New lesser-evilist handbook from man who wanted us to vote for John Kerry in 2004

Forthcoming from Verso, October 2010

A merciless dissection of Obama’s overseas escalation and domestic retreat …

What has really changed since Bush left the White House? Very little, argues Ali in The Obama Syndrome, apart from the mood music. The hopes aroused during Obama’s election campaign have rapidly receded. Following the financial crisis, the “reform” president bailed out Wall Street without getting anything in return. With Democratic Party leaders and representatives bought by the lobbying system, the healthcare reform bill was quickly eviscerated, public education delivered to the market and the big banks rewarded with light-touch regulation. Abroad, the “war on terror” continues: torture on a daily basis in Bagram, Iraq indefinitely occupied, Israel permanently appeased, and more troops and drone attacks in Af-Pak than under Bush. Obama’s failures are paving the way for a Republican surge, while his own supporters become increasingly despondent.

Tariq Ali in The Obama Syndrome:

“In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, Obama has treated the world to one uplifting homily after another, each address larded with every euphemism that White House speechwriters can muster to describe America’s glowing mission in the world: ‘Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs’; ‘Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering.’ The model for this variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson—no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it …”

An event from which people couldn’t turn their eyes

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far

Written by Alistair Cartwright

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far (OR Books 2010), 208pp.

Norman Finkelstein is an academic who has written and spoken widely on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Along with Noam Chomsky he has been one of America’s most outspoken critics of Israel. Published just over a year after Israel’s 2008/9 attack on Gaza this book is first and foremost a stunning indictment of that attack. Finkelstein presents a mass of evidence drawn from reports by human rights organisations, soldiers’ testimonies, statements from Israeli officials, news reports, UN documents and in particular the Goldstone report.

Altogether the effect is an onslaught of undeniable condemnation. In this respect This Time We Went Too Far does two things: it blasts away any remaining shred of apology for Israel, and it condenses, out of the evidence, a powerful lament for a great human tragedy. The titles of the two chapters which contain the bulk of the indictment testify to the first part: Whitewash and Of Human Shields and Hasbara (the Hebrew word for propaganda). A quotation from Gandhi at the end of the book indicates the second: ‘Massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty to cherish their memory’.

The balance sheet of operation ‘Cast Lead’ is one of massive, disproportionate destruction:
‘On the basis of extensive field research, nongovernmental organisations put the total number of Palestinians killed at nearly 1400, of whom up to four-fifths were civilians and 350 children. On the other side, total Israeli casualties amounted to ten combatants (four killed by friendly fire) and three civilians… Israel destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes… 280 schools and kindergartens,… 1,500 factories and workshops…’

There was no real resistance; Israeli soldiers’ experiences ranged from boredom and casual sadism to surprise at the extraordinary firepower deployed, uncommon even to members of the IDF: ‘IDF testimonies recalled ‘the hatred and the joy’ , and ‘fun’ and ‘delight’ of killing Palestinians.’ Another soldier said: ‘there was a point where D-9s were razing areas. It was amazing. At first you go in and see lots of houses. A week later, after razing, you see the horizon further away, almost to the sea’.

Individual atrocities were widespread, and Finkelstein is able to document that Palestinian civilians, ‘including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers’. The destruction was deliberately intended, with the design of the operation coming from the highest levels. Finkelstein quotes an exchange between a BBC reporter observing that Israel ‘imposed 100 times more casualties on Gaza in three weeks than they did on you’ and Interior Minister Sheerit responding: ‘that’s the idea of the operation, what do you think?’. Just after the ceasefire Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ‘bragged that “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”.’

This exhaustive factual account is the core of the book but, as Finkelstein acknowledges, it isn’t enough in itself. Finkelstein wishes the book to be more than a ‘lament’, since he sees the attack on Gaza as a turning point in world public opinion, such that ‘the prospects have never been more propitious for galvanising the public not just to mourn but also to act.’

The rest of the book, sandwiched around his account of the attack itself, is dedicated to explaining the strategic logic behind Cast Lead and the tensions leading up to it. Finkelstein offers a picture of the recent shift in public opinion, the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity, and gives advice on how to continue and extend these developments. Within this agenda there are three main touchstones around which Finkelstein orientates his arguments: 1. international law; 2. liberal Jewish opinion, particularly in the US; and 3. the idea that the scale of destruction unleashed by Cast Lead effectively shocked people into action. While all three are important aspects of the forces at play, raising them up to the point where they become the principal bases of the Palestinian cause, as Finkelstein seems to do, is problematic.

Finkelstein is not uncritical of international law. At one point he goes as far as saying that ‘in a rational world the locution “laws of war” would make as much sense as “etiquette of cannibals”.’ Yet he still places a somewhat disproportionate emphasis on the importance of UN resolutions, international legal bodies like the ICJ and most of all the Goldstone report. He criticises US and Israeli exceptionalism in the face of international law but never quite makes the essential point. The US and Israel go unchecked in their disregard for the rules because international law has a certain degree of US dominance built into it. This itself flows from the dynamics of imperialism. International law is not a neutral field, a simple set of rules, but an institution that has formed within an imperialist system.

US dominance can effectively neutralise international law, and just as easily manipulate it. To take an example from the book, Finkelstein recounts how the US and Israel were able to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA) over its support of the Goldstone Report’s recommendations: ‘Acting on direct instruction from President Mahmoud Abbas, the PA representative on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) effectively acquiesced in killing consideration of the Goldstone Report’. The PA had to reverse its stance later, but this episode underlines the fact that the reasons to cite international law are essentially tactical. International law is a contested space that includes a strong bias towards the US and other imperial powers.

It is certainly worth trying to make use of international law in the right circumstances, but only with a clear understanding of its limitations. The danger is that far from serving to unify people as Finkelstein intends, reliance on the processes of international law could have a profound demobilising effect. The recent UNHRC resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report is a small victory on the way to something bigger, but we should still expect the US to block action on it at the Security Council. And of course just because we support the findings and recommendations of the Goldstone report doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wholeheartedly oppose UN sanctions on Iran or the UN-supported occupation of Iraq.

International law (or universal human values) is not the only reason Finkelstein puts such high store in the Goldstone report. He sees in Goldstone a welcome return to a ‘classical’ Jewish liberalism that ends an era of ‘blanket Jewish support for Israel’. Moreover, ‘because of Goldstone’s credentials, Israel could not credibly play its usual cards – ‘anti-Semite’, ‘self-hating Jew’, ‘Holocaust denier’. . . In effect his persona neutralised the ideological weapons Israel has honed over many years to ward off criticism.’ For Finkelstein the wider shift in Jewish opinion makes the prospects of the Palestinian cause and a ‘just and lasting resolution’ of the whole conflict better now than they ever have been.

The shifts in Jewish opinion with regard to Israel, particularly in America, that Finkelstein documents are revealing and important. But in describing liberal Jewish opinion as the key to any movement for a just peace (presumably a movement for solidarity with the people of Palestine) Finkelstein confuses cause and effect. The turning of the tide within this particular section of international public opinion is symptomatic of a much larger movement. Broadly speaking this is the global antiwar movement. The Palestinian cause now has a higher profile because the issue of Palestine has been swept up in the war on terror. The corresponding shift in public opinion is due largely to the way in which this political connection has been made and reinforced by the movement against the war.

An implication of Finkelstein’s title, ‘this time we went too far’, well reflected in the text, is that what was decisive about Israel’s attack on Gaza was simply the level of destruction. The massive destruction of Cast Lead made it an event from which people couldn’t turn their eyes. However, one only has to look at comparable violent moments in Israel’s history, like the war on Lebanon in 1982, to see that the widespread outrage surrounding Cast Lead involved other factors apart from the level and nature of the violence itself. Significantly in 1982 the largest protests against that war were in Israel itself, with one protest bringing hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets of Tel Aviv. While international solidarity campaigns like the PSC here in the UK were founded around the events of 1982 they did not yet have the mass appeal they have now.

In effect Finkelstein recognises this when he notes that ‘it is not so much that Israel’s behaviour is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behaviour has finally caught up with it’. But why did the record catch up now? The global protests around Gaza in 2008/9 were part of a chain of decisive moments from the Jenin massacre in 2002 to the second war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s repression of the second Intifada was swept up in the discourse of the war on terror due to the clear support of the Bush administration. The fate of the Palestinians became visibly tied to US intentions for the whole of the Middle East, including its plans to attack Iraq. Palestine became a cause of common struggle for a large number of those opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The global antiwar movement has been a rising sea lifting the Palestinian cause.

Can Lukacs be a guide today?

The next in the series of Counterfire publications is Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukács by Chris Nineham. Below are excerpts from the publication, out 2nd September.

Georg Lukács was the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century. In the process of explaining the principles of the Russian revolution he provided answers to some vital questions: How do capitalist ideas maintain a hold on our consciousness? In what circumstances do people become radicalised? And how can socialists build genuinely mass revolutionary movements?

Lukács’ revolutionary ideas of the 1920s were suppressed by Stalin and have been marginalised by academics and even many on the left. They have lived a kind of underground existence re-emerging whenever fundamental change is being discussed. The book introduces his ideas and argues they are vital to our world of crisis and war.

Buy on Amazon

A philosopher activist

Lukács became a revolutionary and a Marxist during the greatest wave of working class struggle in history, unleashed by the Russian revolution at the end of the First World War. Already a well known intellectual in Hungary, months after joining the newly-formed Hungarian Communist party in December 1918 he found himself a leader in the events which led to the brief Hungarian soviet republic in 1919. He was People’s Commissar for Education and for a short time a political commissar at the battlefront.

The Hungarian Workers Republic ended in disaster. This was, as Lukács himself came to recognise, because it was unstable from the start. The Hungarian Communist Party had called an insurrection in February 1919 well before it had majority support in the workers’ councils. The uprising was crushed, as mass radicalisation proved no substitute for political preparation. All the same, the militancy of peasants and workers and the annexation of parts of the country by foreign powers led to the collapse of the bourgeois government, creating a power vacuum.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic came about in March 1919 through a merger between the Communists and the reformist Social Democratic Party (SDP). The SDP was handed power by the ruling class in a last ditch attempt to salvage the system. Lukács and the leadership of the Communist Party interpreted the new alliance of reformists and revolutionaries as a spontaneous restoration of proletarian unity, but it turned out to be a recipe for confusion and then disaster.

Communist Party leaders acted as if they were in a revolutionary government, forcing through nationalisation of the land with no concern for the interests of the peasantry while the majority of workers remained under reformist leadership. Faced with new attacks from an alliance of counter-revolutionary powers, the SDP leaders capitulated and the Communists were isolated. A reactionary government was formed, which unleashed a reign of terror on the left, executing 5,000 and driving tens of thousands more out of the country.

Lukács wrote his key works of the 1920s – Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, History and Class Consciousness and Tailism and the Dialectic – in the aftermath of this experience, while he was in exile in Vienna. We can see now this was a decisive moment for the socialist movement. Before the war the world socialist movement had been organised in the Second International, whose complete accommodation to the system was exposed by its leading parties’ support for the First World War. The Russian Bolsheviks stood out against this betrayal and led a successful revolution that became an inspiration for millions around the world.

Both History and Class Consciousness and Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought express the revolutionary potential of the moment, and the fear that lessons were not being learnt from the experience. By 1925, when Lukács wrote Tailism and the Dialectic, there were signs that the isolation of the Russian revolution was encouraging a new form of fatalism.

Life under capitalism

In History and Class Consciousness Lukács does take the role of capitalist institutions as mediating elements into account. But he explains their capacity to secure workers’ acquiescence as a product of the lived experience of capitalism. He also explains how and why that same experience can create opposition.

Lukács’ starting point is the fact that capitalism turns everything in to a commodity, a unit of product whose only purpose is to generate profit for capitalists. Lukács argues it is no accident that the commodity was also Marx’s starting point when he wanted to ‘portray capitalist society in its totality and lay bare its fundamental nature’ in his major works.

The problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.

Commodity production shapes how we experience and understand the world. It reduces quality to quantity and it conceals the overall process of exploitation in an immediate world of buying and selling. Echoing Marx’s words in Capital, Lukács described how commodification has the effect of giving relations between people the character of things, of ‘reifying’ them.

In the process relationships acquire a ‘phantom objectivity’ and an autonomy ‘that seems so strictly rational and all embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature.’ This is why commodities have what Marx called ‘the character of a fetish’. Like primitive fetishes made by humans and then worshipped as gods, commodities come to rule over us even though we create them ourselves.

We can only grasp the full impact of this process of reification when we realise that the essential condition for the conquest by the commodity form is the transformation of labour itself into a commodity. If the value of goods is going to be determined by the labour time necessary in their production, labour power must be fully integrated into this rational, universally-quantified system. The worker must sell her labour power like any other commodity on the market.

Neither objectively nor in relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.

Commodification shapes the physical process of work itself and our understanding of it. Work becomes dominated by rationalisation, a high division of labour, repetition and obsession with quantity rather than quality. The finished article no longer appears as the object of a process at all. The fragmented process of production of the object ends up producing a fragmented subject: ‘The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle fed into an alien system.’

Reification then has three reinforcing effects on consciousness. It hides the real, human relations of capitalism; it makes the system appear as if it is driven by an inhuman, preordained logic; and it makes workers feel powerless to do anything about it.

It is often pointed out that Lukács, through his reading of Capital, arrived at a concept almost identical with the idea of alienation contained in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which was written in 1844 but not published until 1932.

But he did more than that. He broke new ground by showing how reification permeated the whole of capitalist society and laid the foundations for the first ‘unified structure of consciousness’ in history. He went on to explore the implications of this for radical politics.

Lukács argued that the state of mind generated by the experience of work at the sharp end of capitalist production is suffused throughout the institutions of capitalist society.

The atomisation of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that for the first time in history the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified economic laws.

Lukács argued for example that bureaucracies are a corollary to the factory system:

Bureaucracy implies the adjustment of one’s way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness, to the general socio economic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case of the worker in particular business concerns. The formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civil service and so forth, signifies objectively and factually a comparable reduction of all social functions to their elements, a comparable search for the rational formal laws of these carefully segregated partial systems.

So way beyond the profit-making workplace, in institutions across society, tasks are reduced to quantifiable functions, to ‘unit throughput’, in processes that acquire autonomy from the personality and therefore from human judgement. Even for those dealing directly with other human beings the sense of overall purpose is lost, all sense of cause and effect obscured.

Lukács gives the example of the journalist whose powers of empathy, judgement, knowledge and expression are divorced from personality, and who is placed in an unnatural isolation when confronting the facts or events he or she ‘reports’ on. ‘The journalist’s “lack of convictions,” the prostitution of experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’

The second time as farce, the third time as just more tragedy

Fears grow that US headed into new recession

By Doug Lorimer

Fears that the US economy is sliding into a new recession or into a period of protracted near stagnation have been heightened by new data released at the end of August. Real US gross domestic product (GDP) increased at a sluggish annualised 1.6% rate in the April-June quarter of 2010 after increasing by 3.7% in the first quarter, the US Commerce Department announced on August 27. A month earlier the department had estimated US GDP growth in the second quarter would be 2.4%.....

… And throughout Europe the stimulus programmes will be winding down over the next few months — giving way in some cases to draconian austerity programmes, which have already driven Greece, for example, back into a recession …

Read more...

For the socialist order of plenty: Jack London

Jack London on the historic failure of the capitalist class

There are many counts of the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to which capital has never replied and can never reply.

The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed. And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It prattled sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as was the opportunity it had ignored.

But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand. Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and unmistakable...The capitalist class has mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children go hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1320 millionnaires. The point, however, is not that the mass of man kind is miserable because of the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from it. The point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of the wealth taken by the capitalist class, but for want of the wealth that was never created. This wealth was never created because the capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.

With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labor more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material want and wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts. Not only would matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered. In such a day incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman, or child would be impelled to action by an empty stomach. On the contrary, they would be impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action, as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by statecraft. The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent upon such a condition of society would be tremendous. All the human world would surge upward in a mighty wave.

This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class. Less blindness on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were all that was necessary. A wonderful era was possible for the human race. But the capitalist class failed. It made a shambles of civilization. Nor can the capitalist class plead not guilty. It knew of the opportunity. Its wise men told it of the opportunity, its scholars and its scientists told it of the opportunity. All that they said is there to-day in the books, just so much damning evidence against it. It would not listen. It was too greedy. It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. It lulled its conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering and misery of mankind to continue and to increase. In short, the capitalist class failed to take advantage of the opportunity. But the opportunity is still here. The capitalist class has been tried and found wanting. Remains the working-class to see what it can do with the opportunity...
Jack London, 'Revolution', 1905

Material conditions for workers fightback already exist

Warning of social unrest during jobless recovery

By Sean O'Grady, Economics Editor

Saturday, 2 October 2010

Britain faces mounting social unrest as unemployment, especially among the young, is set to remain stubbornly high, according to a stark warning from the International Labour Organisation. It adds to concerns that a “jobless recovery” could leave many idle for years.

In its latest review of prospects for the world economy, the ILO says that, globally, employment levels will not recover to pre-crisis levels before 2015, two years later than previously estimated. The ILO says that the austerity policies being undertaken by governments around the world threaten to generate a long “labour market recession”. The organsiation cautions that 22 million new jobs will need to be created – 14 million in rich countries and 8 million in developing nations.

“There has been too much focus on how much further we are going into debt, when the question is how much more we should invest to get the real economy going,” the director general of the ILO, Juan Somavia, told Reuters. He added that stimulus withdrawal was “going too soon, too fast” to underpin a “fragile” global economic recovery from the financial crisis.

“Fairness must be the compass guiding us out of the crisis. People can understand and accept difficult choices, if they perceive that all share in the burden of pain. Governments should not have to choose between the demands of financial markets and the needs of their citizens. Financial and social stability must come together. Otherwise, not only the global economy but also social cohesion will be at risk.”

Since the crisis started in 2007, some 30 to 35 million jobs have been lost worldwide. The ILO forecasts that global unemployment will hit 213 million this year, or 6.5 per cent. Overall, British unemployment compares relatively well, with a rate of 7.8 per cent, but youth unemployment, at 915,000 or 19.2 per cent, is higher than most comparable European economies and above its early 1990s peaks.

After the peak of new unemployment, in 1990, it took 11 years for British youth unemployment to subside, and the potential human waste implied by current high levels of unemployment among the under-25s is highlighted by the ILO: “The longer the labour market recession, the greater the difficulties for jobseekers to obtain new employment,” the ILO report said.

“In the 35 countries for which data exists, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year and therefore run significant risks of demoralisation, loss of self-esteem and mental health problems. Importantly, young people are disproportionately hit by unemployment.”

While not in the “high risk” category for social unrest, a group which includes Mexico and Peru, the UK is bracketed with Spain, South Africa and Russia as being at “medium risk” of strikes and protests over austerity measures: “Besides the documented cases of social unrest, there is a real danger that the situation could worsen in the coming months.”

Thousands demonstrated across Europe on Wednesday, with Spain witnessing its first general strike in nine years. Yet governments are also under renewed market pressures to cut their borrowing and implement austerity packages, highlighted by the latest downgrade for Spain’s credit rating and the dramatic news that Ireland’s borrowing will approach a third of GDP this year, to fund a €50bn (£43bn) bank bailout package. The IMF offered a warm endorsement of the British government’s plans and its Global Financial Stability Report recommended similar actions across the world.

Many countries that experienced positive employment growth at the end of 2009 are now seeing a weakening of the jobs recovery. By the end of 2009, more than four million jobseekers had stopped looking for work in the countries for which information is available.

The ILO concludes: “The coexistence of private-debt-led growth in certain developed countries with export-led growth in large emerging economies has proved to be the Achilles heel of the world economy. Recovery will be fragile as long as labour incomes continue to grow less than justified by productivity developments and the financial system remains dysfunctional.”

Recovery of profits, not of working class

Unemployment in U.S. Probably Rose as Recovery Can't Generate Enough Jobs

By With assistance from Julie Alnwick and [bn:PRSN=1] Chris Middleton [] - Oct 3, 2010

The jobless rate probably rose in September for a second month as the year-old U.S. recovery failed to generate enough jobs to keep up with a growing labor force, economists said before a report this week.

Unemployment climbed to 9.7 percent from 9.6 percent in August, according to the median estimate of 62 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of an Oct. 8 report from the Labor Department. The data may also show companies added 77,000 workers to payrolls, and total hiring stagnated amid cuts in government staffing as the decennial census wound down.

A lack of jobs is restraining consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, and underscores the Federal Reserve’s concern that the rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s has been too slow to develop. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg project unemployment will average at least 9 percent through 2011.

The U.S. has “a difficult labor market and mediocre GDP growth,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “Not enough jobs will have been created to keep the unemployment rate from drifting higher.”

A reading as projected means the jobless rate would have equaled or exceed 9.5 percent for 14 consecutive months, surpassing the 13-month period from mid 1982 to mid 1983 as the longest span of elevated joblessness since monthly records began in 1948.

Less Growth

The forecast gain in payrolls excluding government agencies would follow an increase of 67,000 in August. Companies had created an average of 200,000 a month in March and April before growth weakened. The world’s largest economy grew at a 1.7 percent annual pace in the second quarter compared with 3.7 percent in the first three months of the year and 5 percent at the end of 2009, according to Commerce Department data.

Some companies are adding workers for the upcoming holiday season. Toys ‘R’ Us Inc., the world’s biggest toy retailer, plans to hire about 45,000 employees to cope with demand during the holiday season. The move is “essentially doubling” the domestic workforce, Wayne, New Jersey-based Toys ‘R’ Us said in a Sept. 28 statement.

The employment report will be the last before voters go to the polls in midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress. Cooling growth and a sluggish labor market may feed voter discontent. Polls show the public is increasingly skeptical of President Barack Obama’s performance.

Voter Discontent

Support for Obama has fallen as the unemployment rate has been slow to retreat. His job approval over a three-day period that ended Sept. 30 was 46 percent, compared with 52 percent at the same time last year, according to a poll from Princeton, New Jersey-based Gallup Inc.

The Labor Department on Oct. 8 will also publish its preliminary estimate for the annual benchmark payroll revisions to be issued in February. The projected changes, which will cover the period from April 2009 to March 2010, are based on state unemployment insurance tax data that cover almost all employers and update the original figures derived from a sampling of about 400,000 worksites.

A report on Oct. 5 from the Tempe, Arizona-based Institute for Supply Management will show that growth at services industries, which cover almost 90 percent of the economy, picked up in September after cooling the prior month, according to the Bloomberg survey. The group’s index increased to 52 from 51.5 in August, the weakest reading in seven months, economists said. Readings above 50 signal growth.

Factories Cooling

Manufacturing, which last year led the U.S. out of its worst recession since the 1930s, is showing signs of slowing. Orders placed with U.S. factories dropped 0.4 percent in August, the third decline in four months, according to the median estimate of economists ahead of tomorrow’s Commerce Department report.

An ISM report last week showed manufacturing expanded in September at the slowest pace in 10 months.

Data from the National Association of Realtors tomorrow may show pending home sales, or the number of contracts to purchase previously owned houses, rose in August for a second consecutive month, according to the survey median. Housing demand is hovering near record lows after the expiration of a homebuyer tax credit, even with cheaper prices and lower borrowing costs.