So, recalling back 12 years, Goodwyn didn't persuade me to stick around with those various populist campaigns. The theory we were working with at the time, was that Acorn, Jesse J, some good labour people fighting banks via corporate campaigns and pension rights, and a motley collection of internationalists, would get an 1890s-style mass movement going.
After 1982-87 TW debt crisis, 1984 Contilly bankruptcy, 1987 Wall Street crash and 1988-89 S&L meltdown came and went and nothing happened, it became clear that Kism had a few more years of financial puffery left... even after junkbonds and real estate tanked in 1989-91...
Off I went to Zimbabwe a few weeks after hearing Goodwyn, ne'er to return to yankee anti-banking populism (except for a 1990 C&C article and periodic contact with Tom Schlesinger and the good folk at Financial Markets Center).
I think that was the right decision. Max, Tom S. and Jane D'Arista and might dispute the prospects, but actually I think you've been right on this all along, Doug. A much deeper critique of K has to happen, in all sorts of ways, before we can go back to the fundamental problem of finance and capitalist crisis. (I still think that struggle is a rematch of Grossmann v. Hilferding, but that's another story.)
Things are really looking up here in Jo'burg, by the way. After trying to get some anti-banking populism going, the SA Communist Party has moved quickly left to join workers who are this week embarking on a terrific mass strike against privatisation. They are not necessarily going to lose, even though Thabo Mbeki is hopping mad at the left challenge. Even the mainstream press in SA today was going wild on the failure of neoliberalism, including a fantastic cartoon of our finance and privatisation ministers playing to the WB/IMF tune, in the main "populist" newspaper.
Y'all keep an eye on our Indymedia site for more, especially in relation to the Durban conference on racism, starting in a couple of days: http://southafrica.indymedia.org
P.
> Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 13:29:39 -0400
> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Goodwyn on the present, or 1989
> Reply-to: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Ok, Max, I checked out some of your populist sites, and I ran into a
> 1989 contribution from Goodwyn, from a session on "Democratic Money"
> <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8569/Goodwyn.Greider.html>.
> Some excerptsP
>
>
> >Sitting around the kitchen, we may tell ourselves that these three
> >institutions that house victims are not internally organized to do
> >anything about it. They're not quite sure who stole the goods. It's
> >sort of awesome to say that both major parties stole the goods. It's
> >sobering to think that something called "Wall Street" stole the
> >goods. We wouldn't want to speculate that that great reform
> >institution -- a product of populist agitation but certainly not
> >anything the populists wanted -- the Federal Reserve System now
> >persists as an instrument of stealing the goods. We can't have
> >people who donate money to the Episcopal Church and then pay their
> >taxes and wear proper top hats and coats being part of the structure
> >of stealing the goods.
>
> This graf contains a lot of the stuff I find problematic about
> populism. I never know what's being counterpoised to this system. Is
> he saying that the political structure of the U.S. is set up to
> enforce the extraction of surplus value and the maintenance of class
> hierarchy? Or is he trying to isolate some evil elements from some
> virtuous majority? What does "Wall Street" mean - the narrow
> definition of the FIRE sector, or the entire structure that owns and
> controls U.S. industry? Are CEOs part of "Wall Street"? Boards of
> directors? Senior managers? Middle managers? How can "Wall Street" be
> neatly separated from the rest?
>
> And what about that evolution of the Fed? How did an institution that
> LG calls "a product of populist agitation" (which isn't the way
> Livingston presents it - to him, it was the product of high bourgeois
> agitation) end up as such an institution of ruling class power? And
> the Bretton Woods institutions - how'd they go from being Keynes's
> babies into being prime instruments of sadomonetarism? His next
> sentence is:
>
> >The reason we don't want to make this indictment is that it's too sweeping.
>
> But in fact the indictment isn't sweeping enough. You can't look at
> "Wall Street," the Fed, or the IMF apart from the broader social
> structures they're embedded in. But populists don't like that,
> because it's too Red. And sure enough, Goodwyn then goes on to
> celebrate Lech Walesa, an authoritarian patriarch, as a populist hero.
>
>
> >That is a democratic conception that is not on the stage of
> >contemporary debate. It is too broad; it is beyond our imagination.
> >That is not on the agenda of the Democratic Party or the Republican
> >Party. In fact, we're in an era where those tiny pieces of the
> >capital assets of the nation that somehow were smuggled to sectors
> >of the society that are not rich are slowly being shipped away.
> >Since 1980, the lowest 20 percent of the American people in income
> >have had a real income drop of 9 percent. And the top 20 percent of
> >the American people in income have had a real income gain of 19
> >percent. And the top 10 percent of that 20 percent have had a real
> >income gain of 29 percent.
>
> Polarization is real, but on a long enough historical perspective,
> it's remarkable how stable the distribution of income and wealth has
> remained over the decades. But populists thrive on evoking a better
> time, before the bad usurpers burst uninvited into our lost Eden. Was
> the U.S. not a class society in the 1950s? In the 1840s?
>
> >What if we were to suggest to the American people that we can't do
> >anything about the homeless, we can't attack the crisis in the
> >cities, we can't do anything about the inability of the children of
> >unionized workers to own a home of their own because America has
> >been sold to foreign creditors,
>
> A theme that's never far from the surface, is it? Sold to foreign
> creditors indeed - a country that has led the neocolonial
> restructuring of much of the world political economy over the last 20
> years, victimized by foreign potentates?
>
> > because it's being de-industrialized -- we can't do anything about
> >any of these matters if we don't democratize the financial system in
> >this country? In other words, we can't do anything until we get back
> >to being as advanced as we were in 1889 in this city when the
> >subtreasury system was first introduced.
>
> 1889 was "more advanced" than 1989? Really?
>
> >We can't suggest it because that idea is too much. It's too
> >advanced; it's not properly modest. "Why, you people sound as if
> >you're as crazy as those people in Eastern Europe who want to
> >overturn the leading role of the Party." But if you have the
> >long-distance view, if you say,"Give ourselves 20 years. Let's see
> >if we can begin the process of educating ourselves and the American
> >people about the idea of a democratic system of money that will save
> >what is left of the American family farm,
>
> How many wage workers does the average "family farm" have?
>
> Doug
>
>