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.

Loud & Clear DIscussion of Diversionary Personalization of Coronavirus Debate (4/22/2020)

Beyond Republican vs. Democrat: The need for systemic change in U.S. healthcare

The U.S. government at all levels is consumed by infighting over how to respond to the Coronavirus pandemic. A right wing mobilization supported by President Trump is demanding that the economy reopen against the guidance of public health experts, but is the Democratic Party’s single-minded focus on the personality of Donald Trump drawing attention away from the systemic changes needed to save lives? Jim Kavanagh, the editor of thepolemicist.net, whose latest article in The Polemicist and forthcoming on CounterPunch is “Joe or No,” joins the show.

Listen to "Beyond Republican vs. Democrat: The need for systemic change in U.S. healthcare" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

“Taxpayer Money” Threatens Medicare-for-All (And Every Other Social Program)

-Apocryphal (often spuriously attributed to Mark Twain)

Three assertions:

• There is no such thing as “taxpayer money.”


• Taxes do not pay for government spending. (Nor does debt. No revenue is needed.)


• Leftists who continue to talk as if “taxpayer dollars” must be collected to “pay for” government programs are undermining Medicare-for-all and every other progressive policy initiative. 

I know these assertions run counter to an economic ideology that has been ingrained in us as obvious and irrefutable, known for sure. And I know how easy and seemingly effective it is to say things like: “Look at all the taxpayer dollars going to the military. We should spend some of those taxpayer dollars on healthcare instead.” But I want to show, with specific examples, why using this language is a bad idea—a really bad idea.

Maggie’s Farm

There are two reasons why it's important to stop talking like this: 1) Because it's not true, and 2) Because it perpetuates an ideology of how money and public financing work that is not only false, but profoundly reactionary and politically damaging—that is designed to, and will, impede achieving the most basic progressive goals.

Let's deal with the second point first, since I know a lot of leftists won’t overcome their resistance to understanding and promoting an economic proposition that runs counter to the common wisdom unless they can see the political point of it.

Consider the logic of this language: If government spending depends on tax revenue, if the government—the public authority—is an empty pocket that has to be filled with dollars that originate in the private pockets of “taxpayers,” that means public wealth depends on private wealth. That means private wealth is the source, the wellspring from which the public treasury draws; It means that, without large concentrations of private wealth (which are subject to the highest rates of taxation), the public authority cannot function.

Is that not precisely the theoretical grounding of capitalist socio-economic theory in its most regressive Thatcherite form?

If that's true, we are then in a polity where those who pay more dollars in taxes have a prima facie credible claim to demand more influence on the use of those dollars by the public authority—i.e., more political power. After all, the government depends on them; they are its donors, the breadwinners of this household, the source of its wealth. In a taxpayer/donor-financed polity, you can debate whether "taxation is theft" and to what extent “winners”—i.e., meritorious taxpayers—are paying for “losers” and “moochers”—i.e., “undeserving” non-taxpayers. It’s a polity where social programs of universal benefit exist at the sufferance—whether forced or voluntary—of the wealthy, subject to constant negotiation about how far that should go.

This is the paradigm of noblesse-oblige, welfare-state capitalism, whether more or less “generous,” where the public authority—the federal government—must go hat in hand to the wealthy to pay for public services.

Fool Me Twice: Trojan Horse Democrats Pile Into the House of Single-Payer

Duplicitous Democrats are trying to sabotage single-payer, again.

It’s great that more than a third of Democratic senators have signed on to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All bill. It’s a potentially strong bill that’s been welcomed by single-payer activist organizations like Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and National Nurses United (NNU), and it represents a victory for the tireless work of single-payer activists and the popular pressure they stoked. It is also, we must recognize, only possible because of Bernie’s insistent promotion of healthcare as a right, in a campaign that widened the field of American political discourse.

Above all, it is a result of continuing disgust with American for-profit health insurance system. It marks the exasperation with Obamacare’s half-assed attempt to patch up that system, and the rejection of the even crueler Republican schemes. 

At the very least, this bill puts single-payer “on the table” of legislative action and public discussion. The “public discussion” part is perhaps the most important. People will now hear about single-payer, and its advocates will not be completely shut out of media coverage from Fox to PBS, as they are now. Even the Democratic Party will have to talk about it.

But please, please, do not be fooled. It does not mean that most, or any, of those co-sponsoring Democratic senators actually support single-payer. Most of those Democrats have signed on because they felt politically forced to, because they knew they could not face their constituents if they didn’t. But many of them do not support single-payer, have no intention of actually working to make it happen, and will, in fact, do their best to undermine and prevent it.