Reason prints some fairly right-leaning stuff, but seldom anything like this that’s just Republican talking points from beginning to end, with virtually no actual libertarianism at any point in between. Hinkle spends roughly the first half of his article on by-the-numbers victimology about “liberal media bias,” whining that the media would have been all over a Republican as far to the Right as his subject — Montana Democratic Senate Candidate Susan Curtis — is to the Left. When some Tea Party troglodyte pipes up about rape or “illegal aliens,” Hinkle says, the press is all over it, howling about the “takeover of the GOP by right-wing extremists.” But the librul meejia ignores Curtis’s ties to the I.W.W. because she’s a Democrat and a woman.

Um, well. Yeah, the establishment media still tends to be “liberal,” if by that you mean upper-middle class managerial-professional types half an inch to the left of center, who are slightly friendlier than Republicans to abortion rights and welfare but agree with them on about 90% of the basic structural issues of corporate capitalism. But when it comes to most stuff they’re just pro-power — which means the same center-left talking head show types asked the same softball questions about drones, torture and NSA surveillance under both Bush and Obama, and would like to see Edward Snowden stand trial for treason. Not to mention all the #UniteBlue types geared up to support Hillary Clinton, who’s far more of a hawk and a police statist than Obama.

But if there’s an asymmetry in media coverage of the Democratic and Republican Parties’ respective extremists, it might be because there’s an asymmetry in how the two parties treat those extremists. The press pays lots of attention to “the wingnuts who’ve taken over the GOP” because, well, they’ve taken over the GOP. When the Koch Brothers fund a candidate who speaks in tongues and bites the heads off bats, GOP establishment politicians respond by grabbing a bat and chomping down. Their biggest fear is being unseated by Tea Party primary challengers. On the other hand if the center-left media ignores the Democratic Party’s left-wing fringe, that’s because the Democratic Party’s center-left establishment also ignores them. Principled left-leaning critics of the Iraq War, drones and the NSC get their funding cut off by the DNC. The Democrats remain a corporate center-left party and circle the wagons against anyone further to the left, while the Republicans shift as far right as necessary to prevent the Tea Party from undermining the loyalty of their base.

As for Hinkle’s historically illiterate nonsense about the Industrial Workers of the World, where do I even start? He denounces the Wobbly Preamble’s famous statement that “the working class and employing class have nothing in common,” and its call for the working class to “take possession of the means of production” and “abolish the wage system” as “warmed-over Lenin.” And he calls them “communists.”

Notwithstanding that Lenin took a very dim view of those in Soviet Russia who, like the Wobblies, preferred worker self-management to government-appointed factory managers (and by “dim view” I mean sending the “left deviationists” who supported direct workers’ control to the Gulag).

Sure there are commies — libertarian communists, the kind who quote Kropotkin and Luxemburg — in the Wobblies. Not many of the Leninist kind, though. There are also lots of syndicalists. Also a few Proudhonian mutualists. And even some market-friendly individualist anarchists like Joseph Labadie were Wobs in the early days.

Several of us here at Center for a Stateless Society, a market anarchist think tank, are current or past Wobblies. I have an expired Red Card myself (mainly because I’m lazy about paying my dues). We think state intervention in the market has promoted corporate managerial hierarchy and wage labor far beyond their free market levels, and we cheerfully echo libertarian Claire Wolfe’s call to destroy the job culture.

I’d also like to note just how ironic it is for a publication like Reason, which is so uniformly hostile to “union bosses” and NLRB-certified union shops, to run an article blasting a union that also hates these things. The Wobblies, by and large, prefer to bypass NLRB certification and union bureaucracy, instead functioning as self-organized unions on the shop floor, eschewing exclusive bargaining unit representation and automatic dues deductions, and returning to tactics like wildcat strikes and direct action on the job that the Wagner Act was passed precisely to prevent.

Hinkle actually compares the I.W.W., in sheer odiousness, to the Klan. Well, except there are no legitimate reasons to hate, terrorize and lynch black people — but plenty of legitimate reasons to believe corporate power and the present distribution of wealth and income result from injustice.

There is, however, one organization that really is as evil as the KKK, and was founded for the express purpose of terrorist attacks on Wobblies, directly analogous to anti-worker terrorism by Mussolini’s industrialist-funded black shirts: The American Legion. Maybe Hinkle could take them on.

Il capitalismo corporativo, fin dalla sua formazione alla fine del diciannovesimo secolo come cuore dell’economia americana (con una grossa dose di intervento statale), è afflitto da due croniche tendenze critiche: 1) Una insufficiente domanda in aggregato, che risulta in una capacità produttiva infruttifera, e 2) un surplus di investimenti capitali a cui non seguono profitti.

In assenza dell’intervento statale nell’economia, volto a nascondere il calo del profitto attraverso la spesa di stimolo della domanda, l’acquisto diretto di produzioni industriali e la creazione di nuove opportunità di investimento, il capitalismo corporativo americano – e con esso il sistema capitalistico mondiale – sarebbe già morto di Depressione cronica decenni fa.

L’unica ragione per cui la Grande Depressione degli anni trenta non portò il sistema alla fine fu il fatto che la seconda guerra mondiale ovviò temporaneamente al problema della capacità produttiva inutilizzata e del surplus di capitali offrendo nuove enormi opportunità di profitto (finanziate con il debito pubblico, ovviamente) e distruggendo gran parte degli impianti e dei macchinari del resto del mondo. Nel 1945 gli Stati Uniti emersero come il paese con la maggior capacità industriale al mondo, e praticamente privo di concorrenza da parte di quelle che un tempo erano state le aree industrializzate d’Europa. Con la maggior parte degli impianti costruiti a partire dal 1940 a spese dei contribuenti, l’industria americana usciva dalla guerra enormemente modernizzata ed equipaggiata. L’effetto pratico fu un riavvio totale, una generazione di prosperità caratterizzata da cicli economici deboli, sicurezza del posto di lavoro e salari in crescita.

Attorno al 1970, però, avendo l’Europa e il Giappone ricostruito le proprie capacità industriali, il mondo fu nuovamente afflitto da un eccesso produttivo e una scarsità nella domanda. Da allora il capitalismo ricorre ad un espediente dopo l’altro per evitare la crisi. È a partire dagli anni ottanta che l’economia americana viene tenuta fuori dalla recessione in gran parte grazie ad enormi deficit federali, che aggiungono qualche centinaio di miliardi di dollari l’anno di domanda aggregata ed evitano che capacità in eccesso e sovrapproduzione sfuggano di mano. I capitali in eccesso hanno trovato sfogo nella cosiddetta economia FIRE (Finanza, Assicurazioni e Immobiliare), fiorita a partire dagli anni ottanta, nelle bolle speculative gonfiate dall’intervento statale come il Dotcom Boom negli anni novanta, e infine nel boom immobiliare nei primi anni duemila.

Ma c’è una via di sbocco per i capitali in eccesso di cui si parla poco, ed è il debito pubblico (vedi “Superflous labor and state debt,” The Real Movement, 10 marzo). Il debito attuale è attorno ai 17.000 miliardi di dollari. E, contrariamente a ciò che dice la destra, non sta spingendo fuori gli investimenti privati. Allo stato attuale, le imprese si rifiutano di espandere le proprie capacità, o di assumere personale, perché non c’è abbastanza domanda su cui fare affidamento per ripagare gli investimenti. Quei 17.000 miliardi, dunque, non avrebbero trovato altro impiego utile; ma ecco che, grazie alla cortesia dello Zio Sam, chi possiede debito pubblico americano può contare su un rientro garantito… ed esentasse! È una funzione analoga a quella svolta dai contributi agricoli tesi a tenere su i prezzi: i grossi proprietari terrieri ricevono una rendita per i terreni tenuti fuori produzione.

Il modello capitalistico emerso alla fine dell’ottocento – e che lo stato a contribuito enormemente a creare – è sempre dipeso dall’intervento statale su larga scala per mantenere la propria rimuneratività. La grande espansione dello stato, lo stato sociale, l’industria bellica e la spesa in deficit, lungi dal rappresentare un’invasione di quel campo che prima apparteneva al “libero mercato”, sono funzionali alla sopravvivenza del sistema capitalistico così come lo conosciamo noi.

L’idea del Tea Party di pareggiare il bilancio e ripagare il debito pubblico avrebbe l’effetto di togliere questo aiuto essenziale del governo ad un sistema che, anche così, sopravvive appena. Taglierebbe 500 miliardi l’anno di domanda aggregata ad un’economia che a malapena sta a galla. E scaricherebbe 17.000 miliardi di capitale in un mercato già saturo: al confronto, la Grande Depressione fu una passeggiata.

Quello che abbiamo noi oggi non è libero mercato. È un sistema strutturalmente definito dalla collusione massiccia tra capitale e stato, profondamente dipendente dall’intervento statale per la propria sopravvivenza. Il programma del Tea Party distruggerebbe alla base i mezzi di sopravvivenza del capitalismo. Io non sono un keynesiano. Io non voglio salvare il capitalismo. Voglio solo un libero mercato senza particolari privilegi statali per le grandi imprese e i ricchi. E allora, se davvero voi gente del Tea Party volete distruggere il capitalismo, non posso che dire: benvenuti a bordo, compagni!

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Corporate capitalism, since it coalesced (with the help of an enormous amount of state intervention) as the basis of the U.S. national economy in the late 19th century, has been plagued with two chronic crisis tendencies: 1) Insufficient aggregate demand, resulting in idle production capacity, and 2) surplus investment capital without a profitable outlet.

Absent state intervention in the economy to conceal the falling rate of profit through expenditures to stimulate demand, direct government purchases of industrial output and the creation of new investment outlets, American corporate capitalism — and the world capitalist system with it — would have died of chronic Depression decades ago.

The only reason the Great Depression of the ’30s wasn’t the end of the system was that World War II temporarily relieved the problem of idle capacity and surplus capital by providing enormous new avenues for profitable investment (financed by government debt, of course) and blowing up most of the plant and equipment in the world outside the United States. In 1945 the U.S. emerged as the owner of the majority of industrial capacity in the world, with almost zero competition from the former industrial areas of Europe. And American industry itself had been massively modernized and retooled, with a majority of plant and equipment having been built since 1940 at taxpayer expense. The practical effect was to push the reset button, allowing a generation of prosperity with extremely mild business cycles, job security and rising wages.

But by around 1970 Europe and Japan had rebuilt their industrial bases, once again saturating the world with production capacity and a scarcity of investment outlets. Since then capitalism has resorted to one expedient after another to address these crises. From the ’80s on, the U.S. economy has been kept out of recession largely by enormous federal deficits that add a few hundred billion dollars a year to aggregate demand and prevent idle capacity and inventory gluts from getting out of hand. And the glut of surplus capital has found outlets in the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) economy that mushroomed in scale since the ’80s and in state-fostered speculative bubbles like the Dotcom Boom of the ’90s and the real estate boom of the early 2000s.

But one outlet for surplus capital that doesn’t get much attention is the U.S. government’s debt (See “Superfluous labor and state debt,” The Real Movement, March 10). The debt currently stands at around $17 trillion. And contrary to right-wing opinion, it isn’t crowding out private investment. As it is, businesses are refusing to expand capacity or hire workers because there’s not enough reliable demand for them to realize their investment. So that $17 trillion is in fact a mass of surplus capital that wouldn’t have had a profitable outlet; but thanks to the kindness of Uncle Sam, the holders of U.S. debt get a guaranteed — and tax free! — rate of return. It’s analogous to the function of farm price support subsidies, which amount to paying big landowners rent on the land they hold out of production.

The model of corporate capitalism that emerged in the late 19th century — which the state played a huge role in creating — has always been dependent on large-scale government intervention to make it profitable. The growth of big government, the welfare state, the military-industrial complex and deficit spending, far from being alien encroachments on a pristine “free market” system, are integral to the functioning and survival of the capitalist system as we know it.

The Tea Party project of balancing the budget and paying off the debt would have the effect of removing these essential government supports to a system that’s barely surviving even with them. It would reduce aggregate demand by $500 billion a year to an economy that’s only just staying afloat as it is. And it would dump $17 trillion in capital on an already glutted market, making the Great Depression look like — forgive me — a tea party.

What we have now is not a free market. It is a system structurally defined by massive collusion between capital and state,  utterly dependent on ongoing state intervention for its survival. The Tea Party agenda would destroy the basis for capitalism’s survival. I’m not a Keynesian. I don’t want to save capitalism. What I want is a free market without special government privileges for big business and the wealthy. So if you Tea Party folks really want to destroy capitalism, all I can say is — welcome aboard, comrades!

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Il Complotto del Tea Party per la Distruzione del Capitalismo.