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During Barack Obamas first term, the American right became fixated on the supposed threats of communism and socialism. At the time, it felt like another weird throwback trend from the Cold War, along with flared jeans, gated reverb, or Jell-O molds. The proximate causes were clear enoughhuge government spending to bolster the economy (by, uh, bailing out banks, but whatever) and efforts to expand health-insurance coverageeven if fears of a coming socialist America were clearly overhyped.

Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. Wokeness has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is evident in Google search trends and Fox News time allocation, and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case of woke values undermining sound business practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the leftwhich objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

As I wrote last week, the claim that DEI crashed SVB makes no sense and is based on practically no evidence. The swiftness with which prominent Republican politicians leaped on the narrative drew some puzzled reactions. My theory is that a large and growing number of prominent conservatives (politicians, media personalities, etc.) are incapable of even feigning fluency in fiscal policy because theyve been talking about culture war stuff nonstop for like eight years, my colleague McKay Coppins wrote on Twitter. Hes right, and the shift is less incidental than intentional, driven by currents both inside and outside of the political right.

[David A. Graham: Why Republicans are blaming the bank collapse on wokeness]

Part of this is because capitalism has wonor rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, the population has long since reached stasis on it. Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Bidens more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the stateespecially in enforcing conservative cultural values against the progressive ones labeled as woke.

Defining what conservatives mean by wokeness is, as the writer Bethany Mandel learned the hard way this week, not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isnt necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called socialism wasnt really socialist, either.

The term woke originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nations first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in white identity politics (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of critical race theory to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days, is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponentsjust the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the rights leading media figure, endorses the use of the state to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. Hes not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead because they see it as a business advantage.

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to speech codes and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the governmentoxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You cant define woke]

Socialism has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters arent especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that voidwe might even cheekily call this the GOPs successor ideologywith an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although its a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look likeand no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

Link:
Wokeness Has Replaced Socialism as the Great Conservative Bogeyman - msnNOW

Opinion

When banks like Silicon Valley Bank collapse, money floods to bigger ones like JPMorgan. Clients know theyre too big to fail

Sun 19 Mar 2023 06.25 EDT

Greg Becker, the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, sold $3.6m of SBV shares on 27 February, just days before the bank disclosed a large loss that triggered its stock slide and collapse. Over the previous two years, Becker sold nearly $30m of stock.

But Becker wont rake in the most from this mess. Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest Wall Street bank, will probably make much more.

Thats because depositors in small- and medium-sized banks are now fleeing to the safety of JPMorgan and other giant banks that have been deemed too big to fail because the government bailed them out in 2008.

Last Friday afternoon, the deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, met with Dimon in New York and asked whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank could spread to other banks. Theres a potential, Dimon responded.

Presumably, Dimon knew such contagion would mean vastly more business for JPMorgan. In a note to clients on Monday, bank analyst Mike Mayo wrote that JPMorgan is battle-tested in volatile markets and epitomizes how the largest US banks have shed risk since the 2008 financial crisis.

Recall that the 2008 financial crisis generated a gigantic shift of assets to the biggest Wall Street banks, with the result that JPMorgan and the other giants became far bigger. In the early 1990s, the five largest banks had accounted for only 12% of US bank deposits. After the crisis, they accounted for nearly half.

After this week, theyll be even bigger.

Their giant size has already given them a huge but hidden effective federal subsidy estimated to be $83bn annually a premium that investors and depositors willingly pay to these enormous banks, in the form of higher fees and lower returns, precisely because theyre considered too big to fail.

Some of this hidden federal subsidy goes into the pockets of bank executives. Last year alone, Dimon earned $34.5m.

Dimon was at the helm in 2008 when JPMorgan received $25bn from the federal government to help stem the financial crisis which had been brought on largely by the careless and fraudulent lending practices of JPMorgan and other big banks. Dimon earned $20m that year.

In March 2009 Barack Obama summoned Dimon and other top bank executives to the White House and warned them that my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.

But the former president never publicly rebuked Dimon or the other big bankers. When asked about the generous pay Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs continued to rake in, Obama defended them as very savvy businessmen and said he didnt begrudge peoples success or wealth. Thats part of the free market system.

What free market system? Taxpayers had just bailed out the banks, and the bank CEOs were still raking in fat paychecks. Yet 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs, causing the unemployment rate to soar to 10%. Total US household net worth dropped by $11.1tn. Housing prices dropped by a third nationwide from their 2006 peak, causing some 10 million people to lose their homes.

Rather than defend CEO paychecks, Obama might have demanded, as a condition of getting bailed out, that the banks help underwater homeowners on Main Street.

Another sensible proposal would have been to let bankruptcy judges restructure shaky home mortgages so that borrowers didnt owe as much and could remain in their homes.

Yet the big banks, led by Dimon, opposed this. They thought theyd do better by squeezing as much possible out of distressed homeowners, and then collecting as much as they could on foreclosed homes.

In April 2008, Dimon and the banks succeeded: the Senate voted down a bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages to help distressed homeowners.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Dimon warned against policies that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were then advocating, including Medicare for All, paid sick leave and free public higher education. Dimon said they amounted to socialism.

Socialism, he wrote, inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives which they frequently do to maintain power, adding that socialism would be a disaster for our country.

Dimon also warned against over-regulation of banking, cautioning that in the next financial crisis, big institutions like JPMorgan wont be able to provide the lending they did during the last crisis.

When the next real downturn begins, he wrote, banks will be constrained both psychologically and by new regulations from lending freely into the marketplace, as many of us did in 2008 and 2009. New regulations mean that banks will have to maintain more liquidity going into a downturn, be prepared for the impacts of even tougher stress tests and hold more capital.

But, as demonstrated again this past week, American capitalism needs strict guardrails. Otherwise, it is subject to periodic crises that summon bailouts.

The result is socialism for the rich while everyone else is subject to harsh penalties: bankers get bailed out and the biggest banks and bankers do even better. Yet average people who cannot pay their mortgages lose their homes.

Meanwhile, almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance, most workers who lose their job arent eligible for unemployment insurance, most have no paid sick leave, child labor is on the rise and nearly 51m households cant afford basic monthly expenses such as housing, food, childcare and transportation.

Is it any wonder that many Americans see the system as rigged against them? Is it surprising that some become susceptible to dangerous snake-oil peddled by power-hungry demagogues?

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US banks want socialism for themselves - and capitalism for everyone else - The Guardian

In the early 1970s, Chilean workers attempted something never done before: a democratic socialist revolution. Throughout the twentieth century, Chile was a deeply unequal society; it was also unique among the developing world because of its long-standing parliamentary tradition and a highly organized industrial working class and associated political parties.

After decades of struggle, the workers movement took power in a democratic election and, alongside grassroots efforts, initiated a transition toward socialism. Chiles democratic socialist project was ultimately defeated by a capitalist-backed coup in 1973, but it has remained a powerful inspiration for democratic socialists around the world.

The past few years have seen a resurgence in democratic socialist politics in the United States. Socialists have won public office at all levels of government; young radicals are turning toward rebuilding the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers; many American workers are reviving and reforming their unions; and promising new organizing has sprouted at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks. Still, were a long way from socialism.

Without successful models of socialist revolution, those of us in capitalist countries with democratic institutions who want to see fundamental transformation must come up with a new road map. Chiles attempt under Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity (UP) coalition remains one of the few models of a democratic socialist transition we have; both the UPs victory, and its ultimate defeat, have important things to teach us.

Unlike other revolutionary socialist projects that took power throughout the twentieth century, Chiles socialists made elections central to their plan for socialist transformation of society. And unlike the more electoral-oriented socialist parties of Europe, Chiles socialists understood their task as breaking with capitalism. In his inaugural speech to parliament, Allende proclaimed that unlike the Bolsheviks dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, Chile is the first nation on earth to put into practice the second model of transition to a socialist society, a democratic, pluralistic socialism.

Allendes election was made possible by socialist political parties, firmly rooted in the industrial working class, that refused alliances with capitalists and remained committed to full democratization of the economy. The UP governments 1970 election was the culmination of fifty years of working-class struggle. Chiles first Marxist party, the Socialist Workers Party (POS), was founded in 1912, uniting the most radical wing of electoral politics with nascent labor struggles among nitrate miners. The POS renamed itself the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and joined the Comintern in 1922.

Ten years later, following the short-lived Socialist Republic of Chile led by Air Force commander Marmaduke Grove and his subsequent populist-infused socialist presidential campaign (garnering 17 percent of the vote), the Socialist Party (PS) was founded. The PS also identified as Marxist but was more heterogeneous than the Communists, distinguishing itself mainly by its refusal to toe the Soviet line on international politics or domestic strategy.

The Socialists and Communists eventually came together to present a united political opposition to the capitalists, setting the stage for Allendes eventual rise. In the early 50s, they unified a politically fractious labor movement under one central labor federation, the Central nica de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT), and then in 1956, alongside four smaller parties, formed an electoral coalition called the Popular Action Front (FRAP). FRAP fielded the Socialist Partys Salvador Allende in 1958, nearly winning the presidency in a crowded race, and ran Allende again in 1964.

The Socialists and the Communists had different understandings of FRAPs strategy. In the past, both the Socialists and Communists had participated in center-left coalition governments led by the middle-class Radical Party, but this strategy largely led to defeat. While the Communists retained the desire to broaden the FRAP coalition to include reform-oriented upper and middle classes and those they considered progressive capitalists less tied to US investment, by the mid-1950s, the Socialists had broken with their previous strategy of cross-class alliances.

Their experiences with such alliances had taught the Socialists that to break with foreign ownership of Chiles natural resources and the countrys semifeudal agricultural system, the working class would have to lead the fight. The Radical-led governments the Socialists had participated in were incapable of carrying out these two tasks due, on the one hand, to their capitalist and middle-class leaderships political and economic ties to foreign capital and Chiles landed elite, and, on the other hand, the vacillation of the Communist Party between supporting the Nazi-Soviet pact and making alliances with national capitalists in the name of a popular front against fascism. Because of these moderating factors, the Radical-led governments could not carry out land reform, reneged on promises to support legalizing peasant unionization, regularly gave out ministries to the right-wing Liberal Party, and failed to promote state-led economic development, which would have required nationalizing certain sectors held by North American capitalists.

Around the same time, the Socialists began trying to use fights for reforms as a way of radicalizing workers, rather than as ends in themselves. A minimum program to address workers immediate needs and demands would be determined through direct conversation with different sections of the working class. By winning these minimum demands through independent organization going head to head with capitalists and the state rather than through backroom deals with the boss or parliamentary maneuvers, workers could build their fighting capacity and consciousness. If the party lost the fight, it would demonstrate how Chiles capitalists and their politicians were fundamentally opposed to workers demands, and if the Left won the fight, it would build the confidence of workers in their own power.

As opposed to the earlier strategy of cross-class center-left coalitions, by uniting the working class behind its own independent banner in FRAP, the Left could more seriously present an alternative program for society in direct conflict with capitalist parties. But the Socialist insistence on building a movement to fight for the interests of the working class first and foremost, and the Communist tendency to subordinate workers interests for the sake of building alliances with other classes, created a tension within the left coalition.

For the 1970 presidential election, FRAP refashioned itself into Popular Unity, in some ways a concession to the Communist position. Unlike FRAP, UP included some small middle-class parties, but its mass working-class parties led the coalition, and it didnt budge on its commitment to socialism through establishing a workers government.

Still, the UP adopted a moderate strategy for socialist transition its first six years would be a carefully controlled government-led process, laying the groundwork and building a popular majority so that the next administration could complete the transition. In these first six years, UP planned to nationalize portions of the commanding heights of the economy, expand democratic institutions, oversee redistributive programs, and carry out land reform.

UP ultimately won the 1970 election in a three-way race with just under 37 percent of the vote in a grassroots campaign, led by local committees of workers and supporters from the various parties and movements backing Allende. The activists on the ground leading the UP campaign were involved in active struggles in their workplaces and communities, like campaigns for independent unions. While both the Socialists and Communists were electoral parties, they saw building and leading a powerful labor movement as one of their major tasks, and they were the parties most popular with Chiles working class. Their combined votes within the CUT amounted to nearly 60 percent of CUT membership in 1972, with other UP and radical left parties making up another 10 percent. The UPs base in shop-floor organization was crucial to its early success and its ability to beat back, for a time, right-wing attacks on the socialist experiment.

The Communists were the leading force in CUT, beating out the Socialists in membership among private sector workers in core industries. The Socialists advocated a more confrontational strategy, lamenting in the late 50s that CUT overemphasized national unity and striking deals with capitalist politicians, which the Socialists thought dampened the unions ability to unite the working class around a strategy of class struggle. Despite moderation at times from the Communist leadership, these groups of organized workers would play a leading role in Chiles attempted transition to socialism.

Socialists winning an election doesnt mean that capitalists will peacefully and voluntarily give up their wealth and power, and they didnt in Chile. Throughout Allendes three years in power, Chile experienced capital flight, capital strikes, lockouts, shopkeeper hoarding, and middle- and professional-class strikes and slowdowns all while facing a right-wing terrorist campaign, along with pressure from international capital and imperialist intervention. Many of these maneuvers were a rational response of capitalists and privileged sections of the middle class to UPs socialist program. Rising wages alongside price controls, redistributive programs, and the threat of nationalization provoked capital flight, strikes, and hoarding, as capitalists could no longer guarantee future substantial profits nor, importantly, their control over the economy.

The UP government responded to capitalist sabotage by expanding the social property area, the governments term for enterprises under state control. By bringing industries under public ownership and management, the government could operate firms at a lower rate of profit than capitalists would usually accept to maintain adequate levels of investment and production.

In the face of capitalist resistance, a government choosing to socialize more of the economy is not a foregone conclusion; most socialist or social democratic leaders in other countries have feared heading toward an existential conflict with private property. It was mass action from below, rooted in the workplace along with the initiative of radical state officials that led Chiles government to take this more revolutionary path. (The government of Franois Mitterrand in France, for instance, pursued the more common route of abandoning its socialist program in the face of capitalist resistance.)

Allendes electoral campaign and victory inspired a new wave of grassroots action in the workplace and countryside, and that organizing in turn altered the course of government policy. In one dramatic example, workers at the Yarur textile mill kicked out their decades-old company union in favor of a militant independent union shortly after Allende took power. The shop-floor campaign was led by Socialist and Communist rank-and-file leaders, produced a newsletter with its demands for an independent union on one side and Popular Unitys program on the other, and received support from local party organizations. The newly independent union struggled for control over the shop floor, forcing the removal of tyrannical managers and establishing shop-floor committees to oversee production to prevent capitalist sabotage.

Months later, Popular Unity won an astounding 50 percent in the April municipal elections, reflecting the success of Allendes redistributive program in cultivating popular support. This victory inspired the Yarur workers to strike, demanding and winning the nationalization of their factory against Allendes initial wishes. This kind of bottom-up activity spread throughout Chile, resulting in many factories and enterprises being taken into the social property area that werent on the UPs original list of firms to be nationalized. Similar processes occurred in the countryside as radicals organized peasant unions and mass land seizures, taking advantage of preexisting land reform laws but also going beyond them.

The Ministry of the Economy collaborated with workers in organizing the social property area. Members of the ministry were in constant contact with workers on the shop floor, supporting them in developing the case and subsequent plan for nationalization. Their closer contact with the shop-floor movement, along with the economic need for socialization, made members of the ministry more inclined to support these bottom-up initiatives and to transform government policy in lockstep with developments on the ground.

As elite resistance intensified in October 1972 with a trucker owner-operator strike, lockouts, and shopkeeper hoarding, Chilean workers built new grassroots institutions they termed Popular Power to defend the revolution and maintain a functioning economy. Workers reopened factories they were locked out of, and coordinated producing and distributing goods as well as defending against right-wing violence and sabotage. In cities, they formed volunteer committees to requisition and distribute hoarded goods. And within the growing social property sector, workers pioneered new democratic structures of participation and management alongside the government.

But tensions were growing within the Left. The Communist Party approached Popular Power with skepticism and was at times antagonistic toward more radical developments in the countryside. In the partys eyes, the bottom-up activity was jumping the gun on socialist revolution, would prematurely provoke capitalist counterreaction, and threatened the union structures that the party dominated. The strength of this perspective within UP was reinforced by the fact that the legislature and the judiciary remained under the control of capitalist forces who used their legal powers to obstruct Allendes agenda and force a constitutional crisis. Meanwhile the left-wing of the Socialist Party and other smaller parties within and outside of UP embraced Popular Power and advocated that Allende more forcefully embrace the structures as central organs for carrying out the workers revolution and fighting capitalist reaction.

Despite left-wing pleas, Allende adopted a strategy similar to that advocated by the Communists, attempting reconciliation with capitalists to end the employer offensive of 1972. He agreed to integrate the military into his cabinet, and effectively demobilized government support for Popular Power, notwithstanding its continued growth after the October strikes. Despite further conciliatory efforts by UP, the Right remained committed to ending Allendes government at all costs, eventually staging a coup in September 1973 that killed the three-year experiment at a democratic transition to socialism.

A democratic socialist transition is far from the agenda in the United States. And, of course, the two countries political and social contexts are vastly different not to mention that more than half a century has passed since Allende first took office. Nonetheless, Chiles experience carries important lessons and raises vital questions for American leftists.

A democratic socialist transformation of society will likely have to pass through the conquest of power by the working class through its party or parties in a democratic election. But a workers party of the sort cannot solely be a vehicle for winning elections or passing legislation.

Chiles Socialist and Communist parties were real, mass working-class movements, embedded in the workplace and shop-floor struggles and oriented toward the conquest of political power by the working class and the reorganization of the economy along the lines of social and democratic ownership and control. They operated independently of and in direct conflict with capitalists, and to the extent that they incorporated middle-class parties into their coalition, it was on the basis of the middle-class groups accepting a working-class program for socialism. This is in contrast to left-wing parties that moderate their demands to attract the middle class, as many social democratic parties have done in the past fifty years.

Abandoning their previous strategies of class collaboration and instead orienting toward building an independent working-class electoral formation in FRAP allowed the Left to consolidate a unified working-class movement behind a socialist program. In doing so, the Left successfully polarized society around the politics of class. As conservative and reform governments were unable to address Chiles rampant inequality, inflation, unsustainable economic development, and imperialist domination, this independent force was able to put itself and its program forward as a compelling alternative.

Actions inside and outside the state reinforced one another, with victories in the electoral sphere both building upon and further inspiring grassroots action. Grassroots activity in turn set into motion revolutionary processes that state managers couldnt control, although some encouraged and collaborated with them. The electoral and grassroots wings also came into conflict as a real contradiction emerged: the bases growing expectations propelled the movement into a struggle that the leadership feared it couldnt win.

Attempting to moderate the base rather than encouraging bottom-up initiative may have stunted the movement from developing the capacity necessary to defeat or stave off a coup. Allende was right to want to avoid civil war, but it remains an open question of how to avoid civil war while retaining a commitment to deepening and expanding the revolution being carried out by the grassroots movement. Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, in his classic essay The Coup in Chile, argued that only through wholeheartedly preparing for such a war, giving real institutional teeth and strategic leadership to organs of popular power, can socialists prevent one.

These questions may rear their head again if were ever so lucky to get as far as socialists in Chile did. But were still missing the central ingredients necessary to get there. In the United States today, there is no party or serious pre-party group representing an independent working-class political program and bottom-up struggle. Nor do we have a large, militant labor movement in which to root such a party. If were looking for an on-ramp onto the long democratic road to socialism, building those movements and institutions is a good place to start.

Read more:
Chile's Attempt at Democratic Socialism Combined State Action and ... - Jacobin magazine

During Barack Obamas first term, the American right became fixated on the supposed threats of communism and socialism. At the time, it felt like another weird throwback trend from the Cold War, along with flared jeans, gated reverb, or Jell-O molds. The proximate causes were clear enoughhuge government spending to bolster the economy (by, uh, bailing out banks, but whatever) and efforts to expand health-insurance coverageeven if fears of a coming socialist America were clearly overhyped.

Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. Wokeness has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is evident in Google search trends and Fox News time allocation, and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case of woke values undermining sound business practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the leftwhich objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

As I wrote last week, the claim that DEI crashed SVB makes no sense and is based on practically no evidence. The swiftness with which prominent Republican politicians leaped on the narrative drew some puzzled reactions. My theory is that a large and growing number of prominent conservatives (politicians, media personalities, etc.) are incapable of even feigning fluency in fiscal policy because theyve been talking about culture war stuff nonstop for like eight years, my colleague McKay Coppins wrote on Twitter. Hes right, and the shift is less incidental than intentional, driven by currents both inside and outside of the political right.

David A. Graham: Why Republicans are blaming the bank collapse on wokeness

Part of this is because capitalism has wonor rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, the population has long since reached stasis on it. Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Bidens more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the stateespecially in enforcing conservative cultural values against the progressive ones labeled as woke.

Defining what conservatives mean by wokeness is, as the writer Bethany Mandel learned the hard way this week, not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isnt necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called socialism wasnt really socialist, either.

The term woke originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nations first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in white identity politics (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of critical race theory to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days, is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponentsjust the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the rights leading media figure, endorses the use of the state to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. Hes not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead because they see it as a business advantage.

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to speech codes and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the governmentoxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: You cant define woke

Socialism has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters arent especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that voidwe might even cheekily call this the GOPs successor ideologywith an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although its a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look likeand no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

More here:
Wokeness Has Replaced Socialism as the Great Conservative ... - The Atlantic

Review of The Austrian Revolution by Otto Bauer, edited by Walter Baier and Eric Canepa (Haymarket Books, 2021)

The end of World War I was a moment of world-historical importance. The collapse of the once-powerful Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires brought the catastrophic conflict to a close and paradoxically opened the way to renewed conflagration as the peoples of radically reconfigured Central and Eastern Europe struggled to revise a settlement imposed upon them by the victorious Allied powers.

Germany and Soviet Russias centrality to that revisionist effort, which ultimately precipitated World War II, often push the histories of the regions smaller participants into the background. Overshadowed by grand narratives of the period that portray them primarily as pawns or bit players in great power politics, their rich histories thus remain little known to outsiders.

The First Austrian Republic is one of those lesser-known states. Once the center of power in a massive, multinational state comprising fifty-five million inhabitants, the Austro-Hungarian Empires dissolution in 1918 transformed Austria into a polity of six million people, of which one-third lived in Vienna, the former imperial capital. With the exception of its ignominious demise at the hands of Nazi Germany in 1938, this republics fascinating story has drawn relatively little attention from outsiders.

That is why the appearance of Otto Bauers classic study, The Austrian Revolution, ably translated for the first time by Walter Baier and Eric Canepa, is such a welcome addition to the English-language literature on Austrian history. First published in 1923, the book examines the republics early years from the perspective of one of European socialisms leading theorists and one of Austrias most important political actors. It is a work of history deeply informed by the authors concrete political experience as well as his commitment to a Marxist approach to understanding unfolding events.

Otto Bauer was a man of wide-ranging interests and talents. Born in 1881 into a prosperous, liberal Jewish family, he was trained in law at the University of Vienna, where, as a member of the Socialist Student League, he joined a circle of young intellectuals later regarded as the founders of the Austro-Marxist School who believed it was their task to further develop the social theory of Marx and Engels, to subject it to criticism, and to place their teachings in the context of modern intellectual life. Despite disparate disciplinary interests, members of this group, including Karl Renner (law), Max Adler (philosophy), and Rudolf Hilferding (political economy), were united in their undogmatic approach to Marxist theory.

Bauers initial main interest was the nationalities question, an issue that repeatedly convulsed Austria-Hungarys political life as Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Italians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Poles, among others, vied for power in a semi-absolutist system dominated by German-Austrians. In 1907, at the age of twenty-six, he published The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, which attempted to theoretically undergird social democracys effort to build a cross-territorial, cross-ethnic movement while still preserving the cultural and legal rights of the empires myriad nationalities. This effort ultimately failed, but the book established Bauer as a leading socialist thinker.

Meanwhile, as a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), he also demonstrated an enormous capacity for political work. In 1907, Bauer founded Der Kampf (the Struggle), which became the partys leading theoretical journal; wrote almost daily on a wide variety of issues for the partys flagship newspaper, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung (the Workers Paper); and in 1914 became the SDAPs secretary and the obvious successor to the partys aging leader, Victor Adler.

Bauer did not oppose the SDAP leaderships decision to back the imperial governments declaration of war on Serbia in August 1914, which effectively triggered World War I. Immediately drafted, he was captured by the Russians in November and spent the next three years as a prisoner in Siberia. Released after the fall of the tsar, he returned to Austria in September 1917 after a sojourn in revolutionary Petrograd, which radicalized but did not convert him to Bolshevism.

Back in Vienna, Bauer played a major role in Austrian politics as the empire disintegrated along ethnic lines, and he succeeded Adler as the partys de facto leader. In November 1918, the Austrian Provisional National Assembly created a provisional government dominated by the Social Democrats, with Karl Renner serving as chancellor and Bauer as foreign minister.

Bauer saw up close not only the creation of the new Austrian Republic, but the governments decision under duress to sign the harsh Treaty of Saint-Germain, which required Austria to assume the empires guilt for starting the war, imposed a heavy reparations burden, and forbade Austria from unifying with the new German Republic. Bauer, believing a rump Austria was economically unviable, had made unity with Germany the linchpin of his foreign policy. He stepped down following the governments acquiescence to the treaty in September 1919 and turned his attention to party affairs and parliamentary politics.

Bauers history tells the story of the democratic republics early years, a period of both great promise and deep economic and political crisis where the limits of the new parliamentary order exploded into full view.

Arranged in five chronological sections, the books first part treats the nationalities question and its relation to the war and revolution. In four extensive chapters, Bauer examines how prewar tensions between the Hapsburg monarchy and the empires subjugated ethnic groups erupted into war in 1914 and the implosion of the state four years later. In Bauers view, it was the Hapsburg regimes fear of the rising national aspirations of the South Slavs, a people long subject to servitude, fragmentation, and a lack of history at the hands of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish overlords, that drove it to declare war on Serbia.

The war initially seemed to overcome the ethnic and class divisions that had rent imperial society, but it ultimately accelerated a process of national revolution that had been underway for decades. By 1918, after four years of enormous casualties, privation, and military failure, the empire had lost its legitimacy and was too exhausted to restrain the forces of democratic reform and national independence.

Of course, for dominant German Austrians the issue of national identity was different. Noting that the conflict between our German-ness and our Austrian-ness runs through all of German-Austrias recent history, Bauer traces the oscillating attitudes of different German-Austrian social classes toward unity with Germany or support for the multiethnic empire they controlled. In 1914, the bourgeoisie considered this conflict essentially resolved as Germany and Austria-Hungary joined together in a patriotic defensive war. Indeed, they were joined in this attitude by the workers movement, which, despite its internationalist commitments, was gripped by the fear of Russian victory.

This outlook did not last, however, as the war dragged on and antiwar sentiment, especially in the labor movement, gained steam. Bauer provides substantial detail on the internal process in which the SDAP, too, came to oppose the war and to support the principle of self-determination for the empires peoples.

By the end of October 1918, the Hapsburg regime was finished. In part two, Bauer describes the collapse of the war effort and the victory of popular rebellions that created new national states across the former empire, including in German Austria. There, Bauer argues, a revolutionary process unfolded that was national, democratic, and social in content.

Austrias democratic revolution, he writes, was completed by November 12 with the creation of a Provisional National Assembly. But the social revolution continued. Over the next two years, until its defeat in the first round of postwar parliamentary elections, the SDAP dominated that body. During this stretch, under what Bauer titles The Hegemony of the Working Class, the state was able to carry out substantial pro-labor reforms, including the eight-hour working day, collective bargaining rights, and workers councils in the workplace.

Yet the radical transformation of Austrian society faced many challenges, from within and without. Like many Social Democratic leaders, Bauer regarded himself as a socialist revolutionary, but he also feared the chaos and violence that revolution could bring. His analysis of events in Vienna makes clear he was no admirer of the Bolshevik model. When radicalized soldiers abandoned military discipline, seized private property and government rations, and attempted to form a Red Guard, Bauer dismissed their actions as the revolutionary romanticism of Bolshevism. He was relieved when most of the soldiers went home, and he supported the creation of a new army, the Volkswehr, consisting largely of workers, including many Social Democrats, which he believed saved the country from the imminent danger of anarchy and enemies on the frontier.

In Bauers view, the social revolution initially began in the barracks of the Vienna garrison, where soldiers rebelled against their officers, and then spread among the workers, who mobilized for mass demonstrations in favor of a republic. It was the culmination, he argues, of decades of Social Democratic efforts to guide the working class toward democracy. The national revolution, he writes, became the business of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution the bearer of the national revolution.

The events leading to November 12 generally had broad cross-class support, even in the conservative countryside, but Bauer insists that the step-by-step actions of the unified Left were decisive in winning a republic with little bloodshed. For him, the creation of the parliamentary order, buttressed by new institutions such as factory councils, fashioned the framework for a further advance toward socialism, a process that would be orderly and eschew the violence of Bolshevism.

In part three, Bauer examines the attempts of the SDAP-led government to improve workers conditions and puts forward his ideas for organizing a new, socialist economy.

At the same time, however, he doesnt paper over the obstacles Austrias political isolation abroad, its internal social and political divisions (especially between the anti-socialist Catholic peasantry, urban bourgeoisie, and socialist-dominated industrial centers); its deepening poverty in the face of rocketing inflation and food, fuel, and raw materials shortages that blocked the governments more radical aspirations. He shows how the left-wing government had to maneuver to avoid war with neighbors covetous of Austrian territory, fend off intervention by Western powers fearful of the spread of communist revolution, and resist being dragged into the revolutionary events in Hungary, where the proclamation of a Soviet Republic in March 1919 sparked renewed regional warfare that ultimately triggered a successful counterrevolution.

Plunged into this combustible environment, Bauer was convinced that the labor movements task was not to establish a Bolshevik-style dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather to act as a brakeman of the revolution. In his view, workers needed to use their newfound power prudently, and it was social democracys duty to prevent them from undertaking potentially ruinous actions for illusory aims. To that end, he writes, the SDAP-led government was in constant contact with key nongovernmental organs of the labor movement, such as the trade unions and workers and soldiers councils to promote policies that could realistically be pushed through the National Assembly.

This was hard and often unpopular work workers frequently demanded more than the government could deliver but Bauer insists it was essential to the process of educating the working class and raising their level of political consciousness. Bauer could justifiably argue that the government did what it could under difficult circumstances.

Still, he exaggerates the SDAPs success establishing its ideological hegemony among the masses, which, he claims, through purely intellectual struggles [had] broadened their intellectual horizon, kindled their intellectual agility, and maximized their drive to self-actuation. Like other Austro-Marxist intellectuals, Bauer was a teacher at heart, and had long thought that educating workers politically was the socialist intellectuals most basic activity. As the movements later failure to secure majorities would reveal, he overestimated the SDAPs ability to win over the working class and other social groups.

In parts four and five, Bauer analyzes the shifting power relations among Austrias social classes and how they clashed or coalesced in the political arena. Even before the SDAP lost the first parliamentary elections to its erstwhile coalition partner, the Christian Social Party, in the fall of 1920, it was apparent the peasantry and bourgeoisie had recovered from the political shocks of the revolution and were less willing to cooperate with labor.

Since the Christian Socials were at odds with the pan-German nationalists and lacked an absolute majority in parliament, Bauer believed that an Equilibrium of Class Forces, as he labels it, existed in the country that would still allow the workers movement, mobilized in the SDAP, the unions, and myriad other organizations, to exercise power. By 1922, however, he had concluded that, by mastering the inflation crisis with the help of international high finance, the Christian Socials had managed to stitch together a coalition of the peasantry, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the whole of the bourgeoisie (industrial and financial). The bourgeoisie, as the heftiest social force, thus asserted its control over the republic.

That control was not complete, however. Bauer points to the SDAPs robust popularity in the republican army and abiding stronghold of Red Vienna, where the party consistently commanded absolute majorities and launched a sweeping set of reforms in many spheres of urban life. He knew that, over time, a strong bourgeois government could undercut these gains, but he believed the SDAP would be able to overcome its recent setbacks and regain the initiative. The Right would fail to resolve the countrys ongoing economic and social crises, and the Social Democrats could bring white-collar employees and small tradesmen to its side, overthrow the bourgeois government, and reconquer workers power.

Despite such radical rhetoric, however, Bauer rejected the use of mass action unless the bourgeoisie tried to destroy the republican constitution. Victory was to be achieved within the framework of parliamentary politics.

It did not turn out the way Bauer wished. In the end, Social Democracy never returned to power, and the Christian Socials assiduously prepared the ground to overthrow the republic in 1934. While Austrias labor movement did offer violent resistance, its leadership, including Bauer, only supported taking up arms when it was already too late to be effective.

Though Bauers The Austrian Revolution appeared a decade earlier, its analysis of the revolution and of the system that emerged from it casts light on his approach to politics, a factor that was of substantial importance to the republics demise and points to what Peter Gay called the dilemma of democratic socialism. Bauer stood at the helm of a party of six hundred thousand members fully 10 percent of the entire population that consistently won over 40 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. To box out the SDAPs Communist rivals and to maintain the movements unity, he often used the radical rhetoric of class warfare and called for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.

In practice, however, he remained committed to parliamentary politics and was unprepared to seriously consider other means. In a political environment in which the anti-republican Right had no qualms about resorting to ruthless violence, the fate of the republic was sealed.

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