[Marxism] Is the bailout "Marxist"?

[guava tree]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote:

> (As soon as I get a chance, I am going to refute this bullshit about
> Henry Paulson's "socialist" measures.)


On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Sky Keyes-Vogt <skeyesvogt at gmail.com>wrote:

> I was drawn to the ISO early on when I became politicized (I was coming
> from
> the Green Party)... but when I read their line in their paper in the 'about
> us' section that states "Cuba has nothing to do with socialism" I was
> really
> turned off.  Say what you will about the degree to which they are socialist
> or not, but to say that have NOTHING to do with socialism is some straight
> up slander in my view.  No step that Cuba ever took, nothing they ever did
> has ANYTHING to do with socialism?  I'm inclined to disagree.  All the
> same,
> I run into ISO activists that I respect and work with.
>

These issues of naming, of labeling, of signifying seems to be a crucial
issue in politics and left politics especially. Also the recent discussion
of "communist" versus "socialist". Seems to me that the obsession over
labels has a lot to do with the psychological component, when there is a
dominant system, ie, capitalism, how people tend to identify with that
system rather than interrogate it. Saying Cuba has "nothing to do with
socialism" is like saying the USA has "nothing to do with democracy".
There's more than a few libraries of evidence against American "democracy",
but at the same time there has been a certain type of democratic process and
struggle in the USA for sure. Negation, as Freud wrote about (in a way that
brought up not a few avenues of attack to his critics), often has more to do
with repressing the itch and fixating on the itch of what is being negated
rather than expressing or proving a "truth". I certainly agree with Louis
that Paulson and Bernanke's nationalization has nothing to do with
"Socialism", though it is a radical enough gesture to "raise a red flag" for
right wingers, libertarians, anti-communists, what have you. This
nationalism of assets (and American capitalism in general?) seems to deserve
the title of "state capitalist", though I haven't read Cliff so I don't
exactly the specifics of his argument. More and more and more evidence shows
that contemporary capitalism is safeguarded by the power in Washington, the
white house, the capitol, the pentagon.

I'm riffing here, but the issue of naming is rich territory for more
analysis and is a challenge to overcome in order to frame our debate as
capitalism enters this 2008 crisis. As words keep their spelling and
pronunciation, material reality changes.

here's some Ellen Meiksins Wood to chew on from her essay "Demos vs. 'We,
The People'"

For the Federalist in particular, ancient democracy was a model expicitly to
> be avoided; it was mob rule, the tyranny of the majority, and so on. But
> what made this such an interesting conceptual problem was that, in the
> conditions of Post-Revolutionary America, they had to reject the ancient
> democracy notin the name of an opposing political ideal, not in the name of
> oligarchy, but in the name of democracy itself.{snip}
>

We're in a not totally unsimilar bind now, having to reject the notion of
this "socialism" of paulson and bernanke in the name of socialism itself.