[A-List] "Recapitalization" Is Not "Nationalization"

[Charles Brown]

Sunday, October 12, 2008
"Recapitalization" Is Not "Nationalization" 
by Norman Markowitz

The major industrial capitalist countries today are in effect
purchasing "equity stakes" in major central banks, guaranteeing credit
and deposits, and seeking to "recapitalize" through state investments
and, hopefully, controls, a collapsing system. The Bush administration,
according to the press is beginning to follow suit,shifting gears away
from its $700 billion bailout.

While this is being called "partial nationalization" it is yet a
further exercise in state capitalism whose guarantees are primarily
aimed at insuring that the capitalist class retains its control over
capital.

Many theorists in the socialist and to a much lesser extent the later
Communist movements looked positively to aspects of state capitalist
development, seeing in its centralization, its placing of state controls
over capital, an important stepping stone on the road to the
transformation of a centralized advanced form of capitalism into
socialism. 

But without a strong workers movement(and Communists would say without
a strong Communist party to educate the working class and help to
coordinate its struggles) state capitalism can and has been a stepping
stone to open capitalist dictatorships in Germany, Italy and other
countries. Will these state capitalist interventions contain the crisis
and keep the "recession" from becoming a major depression? Will they
lead in the direction of working class revitalization or in the
direction of increased monopoly power. 

That will be decided by the struggles ahead, the political struggles in
the U.S. both before and especially after the election, especially the
struggles to alleviate what we might call the "peoples crisis,"
unemployment, loss of homes and other personal property, loss of access
to credit in an installment plan society, loss of pensions. While the
peoples crisis and the capitalists crisis, the crisis of the banks and
the stock market, the investors seeing their "portfolios" net worth
plummet, the business managers seeing their credit tighten greatly, are
inter-related, they affect different people in different ways, with the
former affecting most of the world's people, who own nothing butt their
labor. Senator Obama has talked about addressing the crisis "from the
bottom up," which I interpret as addressing the peoples crisis first. So
far that isn't being done. But it can be done and it is what has to be
done.

What is also interesting about the European governments actions is how
irrelevant the Bush administration and its policies are to what is
happening. Bush is in effect following Europe's lead, shucking and
jiving so to speak with neither a consistent policy or much
understanding of the developing crisis. If this is the world of "one
superpower," that the pundits were proclaiming after the fall of the
Soviet Union, it is a superpower straight out of Monte Python, with a
President for global silliness.

Meanwhile, McCain is running around, being booed by his own "base" for
telling them that Obama is not an "arab," but a good family man,
throwing in Bill Ayers while contending that the campaign should be kept
clean, and expressing anger when Representative John Lewis, who was
beaten into unconsciousnesses during the Freedom Rides in Alabama in
1961, accuses his campaign of "sowing hate" the way Alabama governor
George C. Wallace did in the 1960s, hate that reverberated in increased
violence against civil rights activists and peace activists. While the
Obama campaign and Lewis are backtracking from the Wallace comparison, I
wouldn't, in the sense that McCain's Town Meetings are filled with
"supporters" who are talking like George Wallace in the 1960s or worse.


Richard Nixon began to bring the George Wallace "base" (nearly 10
million votes in 1968) with coded appeals to racism and authoritarianism
under slogans like "law and order" and "silent majority." McCain is
using the "town meeting" format at this moment to have his supporters
talk like George Wallace in a non coded way, to create a sort of
audience participation racism and reaction while the world passes him,
his campaign and his party by.





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