Michel Rocard and the End of Something

Have I got it wrong all these years? Was it always futile to think there was a possible alternative to the global market-based capitalist economy? Did socialism in all its forms die a slow death after 1945, and expire altogether when the Berlin Wall came down?

These thoughts arise with the death over the weekend of Michel Rocard, France's prime minister  from 1988-91, and leader of a third-way current within the Socialist Party. Rocard was by all accounts a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual politician, trained at the highest levels and introduced into France's leadership caste in the 1950s, a protégé of Mendès-France. Never a Communist though initially on the Marxist left wing of the socialist movement, Rocard became convinced in the 1970s that social democracy within the framework of civil society and a market economy was the only viable compromise for achieving the social benefits the socialist movement in its various forms aspired to. Popular, a straight-talking man of great personal integrity, Rocard with his adherents represented  the right wing of the Socialist Party formed under François Mitterand, and he and Mitterand had a famously hostile relationship. Mitterand nonetheless included him in his first cabinet in 1981, and kept him on through the disaster of that first government, where it became clear that Mitterand's classic strategies of nationalization, capital controls, an authentic state socialism, were completely untenable in a globalized economy. Rocard resigned eventually, in protest of Mitterand's dubious maneuver to introduce proportional representation into the Assembly--a move that damaged the conventional right by elevating the National Front (Thanks, Tonton).

After Mitterand won reelection in 1988, he selected the still-popular Rocard to run his government, and Rocard was able to advance a social democratic agenda, including a form of guaranteed minimum income--a modest but significant addition to the social safety net.

With Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder, Rocard can be seen as a late flowering of the socialist movement, or its moment of demise in the triumphalist 'end-of-history' euphoria of the 1990s. Mitterand fired Rocard in 1991 and sabotaged his attempt to run for president in 1995. Rocard remained an elder statesman and inspiration to a younger generation of Socialist Party conservatives, including the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

I am inclined to view Rocard as the man who led an honorable retreat from the barricades--unlike Blair and Clinton, who crossed lines and fraternized happily with the financiers. Perhaps the very French identity of intellectual--a man of books and learning as neither Clinton nor Blair was, for all their education and intelligence--was lure enough for Rocard to remain honorably in his tradition. But his moment passed, and now he has too. What is left of the French and European socialist movement he lived in and inflected is a sorry spectacle at this moment--shrill, defeatist, rudderless. Rocard may represent the end of that tradition--certainly for the present. I would have placed myself in opposition to his moderating, social democratic ways, but maybe that's because his sense of history was more acute than mine.

After Orlando: Will We Endure?

One knew an event such as the Orlando massacre would happen. That foreknowledge doesn't make it any less sad for the victims, their loved ones, and indeed, all the rest of us who have to suffer the threat of sudden, senseless violence. We all live in a diminished world after Sunday's bloody horror.

We also know that these sorts of attacks will happen again--here, in Europe, in Africa and the mideast, wherever. It is instructive to think that the Orlando massacre was the work of a disaffected Muslim, who felt some sting of prejudice and some pull of jihadism, but also (apparently) a deranged and contorted homosexual, who hated his own attraction to the LGBT culture he attacked.

From this I draw two conclusions: first, there are many complex patterns of causality behind this, and probably every other mass terrorist attack, and we go wrong when we try to assimilate them into a simplistic, linear narrative. And secondly, in such a maelstrom of psychotic crosscurrents, the deranged party will find the means of violent destruction if he chooses: a military-grade automatic weapon if he is American, a homemade bomb if he has internet, a knife if he is Palestinian and thus deprived of every other weapon. These discouraging conclusions are by way of preparation for those recurrences which are now an ineluctable fact of our contemporary, mediated, globalized, highly-powered civilization.

These sober realities do not make it inevitable that our nominally democratic political systems will collapse into fascism--but they give a strong push in that direction. That is a shocking remark--I am shocked to see it on my screen--so let me try to justify it with some very recent particular facts.

• Lies and falsifications are remarkably easy to let loose in our mass media. Thus Donald Trump calls the Orlando shooter an "Afghan" when he is really an American. Restrictions on Muslim immigration would have prevented this tragedy, Trump tells us, but the perpetrator was not an immigrant. "Hundreds of thousands" of such immigrants are admitted "without screening" he tells us, but no, intensive screening can take up to two years. And so on. 
• Such amplified Big Lies threaten to delegitimize our civil order. Trump himself has delegitimized the Obama administration for years by denying Obama's claim to citizenship. Tens of millions of Americans have been persuaded--on the basis of no evidence whatsoever--that he is right. Their visceral hatred of the President, their absolute refusal to acknowledge his presidency, has made the country ungovernable in some key respects.
• And now, for me the most shocking instance of the delegitimizing Big Lie: Trump, speaking as nominal head of the Republican Party, accuses Obama, through a screen of veiled but perfectly legible innuendo, of colluding with global terrorists to bring about attacks such as the Orlando massacre. 

This despicable gutter rhetoric would make the author of Mein Kampf proud. It will only get worse. We are after all still early in Trump's 'campaign'--really less an electoral campaign than a media-platformed March on Rome. Can this juggernaut of poisonous rhetoric, fueled by the hate-filled nightmares of psychotic terrorists world-wide, be averted? Is there room for 'good speech' to overwhelm and neutralize this tainted sort? That will be the challenge of the Clinton campaign, the respectable news media, and all of us as we try to survive this bitter electoral season in a world coarsened by unspeakable violence.

Bern It Forward

That's it. With yesterday's results in California and elsewhere, the Democratic nomination phase of Bernie Sanders's campaign--whatever he and his diehard supporters may say--is over. I voted for him, I like him a lot, but I have to say it: after the primary voters have decisively chosen Clinton, there is no justification for claiming 'foul,' for demanding that unelected super-delegates should switch their support to Sanders, or for bringing any of this adversarial rhetoric to the convention. That part is over.

But the Sanders campaign itself isn't over and musn't end. The issues he has brought to the surface--and some others he hasn't--will not be fully addressed by candidate or president Clinton, and the energy and enthusiasm Sanders has generated needs to move forward in pursuit of those issues. The best way to do this is NOT to argue about procedures in Philadelphia, smear Clinton, and undermine her general election campaign.

What then? On June 17th, 10 days from now, a People's Summit will convene for three days at the McCormick Center in Chicago. (I wish I could be there but I can't.) The goal? To bring together all the activist groups on the Left, including Sanders campaigners, to organize an integrated campaign going forward. There are so many fronts in this campaign: the $15 minimum wage, the incarceration epidemic and brutal law enforcement, the need for free college, health, and secure retirement, immigrant rights, women's pay equity, financial regulation and taxes on speculative profits. And overarching them all, the need to build a new, sustainable, job-rich green economy--fast! All these movements are actively in the field, but separately. The Sanders campaign has brought many of their adherents together around a visible, immediate goal. Now they have to stay together to lobby candidate Clinton, and then put pressure on President Clinton. This fight is just beginning. Integration of these many issues around a singular, holistic vision for a new society is key.

[Parenthetically, one can see that vision, more articulately expressed, in the campaign of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I only wish it would make tactical sense to vote for her, as she is by far the most articulate and impassioned candidate in the field. Perhaps it will.]

Last night in California Bernie Sanders was not the most gracious loser--but who would be at that moment, after all he's done? I give him maximum credit for his combative determination--but I also hope that after a short respite he will see the futility of pursuing the nomination fight. But what I really hope is that he will lend his enormous charisma and prestige, not just to Clinton's general election campaign, but more especially to the ongoing work of the People's Summit, and the many interlocking struggles to which he has given voice this past year.

The battle is over, Bernie & comrades. The war continues without a pause. If you can make it to Chicago, be there!

Some Missing Scenes from "Hamilton: the Musical"

Scene 1: It's 1782. Hamilton, after recovering at home from his madcap bayonet charge at Yorktown, has left his family in Albany and joined the confederation congress, the new nation's governing body, in New York. Big problems: the confederation owes a lot of money to a lot of people, but can only raise it by begging from the states, which have their own debts to worry about. Member of congress Robert Morris has two problems of his own: first, as committee chair the national debts are his responsibility. Second, most of the war debt is owed to him personally. After reading up on Hume and others on the public finance question, quick-study Hamilton attaches himself to Morris, and they make a plan.

The continental army is encamped up the river at Newburgh, 10,000 men and 500 officers. The war is over but they don't want to go home without being paid. A certified military hero, Hamilton contacts some former comrades and suggests that a threat of mutiny--and a march on the congress--might focus congress's attention. Hamilton through intermediaries suggests to General Gates--who always thought he himself should have been commander in chief in place of Washington--that he might want to direct the mutiny. He then writes to his old friend General Washington, warning him of the army's restiveness. Washington gets it--he hastens to Newburgh, unhorses Gates, and lets the congress know how urgently things stand. Morris then proposes a generous settlement: the officers can be decommissioned with large, fully funded federal notes, along with the national creditors (like himself)--all included in the same blue-ribbon tranche. The private soldiers will be given much smaller sums of non-negotiable paper, which they sell off at large discounts before going home, broke and dispirited, after winning independence ... so that men like Morris and Hamilton can move forward with their plutocracy. Crisis averted, debt refinanced and consolidated to guarantee stronger taxing powers when the new constitution is written.

"We won the war. What was it all for?"

Scene 2: 1794. Hamilton, still secretary of the treasury, has coaxed his program through Congress: federal assumption of national debt, creation of a national bank, and--most delicate--imposition of a domestic tax, the first such, on whiskey distillers. With his passion for detail Hamilton has studied the distilling industry, domestic and foreign, and realizes that consolidation of small independent producers into large industrial ones is in the air. He carefully structures his tax to benefit these large producers, and thus imperil the only cash commodity produced by many western farmers, who lack the means to sell their grain to the eastern market in any form except whiskey.  These westerners, already dubious about the strengths of the new national government, refuse to pay the new tax, organize militias to repel the federal agents, and threaten secession. Hamilton persuades Washington, in his second term as president, to mount up and lead a large army--10,000 strong--over the Alleghenies to put down the rebellion. Hamilton becomes field commander as Washington returns to his executive duties, and leads a brutal campaign, arresting and detaining hundreds of the resistors without any legal or constitutional authority. Many are marched back to Philadelphia, where the courts release them. The battle has been won though: federal authority over local democratic bodies, industrial production over small decentralized homesteads, big finance over the land banks and easy credit that historian William Hogeland calls populist or egalitarian economics.

"Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?"

Taken together, these scenes represent two of Alexander Hamilton's greatest triumphs, moments when his vision of the new nation was built into the foundations of the national economy. Are the repercussions of these scenes with us today? You bet, from the self-dealing legislators and bond-holders to the misguided and ineffectual but fundamentally democratic resistance, both left and right, to our governing system of finance. Just listen to the current presidential campaigns. Hamilton is with us, not the awkward but well-intentioned young striver of the musical, but the steely man on a white horse, the friend of big capital and enemy of popular sovereignty. It's a different drama, and one worth staging.

"What's Your Name, Man?"

I have recently been listening with enormous pleasure to the soundtrack from "Hamilton: An American Musical." I know I'm coming late to the party, but this one is going to be with us for a while--folks in Boston are scheming to get tickets for the traveling show a YEAR or TWO from now--so I think there's still time to get down with it. And it's easy to like. The lyrics, especially the rap ones, are brilliant and irresistible, the sing-through format has unstoppable energy, and the actual story--Hamilton's improbable and tumultuous life--contains the elements of great drama: war and politics, romance and tragedy, larger-than-life characters straight out of history but personalized by the show's pop idioms. Great stuff!

And what a story the work itself is: Lin-Manuel Miranda, 1st generation American, picks up Ron Chernow's doorstop biography of Hamilton by accident, sees immediately not just the dramatic possibilities but the connections to his own Caribbean-American background. Obama feels similar affinities and helps launch the project at a White House soirée. Soon the whole world is rapping about the "ten dollar founding father with no father/Got a lot farther by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter," and the rest is, as they say, history. Miranda's work is even keeping Hamilton on that ten-dollar bill where he belongs.

Like most miraculous birth narratives, though, this one leaves out the more questionable truths in favor of the glorious ones. Yes, Miranda deserves his genius grant, and I can hear in one run-through why the show is winning all those emmys, grammies, or whatever. But the fact is, "Hamilton" is just the culmination of a 20-year neo-conservative campaign to reshape our national story around the unlikely figure of Alexander Hamilton, who was an under-appreciated Founding Father for a reason.

The re-invention of Hamilton actually starts, as far as I can tell, with reactionary icons William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, and publishing a seminal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 1997. Chernow's very accessible biography--called a 'hagiography' by professional scholars--comes along a few years later, just as the New York Historical Society relaunches itself with a blockbuster Hamilton exhibit in 2004. That exhibit, underwritten by the Society's ultra-wealthy supporters at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, attracts big crowds but also a fair bit of controversy from scholars, who resent the obvious right-wing bias of curator and Hamilton biographer Richard Brookhiser, in whose vision Hamilton becomes the patron saint of modern global capital, as well as the exemplary case of meritocratic individualism.

On this platform, Miranda's spirited work adds a captivating aura of romance to a figure who otherwise lingers in the shadow of his once-admired adversary, Thomas Jefferson--and in the shadow of his violent death at the hands of the ineffable Aaron Burr. Miranda's musical manages to humanize Burr while caricaturing Jefferson, a two-fer that clears the way for Hamilton to join Washington at the apex of our national pantheon.

Revision also means exclusion. We see Hamilton's undisputed heroism at Yorktown, but not his scorched-earth suppression of revolt in western Pennsylvania, the only Secretary of the Treasury who ever led an army into the field against tax evaders. We hear a lot about his immigrant status, but not so much about his anti-immigrant politics. And the breezy evocation of his epochal dispute with Jefferson--industry vs. agriculture, capital and trade vs. homesteading and slavery--disguises Hamilton's strong beliefs in inequality and his support for a financial elite. We hear the farewell address he wrote for Washington but not his famous 6-hour speech to the Constitutional Convention on behalf of monarchy.

In short the astonishing success of "Hamilton" is not just artistic but political. As I pursue my researches I hope to return to this compelling question: why? Why is Hamilton such a ready-made fit for this America, right now? The answers will I hope prove enlightening.

New World Rising

A few days ago I posted about the decline of left parties in France and Europe generally, along with the rise of myopic right-wing nationalisms both there and here. I want to follow up by signaling this valuable article by British left-wing activist and journalist Neal Lawson, who looks at the decline of social democracy all over Europe but then offers a much more detailed vision of how a new progressive phoenix might arise from those ashes. Some key ingredients:

• Lawson first of all embraces the new post-modern realities, including what he calls "new solidarities in a digital world," such as: cooperatives, the sharing economy, on-line activism and newly networked political parties; shared work and reduced working hours, basic income guarantees; and radically participatory decision-making;
• he rejects 'growth,' i.e. ever-expanding consumption, in favor of a new roster of social 'goods': leisure time, public space, a cleaner, carbon-reduced environment, workplace democracy, and guaranteed necessities such as basic income, health care, and housing;
• he imagines progressive governance not as the domain of a social democratic party in power, but rather an alliance of parties, movements, social change organizations, a new form of power-sharing facilitated by internet connections.

In short, rather than working through Labour or various Socialist parties or even the Sanders/Warren wing of our Democratic party, Lawson imagines a new and more radically democratic 'golden age.' That new political formation will make use of the new technologies and networks to build new forms of social solidarity more flexible and far-reaching than the older party-driven politics. And he imagines new social forms based on sustainability (he says "de-growth, not green-washed growth" but I would argue that authentic green growth, within limits is possible and indeed, essential), a reinvented workplace, and a renewed public sphere.

We are already seeing elements of this vision, often framed as private entrepreneurialism (the so-called 'gig economy') with its flexibilities and libertarian styles of governance or regulation. And we see that in that form it greatly accelerates social inequalities while seeming to enhance 'personal choice.' Lawson want to socialize the best parts of that vision, and tie them to social movements that are egalitarian, democratic, and grounded in solidarity. Though Lawson doesn't mention them, I would argue that the Occupy movement, the Indignados, and Nuit Debout are precocious versions of the solidarities he is calling for.  It's an epochal vision, and a discussion we should all be having.

Vive ... What, Exactly?

American observers have often looked at France, particularly its leftist legacy, with an eye roll, as if this venerable republican tradition, which gave us, inter alia, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were the work of a precocious but unruly adolescent. Now it's eye roll time again, as on Thursday a Socialist Party insurgency fell just two votes short of passing a no confidence motion that would have brought down its own Socialist government. Even the French were surprised: "That's something unbelievable," sputtered centrist scholar Gérard Grunberg. "We've never seen that before."

But bemused incredulity is not an adequate response to this byzantine event. At issue is France's proposed labor reform law, which is intended to lower rampant unemployment by offering employers greater flexibility: hiring and firing, work hours, overtime pay, many of the highly structured worker protections in France would be relaxed. In itself the law is perhaps not the bogey man it has been made out to be: French unions would still wield real bargaining power, and many protections would remain. But the precedent that a Socialist government with a substantial majority would promote a rollback of workers' rights is for many on the Left--including 56 Socialist deputies--a red line that must be defended with protest marches, the Nuit Debout occupation of many public spaces, and now perhaps the demise through schism of the Socialist Party François Mitterand brought to national power 35 years ago.

But is this just France's problem, which we can dispatch with a wink? No, I would say, it is rather the most advanced and articulate version of a struggle that is happening all over the developed world. In America we have Donald Trump making ridiculous promises to launch a global trade war that will 'make America great again.' And we have Bernie Sanders earnestly gathering support, especially among the young, for a 'revolution' that will lead us out of the impasse keenly felt by our most promising young people. In France, but also in the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and indeed most of Western Europe you find nationalist parties growing rapidly on platforms that are nearly as bigoted and ignorant as Trump's. Free trade agreements that define the 'global economy' are particularly under fire, as are the tax havens and other lucrative perks that make the financial sector's domination of the global economy such a repugnant reality. The crisis signaled by these various manifestations of revolt or discontent constitute a civilizational impasse, and France--with its traditions of rational discourse and an articulate left-wing alternative--is merely taking the lead in a debate the rest of us can't obfuscate forever in personality contests and demagogic outbursts.

The crux of the debate--improbably signaled by this rather modest French labor law--is something much bigger than its technical details. What kind of society are we building? Will there be job security? Or a ceaseless shuffle among independent contracts (gigs, to use that offensive buzz term), low-wage service jobs, part-time, short-term expedients, unpaid internships, with a minority of high-paying high-tech jobs for the lucky few? Can these new forms of employment generate mass satisfaction, as the old ones did for a generation? The social unrest that is surfacing everywhere in no-nothing political movements suggests not.

On the other hand, I don't think the French or any of us can hold on to that previous system in a world that really, like it or not, has become globalized. The race to the bottom has already been won--and the working classes in the once-dominant economies have lost. What remains in countries like France, Italy, or the US, is the darwinian struggle to claim one of a diminishing number of winner slots, or accept the second-class status of the hustler ('gig') economy. Not the sort of choice that will fend off the Trump supporters for long.

 One conceivable option is an older-style socialist one: capture some of that excess profit lolling offshore and use it to create a minimum income floor for everyone, to reduce at least the worst forms of poverty and social exclusion. Such a program is finding supporters among conventional liberal theorists, and may appear in Elizabeth Warren's platform in 2020 or 2024. I have my doubts, but I can't say I've looked at it in depth.

The other, less formed but infinitely more promising alternative, is the one I call by its shorthand name: eco-socialism. This points to a new sort of economy, powered by green energy, grounded in local, sustainable production, building social forms around cooperation and solidarity, with localized democratic control. Very scattered forms of this brave new world--co-ops of various sorts, sustainable agriculture, a 'shared' economy--are appearing here and there. It lacks mass support or a global theory, but 'horizontal' experiments in power-sharing such as Occupy Wall Street, Los Indignados, and now Nuit Debout are early rehearsals for such a transformation. Is it feasible? I don't know. But if the alternative is authoritarian retrenchment behind a Marine Le Pen or a Donald Trump, sign me up for a test drive to a different future. Please.