I find myself thinking alot about the disconnect between the American dream (both imaginary and the good and real stuff that's being dismantled) and socialism, because I live and organize in Nevada (previously Vegas, and now a small mining and sheepherding town in the rural northeast of the state). And Nevada, Las Vegas especially, seems to me to exhibit the irrationality and individualism of American in stark terms. The Vegas metro area is by far and away the fastest growing metro city in the country (one of the fastest in the world too). And it is the most visited place in the US (second most visited in the world after Mecca). What is the engine of the growth? Well there are many things (mostly connected to troubling aspects of American individualism), but at the heart of it is gambling.
Now I'm not above winning some money on the steelers in the superbowl, or even milking the free drinks with friends at the cheap roulette tables on the strip friday night. But at heart, I am not a gambler--- it does not excite my brain the way it does some of my friends, and the millions who flock here to do it. I find gambling to be basically a tax on people who don't want to do the math; the Bellagio was not built on casino losings; the House always wins in the end.
But leaving aside the rush of adrenaline and the fun of dressing up and marveling at the spectacle of it all, I think our countrymen and countrywomen's love of gambling is at root quintessentially American--- some mixture of hope and greed (and flash and spectacle) that gets folks to play a game that is clearly statistically rigged against you (even though some do win, a few huge). I agree with Doug that history seems to have hard-wired this stuff into Americans (more than most places--- although anyone at the Pai Gow table can tell you it can be found among people of all nations).
This hard-wired mix of hope and greed and spectacle has so profoundly influenced Vegas, Nevada, and the people who move here, that this place evidences many of the worst excesses of this ideology made concrete--- massive exurban sprawl (I myself live in a cookie cutter subdivision in a suburb), an insane mismatch between nature and society, a libertarian opposition to all public-sector (much less collectivist socialism itself!), a willingness to commodify everything (up to and especially sex), an incredibly bland and stale cultural and intellectual public climate.
But the flip side of this (and the one I am engaged in) is that people also move to Vegas because it is the new Detroit--- a place where any single mom, highschool dropout, or migrant from Michoacan or Manila can come to, with or without a trade, and get a job that pays enough they can feed and raise a family pretty well and afford one of the subdivision houses and make payments on an SUV and participate in the spectacle (also things me and my comrades participate in--- half the revolutionaries in the union hall drive SUVs or light trucks they don't really need, and after work I am practically hooked to the cable TV with an IV tube).
Vegas is the first in the next generation of 'New Detroits' because, like Detroit, it is unionized; the major domestic social struggle of the next decade, already underway, is going to be organizing the service sector and turning the jobs of nurses aides and janitors and housekeepers and waitresses everywhere into what manufacturing jobs used to be--- the good, solid, well-paying jobs you try to get and keep to support a family with, and which organize the political powers of the working class into organizations that can beat the right and ideally influence society at large for the better. Vegas has been the first city to get its service sector really organized for a variety of reasons (history of mob unionism in gaming now shorn on the mob, succeptability of the Strip casinos to picket lines, some successful corporate campaigns on local hospitals, etc...not to mention the considerable agency and contested bravery of Vegas workers themselves). But the point is, Vegas is not only the apex and dystopia of American-Dream capitalism, but also the place where hopefully the tide turns and a new new deal gets underway. And that struggle, to unionize the service sector, is overwhelmingly being fought by workers here not for socialism (leaving aside the handful of lefty shop stewards here and there), but for a better position to participate in the larger game, as mh speculated. People like private property, and will fight to have some more of it.
As a socialist, and someone who believes spectacular games of chance are not an apropriate way for the working people of society to be participating in the economic world, and that it would be saner to work productively and rationally to meet needs instead, how do I relate to this? I do not really know. I am confronted every day with the fact that most normal folks are not leftists (and I think Doug's usual guess of 15% is waaaay high), and that to the extent they today participate in left movements or social struggles it is not usually with transformative aims in mind. I am glad to engage with this reality instead of taking the bury-your-head-in-the-sand-of-academia-or-sects approach. But it is troubling, to say the least.
I can only hope things will turn out like the Russian parable of the two frogs drowning in a pot of milk they can't leap out of. One realizes he can't leap out, gives up and drowns. The other continues kicking and trying to leap out, and eventually his froggy legs churn the milk to butter, which he stands up on and leaps out of. That is to say, may we believe and hope and pray that in the process of working hard at a struggle that seems doomed, we might catalyze an unexpected qualitative change in context that allows us to make transformative changes which once seemed obviously and measurably impossible.
> On 10/23/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > A discourse of individual rights is compatible with American
> > principles, but it's a real stretch to make them conform to anything
> > collective (or secular). Competitive individualism seems so deeply
> > ingrained into our common sense that I can't imagine how you'd break
> > out of it. So much of American populism has centered on a critique of
> > monopoly, the offense being the restriction of free competition, the
> > unexamined virtue. It's in Naderism, it's in a lot of Green politics,
> > it's in the anti-Wal-Mart movie, it's everywhere.
> Doug
> <<<<<>>>>>
>
> admitting to a certain skepticism - something i think is actually
> healthy - when it comes to opinion polliing, contemporary survery
> research/polling data is pretty consistent in indicating that
> americans, by and large, prefer private propertry *and* they frown
> upon existing distributions of income and wealth (minorities and women
> are more likely than white men to favor an appreciably more equitable
> slicing of the pice)...
>
> not conventionally understood socialism, certainly not marxism, but
> not stuck in the collectivist/individualist dichotomy either...
>
> hegemony is never monolithic, hegemony is never monolithic, hegemony
> is never monolithic (toto too)... mh
>
>
>
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