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 question was always going to be posed.  How do you stop the police from physically dismantling your protest by sheer overwhelming force of arms?  How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds?  When armed paramilitary police are running around like storm troopers - the cliche is appropriate - assaulting unarmed and non-violent protesters?  When, having literally broken bones and smashed skulls, the chief of the police department can tell the press, "I think we allowed people to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly"?  And when the mayor - who was herself a target of Occupy Oakland's criticisms - can commend the police on a "a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated"?

The debates on LBO Talk suggest two reasons not to be surprised by the police action.  The first is that local Democratic Party machines are just as apt to resort to repression as the Republicans; and the second is the proliferation of Joint Terrorism Task Force franchises throughout the police during the Bush era - as is typical, a 'counter-terrorist' weapon has been largely refined and used in combat with workers and the Left.  So what can one do?  If you resort to tooling up and having running battles with the police, like the Black Bloc do, the police always win.  At any rate, the problem isn't ultimately kinetic force, it's political force.  Even at the moment when the police bring out their weapons, the chances of their being successfully faced down depend on political organisation not weapons.  It is at the level of politics that the problem has to be countered.  Yet, if you try to work around it by negotiating with local authorities, the mayor's office etc, you may end up having making your protest inoffensive and ineffective, at which point you may as well pack up and go home.  The bourgeoisie fears "mob rule" more than anything at this point - by which they mean, they fear a surfeit of democracy.  If you're doing anything remotely effective, the ruling class should be put out.

As far as I can see, the only possible solution is the one opted for by Occupy Wall Street - broaden the movement within the working class.  The tactical alliance with unions was probably decisive in stopping NYPD's attempt to 'clean up' Liberty Plaza.  Even that isn't necessarily sufficient.  The Oakland occupation was, until last night, one of the largest in the US.  It had already made links with major unions, as well as with several other occupations across the country.  Labour organizers had come along to help out.  They were doing everything they could do, and making a success of it.  But this didn't stop the police waiting until the early hours of morning, and going on the rampage against children, women in wheelchairs, whoever - the cops weren't there to discriminate, they were there to break limbs.  Even so, if Occupy Oakland has a chance of reviving and facing down this terror, it is because of the organisational alliances they formed, the political support they assembled, and the coalition of forces willing to continue to support them.

The outlines of the deal between the White House and Congressional Republicans on the debt ceiling are now becoming clear.  The White House, of course, celebrates it as a victory for bipartisanship, compromise, economic prudence, and - but what else? - "the American people".  Ask not for whom the ticker tape falls... The deal is simply this.  The government will get its debt ceiling increase, so there will be no default.  The matter will not return to debate until after 2012, meaning that Obama doesn't have to go to the polls with this potential for sabotage hanging over his campaign.  And in return, he will fund repayment of the deficit almost entirely from spending cuts.  This will mean deep cuts to medicare and social security.  Obama is colluding with the Republicans to attack his base.  This is Jared Bernstein's account:

Of course, the centre-left commentators and economists are angry.  Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are typically nonplussed.  How could the president be so stupid?  How could he surrender?  He had alternatives to force through an increase in the debt ceiling.  He had legal manouevres, political manouevres.  He has thrown away the Democrats' advantage on medicare, caved in to blackmail from right-wing extremists, systematically refused to make the argument for protecting jobs and stimulus.  It's a comprehensive victory for the radical right.  

Well, all this is true.  But Obama isn't stupid, and he didn't surrender.  As Krugman has himself suggested, Obama has ideological (and as he did not suggest, strategic) reasons to embrace cuts.  He never subscribed to the Keynesian revival that intellectuals did - that was just emergency management.  He's a committed neoliberal, heading a neoliberal bloc within the Democrats.  He has demonstrated from the start that his major duty is to the banks, to finance.  Their hegemony the alliance of capitalist class fractions condensed within the Democratic leadership ensured that whatever took place, Obama would find a way to eviscerate public spending programmes.  And above all, he would eventually find his way to approaching, by some sleight of hand, the road to social security privatization - which I would predict will soon be on the agenda.

Recall that Bush attempted to attack social security in 2005, and was defeated by an impressive union-led campaign.  Obama was happy to capitalise on this, attacking McCain for favouring the privatization of social security.  He has continued to position the Democrats as defenders of social security and medicare.  Yet, things were never as rosy.  His cabinet was filled with Clinton-era retreads, and officials who had been complicit in the very neoliberal policies that brought about the crash.  His economic advisors were, from the start, neoliberals.  His strategically important debt commission was filled with apologists for spending cuts and privatization.  He consistently sends right-wing advocates of cuts and privatization to his commissions.  The leading Democratic opinion formers in the elite media, such as the Washington Post, and in think-tanks such as the Brookings Institute, have been pushing for social security 'reform' for some time.  Former president Clinton is himself a leading advocate of privatization who plotted with Newt Gingrich to try to bring it about, as are most of his former officials now recycled in the Obama administration.  The administration is studded with leading personnel from finance, and the banks are desperate to get their hands on social security.  And despite Obama's rhetoric, he and his Congressional allies have signalled a willingness to arrive at a more gradual, gentle and bipartisan route to social security privatization.   In short, there is every reason to believe that the Democrats will take any opportunity, particularly those presented by the blackmail of the Republican Right, to push for privatization.  These cuts, savage as they are, will almost certainly be used to demand privatization on the grounds that the economy can't sustain a publicly owned model. 

Of course, this isn't the end of the matter.  There is some Democratic opposition to the deal.  But more important, perhaps, is the intransigence of the 'tea partiers' (actually, just the Republican right) who think they can hold out for more.  Now, you may say this is insanity on their part.  You may say it is impolitic, especially if it inflicts embarrassing defeats on the GOP leadership just at their moment of apparent triumph.  But they have their uses, providing a suitable contrast to the apparently sober and rational Obama administration - in contrast to their 'ideological' and 'sectional' lobbying, the executive takes on the mantle of the nation, the blessed American people, on whose behalf he tries to negotiate a route out of catastrophe and national suicide.  It isn't quite correct that the 'tea party' movement can be reduced to a corporate astroturfing operation.  It resembles classical anticommunist networks in many respects, a movement with some (petty bourgeois) civil society roots enjoying the support of the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class.  So it is somewhat autonomous.  What it presently lacks is the support of the state, which made past anticommunist networks so deadly.  It has not occupied the Justice Department and is unlikely to take the executive or any such directive position, short of a major crisis and decomposition of the state apparatus.  So, though having some autonomy, it is subordinate.  It is a supporting player in the delicate choreography that has shifted the US from stimulus to austerity.  One would therefore expect the leadership to discipline them rather harshly as soon as this is all over, just to avoid any further embarrassments.

There were fifty pro-union rallies in fifty state capitols today, outnumbering their right-wing Tea Party opponents when the latter bothered to show up. This is what one would expect. The Right can bring out numbers, but it can't usually match the Left in this terrain - its real power is in the support it gets from the state and the ruling class. But more surprising perhaps is the way in which two crucial aspects of the state in Wisconsin have swung behind the protesters. First of all, the local Democratic Party has actually demonstrated more spine than I've seen in the Labour Party of late. Second of all, the police - yes, the poh-leece - refused to evacuate protesters from the capitol building on orders from the governor today, and instead joined them.

This is raising questions which I don't fully know how to answer at the moment. It's surely unprecedented for major components of local power structures to swing behind labour in such a major way. And this is all happening in the much maligned mid-West: the strikes have been breaking not only in Wisconsin, but in Iowa and Ohio where similar measures are threatened. The scale of the protests and strikes, with 70,000 marching in Madison last weekend, the degree of organisation and rank-and-file militancy that has been unleashed, and the speedy way in which the campaign has taken the elements of popular discontent, articulated them and polarised them to the Left, may have shocked the political establishment. It may also be that this has raised doubts among sectors of the ruling class who previously accepted the direction of the Koch Brothers/Tea Party wing of the Republicans purely for the material benefit of tax breaks and weaker unions, without having invested in the wider strategy of outright conflict. After all, if strikes spread, these employers could stand to lose tens of millions for every day of action, perhaps more than they gain in any tax breaks. And the risk of energising and rebuilding a national left-wing movement after the Obama administration had successfully coopted the elements of leftist, working class dissent, rearticulated and neutralised them, is one that they may be wary of. But the Wisconsin campaign shouldn't just be looked at in terms of the crisis of capitalism, the divisions among the ruling class and the crisis of the state apparatus, as important as these are. The initiative is very much on the side of the workers at the moment, and the way it has energised the Left across the US suggests that it might in the near future demand study as an example of a successful left-wing, labour-based political intervention.

The Democrats have lost the House of Representatives but kept the Senate by a slim margin. The Tea Party 'movement' will be credited for giving the Republicans this energy in the polls, but in fact there will be little evidence when the dust settles that anything particularly remarkable happened here. A few whack jobs got elected, quite a few didn't, turnout was probably around 40% (which will be hailed as a record high if true), and capitalism remains firmly in control of the political process. The dominant faction of the 'political class' will still comprise rich corporate lawyers, the majority of senators will still be millionaires, and Wall Street will still control the Treasury.

The Republican sweep, announcing a "seismic shift", will be every bit as flimsy as the 'revolution' of 1994. This was when Gingrich's hard right rump took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fifty years. They added 54 seats to their total in the House of Representatives (2010 equivalent: 36, with 14 undecided), while adding 8 senate seats to their total to gain the upper house (2010 equivalent, 5, with 3 undecided - and no prospect of gaining control of the upper house). But the 'Republican revolution' took place with the support of less than 20% of eligible voters, with a turnout of less than 40%. Many of the same personnel who drove that 'revolution', and drafted the 'Contract with America' that few read or understood, are now 'activists' in the Tea Party movement. The FT calls Dick Armey an 'activist', for christ's sake.

This change in the political composition of the elected chambers as a result of the 2010 mid-terms will be even less significant than the 1994 congressional elections. The GOP's 'surge' will be predicated on, again, just about a fifth of eligible voters. Bear in mind that voter eligibility is, thanks to a racist criminal justice system and voting laws that deprive convicted felons of the right to vote, biased against poor and black voters anyway. But it will be depicted as a populist upsurge against what is perceived to be a tax-and-spend administration with socialist, Muslim, Kenyan anti-colonialist roots. In fact, the Tea Party 'movement' will probably not have had the effect that the commentariat is looking for. It is the result not of 'grassroots' right-wing anger, but of class-conscious business intervention in the political process - particularly by the billionaire Koch brothers. The 'grassroots' that are mobilised tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and they are heavily dependent on the media to talk up their activities.

In reality, just as in Massachusetts in January, millions of Democratic voters will not have turned out. Obama and his supporters have relied on a strategy of condescendingly lecturing the base, telling them off for expecting too much, which is grotesque and pathetic. (He saved capitalism, you fools!) His staff, as well, have been known to insult the base, especially progressives, as idiots and morons for being furious over the healthcare sell-out. So, why would grassroots Dems mobilise for an elitist pro-Wall Street clique that treats them like dirt and tells them they should be grateful? More on this in a bit. The point is that voters, just like the Tea Party 'movement', and just like the Republican base, will be heavily skewed toward the whiter and the wealthier, and the majority of the working class will have been effectively squeezed out of the electoral system.

***

If we understand electoral politics as a particular expression of the class struggle in the US, the bizarre trends noted above can be comprehended better. First of all, the obvious. Unlike in much of the world, the United States does not have a party of labour, that is a party created by and rooted in the organised working class. The electoral system is entirely dominated by two pro-business parties. The Democrats have, since the 'New Deal', tended to gain from whatever votes are cast by the working class, and have ruthlessly and jealously guarded that advantage against all potential 'third party' rivals. But the correlation between class voting and Democratic voting declined in the post-war era. This has usually been measured by the gap between the number of 'working class' and 'middle class' voters supporting the Democrats in any given election. You subtract the percentage of the 'middle class' vote that backs the Democrats from the percentage of the 'working class' vote that backs the Democrats and you have a class voting index - the Alford Index. This is not particularly sophisticated, and tends to rely on simplistic, occupational grading models of class. But the results of applying it do disclose a trend, which is worth noting.

One study, which focused on white voters (because African Americans were for much of the relevant period prevented from voting in much of the country), noted that the gap in 1948 was 44%. In 1952 it was 20%. In 1960 it was 12%. In 1964 it was 19%. In 1968, it was 8%. And in 1972, it was 2%. This form of 'class voting' benefiting the Democrats is subject to considerable variation depending on the context. I suspect that it would have been relatively high in 2008 and relatively low in 2004, for example. But the secular trend is one of decline. And the declining relevance of this particular index of class to determining voter behaviour has been interpreted by the usual dirt - sorry, by some academics - as a decline in class voting as such. It's been tied into a broader claim about the demise of class as an important factor in American life, most notably by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset. This is just the American version of 'electoral dealignment' theory, which became popular among psephologists in the UK in the 1980s, and it maintains that as class loses its social significance, voters become more like consumers, choosing electoral brands based on the values they associate with that brand.

More plausibly, it has been claimed that since the Goldwater campaign in 1964, the Republicans learned how to use 'culture wars' effectively to win over a sector of racist white wokers. This is arguably the very effect that Republicans were unable to produce in 2008. Thus, the 'southern strategy' using a fusion of racial and religious politics, helped depress the overall levels of class voting. But it's important not to exaggerate this. Most white workers still don't vote Republican. In most cases, a majority of them simply decline to vote. Further, 'class voting' in the sense of working class mobilisation for the Democrats was in decline well before the overthrow of segregation and the onset of the Nixonite 'southern strategy'. Most of the decline cannot be explained by racism. According to Michael Hout et al (1995) [pdf], adjusting the research to take account of advances in stratification and class theory, and using multivariate analyses rather than just the Alford Indez, produces a very different picture. They build on the approach of critical psephologists such as John Curtice and Anthony Heath in the UK to suggest that 'electoral realignment' is a more plausible description of the trends than 'electoral dealignment'. Class still profoundly determines voting behaviour, and it determines it all the more if you consider non-voting one form of that behaviour.

The study shows changes in the make-up and alignment of the electorate. The number of owners and proprietors has declined - perhaps as ownership becomes more concentrated. Meanwhile the number of professionals and managers has increased. There has been an overall increase in white collar non-managerial voters, the votes of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remain steady, and the representation of skilled workers has fallen sharply. So the class structure has been recomposed, and the electorate has changed accordingly. Secondly, when you look at the partisan preferences of different class, you see that skilled workers became less Democratic between 1948 and 1992, while white collar workers went from being modestly Republican to being strongly Democratic. Professionals became more Democratic, while owners and managers became strongly Republican. Finally, on turnout, you see that managers, professionals and owners are much more likely to vote in presidential elections than workers of all kinds. The study concludes "The gap between the turnout for professionals and for semiskilled and unskilled [workers] ... corresponds to a range of 77 percent to 40 percent (using 60 percent as the average turnout)."

***

Thus, you have an electoral system that vastly over-represents owners, managers and professionals, and under-represents the working class by a wide margin. Incidentally, there's no sign that education has any impact on this. The increase in high school and college education among 'lower socioeconomic groups' has not led to a corresponding increase in turnout. Other research looking at non-voting corroborates this picture. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, looked at voting and non-voting behaviour in the US, comparing it with the UK, for the period covering the Sixties and early Seventies. They found that voters who were most inclined to self-identify as working class overwhelmingly voted for Labour in the UK, but overwhelmingly didn't vote in the US. By contrast, they found that more than two-thirds of supporters of the Democratic Party, which claims a near monopoly on all social forces left-of-centre in national elections, self-identified as middle class. Thus the perception of class, which Vanneman and Cannon show is strongly correlated to the reality of class, powerfully drives voting and non-voting behaviour.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued, in Why Americans Still Don't Vote, that the exclusion of the working class from elections is actively desired by politicians. They suggest that if politicians were interested in crafting a policy mix that would appeal to the poor, the poor would respond, and they would be able to command electoral majorities. Pippa Norris of Harvard University concurs: the evidence suggests that turnout among the working class will increase at elections if there are left and trade union based parties that are capable of mobilising them. But it is again worth stressing that the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system is not wholly voluntary. Thomas E Patterson, in The Vanishing Voter (2009), points out that the electoral system in the US has had a long tradition of seeking to exclude the uneducated and the poor, and Patterson argues that voter registration rules still work to limit the size and composition of the electorate. He notes that the US has a disproportionately high number of non-citizens among its total population (7%), and ineligible adults (10%). Thus, 17% of the total adult population at any given time is legally excluded from voting. The exclusion of so many voters is the result of deliberate projects: in one case to manage labour migration flows to benefit capital (non-citizens cause less trouble than those permitted to naturalise); and in the other case to construct a carceral state that imprisoned more poor and black Americans than ever before. On any given day, 1 in every 32 American adults is directly in the control of the criminal justice system, either through jail, parole, probation or community supervision. This only hints at the wider effects that this behemoth has on American society, but suffice to say that it deprives millions of the right to vote where it would easily make a significant difference to the outcome.

***

The 2010 mid-term elections have thus taken place not only without the participation of the majority of voters, but with the pronounced exclusion of millions of working class Americans and particularly African Americans. Don't believe me? Let's look at the exit poll results. You can see that there's a strong Democratic bias among voters with incomes under $50k, but they only represent 37% of the total vote, while making up just over 55% of the population. Those earning $100,000 or more make up more than a quarter of the vote (26%) and have a strong Republican bias, yet they represent less than 16% of the population. Breaking it down even further, 7% of the electorate is composed of those on $200,000 or more - again, strongly Republican - which is more than double their representation as a whole. In fact, I'm over-representing the higher income earners and under-representing lower income earners because I'm relying on figures for households rather than individuals. The percentage of individuals on $50k or less is 75%. Those on $100k or more make up just over 6% of the population. So, the turnout is enormously skewed in favour of the wealthy.

The two main parties will have constructed their electoral coalitions with a disproportionate reliance on professionals, owners, and managers. Their leading personnel, those who frame and carry through policy, will be bankers, laywers, and other members of the wealthy minority. Their daily consultations and coordinations will be with the industrial and financial lobbies who fund campaigns. And the "seismic shift", the "grassroots insurgency" that is supposedly propelling reactionary populists to the levers of power will have been effected principally by a relatively small shift in an already exclusive electoral system in favour of middle class and rich voters. I raise all this merely to put it in perspective. The drama of headlines, and of the vaunted new political eras, does not have much bearing on the real state of American society.

Lastly, the Tea Party. If these results are supposed to demonstrate the enormous clout of this movement, its great popular resonance, and so on, I am singularly unimpressed. They were up against a hugely unpopular Democratic Party, whose control of the executive has disappointed so many, amid a recession that has made everyone terrified. The economy is the number one issue in this election, and the numbers of voters who said they were optimistic about the future for the economy were tiny. If the Tea Party was such a wildly popular 'movement', it would not have contributed only a small fraction to the GOP's small slice of the voting age population. As dangerous as these creeps can be, as a Poujadist movement seeking to mobilise a mass base, it's a flop. And that's a key lesson of 2010.

With Islamophobia as their current national mobilising tool, the billionaire-funded 'Tea Party' movement has scored a victory, though potentially a pyrrhic victory, in Delaware primaries. The candidate is a genuine loony-tune - the masturbation is a sin, guns are holy sort, my opponents are hiding in my bushes sort of loony-tune.

As Gary Younge reports, the Republican establishment did not want her as the candidate, because the Democrats can beat her. You can see the line coming: Republicans have been taken over by extremists, this is not what America is about. I don't think this is an electoral threat for the time being. I expect that the Democrats will probably win Delaware, and anywhere else that the Tea Partiers claim the Republican nomination. The Democratic base that has been demoralised and insulted by the Obama camp for the last couple of years will probably turn out if there is any chance of some of these racist lunatics taking power.

But it does show how a capitalism in crisis, without a rational alternative clearly available, backed by substantial social forces rooted in the working class, unleashes and amplifies all of the most reactionary and socially regressive elements in society. As Gary Younge puts it, people can't eat hope. With unemployment at historic highs, investment low, banks refusing to lend, foreclosures proceeding apace, the insecurity of the middle classes - for I think you'd find the Tea Partiers are largely middle class white Americans - is becoming poisonous.

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.

Obama, 2009: "I Did Not Run for Office to Be Helping Out a Bunch of Fat Cat Bankers on Wall Street"

Oh yes, you did.

Obamamania among eager Democrats is perhaps being replaced by Palinoia as you read this. The panicky sense that this gun-toting Alaskan separatist upstart is ruining something wonderful is ubiquitous. As Obama dives in the polls, I can't see much beyond the radical samizdat media suggesting that BHO's policies might share some of the responsibility. He cannot be to blame, even in part, because He has been pre-humously canonised, if not crucified and resurrected. Well, a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading Savage Mules. It is quite unlike anything else I've read on the Democrats. To take one example, LBJ is described as a "blood-caked jackass" who "made Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy look in comparison like the provincial amateurs they were". I like this. Every liberal luminary is thoroughly trashed in a similar way, and one gradually gets the impression that the Democratic party is more of an extended crime dynasty than a party of progress. Their most hallowed leaders even helpfully talk like mafiosi below the media radar. (Think of dear old Bubba waxing humanitarian about Somalia: "I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.") So, I got in touch with the author of Savage Mules and asked for an interview. This is it.

Self-described antiwar progressives are gushing with enthusiasm for a potential Democratic presidency this Autumn - what are they missing?

"Their preferred Party's history. Some of the drivel I read at liberal blogs about American history, and the liberal role within it, is truly stunning, but predictable in a country where history isn't seriously studied and scrutinized. I could name names, but I'm in a generous mood. Besides, I'm sure your readers can find them without me.

"A major part of the problem is that American liberals really seem to think there's a decent, representative democracy under all of the machinery and violence. If only the Democrats ran all branches of government, and did so for an extensive period, many of these obstacles would be cleared away -- or so the mantra goes. This naturally extends to war. I can't tell you how many local yards have both 'War Is Not The Answer' and 'Obama `08' signs in them. As if one goes with the other. Since Obama has promised to expand the Terror Wars, and continually speaks in hawkish tones, this would seem odd to a skeptical outsider. But it's very common within the US. As there's no serious political alternative to the corporate-owned state, people have to dream, create scenarios, in which their votes ostensibly 'make a difference.' This is why you see so much confusion and contradiction among powerless people. What else are they going to do, given the reality?"

Given the bloody history you describe, how did the mules acquire a reputation as reluctant warriors and peaceniks, and why is the myth so seemingly invincible?

"It began in the 1960s, when the American left challenged a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, over his mass murder in Vietnam. Many mainstream liberals supported that war, some to the end; but as the war dragged on, and elite sectors began souring on the whole enterprise, liberals inside the Democratic Party were given openings to oppose the war. The 1968 convention in Chicago showed the split on national television, where antiwar delegates chanted and heckled pro-war Democrats, and were usually beaten and arrested by plainclothes cops for their trouble. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy played to this demographic, but it was the pro-war Hubert Humphrey who won the nomination, and nearly the presidency.

"Still, the seeds had been planted, and by 1972, the Dems nominated George McGovern, a genuine antiwar candidate. McGovern was crushed by Richard Nixon, and the Dems began their rightward drift that continues to this day. "McGovern Democrat" is still a nasty putdown, and while there is no comparable individual in the present Party, the myth of the 'reluctant warriors' remains thanks to that candidacy. For the right, it serves to paint the Dems as pacifists and appeasers. For liberals, or some anyway, it lends the impression that the Democrats only go to war when all else fails. Both images are false, of course. But they serve ideological needs, and keep a fantasy America alive for those who need it."

A subtext of your book appears to be that some liberals actually admire mass murder, provided it is carried out under the yankee ensign. Is this related to your own brief lurch into war fever? When liberals demand humanitarian intervention, do you feel they are sublimating a much more savage and vengeful desire of the kind that you describe with such brutal clarity in your own case?

"That's the twisted skull beneath the face. As Americans, we're raised to believe in our special uniqueness and shimmering good will. Not everyone buys into this propaganda, but a vast majority do, liberals included. As I remind liberal emailers and radio hosts, no reactionary can match the amount of bloodshed that liberals have spilled throughout our history. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone seals that deal. I tell them to embrace their murderous legacy and stop being pushed around by the Republicans. They really don't know what to do with that advice. It's part of the overall confusion, and provides some fleeting amusement.

"Yes, in my case, war fever did bend my brain. Quite seriously so. It goes back to when I was in the Army, the early part of which I was very gung-ho. The 9/11 attacks opened that part of my brain and I went nuts, I'm ashamed to say. I've since recovered, I hope. But it doesn't take much for an American to go ballistic. The culture encourages it, and there's certainly no shortage of imperial howling stateside. And liberals are especially good howlers."

You describe your friendship with Christopher Hitchens during the 1990s, and still admire the pugnacious and locquacious debater that he then was. Yet, by 2002 he was "a willing, well-paid imperial stooge". What happened to Hitchens? [Yeah, I know, but I had to ask.]

Who knows, or really cares at this point? Money and a certain celebrity are a big part of it. In order to fit into that world, Hitchens has lied repeatedly about past positions, beliefs, etc. He's lied about me and our friendship. I'd like to think that the old Hitch is still in there somewhere, but ultimately, it's not a major concern of mine.

The 'netroots', in the self-congratulatory locution of liberal bloggers, are purportedly in the business of democratising politics. By your account, the online liberal scene appears to reproduce the hierarchy that obtains in the Democratic machinery itself, with a corporate-friendly peerage lording it over activist serfs. The Tomb's British readers might not be that familiar with the Daily Kos and its periphery, so could you explain a little about the "Kossacks" and how they relate to activists and the antiwar movement?

If your British readers are unfamiliar with Daily Kos, they should consider themselves blessed. It's the brainchild of Markos Moulitsas, and it's essentially an online arm of the Democratic Party. Kos wants to be a Party player, and insists that social change can be realized through online efforts and partisan blogging, but it's just another political hustle. Liberal bloggers don't want to change the system at all. Tweak here and there if it's deemed favorable to them, but that's about it. And they are in no way against imperial war, at least structurally. They may have some tactical disagreements with the Republicans, but liberals can and will cheer on the cluster bombs as enthusiastically as their reactionary cousins.

But, surely, Obama will change everything?

Ha! Yeah, well, we'll see -- or not. Obama must be elected first. At the moment, that's not at all guaranteed, and you can hear liberals whistling past numerous graveyards, fearful that yet again, their fellow Americans are too stupid to know that Democrats are better for them. I confess a certain delight in watching them squirm, but in the end, I want Obama to win. The Democrats will have the grand stage to themselves, and finally we can see what the modern savage mules are made of.