Trading Eights With Digby

by tristero

Trading eights: [Jazz.] Also ‘trading fours,’ etc. Soloists taking turns at improvising, playing for eight (or four, etc.) bars at a time.”

In her recent post about socialism, Digby writes:

This crisis is reawakening the left in some ways it hasn’t been tested in some time. It’s been a long series of bubbles and political setbacks over decades and there aren’t a whole lot of people who have been engaged in these issues on a philosophical basis for quite some time. The argument among us took place between the economic neoliberalism of the DLC and lukewarm, leftover Great Society articles of faith. But there is more on the left spectrum than that (or full throated Marxism.) It’s necessary to expand the conversation in a time of crisis.

On the main point, I totally agree. We really need to hear leftwing voices in the mainstream media. Where we may disagree is, to some extent, on a labeling or definition refinement, which will probably strike youngsters and newcomers to American politics as merely semantic:: liberals are not leftists. Or, ito be more precise, most liberals are smack in the center of American politics. For example, most people would agree that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is a liberal (by the way, read his column and weep). But few, other than the kind of rightwing nuts who argue – still! – that FDR was as Marxist as Stalin, would argue that Krugman, who worked for Ronald Reagan, is in any way, shape, or form a leftist. LIkewise, while it is quite clear that the great Rachel Maddow is to the left of center, her liberalism is not cut from the same cloth as the kind of socialism Mike Davis espouses in the Moyers interview that Digby discusses.

What we need in the mainstream media are not only more people as liberal (and as intelligent) as Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow – and less people as incoherently right-centrist (and stupid) as Tom Friedman – but also genuinely leftwing voices. As a liberal in rough agreement with Maddow on most issues, I am talking about the necessity of hearing more from people to my political left, people who, in the Sixties, reviled liberals as enthusiastically as they did Nixon and Agnew. What a pleasure it would be to turn on cnn and vehemently disagree with someone because they were too far to the left! I’m not talking about just Amy Goodman who, while surely left, is still close enough to the mainstream to invite Krugman on her show (even if she is never invited on Press The Meat), or even the much=reviled Noam Chomsky (who by the way, enjoys a tremendous reputation nearly everywhere but here). I’m talking about… and there’s the problem.

As it happens, the March 23, 2009 Issue of The Nation is all about socialism and the left. And among the articles is one by Immanuel Wallerstein, of Yale who can’t help bringing up:

the structural crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is facing, in my opinion, its certain demise in the next twenty to forty years.

Uh, huh. Riiiiiiiiiiight.

And that’s the problem, at least from this liberal’s perspective. There are a lot of crappy writers on the left who, like Mr. Wallerstein, just can’t resist the apocalyptic mode. Yes, we need genuinely leftwing voices in the mainstream media, but not just any leftwing voices. The last thing American public discourse needs, after countless decades of giving rightwing nuts predicting Armageddon a free pass, are lefttwing nuts predicting Armageddon.

Of course, there are more thoughtful leftists out there. In their lead article to The Nation issue, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr. are, to some extent, those kinds of voices we need to hear more of, even if they first appear to caution against precisely the hyperbole Wallerstein indulges, and then indulge in it themselves:

If you haven’t heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn’t just because there aren’t enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism–its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of “stimulus” are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral

Barbara, Bill, trust me on this: we haven’t. Oh, it’s gonna be awful, the next few years, but no. No death spiral.

Fortunately, Ehrenreich and Fletcher have something quite constructive to add: They identify a serious, contemporary economic condition that all but requires leftists to fashion entirely different critiques and proposals than those of the past, even the recent past of the 60’s and 70’s:

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism–with some help from industrial communism–has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat..

As Ehrenreich and Fletcher admit, the left doesn’t yet have a coherent plan to meet this lack of abundance. But – and I agree it is to the left’s credit – they recognize they must develop one. That is a vast improvement over the magical laissez-faire delusion of the right, the assertion that no plan is the best plan.

I’ll never be anything close to a socialist (you’re welcome to try to convince me, but you won’t) and I’ll always be a liberal. What that means, among other things, is that I can recognize a smart idea when I hear it. Ehrenreich and Fletcher are genuinely on to something and I look forward not only to more left voices in the media but to pondering the left’s answers to the questions and problems these two writers pose.

[Revised slightly after the original post, to clarify my sense of Amy Goodman’s position in the media.]