The political battle emerging today in the U.S. is over control of the State, its organs, laws and institutions. The ruling class faces a need to realign the State to protect private property as it faces capitalism's inability to guarantee economic and social stability. Specifically, it needs to use the U.S. State to support the market and its banking system in the context of the worldwide crisis of capitalism. The means to do this, if even for the short term, are emerging around attempts to treat government debt as the main culprit while supporting industry and banking bailouts, as well as war.
As more of the U.S. working class faces dispossession, however, the rulers face the prospect of an increasingly awakened and angry populace. There is a sense of urgency. Can the rulers reorganize the governmental bodies and other structures of public accountability erected in the past period of the social contract before a social response demanding the government meet the needs of society is consolidated? And particularly, can they do so before they are forced to face a fight for political independence by the new class being created by the revolution in production?
Both classes are fighting on the battlefield of nationalization. This is only beginning to be reflected in the social awareness of our class. The role of the revolutionaries is to politicize this emerging awareness into class consciousness.
Even for the ruling class, there is disagreement over whether to take steps to rise above competition for market share and political position to deal with the interests of the ruling class as a whole. The need is there, the striving is growing and the motion towards a new political movement as a means of addressing these problems is beginning to emerge. The “bipartisanship” that marks this Administration is an express reflection of this emergence and is beginning to take specific forms.
Organizational and programmatic changes being considered or instituted by the current Congress and Administration reflect attempts to reorganize and/or expand the State apparatus in order to attempt to maintain private property relations in the context of the economic crisis. All or most of the major areas of policy change at the Federal level at this time are intended to deal directly with basic economic restructuring.
This requires new forms of political organization, including forms that legalize greater independence of the Executive from Congress. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and other outcomes of the bipartisan health care and financial re-structuring agreements will be particularly important in the coming period.
Secondly, while bipartisanship in the passage of federal bills is an important indicator, it will no doubt be in the process of implementation of these proposals, particularly in the playing out of new political impulses or structures on the state and even local levels, that the full playing out of ruling class agreement will emerge. Lastly, there are indications of some of the forms this new political movement is taking.
It is important for the revolutionaries to summarize these forms alongside responses of our class as we fight to build an organization of revolutionaries out of the growing objective communist movement in this country. Attention to the debates and those proposing them will be one way to get at “insider” forms of the growth of fascism, including any motion towards a third (bourgeois) party. Impulses toward some form of worker's party may also be illuminated as the workers begin to recognize that the rulers’ proposals are inadequate to the needs of society as a whole, let alone the working class.
Health Care: Nationalization as economic restructuring
While health care “reform” was treated as a proposal about providing greater access to quality healthcare, there was, throughout the process of debating the bill that eventually passed, a clear focus on significant restructuring of the economy. This reorganization is an integral part of the multi-layered forms of nationalization in the interests of private property in the current period. Examination of the outcomes of national health reform illuminates the direction in finance “reform” as much as the ill-fated jobs bill or the various “bailout” agreements.
Both major parties recognized the need to rationalize and restructure the delivery of healthcare. They had differences about how to do it, but they agreed it had to be done. As healthcare reform progressed, a marked bi-partisan convergence began to dominate the debate. Healthcare costs were increasingly seen as a major element of the federal deficit, and that the main focus of reform was in fact control of the deficit.
In April of 2009, Senator Jay Rockefeller was honored by West Virginia Health Care for America Now with the Champion of Health Care Reform Award. He noted at the time that “health care costs (are) consuming nearly 1/6 of our economic output, and… healthcare (is) ‘the fulcrum’ of our economy." In May the Senator sponsored the Med PAC Reform Act of 2009 for Medicare reform, which proposed a body of independent experts as an “executive agency modeled after the Federal Reserve," responsible to the executive branch and not subject to the “whims of Congress.”
In previous periods, the ruling class organized healthcare so as to guarantee the greatest advances for private property, but the primary concern was to guarantee a stable industrial working class and to provide some support to the unemployed, who were a “reserve army” of workers. We are at the end of an era based on a wages system. Today, the primary concern is to provide a stable area of investment for financial interests, with a secondary concern about maintaining class peace.
There is substantial evidence that economic restructuring in health care – one of the largest relatively stable areas for investments in the U.S. – was important to the ruling class, and the driving force behind the bipartisan support for the reform.
The 2007 study, "Market Based Health Care: Big Money, Politics and the Unravelling of U.S Civil Democracy" conducted by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy gives a sense of what is at stake. “Health-related investments have become a major new component in financial markets,” the study found and "just 495 health care corporations have an aggregated market capitalization of more than $2.4 trillion and the top 25 alone about $1.7 trillion” with “large banks looking to reap upwards of $75 billion in new funds to manage through Heath Savings Accounts offerings.”
By way of a single example, the giant investment bank Goldman Sachs acquired the medical instruments manufacturer, Biomet, Inc for $10.9 billion. Goldman Sachs is one of the leading campaign contributors to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney.
There is much more at stake than political maneuvering here. There is an inter-connectedness of the supposedly different areas of “reform” by which the administration is attempting to reorganize the economy. To get the whole picture of what is being attempted on the “battlefield of nationalization” in terms of corporate hegemony, these reforms need to be considered together – banking bailouts, financial "reform", struggles over a "jobs bill" of state aid, infrastructure investments, stabilization of Medicare reimbursements and health benefits for the long term jobless.
New forms of political organization
Basic economic restructuring requires new forms of political organization, including forms that increasingly legalize the independence of the Executive from Congress. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and other outcomes of the bipartisan health care and financial re-structuring agreements will be particularly important in the coming period. Central to this analysis is explaining the relationship of privatization to the consolidation of a U.S. “Corporatist State,” or nationalization in the interests of corporations.
As stated on its website, the Fiscal Commission's mission is to propose, by December 2010, "recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015," and to "meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government." The Commission had come under fire due to concerns over its mission and secrecy around its formation, and there has been much "to do" over establishing a web-site and inviting public “input” to the monthly public meetings.
Bi-partisanship is a clear and open mandate of the commission. The Commission is co-chaired by a Republican and a Democrat. A press release on the founding of the body states that “The Commission will build bipartisan consensus to put America on the path toward fiscal reform and responsibility.” A letter to the Commission members published on the Commission website states “The Commission’s goals are ones on which we can all agree. They are not Republican or Democratic objectives. The solvency of our federal government is a matter of such importance that it transcends political parties.”
It is important to note that the current Commission is a step down in function from the original proposal to Congress. Nevertheless, the intent is clear – to place power in the Executive as also proposed by Rockefeller’s original Medicare Commission. While it is formally an advisory body, the Commission reports directly to the President.
The President has his people lined up carefully. The Executive Director Bruce Reed is currently the CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council and served as chief domestic policy advisor and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Clinton Administration. He helped write the 1996 welfare reform law. Obama appointees Alice Rivlin, Clinton’s budget director from 1994 to 1996, and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and co-chair former Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) all worked on deficit reduction in the 1990s. According to the journalist William Greider, Bowles and Reed secretly negotiated a partial privatization of Social Security with Newt Gingrich in the Clinton years before the deal blew up with Clinton's sex scandal. Andy Stern, the former president of SEIU, had once joined liberal groups in opposing a Senate version of the Fiscal Commission, and is now certainly being looked to for populist purposes.
It is important to understand that the Commission is working within an already established set of assumptions. At its May 27th meeting, for example, researchers presented a study of the relationship of debt to GDP in 44 countries over a period of two hundred years, showing that capital’s growth rates “deteriorate markedly” with debt/GDP ratios over 90%, which the U.S. is supposedly reaching. The idea is that the entire economy will fall without cuts to government “entitlements.” This provides a bipartisan answer to the debate that has been raging about “deficit-mongering,” that is, cutting deficits while supporting industry, banks and the rest of the financial sector.
At a speech in April at the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made this clear: "To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above." Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be cut, "because that's where the money is."
Dismantling democracy
The Commission is clearly a form of political organization to more directly merge the corporations and government through a qualitative development of bi-partisanship that extends domestic power to the Executive to match that power recently exercised in international politics. The Commission represents a qualitative change in the way the Federal budget is determined. It is, in effect, a committee of 18, working outside the Constitutionally established mechanisms of government, that will deliver the over-all budget for the country and lay the foundation for more extensive economic restructuring in the corporate interests.
It is another step in the dismantling of bourgeois democracy. It is on a continuum of new forms of State power such as the Department of Homeland Security, an unprecedented reorganization and concentration of government control, which in the process, a 2008 Heritage Foundation Report "Health Care and Homeland Security: Crossroads of Emergency Response" observed with satisfaction, stripped "180,000 government employees of their union rights.”
This Administration has been able to establish a new “set-point” within which financial capital can operate; a stage of the process of ending the social contract with the least amount of political fall-out possible. Certainly, we are in the earliest stage of a process. The forms that will develop are still congealing and are still more potential than actual. While bipartisanship in the passage of federal bills is an important indicator, for example, it will no doubt be in the process of implementation of the proposals, particularly in the playing out of the new political impulses/structures, including on the state and even local levels, that the full playing out of ruling class agreement will emerge.
September.2010.Vol20.Ed5
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