International petty-bourgeois “merit-ocracy” awards Obama Nobel Peace Prize
excerpt below from "The Cosmopolitan ‘Meritocracy’ and
Class Stratification of Black Nationality"
a chapter of Malcolm X, Black Liberation,
and the Road to Workers Power’
BY JACK BARNES
[The] expanding layer of the comfortable middle classes, whose place in bourgeois society is registered by Obama’s election, is composed of the handsomely remunerated staffs of so-called nonprofit foundations, charities, “community organizations,” and “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs)—in the United States and worldwide; of well-placed professors and top university administrative personnel; of attorneys, lobbyists, and others. The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundation- and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people of any racial or national background.
This reality was reflected in the presidential election results in November. Obama, of course, largely locked up the so-called Black vote. That isn’t what pushed him so decisively over the top in the race against Republican John McCain, however. Among the most striking changes from previous elections is that Obama won 52 percent of the votes from those with annual incomes of more than $200,000, whereas Democrat John Kerry had won 35 percent of this layer only four years earlier.
And for the first time in many decades, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 won more than 50% of the votes in the nation’s largely white suburbs, compared to the 41% and 47% share taken by Clinton in 1992 and 1996. What’s more, while the Republicans still dominated many suburbs populated by more established “old wealth”—places such as New Canaan and Darien, Connecticut; Saddle River and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; or Sunfish Lakes and North Oaks, Minnesota—he tallied substantial margins in towns with larger congregations of high-income professionals, the parasitic users of wealth—places such as Westport (65%), West Hartford (70%), and Greenwich (54%), Connecticut; Montclair (84%), Tenafly (64%), and Ridgewood (56%), New Jersey; Edina (56%), Minnesota; and numerous others. More than 65% of voters in Scarsdale, one of New York City’s most exclusive suburbs, voted for Obama, and Westchester County—the second wealthiest county in the state, and twelfth richest in the United States—went for Obama by a 63% margin (up from 58% for Kerry in 2004 and 56% for Clinton in 1998).
The aspiring social layer Obama is part of is bourgeois in its class interests, its values, and its world outlook. But it is not a section of the capitalist class in becoming. It is not “entrepreneurial.” It is not composed of the owners, top managers, or large debt holders of rapidly expanding new capitalist businesses—factories, farms, technology companies, or financial or commercial enterprises. The long, debt-fueled capitalist “boom” of the past three decades was marked by the stagnation of investment in capacity-expanding plant and equipment, and by an accompanying slowness in the drawing of production labor into the creation of social wealth. This stagnation of capital accumulation, together with the expansion of the middle-class layer we’re discussing, are in fact two sides of the same coin. Its members enjoy high incomes, but very few can or will pass down sizable capital through family trusts to coming generations.
Instead, this is a self-designated “enlightened meritocracy,” determined to con the world into accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and “service.” Its members truly believe that their “brightness,” their “quickness,” their “contributions to public life,” their “sacrifices” (they humbly point out they could be making a lot more in business or banking) give them the right to make decisions, to administer society on behalf of the bourgeoisie—what they claim to be on behalf of the interests of “the people.” In exchange they get better and bigger homes, obscenely expensive K-through-16-plus education for their bloodline, consumer “necessities,” plus the equivalent of a “law enforcement discount” on all major financial transactions. (The killing the Obamas made on their Hyde Park manse and grounds in Chicago, generously subsidized by a big-time Daley machine fund-raiser, is but one example typical of these milieus.) And believe it or not, these bourgeois wannabes see all this as social sophistication, not the conspicuous consumption of schlock.
While the existence and expansion of these strata are largely divorced from the production process, they are very much bound up with the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. They have a parasitic existence. To maintain their high incomes and living standards, they are dependent on skimming off a portion of surplus value—”rents”—produced by working people and appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Yet the big majority of them contribute nothing to the creation of that value, even in wasteful or socially harmful ways.
Instead, many of them pursue careers—in the universities, the media, “think tanks,” and elsewhere—that generate ideological rationalizations for class exploitation and inequality (as they strive to “reform” it, of course). Others, whether as highly paid supervisory personnel, staffers, or attorneys, administer the rulers’ efforts through foundations, “advocacy groups,” charities, and other “nonprofit” institutions, here and around the world, to postpone and buffer the explosive social and political responses by working people to our worsening living and job conditions.[footnote from original: "The trade union officialdom, despite their petty-bourgeois lifestyles and bourgeois outlook, is not really a part of this layer. They are still too connected, just by the character of their dues base and function in capitalist society, to the grit and grime of working. JB"]
This is a social layer that is insecure in its class position. It lacks the confidence exhibited by the bourgeoisie, even by the nouveau riche bourgeoisie. The propertied rulers—comprising only hundreds of families, not thousands—are a confident class (except during prerevolutionary crises or times of a rapidly accelerating breakdown of the capitalist order). Not only do they own, control, and hold the debt in perpetuity on the commanding heights of industry, banking, land, and trade. They also dominate the state and all aspects of social and political life, and finance the production of culture and the arts, including its “cutting edges.”
The meritocracy, to the contrary, is not confident. Dependent on cadging from the capitalists a portion of the wealth created by the exploited producers, these privileged aspirants to bourgeois affluence—a lifestyle they are convinced “society” owes them—nonetheless fear at some point being pushed back toward the conditions of the working classes. On the one hand, due to their very size as a stratum of society—it’s millions, if not tens of millions in the United States today—they recognize that the rulers find them useful to bolster illusions in the supposedly limitless “careers open to talent” under capitalism. At the same time, and despite their shameless self-promotion, many of them also sense that since they serve no essential economic or political functions in the production and reproduction of surplus value, they live at the forbearance of the bourgeoisie. In the end, large numbers of them are expendable, especially at times of deepening social crisis.
excerpt below from "The Cosmopolitan ‘Meritocracy’ and
Class Stratification of Black Nationality"
a chapter of Malcolm X, Black Liberation,
and the Road to Workers Power’
BY JACK BARNES
[The] expanding layer of the comfortable middle classes, whose place in bourgeois society is registered by Obama’s election, is composed of the handsomely remunerated staffs of so-called nonprofit foundations, charities, “community organizations,” and “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs)—in the United States and worldwide; of well-placed professors and top university administrative personnel; of attorneys, lobbyists, and others. The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundation- and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people of any racial or national background.
This reality was reflected in the presidential election results in November. Obama, of course, largely locked up the so-called Black vote. That isn’t what pushed him so decisively over the top in the race against Republican John McCain, however. Among the most striking changes from previous elections is that Obama won 52 percent of the votes from those with annual incomes of more than $200,000, whereas Democrat John Kerry had won 35 percent of this layer only four years earlier.
And for the first time in many decades, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 won more than 50% of the votes in the nation’s largely white suburbs, compared to the 41% and 47% share taken by Clinton in 1992 and 1996. What’s more, while the Republicans still dominated many suburbs populated by more established “old wealth”—places such as New Canaan and Darien, Connecticut; Saddle River and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; or Sunfish Lakes and North Oaks, Minnesota—he tallied substantial margins in towns with larger congregations of high-income professionals, the parasitic users of wealth—places such as Westport (65%), West Hartford (70%), and Greenwich (54%), Connecticut; Montclair (84%), Tenafly (64%), and Ridgewood (56%), New Jersey; Edina (56%), Minnesota; and numerous others. More than 65% of voters in Scarsdale, one of New York City’s most exclusive suburbs, voted for Obama, and Westchester County—the second wealthiest county in the state, and twelfth richest in the United States—went for Obama by a 63% margin (up from 58% for Kerry in 2004 and 56% for Clinton in 1998).
The aspiring social layer Obama is part of is bourgeois in its class interests, its values, and its world outlook. But it is not a section of the capitalist class in becoming. It is not “entrepreneurial.” It is not composed of the owners, top managers, or large debt holders of rapidly expanding new capitalist businesses—factories, farms, technology companies, or financial or commercial enterprises. The long, debt-fueled capitalist “boom” of the past three decades was marked by the stagnation of investment in capacity-expanding plant and equipment, and by an accompanying slowness in the drawing of production labor into the creation of social wealth. This stagnation of capital accumulation, together with the expansion of the middle-class layer we’re discussing, are in fact two sides of the same coin. Its members enjoy high incomes, but very few can or will pass down sizable capital through family trusts to coming generations.
Instead, this is a self-designated “enlightened meritocracy,” determined to con the world into accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and “service.” Its members truly believe that their “brightness,” their “quickness,” their “contributions to public life,” their “sacrifices” (they humbly point out they could be making a lot more in business or banking) give them the right to make decisions, to administer society on behalf of the bourgeoisie—what they claim to be on behalf of the interests of “the people.” In exchange they get better and bigger homes, obscenely expensive K-through-16-plus education for their bloodline, consumer “necessities,” plus the equivalent of a “law enforcement discount” on all major financial transactions. (The killing the Obamas made on their Hyde Park manse and grounds in Chicago, generously subsidized by a big-time Daley machine fund-raiser, is but one example typical of these milieus.) And believe it or not, these bourgeois wannabes see all this as social sophistication, not the conspicuous consumption of schlock.
While the existence and expansion of these strata are largely divorced from the production process, they are very much bound up with the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. They have a parasitic existence. To maintain their high incomes and living standards, they are dependent on skimming off a portion of surplus value—”rents”—produced by working people and appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Yet the big majority of them contribute nothing to the creation of that value, even in wasteful or socially harmful ways.
Instead, many of them pursue careers—in the universities, the media, “think tanks,” and elsewhere—that generate ideological rationalizations for class exploitation and inequality (as they strive to “reform” it, of course). Others, whether as highly paid supervisory personnel, staffers, or attorneys, administer the rulers’ efforts through foundations, “advocacy groups,” charities, and other “nonprofit” institutions, here and around the world, to postpone and buffer the explosive social and political responses by working people to our worsening living and job conditions.[footnote from original: "The trade union officialdom, despite their petty-bourgeois lifestyles and bourgeois outlook, is not really a part of this layer. They are still too connected, just by the character of their dues base and function in capitalist society, to the grit and grime of working. JB"]
This is a social layer that is insecure in its class position. It lacks the confidence exhibited by the bourgeoisie, even by the nouveau riche bourgeoisie. The propertied rulers—comprising only hundreds of families, not thousands—are a confident class (except during prerevolutionary crises or times of a rapidly accelerating breakdown of the capitalist order). Not only do they own, control, and hold the debt in perpetuity on the commanding heights of industry, banking, land, and trade. They also dominate the state and all aspects of social and political life, and finance the production of culture and the arts, including its “cutting edges.”
The meritocracy, to the contrary, is not confident. Dependent on cadging from the capitalists a portion of the wealth created by the exploited producers, these privileged aspirants to bourgeois affluence—a lifestyle they are convinced “society” owes them—nonetheless fear at some point being pushed back toward the conditions of the working classes. On the one hand, due to their very size as a stratum of society—it’s millions, if not tens of millions in the United States today—they recognize that the rulers find them useful to bolster illusions in the supposedly limitless “careers open to talent” under capitalism. At the same time, and despite their shameless self-promotion, many of them also sense that since they serve no essential economic or political functions in the production and reproduction of surplus value, they live at the forbearance of the bourgeoisie. In the end, large numbers of them are expendable, especially at times of deepening social crisis.
The capitalist rulers are utterly pragmatic in their policies, but they do have class policies. They do what they deem necessary to defend their profits, their property, and above all their class dictatorship. They use that dictatorship—they use their state power: their cops, their courts, their armed forces, their currency, and their border controls.
In contrast, this “meritocratic” middle layer has no class policy course of its own. To the degree they commit themselves to a course of action—often camouflaged as caring, feeling, thoughtful, and above all very intelligent—such policies are in fact derivative of the needs and demands of their bourgeois patrons. Despite the Obama campaign’s mantra of “change,” for example, the Obama administration is relying on exactly the same top Wall Street bankers and financiers as its predecessors, in fact, the very same moneyed interests—even the same individuals—who are the architects of today’s accelerating capitalist economic and financial crisis. And more than any other administration in the history of U.S. imperialism, its foreign, military, and “domestic security” policies are stamped by near total deference to the top echelons of the professional officer corps of the U.S. armed forces.
This is the social layer from which Barack Obama emerged. Not from the majority proletarian Black nationality. Not from the producing small-business milieu, the petty bourgeoisie. And not from the bourgeoisie. It is with the class interests and world outlook of this increasingly multinational “meritocracy” that Obama identifies.
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Mike Italie's 2002 article demolishing another "humanitarian imperialist," Nobel Peace Prize winner (Jimmy Carter), can be enjoyed here.
An excerpt: "Carter’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony was consistent with his record as a war president of a liberal stripe. Alongside the usual empty pacifist blather that "we will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children," Carter endorsed the fundamentals of George Bush’s policy all along the line. He warned Iraq that it must disarm because "the world insists that this be done." Later he told a CNN interviewer that if Iraq does not disarm, then a U.S. bombing campaign and invasion would not be "unprovoked."
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