The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

 The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

Jim Kavanagh

Am I missing something or is there much less concern than one might expect in the country over the fact that the government is shut down?

I understand that each of the protagonists—the Trump administration and the Democrats—knows its own fundamental weakness in this situation and hopes it can turn the other’s weakness to its advantage, if played carefully enough. But I repeat: the government is shut down, for over a month now, with no end in sight. Thousands of people are getting laid off, thousands of businesses and millions of people aren't being paid or receiving services, scores of programs and agencies are being suspended or eliminated. Forty-two million people are about to lose their SNAP benefits, and millions will see their health insurance premiums soar. Flights are being cancelled as air traffic controllers are laid off. The country should be up in arms. Why isn’t it? Why the big—actually, moderate—yawn?

Well, maybe because paralysis is the normal state of affairs for the U.S. government. The budgetary process is now comprised of an infinite chain of Continuing Resolutions, Supplementary Appropriations, and Debt Ceiling fights. There is no agreed-upon concept of what the federal government is or what it should be doing.  Though our entire social economy depends on and is structured by it, there is no understanding of why this is so or how it works. People perceive “the government” as some kind of strange animal they have to live with that sometimes brings food and favors, sometimes goes wild and attacks the neighbors or the siblings, and spends a lot of time busying itself with tasks that no one understands. And, of course, an animal that lives off the food (taxes) it eats from our hands. Or something like that. It’s more than that people don’t have a dog in the fight; it’s that they don’t know what the dog in it is.

This is a nice example, a political instance, of what Marxism calls alienation —the phenomenon where social subjects become estranged from the process and products of their own labor, which they confront as strange, alien entities and forces with which they have little, and largely antagonistic, relation. This occurs because the process and product of their labor is not under their control. In this case, the political process of producing a government and the government produced by it, though nominally an expression of the people’s will expressed through elections, are not actually under the people’s control.

It's under the control of the same ruling class, which appropriates the political power that flows from people’s hands and uses it for the ruling class’s own antagonistic interests, in the same way that the ruling class takes the economic wealth the people’s labor created and turns it against them.

The ruling class wants the people alienated from the “government” and confused about what it is. The ruling class does not want the polity to have clear lines of political authority that derive from the people, that the people can understand and, heaven forfend, exercise.

The vaunted Constitution itself, written by and for an uneasy coalition of propertied commercial and slaveholding interests, prevents this. Its patchwork of imprecisely delineated executive, legislative, and judicial—not to mention federal and state—powers that gets constantly re-negotiated. “Checks and balances”—a bicameral legislature (now with default filibuster) often politically divided between its houses and/or politically opposed to the executive, judicial review, a rat’s nest of inconsistent and opaque electoral systems scattered among states and counties—function, as intended, to impede and divert any program of fundamental change, especially from the unpropertied classes. Absent a structurally difficult legislative and presidential landslide (of the type we last saw with Obama), the only path for realizing any such program—of the right or left—is pushing the ill-defined limits of executive power to the max and inviting a showdown and shutdown.

The result-—the intended result-—is political confusion, antagonism, and paralysis. That suits the ruling class, which prefers to exercise real, controlling political and economic power in its own opaque ways behind ideological and constitutional confusion.

Indeed, paralysis and shutdown are now the norm. The government is always on the verge of, in an implicit state of, shutdown over some issue or another. And for the laissez-faire/Tea Party/Freedom Caucus/Friedmanite and Thatcherite Republicans, any issue will do. Shutting down the government is the goal. The Democrats, and even Trump and some Republicans, may think they’re playing a game of positional electoral advantage, but the Russell Vought/Heritage faction driving this shutdown is playing in a different league entirely. They are seeking to fully accomplish the mission set forth in reactionary manifestos from the Powell memo to Project 2025, which mandate no less than the eradication of any “social” ethic like that underlying New Deal social welfare policies, and the complete commitment of “small” government to the interests of “business,” with austerity for everyone else.

The ability of a people to think about themselves as part of a society working for the general welfare has been replaced by a collection of individuals fearful of a rapacious “government” stealing their “taxpayer money.”

In his talk to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Lindsey Graham summed up the entire ethic of right-wing American capitalism quite nicely: "I feel good about where we're going as a nation. We're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes."

Somewhat like the Israelis see Gaza not as moment to gain another incremental advantage but as the opportunity to finally “finish ‘48” and get rid of the Palestinians once and for all, these reactionary laissez-faire capitalists see the Trump administration, and this shutdown, not as a moment to gain electoral advantage but as the opportunity to finally kill off—“drown”—the entire apparatus and concept of a state with any kind of social purpose beyond facilitating private profit-making. (As well as guaranteeing capitalist rule throughout the “free world” and Zionist rule in Palestine—necessary exceptions to the “small” government rule.)

They are out to reverse time—on a socio-cultural level, back to before there was any awareness of and accounting for destructive historical realities like American racism and imperialism, and, on a socio-economic level, before there was any awareness of and accounting for the destructive effects of capitalism. In other words, before New Deal ameliorative policies. In other words, back to the time of depression. Miller, Vought, Trump, Freedom Caucus and such Republicans, driven by the superficial, antisocial “libertarianism” that has been so successfully transplanted into the minds of many Americans, are done with reformist attempts to ameliorate, and outright reject any critique of, naked capitalism. They want the government to be shut down. They are not negotiating about that, and are therefore likely to stare down the Democrats who are.

Thus, despite the political damage Republicans will likely suffer—as people see their health insurance bills jump thousands of dollars a month, forty-two million lose food stamps, thousands of flights are delayed and cancelled—“small/no government” enthusiasts are acting on principle, and to real effect. They will have eliminated thousands of jobs and scores of programs, many of which won't be coming back. And, importantly, they will have demonstrated—precisely with those high health insurance bills—how terribly unaffordable the federal government is.

Nothing better illustrates how insulting to the people this whole process is than the ostensible issue over which the Republicans and Democrats are fighting: the extension of ACA health insurance subsidy payments. This is a direct result of Obama deliberately blocking any public health insurance plan in favor of what Obama himself called a “Republican idea”—"the same plan” crafted by “the same advisers” as Romney’s plan in Massachusetts—that saves and subsidizes private, for-profit healthcare. That’s why the health insurance industry loved it!

Here's what I wrote about it in 2016:

Thus, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), christened Obamacare… is—as its Republican ancestry makes clear, and the smartest conservatives understood—based on the capitalist, anti-social imperative to reject the possibility of taking public responsibility for the common good, in favor of insisting on a program of dispersed, “mandated” individual private purchases.

It’s also a boondoggle, designed by Obama and the health industry lobbyists who wrote it to save their capitalist industry, the source of their enormous personal wealth.

So, both Democrats and Republicans are now fighting over a Republican plan—the Democrats, shrewd capitalists that they are, fighting to save it and the private health insurance regime it perpetuates with subsidies, and the Republicans, stupid capitalists that they are, fighting to destroy it,—because eliminating the subsidies will destroy the private health insurance industry, whose unsubsidized premiums no one can afford.

What the Republicans are succeeding in is showing the true cost of the ACA. They’ll say: “If your premiums are going from $500 to $1500 a month, it’s because the government was paying that $1000 of your 'taxpayer money' to the insurance companies—not even to doctors. The Democrats and the ACA were just hiding how expensive it is. We can’t afford it.” The Democrats say: “The Republicans are depriving you of health insurance by stopping the government from paying that $1000. The government must use 'taxpayer money' to pay that subsidy to the for-profit health insurance companies (not even to doctors).”  They are fighting over terrible vs. worse terrible versions of the private health insurance industry, whose intrinsic purpose is to maximize profit by denying healthcare (payments to actual doctors).

Neither is talking about the only reasonable alternative—a public, single-payer, universal-coverage (Medicare-for-All) program—funded by public, not “taxpayer” money—which would eliminate feeding the >$20 million compensation of for-profit health insurance CEOs and pay healthcare providers directly, is the only way to control costs, and is tremendously popular. The Republicans are known to blatantly oppose any such public program, on principle. The Democrats disguise their equally adamant (“never, ever”) opposition to any such program behind occasionally accommodating rhetoric, and, with their allied media, have worked hard over the last three election cycles to quash the idea of it within their own constituency, and reinforce the reactionary anti-social “market” and “taxpayer” ideology that arms the anti-government Republicans.

The entire plot of this conflict drama revolves around the protagonists fighting over whether the government can, with what tax payments, afford to pay for certain programs. I cannot overemphasize how wrong and counter-productive this is for those trying to save social programs, let alone seek any healthcare reform like single-payer. The left’s misunderstanding of the source and purpose of taxes, the inability to recognize that the federal government, because it creates money at will, can fund any programs it wants, and taxes pay for none of them, feeds the inability to understand the purpose and function of the ”government” and the “anti-government/anti-tax” ideology that permeates all social classes.

If you continue arguing about how much and from whom to raise taxes to pay for things, you will lose. Because both parties reinforce “taxpayer money” ideology, people making $40K a year, and paying little income tax, resent that their “tax money” goes for healthcare and food for people who pay less or no tax, and when you tell them that you’ll raise taxes on billionaires some more, and theirs just a little bit more, it doesn’t help. Please understand how much truer and politically better to tell them: “Your taxes do not pay for any healthcare or food stamp, or air-traffic control program we have or might devise,” that neither their nor the billionaires’ taxes pay for any federal program, that workers in fact pay too much tax and their biggest tax hit—the irrelevant payroll taxes, which FDR himself said were not “a matter of economics, they’re straight politics”—should be abolished. Say that, and the whole “Why should I pay taxes for…” discourse evaporates.

As does any reason for a shutdown.

Don’t say that, and—whichever political party gains electorally from it—you will come away with perpetual shutdown, with more and more elements of the “government”—i.e., the means of, and even the ability to think about, providing for the general welfare of society—constantly whittled away. Because “affordability”.

The purpose of taxes is not to raise revenue but to control inequality and inflation, and we should raise income taxes only on those who have too much money, for those objectives. Tax cuts for the working class are as important as tax hikes for billionaires, and neither has anything to do with the government paying for things.

Another important, and potentially positive, result of this shutdown rigmarole and the anti-social ideologies underlying it, is a crisis level of political disaffection. People do not believe that either (political) party to this “shutdown” fight really wants, or knows how, to solve the problems they are fighting about. And they are right, precisely because underlying the whole shutdown drama—the only reason for a shutdown—is a fictional script about financing that generates heated conflict over a problem that cannot be solved, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a deliberately staged tragi-comedy of error.

I’m terribly pessimistic because I think none (least of all the Democratic Party) will, but until the ostensibly “progressive” players in this—and more importantly, the audience—stop arguing about taxes and affordability, and drop the laughably false “taxpayer money” framework about government financing that drives this Punch-and-Judy show, we’ll be stuck in it—shutdown, paralyzed, and getting pummeled—forever.

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