--- On Fri, 7/24/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> recently. The US is
> not unique in subjugating the state and other social
> institutions to
> business interests, although this arrangement found it's
> highest expression
> in the country where capitalism was most highly developed.
> As for the
> present, I can't see where the angry mood but quiescent
> political behaviour
> of US workers in the current crisis is exceptionally
> different from that of
> most workers in Europe, Japan, and the other OECD
> countries. Can you?
[WS:] No, I cannot, but I do not think it is the main cause behind capitalist hegemony either. Historically, a revolutionary movement (working class or otherwise) was able to succeed only when the institutional structure of the state was weakened, typically by hostile actions of another state (i.e. war). Russia and China are prime examples. Moreover, radical reforms succeeded only when the reformist social movements (working class or otherwise) founds allies within institutional structure of the state who possessed enough power to implement these reform (e.g. the Beveridge reforms in the UK.) Barring that, any attempt of a radical change or reform is doomed.
The point I am trying to make is that the US state is deliberately structured in way to derail any attempt to change it, especially in a way that disrupts the public-private symbiosis between business and political establishment. The US labor was probably better organized, at times, than many of its European counterparts, yet it failed to implement any of the reforms that Europeans did precisely because of the institutional architecture of the US state that is carefully crafted to derail any such reform - and has succeeded derailing them for 200+ years.
As I said elsewhere, the US state is selling out family silver to buy more time and in a few years, likely during our life time, it will be reduced to a regional power akin to its rival the x-USSR. But it will not be reformed in any substantial way. If anything, political patronage and pork and barrel - which is at the core of the US state- will only intensify to contain growing resentment of the downwardly mobile public.
To reiterate "all hope abandon, ye who enter here." If you want hope, or social change, look to India, China, or Brazil where the center of global action is moving. The US is a "has been," a force that if not entirely spent, is increasingly looking inward to maintain its ossified institutional structure. Many empires ended in a similar way, lingering in its ossified shell for decades or even centuries until some external force put them out of their misery.
Wojtek