Francis Fox Piven conceives of "disruptive power" as that form of usually implicit power that people have as a result of the interdependencies that social organization gives rise to:

"All societies organize social life through networks of specialized and interdependent activities, and the more complex the society, the more elaborate these interdependent relations. Networks of cooperation and interdependence inevitably give rise to contention, to conflict, as people bound together by social life try to use each other to further their often distinctive interests and outlooks. And the networks of interdependence that bind people together also generate widespread power capacities to act on these distinctive interests and outlooks. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural workers, just as industrial capitalists depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, merchants depend on customers, husbands depend on wives, masters depend on slaves, landlords depend on tenants, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.

"Unlike wealth and force, which are concentrated at the top of social hierarchies, the leverage inherent in interdependencies is potentially widespread, especially in a densely interconnected society where the division of labor is far advanced. This leverage can in principle be activated by all parties to social relations, and it can also be activated from below, by the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations. I call the activation of interdependent power disruption, and I think protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." (Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 20)

This analysis is consistent with many theoretical perspectives, and the concept of disruptive power certainly has an affinity with the marxist conception of class capacities, or more broadly, structural capacities.  It follows from this that disruptive power is not a particular tactic.  Disruptive power may be violent, depending on the context of the struggle that activates it, but it is not necessarily so.  It may be noisy, or carnivalesque - but again, not necessarily.  The presumption in social movement literature is, says Piven, against violence and in favour of spectacle; but this dual presumption is based on a misunderstanding of protest movements, conceiving them as essentially a form of communication intended to win the support of wider audiences, whereas this is not always the case.  In fact, the exercise of disruptive power is mainly about leverage.

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements.  It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned.  Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such.  For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience."  In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience.  If there was a textbook, this would be in it.  The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is.  At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications.  Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows.  One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage.  However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class.  The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class.  This brings us to the next point.

Disruptive power is distributed widely, but that doesn't mean it is easy to actualise.  Piven cites six difficulties that obstruct this: first is the problem of getting people to recognise the relation of interdependence that endows them with disruptive power; the second difficulty is that the exercise of disruptive power requires people to break rules, defying institutional mechanisms that enshrine the cooperative (if fundamentally exploitative and oppressive) relations that sustain daily life, with the resulting risk of repression; third, this disruptive power has to be coordinated across many different groups and individuals who contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations, in order to be effective - "the classical problem of solidarity"; fourth, the people exercising disruptive power are enmeshed in a network of relations with multiple others who may attempt to restrain this disruption (church, family, etc); fifth, those involved have to find ways to endure the suspension of the normal cooperative relations that allow them to effectively reproduce themselves in their normal condition - strikers need to eat, occupiers need tents, etc.; and finally, those engaging in disruption have to consider the threat of exit by those from whom they have withdrawn cooperation - the rich taking off with their capital, partners leaving relationships, etc.  The means to overcome these obstacles "are not solved anew with each challenge", but rather enter the "language of resistance", and "become a repertoire" (pp. 21-32)

This will do as an interpretive grid for understanding what the Occupy movements in the US are going through at this moment.  Their challenges are all comprehensible as those arising from the exercise of disruptive power: how to attack the dominant ideology, coordinate heterogenous groups, sustain their own 'rule-breaking' and support others in their 'rule-breaking', and resist repression.  It is through the prism of the latter question that I want to assess the current state of the Occupy movement in the US.  The recent wave of renewed police assaults, some of them apparently co-ordinated across eighteen cities by both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been severe.  From pepper-spraying the elderly to macing students, the intention has been to physically atomise these collective enterprises.  It is tempting to say that such an over-reaction indicates the degree of apprehension on the part of the ruling class.  In fact, however, apprehension has been far more apparent in their hesitations, retreats and fumbling attempts at co-optation, than in the resort to brutality.  The latter is their default: far from being a panic reaction, it is how the US ruling class does business.  As far as cops are concerned, it is "fairly standard police procedure".  Their reliance on such methods may in fact reflect an underlying lack of concern, an insouciance, a feeling that this movement is a nuisance, but ultimately a brittle, shallow affair.  To deviate from such methods would show that state planners are concerned that this is a movement which cannot be managed by escalating the costs of participation.

For the sake of argument, anyway, let me assume that the police actions in Portland, Seattle, Oakland, New York, UC Davis, and elsewhere, all reflect a consensus among ruling elites that a sufficient show of force will produce a collapse in confidence among the occupiers, deter their supporters, disorganise their alliances and leave them reduced to a hardcore of easily contained and potentially vilified activists.  The timing would support this, as city managers would expect winter to start thinning the numbers anyway.  A disorienting attack, a forcible shutdown, before the occupiers have had the chance to fully conceive and implement strategies for managing the cold months ahead, would be tactically intelligible in this context.  Yet, although the police offensives have had some of the sought effects, forcing the occupiers onto the back foot, depriving many of them of their secured bedrock, they have nonetheless failed to thwart the momentum.  The scale of the mobilisation in New York last Thursday, where an estimated 32,000 people took part in a day of action to shut down parts of the city, followed an ostensible victory on the part of city authorities three days earlier.  This was when the police attacked the camp at 2am, and the mayor obtained a court ruling denying occupiers the right to camp in Liberty Square - though the city could not stop protesters from actually gathering there.  The evictions demanded a bigger response from the occupiers and their periphery of active support, and Thursday provided it.  Liberty Square is still occupied every day; it is still a meeting place, a pedagogical forum, and a launch pad for further action.  So, the initiative remains in the hands of the protesters; not the state.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, this is a movement that is still in its upswing.  A full-frontal attack on a movement which is still growing, and still popular, can be a dangerous mistake to make.  The problem for the authorities is that such an assault isn't a technical operation but a political wager.  As technically proficient as a repressive manouevre may be, the political effects aren't easily calculable: the same tactic that kills a movement today may consolidate it tomorrow.  Second,  as the statement from Occupy Wall Street following the eviction notes, the movement is serious.  This seems nebulous, moralising even, but it has a precise political meaning: most of those joining the movement fully expected repression, and were mentally prepared for it.  There are arguments that the police are just blue collar workers who should be on the side of the 99% - though, when former NYPD police capitain Ray Lewis asserts that his ex-colleagues are "workers for the 1%" and "mercenaries for Wall Street", one can safely say that such arguments are losing traction.  But the occupation in Wall Street came to national prominence following a particularly brutal NYPD assault.  It is a simple but reasonable inference that those who joined OWS and embarked on similar projects after this, knew that repression was a risk.  So, the movement is far less brittle in this respect than its opponents perhaps estimated.

Third, as a former head of the CBI has pointed out, the ideology of free market capitalism has lost a significant part of its material basis: it cannot as easily claim to be more efficient than rival forms of organisation, or delivery greater prosperity for the majority over the long run.  The increasing sympathy for socialism and communism among Americans has something to do with this disintegration of capitalist ideology.  There is enormous sympathy for this left-populist movement, and those deemed complicit in its repression run the risk of being publicly shamed and of losing allies rapidly.  Fourth, and relatedly, the repressive response from the ruling class may be coordinated and bipartisan, but it is far from unanimous.  Some elements of the ruling class have preferred to try and co-opt the movement rather than simply attack it.  This is most visible in the liberal segments of the capitalist media.  From the very early days, it was obvious that the New York Times and perhaps also MSNBC favoured co-option rather than simple coercion.  The fear of the banking industry, as their professional lobbyists have summarised it, is that this strategic fracturing of US ruling class opinion may be disadvantageous to their position.  As they are not their own best advocates, they require public advocates - and the fear is that politicians under pressure to respond to such a movement will consider it imprudent to publicly defend financial capital.  But the more the repressive option fails, the more the emphasis will fall on co-option.  Finally, the occupiers have worked hard to build alliances with groups who already know how to wield disruptive power and have their own sets of repertoires.  The response to the first attempted assault on Occupy Wall Street was based on an alliance with unions; the response to the first assault on Occupy Oakland, a city-wide 'general strike', was based on an alliance with the unions too.  Of course, one must be wary of what Glenn Greenwald detects is an effort by pro-Obama union leaders to direct the movement into the Democratic fold.  And solidarity work has taken other forms, such as the attempt to obstruct foreclosures.  But there is a genuine convergence of interests between organised labor and the heterogenous groups assembled at OWS - whether debt-shackled students, workers, the unemployed, or dissident former soldiers.  The union leadership knows it, especially after the defeat of the union-bashers in Ohio.  The alliance between these groups has to be negotiated and constructed.  But the material basis for it, which the slogan 'we are the 99%' communicates, is a shared class interest.  This shared interest, at a time of sharpening class antagonisms, is making solidarity easier to achieve, and is laying the basis for a new Left.

George Clooney, Hollywood's meridian liberal, offers a story about a liberal politician making a run for president.  This could be good, or it could be insufferable.  (The presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman is a reasonable guarantee that it won't be too insufferable, though).  You think you're going to get something like Bulworth, where the hero's progressive views are met with disapproval by party bosses and rich donors alike, but stimulate popular enthusiasm.  Or you think, as the ambiguous title invites you to, that there's an assassination in the post.  And indeed the movie obliquely alludes to this possibility - there's a brief, tense 'Wellstone' moment as the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, and his advisors sit in a small jet air craft passing through turbulence.  There are other allusions - a dead intern, redolent of Chandra Levy, perhaps.  If the CIA doesn't off him, if his donors don't hang him out to dry, if the media doesn't destroy him, maybe someone will frame him.  Somehow, our liberal lion will be sacrificed to the Christians.  But no.  

At a simple didactic level, this film is closer to The Candidate, where an intelligent, principled reformist allows his campaign to be corrupted, dumbed down and pulled to the right in order to win.  But that's not really the basis for two hours in the cinema - not for my money.  And indeed if this film were reducible to its explicit politics, it would be fairly appalling.  This is often the case with Clooney films.  Up In the Air, for example, was a deeply conservative movie whose argument was that only families provide the durable emotional and financial bedrock that allow people to survive unemployment.  Syriana was critical of the neoconservatives and the oil companies, but its hero was a fairly repulsive CIA agent.  So, consider the elements of the candidate's appeal: the unproblematised liberal nationalism (we want America to lead the world again), the imperial chauvinism (we fight the war on terror by not needing "their product", which is oil), the hypocritical populism (the governor attacks the rich for not paying their dues, but his own wealth, the fact that rich people dominate the political system, is not seen as being problematic).  This is 'Obamamania' reheated, without the story of racial redemption.  In fact, on that subject, the film's racial politics are reprehensible.  The only major black character is a Senator played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who is depicted as the basest, most reactionary snake oil salesman - in some respects, he's like a cross between John Bolton and (the fictional) Clay Davis.  As I say, if this was all there was to the film, there would be little to admire.

The core of the narrative is the 'corruption' of Ryan Gosling's innocent, idealistic, blue-eyed, K Street consultant employed by the campaign who, we are led to believe, is not a completely cynical, self-serving piece of shit.  He is a believer.  He thinks Morris is the man who will make a difference.  A wised up columnist from the New York Times tells him that he's an idiot, that the presidential race will make no difference to the average working "fuck", that the only real difference it makes is between him working in the White House, or going back to K Street to work for a million dollars a year.  He demurs, charmingly.  Events, which we won't describe in any detail here, lead the cornflower-eyed sap to revise his idealism, and realise that the drive for success has led both himself and the candidate to compromise themselves, and undermined the progressive content of the campaign.

Again, so far so boring.  We have heard all this before.  We've heard some of it from Joe Klein.  There's very little of political substance here.  For many who watched and enjoyed the film, it was yet another sermon about the corrupting effect of politics on integrity.  If only we had a better media.  If only the political system didn't smile on the ruthless.  The liberal lament.  And indeed they wouldn't be wrong to see all that.  And ultimately, this has a tendency - if pushed to its conclusions - to collapse into the patronising argument that the average working fuck is at fault for being so suadible.

What I think makes the film a bit more interesting is the way it works as a deflation and desublimation of its own 'Obamamania', or rather of the elevating liberal discourse that Obama has mastered.  At the start of the film, the basic liberal assumptions are in place.  We have a charismatic liberal hero, someone who can make the difference, if only the media and the Republicans can be fought off.  The system can be made to work for the good guys - Democrats, as far as this film is concerned - if only talented hucksters will come to their aid.  By the end of the film, none of these comforting ideas have been directly contested or challenged: this is not Brechtian film-making.  Rather, they are simply cast in a new light in which they appear to be worthless.  It's not that the progressive potential of the campaign has been betrayed; it's that it was never there.  The impoverished tropes of idealism, integrity, re-taking this country, etc., are just so much sublimated avarice, the language of bourgeois esurience levitated to the plane of 'the general interest'.  And it's the affective level on which this case is made; it is only a shift of perspective that transforms dutiful conscientiousness into pitiless, self-serving ruthlessness.  After which, the cynosures of Democratic liberalism, which Clooney undoubtedly believes in wholeheartedly, leave a sour taste on the palate of the working fuck.

The annual Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report is a serious study of liquid, investable wealth held by the richest people on the planet: the High Net Worth Individuals who have at least $1m liquid wealth, and the Ultra High Net Worth Individuals who have at least $30m, both "excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables". As such it constitutes an invaluable starting point for understanding who the ruling class are, where they live and how they hold their wealth. This is from the 2010 wealth report (I'm afraid there doesn't appear to be a working online file):

The world’s population of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) grew 17.1% to 10.0 million in 2009, returning to levels last seen in 2007 despite the contraction in world gross domestic product (GDP). Global HNWI wealth similarly recovered, rising 18.9% to US$39.0 trillion, with HNWI wealth in Asia-Pacific and Latin America actually surpassing levels last seen at the end of 2007.

For the first time ever, the size of the HNWI population in Asia-Pacific was as large as that of Europe (at 3.0 million). This shift in the rankings occurred because HNWI gains in Europe, while sizeable, were far less than those in Asia-Pacific, where the region’s economies saw continued robust growth in both economic and market drivers of wealth.

The wealth of Asia-Pacific HNWIs stood at US$9.7 trillion by the end of 2009, up 30.9%, and above the US$9.5 trillion in wealth held by Europe’s HNWIs. Among Asia-Pacific markets, Hong Kong and India led the pack, rebounding from mammoth declines in their HNWI bases and wealth in 2008 amid an outsized resurgence in their stock markets.

The global HNWI population nevertheless remains highly concentrated. The U.S., Japan and Germany still accounted for 53.5% of the world’s HNWI population at the end of 2009, down only slightly from 54.0% in 2008. Australia became the tenth largest home to HNWIs, after overtaking Brazil, due to a considerable rebound.

After losing 24.0% in 2008, Ultra-HNWIs saw wealth rebound 21.5% in 2009. At the end of 2009, Ultra-HNWIs accounted for 35.5% of global HNWI wealth, up from 34.7%, while representing only 0.9% of the global HNWI population, the same as in 2008.

The total liquid wealth of the rich in 2009, at $39 trillion, was actually more than two-thirds of world GDP in the same year, almost triple the GDP of the US, and nearly ten times that of China. Another way of looking at it is that the increase in liquid assets from 2008 to 2009 held by the rich was about $6.5 trillion, more than 10% of total GDP in 2009. This was in a year in which world GDP actually shrank by 0.8%.

The distinction between "economic and market drivers of wealth" is very important, and very telling. Most of the new wealth held by the rich was, as you can see, not produced by economic growth, but by stock market capitalisation. In other words, market relations, sustained by state intervention, facilitated the transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich at a time when most of the world's economy was such that the direct exploitation of labour could not sustain high profit rates. That's what the bail-outs did; it's what they were intended to do. Another intended consequence is that there were not only more high net worth individuals, 10 million of them globally (0.014% of the world's population), but the 'ultras' did far better at increasing their share of liquid assets than mere millionaires - thus wealth became even more concentrated than it had been, among a mere 36,300 people, or 0.0005% of the population. The corollary of this has been, and will continue to be, a general decline in the living standards of the working class in most of the advanced capitalist economies: at the same time as the wealth of the richest grew, global unemployment rose by 14.4%.

The role of finance-capital in surplus-extraction varies considerably, of course - and here, China's contribution to the reproduction of the world's ruling class stands out. While financial bail-outs (temporarily) solved many of the problems of the rich in Europe and North America, growth driven by unprecedented spending commitments in China (and, to a lesser extent, India, whose stimulus actually began before the crisis) kept the rich from the Asia-Pacific region in dough, and contributed to the wealth of the US ruling class. This could happen partly because China's growth rates were, like those of many 'newly industrialising countries', already robust. This meant that China's per capita stimulus was greater than that of any other country, and as such accounted for 95% of economic growth in the first three quarters of 2009. But it was also in part because state ownership of the financial and banking sector in China has enabled the government to have more control over the coordination of its stimulus and its effects.

Much has been made of the regime's policy of driving up wages. In fact, what has happened is that China's stimulus enabled an increase in the total amount of surplus value, both by increasing the total employment of labour and by increasing the productivity of labour. Productivity growth has offset wage growth, thus allowing an increase in working class wages and living standards to take place, while continuing the long term strend for wages to decrease as a share of GDP [pdf]. The result is that the top 0.4% of the population controls 70% of the country's wealth. Chinese growth has actually depended on wages sliding as a share of national wealth, and the world capitalist system would be a lot worse off if that hadn't continued to happen. Indeed, according to a World Bank economist, China's stimulus alone contributed 1% to world growth in 2010 - an extraordinary figure. Its GDP by purchasing power parity is already larger than the US by some calculations. China's growth is enabling its ruling class to dramatically increase its demand for luxury goods, accounting for 49% of luxury market growth as the rich spoil themselves with the usual array of jets, mansions, and yachts. But it has also substantially paid for US growth, through direct investment and sovereign debt purchases.

The role of China's working class, the largest in the world by far, in the reproduction of the world's ruling class has, of course, been steadily growing since 1978. The interesting question now is whether this can continue. The World Wealth Report expects future growth to be led by the Asia-Pacific region, "excluding Japan" - despite the latter's substantial stimulus. This obviously means the rich expect China to continue to drive growth and thus profitability. During the last thirty years, China's growth rates have been significantly ahead of its record following the 1949 revolution, and more than double the world average. Its share of world manufacturing rose from 2 to 18%, picking up the slack as manufacturing jobs were lost in Europe and the US. Its expansion fuelled a regional growth surge, eg allowing Japanese capital to increase profits by outsourcing to Chinese labour, and was a significant driver of world growth since 1982.

But the Chinese economy is accumulating tremendous spare capacity as a result of its stimulus package, adding to a global problem and endangering its future ability to produce sustainable growth. It has constantly had to counteract overheating, and may have to substantially reign in growth just when the rest of the world's economies are doing exactly the same, thus undermining its ability to lead a new phase of capitalist growth. The tendencies toward over-accumulation and declining profitability are already evident. Despite the hype about wage increases, real wages are already so low (manufacturing workers in China get less than 5% of the average in the US) that they can't go much lower. Even if they could, the effect may be to contribute to global deflation, thus harming the economies on which China depends for its export markets. China may thus be closer to the end of a long-term wave of growth than the beginning - that growth having been predicated on a now expired global wave of neoliberal expansion based on 'primitive accumulation' and the subsequent record expansion of the country's working class.

Whether and however the ruling class succeeds in overcoming the present barriers to further accumulation, it's hard to see future waves of growth proceeding in this self-same way. Instead, for the foreseeable future, it looks like there will be heightened competition over a diminishing share of surplus value. And Obama has just announced that America's approach in this will be a revamped 'open doors' policy, advised by a new panel headed by the chief executive of General Electric. This will basically involve coercing other economies into accepting US exports at whatever cost to the national or regional economy being thus prised open. It probably presages a new wave of aggression in the global south, especially where popular movements succeed in establishing governments that are interested in independent development based on some concessions for the working class. One would also expect things like this to happen more often, as white supremacy in its various forms is a well-established praxis for weakening the bargaining power of labour and breaking the political threat from the Left. And, especially in a period like this, when growth is thin on the ground and profits have to be wrested through acts of accumulation-by-dispossession, that is how the ruling class makes its money.

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

Obama's dual constituency in the 2008 election comprised the majority of the working class, and the dominant fraction of big capital, particularly the finance, insurance and real estate industries (the rentiers in other words) who gave Obama $37.5m toward his campaign. In the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, the signs are that much of the working class component of that electoral coalition will fail to mobilise for the Democrats. This has already been foreshadowed in the Massachusetts by-election, where the core working class vote collapsed - and, of course, the media blamed it on Obama's excessive radicalism over healthcare, despite Massachusetts favouring socialised medicine by a wider margin than most states.

There will be almost no discussion this election as to what has been done, what has continued to be done, to the American working class. The generational stagnation and decline of working class incomes, and the stomach-wrenching fall [pdf] in the share of produced wealth going to the working class, has worsened under Obama's watch. In this recession, bosses have taken the opportunity afforded by the crisis to slash jobs and downsize in a way that is massively disproportionate to the impact the crisis has had on their profitability. David McNally reports:

The best description I have heard comes from an economist who I won't name for the moment because he's a real shithead. But he did nail this one when he said, "What the United States is experiencing is a statistical recovery and a human recession." That's precisely what's happened. A few statistical indicators have moved up, but for the vast majority of working class people, the recession continues.

If you add in the nearly 10 million who are involuntarily underemployed--they're taking part-time work because they can't find full-time work--you've got about 27 million people unemployed or underemployed in the U.S. economy right now. That translates into an unemployment rate of over 17 percent, and for Black and Latino workers, it's an unemployment rate of around 25 percent.

According to the Economist, one out of every six U.S. workers has taken a wage cut in this recession, and amazingly, four out of every 10 African Americans has experienced unemployment during this crisis. Looking at food stamps, an additional 37 million people went onto food stamps in the U.S. in 2009, and 40 percent of those recipients are working for a wage. They're not unemployed--they're simply the working poor that can't make ends meet.

As for the next statistic I'm going to give you, this one was so overwhelming that I did check it to be sure. Half of all U.S. children will now depend on food stamps at some point during their childhood, and the figure runs at 90 percent for African American kids. Imagine that--in the heartland of global capitalism.

The "new normal" is signposted by a catastrophic drop in income in the last year, and a long-term doubling in the ratio of "economically insecure" workers. This intensification of the rate of exploitation is a logical way for the ruling class to proceed, but it may not be good for the system as a whole. A section of the US ruling class is aware of the problem this poses for consumption, and therefore for the system's capacity to reproduce itself. Ben Bernanke argues in a speech published today that depressed wages and incomes, resulting in falling consumption and diminished revenues for local state budgets, is "weighing on economic activity". On that basis, he urges continued stimulus spending at federal and state levels.

In the coming elections, the GOP will naturally bluster about cutting spending, throwing red meat to this astroturf 'movement' they and their business allies have helped create. But few will buy this: the GOP co-engineered and voted for TARP, after all. And any stimulus spending they can attack is pittance compared to the truly astonishing transfer of wealth to the banks, which itself discloses the fatal dilemma posed by the current crisis. This transfer of wealth was not ostensibly just for the benefit of one sector of capital. The whole system in the neoliberal era has been financialised, so that manufacturing and service capital, along with a sector of the actually existing middle class, is substantially dependent on financial revenues. But that transfer really didn't rejuvenate the system, even though the attack on the working class has temporarily boosted profit margins. It just staved off the worst. And now the final act of the transfer, that being the cuts in social expenditure and privatization (the whole thing is an act of accumulation-by-dispossession), risks further slashing spending power and thereby prolonging and deepening the crisis.

However this conundrum is resolved, it will not be in the interests of the working class. David Harvey has written of how capitalists would usually rather retreat behind the flood barriers and watch everyone else get washed away in the deluge than sacrifice some of its wealth to boost consumption and save the system. Only under significant working class pressure do they ever take the latter option, and such pressure is not a significant factor in American political life at the moment. It is certainly not expressed in elections, as electoral insurgencies are very capably and swiftly stamped on by the Democratic Party machinery. The Democrats' hegemony on the working class vote (to the extent that workers vote) may have been eroding, but it has not been successfully challenged from the left since it was first consolidated in 1932. Only the Progressive Party came close, and they didn't come very close. Instead, most workers simply do not vote. It is also true that the Republicans have in the past taken an expanding layer of (esp. white) working class voters, partly on racist grounds as per the misnamed 'southern strategy'. But the main factor - as Kenworthy et al [pdf] have shown - is the disorganisation and de-unionisation of the working class since the 1970s, which led to millions of workers seeking individualist solutions to their material needs, sometimes identifying with a conservative agenda of low taxes as being more advantageous to their immediate economic wellbeing than social spending.

The main problem for the American working class is not a lack of class consciousness. It is the weight of the accumulated outcomes of successive class struggles over several generations. At each phase, workplace organisation has been smashed, left-wing political movements broken up and the remnants coopted. Chris Hedges argues that America needs a few good communists, and he's right. But a few won't cut it, and they won't be sufficient unless there's a movement of working class militants they can relate to. What do I mean by 'militants'? Well, a militant is a worker who has experience of dealing with management, who has learned how to stand up to them and how to protect her rights as well as those of her co-workers, and who has learned the need for a strategy, for planning, for meetings, for leafleting and so on. There are such people in America, but there aren't enough of them, because the strength of the ruling class has hitherto been such that being a militant, or being organised politically in any way, can be unrewarding and often downright hazardous. However, if this crisis continues to see a weakening in the global power and cohesiveness of the US ruling class there will be opportunities for a renaissance in the labour movement. Every US worker should be praying for the fall of the empire, and the opportunities it will bring. And then the conversation will change, and we won't be hearing about how Obama, the president of Goldman Sachs, is too left-wing for such a conservative country.