"MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?" * NOTES ON THE WALL STREET "MELTDOWN"
The breakdown of the Wall Street financial machine makes the task that we outlined in our June meeting more urgent. In June we planned to rethink Midnight Notes in view of the restructuring of the accumulation process and class relations carried out through the neoliberal turn and Structural Adjustment. We can now define this project more precisely: what do the current crisis and restructuring of the financial system imply for us as we join the rest of the world in the dog house of structural adjustment in the twilight of the American empire?
In response to these questions, it is important, first, that we realize that the so-called Wall Street "meltdown" is certainly the end, but also the completion of the neoliberal program. Let us be clear about it. To think otherwise is to ignore the lesson taught to us by the event that opened the present capitalist era: the 1973 coup again the Chilean working class experiment with socialism, that led to the victory of strong state backed market economy. Karl Polanyi's theory that the single most important cause of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe was the inability to control the financial market after the 1929 crash also resonates here. In other words, we should not read the restructuring taki ng place as a turn to socialism/Keynesianism, to the extent at least that Keynesianism was an intervention by the state into the economy aimed at increasing the state's investment in social reproduction, starting with the reproduction of the working class, in exchange for an increase in the social productivity of labor. Despite the adoption of regulatory mechanisms, the operation presently conducted by the US government bears little resemblance to the Keynesian program launched with the New Deal.
Behind the $700 billion bail-out and the many others that will follow--some already in the pipeline-- is a massive transfer of funds from the US working class to capital, inevitably leading to an assault on the last remaining entitlements (like Medicare, Social Security) and a general program of austerity the like of which we have not seen yet in a long time. The fact that there is no organized response to this assault makes us fear the worst. For things would never have reached this point if over the last decade the US workers had responded to the repeated thefts of their money and benefits, through the Enron scandal and the many other "crises" that have followed it. That despite the "instability" of the market, despite its usage as a means to expropriate thousands of small/working class investors, US workers continued to trust their livelihoods and future to it is certainly a key factor in what we are presently witnessing and Washington/Wall Street confidence in launching=2 0the new austerity program. It is our argument that in the same way as September 11 served the US government to shed the last remains of "democracy" and move to a model of government where militarization is always around the corner (apparently Representatives were threatened with the proclamation of martial law if they did not pass the bailout bill), so the Wall Street crash will serve to shed the last remaining elements of working class "socialism" in the US political economy, starting with Social Security, Medicare, a thorn in capital's flesh, but so far demonstrating a great resilience, the last shore for working class struggle in the nation.
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