| In the current recession, capitalist firms have long since returned to profitability, and are sitting on massive piles of cash. But rather than channel that cash into investments, putting people back to work in the productive economy still stalled at near-10% unemployment, they are returning that cash to private shareholders via massive share buybacks. It is this narrow profit motive that Virginia's proposal is challenging, in the realm of finance.
Radicals have long argued that banking should be run more like a public utility than a profit-maximizing business. Because banks stand at the crucial node in the economic system where accumulated value is collected from savers and re-allocated to investors, radicals have traditionally argued that it should be subject to democratic control. What Virginia is considering doing is opening up that question—are there other demands we want to make of our banking system besides maximizing private profit?
Red state radicalism
This type of economic thinking is more common than many of us acknowledge. Virginia's public bank proposal is based on the Bank of North Dakota, which is owned by the state and returns all profits to the state and its voting public, rather than private shareholders. Alaska, meanwhile, distributes an annual dividend to its public from the operations of the state's oil industry. Moreover, large sections of the rural United States operate largely on non-market barter economies. And dozens of Native American nations return profits from casino operations to their enrolled tribal members via dividends and investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Socialist ideas, in other words, are thriving in rural red America, while liberal big cities like New York and Chicago continue their neoliberal binge, privatizing airports, roads, and education with gusto.
I want to emphasize that I'm not making a public policy case for or against any of these particular policy ideas. I'm simply pointing out that they are classic radical ideas that have nonetheless been embraced by wide sections of the American public, overwhelmingly among people who would not consider themselves political radicals, or even liberals.
We can argue over whether these policies achieve radical ends (I'd argue "no," but that's another conversation). Their popularity, however, argues in favor of a much wider acceptance of radical ideas than many activists would expect.
Why can't we get away with that?
So why is no one crying socialism over the Bank of North Dakota or Alaskan oil dividends? It's certainly true that when traditional progressive constituencies, such as labor unions, community organizers or Occupiers call for similar ideas, they are immediately branded the naïve or dangerous notions of wooly wild-eyed anarchists. But in blaming the corporate media, we perhaps let ourselves off too easily.
Our adversaries on the right wish for nothing more than to make every issue another battle in the culture wars, to paint every radical idea as an alien idea foreign to the bedrock values of ordinary people. And we don't help ourselves when we make radical politics into a narrow subculture, self-consciously different and separate from the rest of the populace.
To crystallize this theme in a single incident, I recall meeting a friend of mine, a union organizer, in a coffee shop. He was dressed in a collared shirt, blazer, and khakis, and was immediately jeered upon entering by a group of young activists displaying all the sartorial markings of "activists." What were they thinking? Is the point to do political work, or to exercise self-expression and demonstrate allegiance to a "radical" subculture via choice of clothes and hairstyles?
Radical-politics-as-subculture has been an annoying constant throughout my political life (roughly encompassing the past 15 years). Besides ignoring capitalism's love of subcultures—they're just another marketing niche to capital—this kind of almost deliberately alienating activism also seems to preclude any kind of political victory. Shouldn't the point be to win, for radical ideas of social justice to be widely accepted and become hegemonic, rather than merely to resist as a marginal subculture?
The victory of Occupy Wall Street
The right has had only limited success in transforming Occupy Wall Street into a culture war issue, however, and that is something that is almost unique for a progressive cause in my lifetime. I think that we should credit the discipline and tenacity of the Occupiers in pounding the beautiful, simple message of "We are the 99%." Despite those profoundly irritating drum circles, they have convinced a great number of Americans that this movement understands their values and is on their side.
Walter Benjamin once argued that it is capitalism that is the dangerous, out-of-control force in the contemporary world. Revolutions, he wrote, are simply "the human race reaching for the emergency brake." Radical ideas are not terrifyingly alien impositions on Mom and apple pie from black-clad anarchist brick-throwers. Rather, they are attempts to bring the forces that shape our lives under our collective control.
Occupy should be talking about Virginia's proposal to partially socialize banking. Who cares if it's a "Republican" idea?
We should learn from what is happening in Virginia and across the country how to articulate our values and ideas and have them accepted as mainstream common sense by our fellow citizens. |
