Holiday Hiatus

We'll be taking a break for the next three weeks. See you in the new year!

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Where will the anger go: reaction or resistance? by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

As might be expected in hard times, there is a lot of anger around. Much depends on how it is directed. I'd like to make some very brief remarks on the possibilities.

All too often, public anger and frustration about hardship and uncertainty is vented not at the powerful elites who benefit, but at the nearest and most vulnerable scapegoats. The forms this takes may range from reactionary anti-union, anti-immigrant, or anti-public sector chatter on comment threads to brutal hate crimes like the killing of Jose Sucuzhanay, who was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat while his attackers yelled anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs. Now, of course, neither anti-union sentiment nor hate crimes are limited to recessions, but there is reason to suppose that we will see an increase in both as the economic crisis deepens: it is an all-too-familiar story. Recently-released FBI figures for 2007 suggest a rise in anti-Latino hate crimes (and anti-gay hate crimes, but a drop in hate crimes overall); history suggests the disastrous consequences if such reactionary trends are left to proceed unchecked.

Some recent events, however, offer another possible story: the anti-bailout rallies on Wall Street, the astonishing victory of the workers at Republic Windows in Chicago, countrywide protest marches against government cutbacks in Ireland, the continuing unrest in Greece. While it is unlikely that all involved in these events experienced an epiphany of class consciousness, we can say at least that their anger was, broadly, on target (if not, perhaps, grounded in a highly systematic analysis); I think we can say, further, that many "ordinary people"-- a curious phrase, I have always thought-- are rather rapidly coming to the realization that their interests just are not the same as the interests of Henry Paulson and his erstwhile officemates on Wall Street.

The "conventional wisdom" usually dispensed in response to recessions is meeting increased skepticism and resistance. Unconditional bank bailouts and severe cuts to public services are not inevitable, "no brainer" responses to economic crisis: they are the result of a very clear and deliberate choice to support the interests of the economically privileged and not those of workers. Budget gaps could be filled by reducing military spending or increasing taxes on the rich, but instead, policymakers choose to cut services upon which middle-class and working-class people depend: healthcare, education, mass transit, fire departments, and so on.

The next step is to see these policy choices not so much as reprehensible actions by individuals but as structural parts of a system-- capitalism-- and that this system, because produced by human choice and action, can be changed or replaced. It is not the only, ultimate, or inevitable system: it arose at a specific time, under specific conditions, and there is no reason that we cannot do better. Marx offers us a way to see an alternative, but he did not sketch the details of that alternative: that's up to us.

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