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.
