January 30, 2006: Uncentered
Unlike France or England, the United States is not dominated by a single great metropolitan center. America's too big for that. Instead there are regional centers: Washington, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami.
Dispersal is a principle determinant of American popular and political culture. For example, the great waves of Rock and Roll, Country and Rap music -- music made by working class people. The Seattle Sound, the San Francisco Sound, Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, Texas, Appalachia. Politically, this means that major decisions requiring ruling class consensus must emerge from this matrix of regional and parochial class formations and interests.
This complex process has specific consequences:
- Differences between the two capitalist parties blur at the national level. Differences are largely cultural, inheriting very old disputes between Patriots and Tories over empire, church and state, Puritanism, race, and so on. National differences are considerably driven by regional fuels: "red state" versus "blue state" sensibilities. Historically, the two national parties held strong differences over corporatism and other issues of strategy-within-the-ruling-class. These differences have been diminished and blurred during the long Democratic drift to the right, but also more specifically by the Republican ascendency since 1980 which has itself been an example of ruling class consensus. It's not clear whether cultural or strategic disagreements dominate today. Strategic disagreements are fought out through cultural narratives.
- The winner-take-all electoral system paradoxically reinforces the need for ruling class consensus to emerge in informal, nonpolitical ways which are then reflected or refracted via the political system. Political institutions in America are where decisions are marketed, not where they're made.
- Ruling class consensus is typically incomplete; decisions are seldom final. Particularly in circumstances of competition over tactics, emergence of consensus from informal regional and local bases can lead to unstable equilibria which aren't static. For example, the struggle within the CIA and other parts of the state apparatus against the Bush administration's adoption of torture and other dubious or incompetent tactics.
- There's no single center for these struggles over tactics. They happen all over the national and regional state apparati and are most often unpublicized.
- Individual politicians emerge from regional class formations, and tend to reflect them even after becoming national figures. Nixon and Reagan were always Californians; Bush and Johnson always Texans.
Comments
The big divide is slavery and its' legacy. Class politics has always been twisted around race. There are differences amongst elements of the elite, but in the end, it is the divisions in the working classes that matter. There will be no effective Socialist, or even left-wing, politics in America that does not organize around intersection of race and class.
Posted by: Wayne Rothschild | February 8, 2006 11:35 AM
I'm pretty sure we've got different objects here. Which is good -- both good objects. Just trying to be clear.
In this piece I'm trying to look at (some of) the determinants of ruling-class decision-making. IMO there's value in that, the goal being to avoid the overly high level of abstraction which says the two employer parties are identical, while also avoiding the political trap of lesser-evilism. I'm stressing geographical decenteredness because this is one very key respect, IMO, in which U.S. experience differs from the European experiences, particularly that of France, which have traditionally been canonical in the Marxist tradition. I don't think race is a key determinant in the formation of ruling class consensus. I do think geography is.
Your object -- I think! -- is the tendencies to disunity within the U.S. working class.
Both of these are important if we're gonna try to figure out American specificity. Just pointing out that they're two different objects.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 9, 2006 04:40 PM
Also -- this is pure aside -- I believe that the decenteredness of the American social formation all by itself makes civil war the inevitable consequence of revolution. Where the state has no center, smashing it isn't a question of simply liberating the prisoners from the Bastille. Pieces of it are all over the place, so that, just like the molten metal monster in Terminator II, the pieces will begin to reconstitute themselves the minute the smashing succeeds. Geography would probably play a key role in that reconstitution. Which in turn is why it's inadequate in my opinion to suggest that the bad guys wouldn't nuke themselves. Naturally not. They'd nuke the revolution, which would for some time be clearly dilineated on the map. The only alternative to this logic is that of a simultaneous "velvet revolution" which non-unevenly topples the state apparatus everywhere at once across a country the size of a continent.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 9, 2006 06:38 PM
O.k. so I was cheating; partially I just wanted to upgrade race in the discussion. While, I agree, to some extent about regional issues and that ruling classes are complex, I have tended to focus on how to mobilize now. The difficulty in aligning class, race and gender is one of the causes of earlier defeats. A new socialist party would try to build its majority politically around those divisions.
Posted by: Wayne Rothschild | February 10, 2006 07:54 PM