America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes
to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two
Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the
viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where
there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks
away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have
to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's
no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around
Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the
American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've
somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're
seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to
America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're
getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little
more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who
got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the
butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named
Karl Marx.
I'm
not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very
specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a
much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at
figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it
wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you
might solve that.
You know if you've read
Capital or if you've got the
Cliff Notes,
you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his
logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as
the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was
really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when
it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy
of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without
regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric
for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure
things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us
what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God.
Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your
number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not
want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that
profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our
society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would
date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism
stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was
predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only
thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements
of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or
philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best
aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it
works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to
think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of
the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After
the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming
out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was
the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not
only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how
facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot
more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th
century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the
American century.
It took a working class that had no
discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working
on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only
had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to
buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the
engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff,
or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we
created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the
west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff
at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did
that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was
the great society. That was all of that argument about collective
bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither
side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments,
capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual
fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that
it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that
they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were
part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it
didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they
had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had
to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers
were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned
that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the
market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now
libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an
intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it
is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a
profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got
built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who
educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the
self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is
astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing
that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey
towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you
would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've
descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed.
This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of
two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two
Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody
is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it
doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't
mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who
stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or
anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if,
if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there
isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that
for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a
horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income,
you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public
education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass
hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a
war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in
the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've
put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into
prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the
number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than
what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to
basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism
is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the
beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I
lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run
economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I
don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to
be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That
argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a
social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't
going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's
astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat
from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end
of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into
consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because
he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got
everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would
want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They
would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if
labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means
human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we
reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth.
Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist
impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was
married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine
that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how
to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way.
Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a
great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society
and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this
point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just
society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The
idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns,
as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with
educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy
after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market
is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is
juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my
country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me
because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves
of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are
we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the
fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over
the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans
are going to offer the world when it comes to something really
complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our
citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this
socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other
people healthy? It's socialism, motherfucker."
What do you think
group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have
group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my
law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The
treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so
you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So
the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able
to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the
idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother,
that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say,
OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're
going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it
affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going
to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for
the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't
want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that
the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished
that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go
back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his
prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if
you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace
some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what
The Wire
was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who
were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer
necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to
solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their
irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on
the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to
have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we
going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It
was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on
the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown
people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and
the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty
school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of
interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to
throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became
vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became
unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith
in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and
market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's
not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's
about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So
how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the
cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to
get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the
banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made
between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people
to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some
practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going
the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people
standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a
brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the
brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The
other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some
element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral
process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all
the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority,
almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's
not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in
my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for
reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has
effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with
the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into
Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the
popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So
I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative
government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all
start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure
we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise
of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
