krebscycle

One of the most consistent and loudest and falsest “criticisms from the left” of the Obama Administration has been that it failed to properly punish and re-regulate the financial sector. The criticism is usually heavily made up in populist cosmetics:  Main Street versus Wall Street, the 99% versus the 1%,  oligarchs versus the people – that kind of stuff.  The substance of the critique, however, is conservative and elitist and it confirms an insight of a pair of German sociologists from the 1800s about how ideas become entrenched in our consciousness. They wrote:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force

Our society is ruled by financiers and  our ideas are suffused with financial concepts, values, and slogans. We inhabit a mental world in which “shareholder value”, “business model”, “market value”,  “liquidity” , and other terms of the art are ubiquitous even when we don’t really understand what they are supposed to mean. And in this shared world view, finance is the center of the universe. Our two Victorian age critics went on to say:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

We are not just automatons but it is damn hard to think outside the box. This was true for the authors I am quoting far more than they realized, and it is  still true even if you are a really smart professor at Brooklyn College or Harvard or write for The Nation or Harpers and you have books by Zizek on your very own bookshelf and immediately recognized the much cited but rarely understood quote I’m basing this article on. Even if you don’t watch cable TV and have a vest and charming goatee you are, like us miserable peasants, subject to the ideas of the dominant class. The logic of finance and the stories of finance are all around us, we grow up in this environment and it affects and limits how we think. That’s why the “left” critics of the Obama administration, generally not the sharpest knives in the drawer, agreed with their right wing counterparts that finance, specifically banking, is what matters. They look up and see that the right and the (boo, hiss) neoliberals advocated deregulating finance and they then conclude that re-regulating finance is the correct party line.

Just for a moment, let’s think about “re-regulating banking” as a program for left-wing reform.  What a piss poor, timid and pitiful effort. We’ve had years and years now of the whole left-liberal spectrum attempting to rally the masses to proposals like “re-institute Glass-Steagall” or “prosecute bankers”. How embarrassing.  We end up with a bizarre situation where the aim of strident left-wing rhetoric is to extol the economic and social system of the USA in the good old days before the neoliberals dismantled  New Deal banking regulation. You know, the 1950s, when things were great for regular people – apparently this means first world white men (Whoops! Could it be that the racist and sexist ideas of the dominant class also influence our super enlightened political commissar class? Perish the thought).

Maybe we could be really adventurous and think about perhaps alternatives to the system where private banking, regulated or not, controls investment. In that case, we might pay more attention to effects of the stimulus bill (which funded, among other things, an electric car industry), the reorganization of the auto industry, the health care reform, and other Obama administration efforts which might, if we are lucky, serve to lessen the control finance exerts on society. Or not. We could just stick to our cardboard cutout model of the world and write indignant screeds to Salon about how the Obama Administration was disappointing us.

Here’s the rest of the paragraph from Karl Marx and Fred Engels, who were smart people, tragically limited by the Victorian Age in which they lived. But this was a good insight.

The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

Nice work boys, too bad your political ideas were junk and your economics was imperialist.

POSTSCRIPT 2025.

This seems to me to stand up well, if anything it is more true after the Biden administration. It would be ridiculous to expect that the “left” which paid no attention to Biden’s ambitious legislation at the time except to condemn it unread, could make any effort to consider how the net effect of Obama and Biden’s changes continue to ripple through society even in the midst of the counter-reconstruction. The concept of long term processes is even less popular among our left intellectuals than dialectics.