices so they can launder drug money and sell dope.

     

    This is the 21st century trembling towards collapse. Manipulated, prostituted, buggered, raped and mugged, lying in a gutter remains what is left of the middle class. Poverty is the new black, and there is room enough for everyone except the oligarchy. 1 in 5 children live in poverty in what was once the world's richest country.

    Foreclosure fraud, perjury and outright theft are now the hallmarks of our banking system. Washington D.C. is a cruel impotent joke, meant only to distract and destroy America. The constitution, the founding document and highest law of the land is merely 4400 words, while the Obama Healthcare bill is over 2,000 PAGES long. We are all criminals because the laws are so verbose, so technical and so lawyerly crafted as to make them impossible to understand let alone obey.

    The masses are sated with not bread and circuses but foodstamps and American Idol. When the power grid goes down, the darkness will be complete. A nation that cannot even feed itself, will starve in darkness.  Change or die, the future is waiting if you have the temerity to merely flex your fingertips and grasp that which is just beyond your reach.  Or you can die in darkness.

     


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 10/23/2010 - 2:28am

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