Post-Peak Liberal: End (of Summer)

Post-Peak Liberal

....... Life on the Downslope

End (of Summer)

Well, the great washed-out summer of 2009 is coming to an end, and this seems a good a time as any to consider the main forces driving our multiple civilizational crises, and what life on the other side of our current morass might look like.

Most trace the present recession to September 15th, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the largest in American history, with "assets" of almost $700 billion on the table. The federal government refused to bail out Lehman, as they had with Bear Stearns, and the company's collapse started the cascade of financial cratering with which we are now all depressingly familiar: more bankruptcies, secret bailouts, evaporating portfolios, and an unraveling housing market.

So far so bad. But when we go into the back story of these disasters, we get a less-than-convincing explanation of why it all happened. We're told by smug pundits that Americans were living beyond their means, buying too many flat-screens and iPods and McMansions. Conservatives decry the deadbeat borrowers of subprime goo, chastising them for running scams on poor, innocent mortgage firms, taking money that they never intended to pay back. And Liberals, of course, wag their fingers and pound their fists about the lack of regulation which allowed all of these toxic instruments to be created in the first place.

These assertions are all, as per usual in mainstream discussions, only partially true. But in this case, partial truths, when added up, yield a sum that is much less than its constituent parts. Because what these analyses all assume is that the current problems are aberrations, gross departures from an underlying pattern that is fundamentally sound. If deregulation, soulless mortgage-scamming, and reckless consumer spending had not been abnormally enabled over the past few years, then the regular workings of US economy and society would have stayed on track, churning out the expected American greatness. This is the reasoning behind the whole rhetoric of the "recovery." There is a desperate desire to believe that we can return to what we had before the crash: full employment, robust consumer spending, quickly replaced automobiles, regular upgrading of homes, etc.

Of course, the Recovered America will be slightly different, according to the pundits. We'll be more serious, and we'll save more, and we'll spend less frivilously, and we'll rent instead of own when its appropriate, etc. But eventually, America will recover its traction, and good times will roll again. Phew!

But this is a gross mis-reading of the current recession. The financial collapse, the excess borrowing, the exotic derivative instruments, the inflated housing market -- these were not aberrations or bad apples in a virtuous bushel. These economic phenomena were absolutely necessary to preserve an overall way of life that has been fundamentally unsustainable for quite a while. Long-range socioeconomic forces have rendered our social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-one Dwelling) obsolete and dangerous. So for decades, we have been papering over the cracks and propping up the dissolving foundation by any means necessary. All of the financial shenanigans and malfeasances recently come to a head are just the culmination of a vast American denial of reality, years in the making. We have bundled, borrowed, swapped and spent our way into a powerful lifestyle simulacrum, while the natural world, our communities, and our psyches melt down beneath our feet.

So what are these long-term trends and developments that we have been side-stepping, preferring instead the cocoon of infotainment and "Easy Motoring Utopia," as Jim Kunstler calls it? What are the forces that will eventually compel us to transition to a completely different social form and way of life? First, there's the rapid advancement of tools of domination. Any cursory look at American history, or even global history, throws up an embarrassing fact: civilization seems to subsist on the squashing out of popular well-being. Unlike tribal hunter-gatherer societies (which are highly egalitarian out of both necessity and design), sedentary agricultural and industrial civilizations thrive on social stratification and control. Slavery, religion, political philosophy, class social structure: these are all arts of domination, evolved to keep the masses in line and doing work to benefit nation or deity, or that noxious combination, "God and country." What these arts of domination really guarantee is that the fruits of the group economy flow upwards to the elite. It's a story that unfolds wherever agriculture and commerce allow for the emergence of portable wealth; and the heroic yearnings of modern democracy have been struggling against this narrative with limited success for the last couple centuries.

But unfortunately and maybe inevitably, the tools of social and economic centralization have been on the upsurge since the mid-70s, which was the contemporary high-point for the distribution of wealth in the United States. Mass media, computerization, financial sophistication, and the rise of the corporate legal structure have catalyzed the massive shift of wealth upwards, to the point where the top 1% now control more assets than the bottom 90% of the population, a spread not seen since the 1920s. As I have detailed in other places on this site, there is really no one to blame for these alarming trends. Sure, we can point to the crushing of unions, the deregulation of industry after industry, the dismantling of welfare by Clinton, or the tax windfalls for the rich enacted by Dubya. But these are really just symptoms of an overall capability that has been developing for small numbers of people to control large swaths of a society and economy. The resulting inequalities and centralization of power can thus be seen as a intrinsic features of high-octane, oil-dependent consumer capitalism, the outcome of myriad changes in legal, economic, financial, and physical technologies.

This concentration of power is closely related to the second major macro-trend of the last few decades: the deskilling of labor. In the recent burblings over the financial meltdown, we consistently hear pundits wagging their fingers at an America that had forgotten how to do productive work. 'We have to stop shuffling money around as a way to make a living, and get back to creating things of value,' you hear them huff. These hasty, ill-formed lectures seemed to envision a mid-50s (or earlier) America where people still rolled up their sleeves on small farms, in Main Street general stores, or on spark-spewing factory floors. Sorry guys, but that ship has sailed, at least in the full-employment version. We all know by now the generally-bad effects of globalization on American manufacturing capacity. In sphere after sphere, the Chinese or Indonesians or Indians find ways to make the same stuff for much less money. And as these areas continue to hone their high-tech skills, the leaching away of jobs in the US creeps up the occupational ladder, to systems engineers, computer programmers, etc . But less familiar and equally devastating for high-paid work is technological unemployment. Many economists estimate that job losses due to computerization and other advances in mechanical technology actually equal, if not surpass, globalization-related unemployment. Long story short: it just takes less intelligent and skilled work to keep the same amount of stuff pumping out of the economy. The old input variables of tradition, memory, and craft have been supplanted by robotics, digitized accounting, and petro-fueled economies of scale.

Signs of this epic de-skilling are everywhere: a bursting-at-the-seams prison population, where we essentially stick our economically-superfluous under the cover of pot possession; epidemic levels of depression, rage, and obesity, as more people sense that they're not really contributing anything of crucial value to society; the merciless shedding of jobs by corporate overlords in the recent financial collapse, with the subsequent reorganization of companies to carry less employees (i.e., "the jobless recovery").

And this brings us to the final macro-trend for the purposes of this post: the complete capture of our culture, economy, and political process by corporations. Liberal criticism of corporations is so ubiquitous, and has been swirling around for so long now, that it becomes tempting to just blow past it when discussing history or society or government. But it would not be an exaggeration to say that the emergence of the corporation as a legal entity and social actor is perhaps the defining feature of the last half of the 20th century, and is still the hallmark of the Oughts. Many of the largest economies on earth are now corporations. Walmart alone is a larger economic entity than Demark or Finland (or more than 100 other countries, for that matter). Corporations completely control almost everything we see on TV, hear on the radio, or read in books. Corporate businesspeople and lawyers are the utterly dominant strata in our federal government, with the revolving door of lobby-shops ensuring that whether in office or out, the corporate presence is never far from the Capitol steps. Corporations, through some heinous Supreme Court decisions, now enjoy the same Bill of Right protections as natural citizens, with their purchasing of political candidates being jokingly interpreted as "free speech."

And it goes on and on. The impact of the corporation, a legal entity that began for the temporary purpose of exploring parts of the New World, cannot be underestimated. Corporations have vacuumed up huge swaths of our culture, polity, and economy, and with the variables mentioned above, they have come to concentrate power and influence in fewer but larger hands. The story of the United Sates of the last few decades is a tale of centralization, concentration, and bigness. Macro-trends have funneled everything upwards, to the point where the rest of us in the bottom or middle have been subsisting on the crumbs. Unfortunately, the crumbs have stopped dropping.

I know, I know -- the rich exploiting the rest of society is old news. Pyramids and all that. But the developments in the last few decades are qualitatively different, because of the sheer volumes involved and the ubiquity of the influence. Corporate/business imperatives now completely dominate our frame of reference. We have no other way of thinking about how to fix things and move forward. So many aspects of our lives have been tied up with corporate fortunes that when they go south, virtually the entire country comes to a screeching halt. "Too Big to Fail" is really the mantra of our age, and it's a terrifying one.

So how can we devolve power? How can we unhitch our wagons from the fickle swayings of the DOW? How can we regain some measure of self-sufficiency and community autonomy? Is there life after bigness? We'll check that out next time.