MEDIA VIEWPOINT: Capitalism in crisis

JUST OVER a year from now Americans will be deciding whether to re-elect Barack Obama or … probably Mitt Romney writes Alexander Cockburn in the UK First Post.

In the latter case this is to assume that Mitt, a Mormon and family man, doesn’t, like one of his rivals for the Republican nomination – Herman Cain – get caught up in the dreadful minefield known as “charges of sexual harassment”.

Study recent photographs of the broken Frenchman named Dominique Strauss-Kahn if you want to be reminded of what such charges can do to a candidate for high office.

Do any of the present candidates, Obama included, offer an answer to America’s dreadful situation – a crisis caused by 40 years of neo-liberal onslaught? They do not, because there is no answer available within the terms and boundaries of the present system.

The middle class is – at least two-thirds of it – crashing into penury. Americans’ store of value and savings – the house – is worthless; social safety nets have eroded; students emerge from higher education crushed by debt.
Thirty million Americans are without work or working part-time. Nearly six million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African-Americans have endured the greatest loss in collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitch-forked into penury and desperation.

This is the mulch that has created the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Its strength lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: the few are rich, the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions, the capitalist system has failed.
But for all its simplicity and truth, how much staying power does the OWS message have as presently deployed? In terms of its powers of repression, the system has not failed. To date, the OWS movement has not even confronted the moneyed elite with a threat on the scale of the 1999 protests in Seattle. Indeed, right now most people love OWS. The Financial Times ran an editorial in favour of it. But in the end, to reform finance capital you have to offend people and institutions, including the Financial Times.

Writing these lines at the start of November, after digesting the daily reports from the national OWS battlefield (Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland, and kindred venues in Austin, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Portland…), my eyes flicker across the world map to Greece, and my heart beats a lot faster. Now there, surely we can savour the whiff of a pre-revolutionary situation!

It must be the dratted Leninist in me, even after years of therapy. Surfeited with somewhat turgid paeans to the democratic gentility of the OWSers, I clamber up to the dusty top shelf, furtively haul down Vladimir Ilich's April Theses of 1917 and dip in: end the war, confiscate the big estates, immediately merge all the banks into one general national bank… The blood flows back into my cheeks, my eyes sparkle.
Then, hearing my daughter's footfall outside the library, I shove Lenin back into place, scuttle back down the ladder and pluck a copy of E.F. Schumacher, even though I'm not at all sure that is on the OWSers' reading lists or Twitter menus.

Now take an arc of Greek history, as evoked in a photo that landed in my inbox at the end of October, featuring a group of Greek demonstrators in front of the Parthenon holding a white banner with 'OXI 1940–2011' written on it in red and black letters.
In Greek, OXI means 'No'. The e-mail accompanying the photo reminded me that the 'No' of 1940 was the answer, given on 28 October, to the Italian ambassador relaying Mussolini's demand that Greece open its borders to the Italian army. The 'No' thus marked Greece's entry into World War II. Annual ceremonies have officially commemorated this response to Fascism.

But this year, the e-mail reported, "the official parades were taken over by the people," who chased away the government representatives and in most cities organised their own parades.

In Salonika, "the President of the Republic left in protest" and for the first time in the postwar history of Greece the military parade was abandoned. A five-year-old child sat in the president's chair "and the schools and people paraded before him!" In Athens, "where nobody was able to approach the Education Ministress and the parade went on 'as usual' under Draconian police measures," some schoolchildren "paraded waving black handkerchiefs before her, while others turned their faces away as soon as they approached her."

On the morning of 28 October, a group of artists, authors and academics smuggled a big OXI sign onto the Acropolis, "wrapped up around the body of an excellent theatre actress under a very large coat. And we managed to demonstrate for more than half-an-hour on the Acropolis itself!" The group could do this because "all policemen were at the parades' battlegrounds at Syntagma and everywhere in Attiki [district] and none managed to climb the Acropolis in time."

OXI in 1940 to Mussolini. OXI in 2011 to the bankers seeking to plant their neoliberal jackboots on the neck of the Greek people, OXI to the bankers' local collaborators.

Toward the end of World War II, an enterprise of Western capitalist intervention (a new chapter of which the Nato coup recently consummated with great destruction and bloodshed in Libya) undertook its maiden voyage in Greece, in the British and American onslaughts beginning in 1943, with Stalin's tacit OK. By 1949, at the end of a fearsome civil war, the left had been decimated, slaughtered, imprisoned, forced into exile. Ahead lay dictatorship by the right, mirrored in Spain and Portugal.

I've no doubt that if by chance the left in Greece today evicts the local political agents of the international banks, it won't be long before a Nato intervention, covert and then overt, is under way, using the usual arsenal of assassination, drone attacks and armed support for whatever security forces do not defect to the left.

Sixty-six years after the defeat of Hitler, 40 years on from the neoliberal capitalist counter-attack that ratcheted up its tempo in the early 1970s, the premises of the system are under fearsome pressure, powerfully evoked by demonstrations from Athens to Oakland.

Having briefly tasted batons and pepper spray, OWSers should know that when capital feels it is being pushed to the wall, it will stop at nothing to crush any serious challenge. The cop puts away his smile. The indulgent mayor imposes a curfew. "Exemplary" sentences are handed down. The prisons fill up.
Organised repression can only be defeated by organised resistance, nationwide. How to mount this is the OWSers' urgent, immediate challenge. In Oakland, on Wednesday, OWS staged a rally calling for a General Strike. That's at least thinking along the right lines.