America's Disingenuous Political System by Matias Bulnes, NYC

I have yet to hear an explanation of Ms. Palin's potential contribution as vice president of the US (and, let us not forget, possible president). All I hear is “women will vote for her,” “she is a hockey mother,” “it’s a smart move given the Democratic primaries,” etc. If we focus on her political credentials, the picture is rather unflattering. She has some political experience at the middle administrative level and none at the high level. Her academic training is far from impressive and she acquired her first passport a few months ago. As a result, she seems to be notoriously unprepared on international politics and diplomacy. Why would anyone think that she can be a good vice president? Except for a few million voters I suspect that nobody thinks she would be a good vice president. In fact, I should suspect that not even republicans believe so, on pain of disrespecting their political acumen.

But despite my suspicion the media has mostly welcomed Palin’s nomination (fortunately with some exceptions). Everybody seems to be celebrating the cleverness of the McCain campaign in making this move. And yet I can’t help the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with decisions like this. In this article I will explore what possible justification can ground a decision that by all informed standards jeopardizes the future of the country. I want to pay special attention to the insincerity of decisions such as McCain’s where the politician who makes them knows that they won’t benefit the country. I do not intend to mount a critique of the Republican Party in particular since I believe democrats acquiesce in the same logic—though perhaps with some more scruples. Ultimately I want to invite reflection on what kind of democracy can be built upon such a disingenuous political system and whether it is worth having.

Rightly or wrongly, making political decisions on purely instrumental grounds is widely condoned in the American media and, derivatively, by American society. It is, for example, assumed that politicians care more about winning elections than about principles such as authenticity or sincerity. Journalists and political analysts would not talk about the “real motive” underlying a political move ever so lightly if it wasn’t routinely accepted by the audience that politicians are usually insincere about their real motives. But as much as authenticity and sincerity are normally considered values, the obsession with winning elections has been justified in the liberal tradition in terms of a consumer-based conception of the political system (sometimes also called interest-group politics). According to this view, voters are consumers and political parties are suppliers of political projects designed to fit their preferences. As a consequence, the real motives of politicians are irrelevant; what matters is that their projects satisfy the consumers, hence that they win elections. This view of the political system relies on the hope that by pursuing politics in this market-like way the best optimum will be achieved—and moreover, in a way that doesn’t required a debate about the good.

But I doubt that McCain’s decision (as many others from all parties) can be justified in terms of this consumer-based model. For it would be analogous in an economic market to the case of a supplier selling a defective product to a costumer that he knows wants it out of ignorance or confusion. McCain should know perfectly well that Ms. Palin is hardly qualified for the US presidency in times of an unmanageable war, a looming economic crisis, an empowering China, etc. But instead of warning American voters of their crucial mistake he is happy to use it in his own benefit. Even raging liberals should agree that there is something deeply problematic about economic relations with such a crucial disparity in information.

One way in which the liberal could reply is by setting the responsibility on the Obama campaign to overlook McCain’s decisions and expose their flaws to the public light. Hence, should McCain’s choice of Palin be ultimately harmful to the US, the political system will react to it and eventually punish McCain with a defeat. But like with so many liberal arguments, their faith in the control power of the market is based on an ideal of social organization that is rarely instantiated in reality. In practice, this blind faith has earned the US 8 years of an erratic political leadership that has brought a previously healthy country to a state of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. But more important for the purposes of this essay is the observation that the political agents themselves know that the consumer-based model is at best a rough approximation to reality and bet on its imperfections. There can be little doubt that if the McCain campaign did after all choose Palin for instrumental reasons, they were aware of her profound political deficiencies and banked on the fact that the Obama campaign will not be able to turn the public attention to them in the short time before the general election. Not only doesn’t the political system guarantee an optimum outcome of the democratic process but politicians exploit the naïve expectation that it will.

The alternative to the liberal conception of political systems is unsurprisingly the social democratic one. The contrast between these views is usually brought out in terms of two opposite conceptions of political freedom introduced by Isaiah Berlin. But McCain’s decision can also make for a good illustration of the contrast. I suspect McCain chose Palin knowing that to be an overall bad decision for the country but based on public acclaim. This could be deemed acceptable only if we see the job of the politician as being the representation of the people’s preferences. But in the social democratic conception, rather than the people’s preferences, the job of the politician is to represent the people’s interest. In particular, making a political decision that goes against the interest of the nation but that has public approval is a violation of the duty of the politician. This together with the inevitable feeling that McCain is patronizing the people of the US, is perhaps what explains my discomfort with the choice of Palin. A democracy where politicians carry themselves in such a disingenuous way and voters are treated like means to seize political power sounds to me like a sham or, in any case, like a democracy not worth having.

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Personal responsibility and systemic problems, part 2 by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

This is part two of a two-post sequence. The first, below, was published earlier this summer, and focused on class, race, and gentrification.

Related questions of personal responsibility arise in connection with environmental issues. Many urbanites are becoming more conscious of their impact on the environment and various changes in lifestyle that can reduce it. Many are making efforts to reduce their carbon footprint and generally consume less; they are growing their own food in private or community gardens and urban farms, or are shopping at farmer's markets, food co-ops, or joining a local CSA (community supported agriculture); they are switching to organic, non-toxic or less toxic, and/or energy efficient products. For example, I spent some of this weekend researching recipes for making cleaning products from vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, and baking soda, and look forward to making the switch from bleaches and artificial chemical sprays; gradually my partner and I are switching to CFL lightbulbs; we now buy electricity from renewable sources. It's not enough, of course: we still contribute too much C02, too much toxic waste. Is it a matter of personal moral responsibility? Am I personally responsible for the effects of water pollution caused by the detergent I used in my laundry yesterday? I cannot deny that I put the detergent in the machine, and that detergent made its way to a river and a sea, where it is going to harm the environment. I know this, and I could have paid extra for a less polluting brand instead of buying a bottle of wine for Sunday dinner. But I didn't.

A Marxist friend chides me for this sort of talk: it's not about you. It's the system. Blaming yourself and thinking you can change things by buying "green" or even getting involved in a CSA or urban agriculture is merely a distraction from the overall task, which is to replace capitalism. Go ahead and do these things if it makes you feel good, but don't think you are thereby fulfilling a moral responsibility. If you want to really do something, get involved in revolutionary politics focused on changing the entire system.

I find myself in sympathy with both sides to some extent here. I share the Marxist view that the overall task is to replace capitalism. Capitalism is-- among other things!-- inherently unsustainable and destructive from an ecological standpoint. Merely becoming a 'green' consumer will not change the overall dynamic: it is constant growth of consumption and production for profit that is the problem. We simply cannot have a model of economic success that is based on "growth" rather than human need. What is more, capitalism distributes environmental burdens unfairly: the poorest people and the poorest countries suffer disproportionately from the effects of global warming and pollution. Wealth and privilege can, to a large extent, allow you to buy your way out of these risks (of course, things will likely reach a point where even this is not possible). Inequality produced by capitalism also means that being a 'green' consumer is a luxury. Of course, we could always just consume less, but how realistic an option is it for most working people in the US, for example, to head off to a mountain somewhere and live "off-grid"-- off the consumer society grid as well as the electricity grid? I'm not packing my suitcase just yet: I love the city, the movies, the cheap seats at the Met opera, the art, the food. If we stay on the grid, so to speak, it can be very expensive to 'consume green', and where it is cheap, it usually involves more time (either time spent researching alternatives, or time implementing the change).

In a previous Intervention, I wrote about food justice issues both globally and locally in New York City. Many people and groups have responded to the problem of unequal access to healthy food by engaging in urban farming or community gardening, by shopping at farmer's markets, or buying a share in a CSA scheme. These initiatives offer alternatives to our current, dysfunctional, TNC-mediated relationship with food. Is getting involved with these alternatives just a matter of making ourselves feel good personally, or do they at least offer the potential of being genuine responses to the problems just described, and therefore a potentially morally and politically significant kind of action? The orthodox Marxist-Leninist will say: "Join the Communist Party and organize with them to try to eliminate capitalism. There's no other game in town if you are serious about social change". I agree, as I've said above, with the aim of replacing capitalism (with some sort of libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism, if you're asking-- I'm open on models just as long as there's no wage labor, and no repression). But I disagree that Being In The Party and fighting the big, abstract fight of eliminating capitalism is the only way of doing revolutionary anticapitalist politics. Depending on how it's done, urban farming and the like can be just as much part of the struggle, as well as being genuinely valuable and morally recommendable in itself. How?

First, urban farming (for example) provides a space for conversations that would not otherwise happen; simply talking with fellow activists or urban farmers about the reasons they have become involved and the insights they have gleaned from it may be an exercise in consciousness raising (for all concerned). For some, getting involved in this sort of concrete activity may raise a lot of good questions about the broader social context. Food justice is not a discrete problem; the more one learns about it, the more one realizes that it is related to a host of other issues, with capitalism-- among other things-- underlying all of them.

Second, urban farming is one way of creating a detailed vision of how the future could be. It is all very well to talk vaguely about how great life would be without capitalism and other forms of oppression and domination. It is quite another to spell out how people could work together without it, successfully providing for the needs of their families and communities. A well-run community garden or urban farm might raise the eminently reasonable question: "Why couldn't more areas of activity be organized like this?" In the US especially, we are so used to hearing that it's not realistic to expect people to work together for common goals. It can be powerful to see an everyday, real-life, ground-level example of people doing just that.

Third, urban farming is one among many fronts of struggle against the status quo. That 'status quo' has many elements-- capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental destruction, militarism, the security state, imperialism, etc.-- so it makes sense that the struggle against it should be just as multifaceted. The danger, of course, is that single issue campaigns will focus on solving their problem through compromise with elites-- for example, 'business unionism', mainstream liberal feminism, HRC and other gay rights groups who seem more interested in cultivating corporate partners than in making common cause with all oppressed people. There is no easy way out of this problem, to be sure; what seems important is what kind of analysis we bring to our various activities. In this sense, it's all about making connections.

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Repressive measures at the RNC

Another RNC, another dismaying tale of repression on the streets. You wouldn't know it to look at the mainstream media coverage of the conventions, but there is a major crackdown on free expression happening in St. Paul (as there was to a somewhat less dramatic extent in Denver). Journalists have been assaulted and arrested for doing their jobs; activist groups planning peaceful protests or engaged in monitoring police behavior at those protests have been subjected to preemptive raids and detentions. Police have used pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades on demonstrators.
You would think that all of this would be front page news; it would be if it happened pretty much anywhere else (or, at any rate, in Bad Countries We Don't Like), and yet, of course, it is hardly mentioned in the mainstream corporate media.
When a journalist as well-known as Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, is arrested for doing her job, we should be particularly alarmed. It's the sort of thing that police states do to show everyone that they can silence whomever they want. This might have its intended effect, which is to discourage dissent and make people frightened, but it might also alert people to the seriousness of the threat to our civil liberties and prompt them to take action. I fervently hope it's the latter.

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