Lou Dobbs and the Politics of Reactionary Class Warfare

CSPAN 2, promptly following congress’s 64 to 35 vote to reopen the immigration debate, broadcasted Lou Dobbs response to the vote and dramatically displayed the fragmentary and reactionary tendencies of his populist rhetoric. This essay will highlight the important tendencies and problems that he addresses, issues that are largely ignored by the mainstream press, particularly on the TV format, while highlighting that how Lou conceptualizes these tendencies, their causes, their solutions and who they directly affect signals his illusionary and politically oriented verbiage, language that is designed to increase his own status and reinforce the tendencies fueling the problems he directly claims to be attempting to solve. Lou claims to be against the de-facto one-party system through his populist stancebut is in fact reproducing a fractured from of knowledge that fails to adequately conceptualize the totality of today’s socio-historical existence, especially that of capital. Lou’s logic is ultimately exclusionary and celebrates the white American middle-class while forgetting the working-class and underclass in the United States but more so in the Global South.

Even though Lou Dobbs draws attention to several disturbing trends:
- Increasing power and control over the democratic process and its institutions by corporations.
- Lack of public process and debate over policies and active citizen involvement in politics.
- The declining quality of media and the freedom of the fourth estate
- That the Democrats and Republicans are nothing more than two wings on the same bird; that they are proxies of corporations and special interests.
- The Bankruptcy Protection Act of 2005 as harmful to the middle class.
- Attributing the decline of the middle class to corporate control over government.

There are several disturbing statements within his speech:
First, he links ethnocentric interests [code for Latino interests] and corporate interests together and opposed to those of the middle class [code for whites]. Now, this is fundamentally misconstruing the relationship between corporations and Latinos. Corporations want cheap, temporary, and contingent labor, meaning easily expendable labor with no legal and or political protections. Latino’s, particularly non-American Latino’s want access to jobs that will guarantee them a higher quality of life then they currently experience. However, they also want political and economic rights so that they are not exploited. To conflate these two groups as in cahoots against a middle class is illogical, as the interests of corporations and workers are rarely on the same side. In fact, in most of the industries where these undocumented workers would obtain employment is where corporations are most active in reducing wages, the social wage and worker rights.

Furthermore, attempting to link the decline of the middle class to the rise of illegal immigration is dubious at best and displays Lou’s inability to adequately critique Neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s. Through emphasizing illegal immigration as a major component in the destruction of the middle class he fails to address the elimination of manufacturing jobs [high quality jobs in terms of a social wage and security] with service sector jobs [not all but a majority of which are low quality in terms of a social wage and security], offshoring, automation and/or computerization, anti-union practices, and the vehement attack by corporations on the social wage in general, all of which have a far larger negative effect on the U.S. working and middle class then illegal immigration, which is itself the byproduct of Neoliberal restructuring of Latin America post 1950s. The IMF and World Bank restructured their economies, assuming unilateral economic growth [development] was possible for all countries and in return created massive debt programs that inhibited these governments and their attempts at creating welfare states and basic social service infrastructures for its citizens and instead fueled the privatization of national resources and industries so American and European multinational’s could buy them, exploit the countries natural resources, and funnel the profit out of the Latin America; leaving Latin America without any benefits to show for the exploitation of their natural resources and the inability to pay off their mounting debt. Two factors which have lead to massive populist resistance to America and neoliberal policies during the 1950s-1970s in Cuba, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua and a rebirth post 9/11 in Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. The failure of Neoliberal restructuring is most prominent in Africa, which was subjected to IMF and World Bank policies post 1940s, policies that have exacerbated civil war, corrupt governments, authoritarian regimes, coups d’etat’s and the general economic collapse of Africa.

Lou’s inability to understand or if he does, honestly attribute the decline of the middle class to the collapse of Keynesianism and the reemergence of Neoliberialism leads his audience and followers away from the fundamental culprits, capital and the left’s disintegration in the face of the far-right onslaught post 1970s. The collapse of Keynesian in the 1970s signaled not only the end of American economic dominance since WWII, as Europe and Japan had regained their economic competitiveness but moreover the radical separation of productivity and wages. The hallmark of Keynesianism was collective bargaining and the agreement to harness the power of labor in capital’s favor only if labor was adequately rewarded. The result was that labor shared in the gains of economic growth and increased productivity not only in the form of increased wages but in the form of a radically expanded social wage – state and employer subsidized mass higher education, social security, health insurance, and generous pensions. Yet, with the 1970s oil crisis and the reemergence of global competition the U.S. corporations launched an attack against U.S. labor through the delinking of productivity and wages, now productivity gains are shifted away from workers towards corporations, therefore leading to increased profit margins and stagnating or declining real wages. Combined with this decoupling of productivity and wages capital’s continued attack via the state against labor’s power to unionize and strike has resulted in a fragmentary work force unable to unite against capital’s demands for continued concessions in the form of social wage cuts – elimination of pensions, increased employee contributions to healthcare coverage, increased work hours and productivity levels, increased cost of higher education and loan interest rates – while either automating or computerizing jobs in addition to their offshoring to Latin America and/or Southeast Asia.

Merely, cutting off the flow of illegal immigration, which is highly improbable in the first place, as Dobb’s policies do little to address the social, economic or political factors leading to this immigration in the first place, will do little if anything at all to halt the decline of the middle class, as it does not address the root of the problem – Neoliberalism and the collapse of the left and anti-capital forces. Lou’s logic also does not address the increasing rate of structural unemployment, which is being feed by automation and computerization. Structural unemployment has increased precipitously in each decade in the 20th and now 21st century, from 3% to 7% or higher. Not to mention that the U.S.’s incorrect tabulation of unemployment means that the current figure of around 5-6% is actually closer to the European levels of 10-12%. Lou is still locked in the belief of full employment, which is an historical impossibility. Structural unemployment will only become an ever-increasing reality for U.S. citizens, meaning that a universal basic income and shorter-hours higher-wages should be at the forefront of any labor struggle against capital.

Additionally, illegal immigration depresses wages because these workers are excluded from having the legal and political rights of citizens, the capacity to unionize themselves or join existing unions or organizations for labor. Thus, illegal immigrants become second-class citizens; if these individuals were brought into society, the collective power of labor as an inclusive movement predicated upon the shorter hours higher wages motto would be beneficial to whites and nonwhites, men and women, rather than the existing exclusionary movement premised on high wages for some by denying employment to ‘outsiders.’

Another problem with Lou’s take is that he focused largely on the unification of Democrats and Republicans behind big business, the political manifestations of the economic base of capital. He never attacks the economics of capital, only the politics of Republicans and Democrats and never gets the root of their compliance with corporations. Capital is premised on the increased concentration and centralization of power and under late capital this results in the creation of a hollow state whose function is largely not of providing social services to its citizens but in maintaining the status quo of capital accumulation through a repressive state apparatus of coercion and violence. As the political process is dominated and currently dependent upon massive monetary funds to run campaigns and win the electoral vote parties are dependent on corporations to feed their bank accounts and therefore control the hands of politicians. Democrats and Republicans will not choose the interests of ‘the people’ [Lou’s words] over corporations until the political process is fundamentally altered through the eradication of gross inequalities in political and economic power, which requires the total public financing of political campaigns, making election day a national holiday, proportional representation and an instant runoff provision, worker control over industries, local autonomy for municipalities, a progressive income tax and the reduction in the work week, so that people can become educated and politically active. Thereby, creating the preconditions for ‘radical’ direct democracy rather than the existing ‘liberal’ representative democracy. Lou does not address nor call for any of these provisions, which are necessary for the liberation of the individual and their ability to achieve emancipation.

Finally, Lou’s whole focus on the middle class goes to show his subjective and biased nature, his call and attention is on only a certain percentage of the electorate, one that will probably buy his book and watch his show, consequently lining his pockets with money. Lou’s systematic exclusion of the working class and underclass exemplifies his liberal democratic ideology and his belief in the middle class and reform of the capitalist system. He pander’s to the middle class, which is itself the byproduct of Keynesian economics; the turn away from Keynesian economics has subsequently resulted in the decline in terms of the quantity of the middle class and the quality of their lives. Yet, he fails to address this in his lecture: the middle class will not be reborn without an all out frontal attack on Neoliberalism and capital. Moreover, the middle class is only now subjectively and objectively experiencing what has been an everyday experience for the American working class and underclass for the past 100 years: temporary and contingent labor without living wages, healthcare, pensions, home ownership and economic security. Once again, the middle class, in its reactionary logic, will seek to guarantee its own continued existence and leave the working classes and underclass to fend for themselves. Rather than uniting together and realizing their similar class interests the middle class will try to stuggle against capital by itself, a struggle it will ultimately lose unless it allies with its class brethern. Without historical knowledge of the continual struggle of the working class and underclass against capital Lou will naively believe that the middle class can return to its glorious past solely through electoral politics and not based on direct action. Additionally, the gains of the white middle class he cherishes so well were largely founded on the exclusion of political and economic power to women and minorities in the US, and the denial of sovereignty to nations whose interest do not correlate with US hegemony, facts that can no longer be tolerated if America is to fulfill the claims of its liberal democracy – claims that I feel it cannot fulfill, nor will it choose too, under the current formation of society.