Over at the suddenly and excellently renascent Ads Without Products, the suddenly and excellently erstwhile CR has been making a vital record of the guilty half-repressed flowering of nationalization talk in the national discourse — patiently noting that while the measures discussed are always simultaneously disavowed, and not really full-nationalization (much less socialism), it remains the case that
...every time they dress the windows with this sort of talk, every time the government players offer the argument that General Motors or Chrysler would have been better managed by responsible, sane, and forward-thinking bureaucrats rather than their board and corporate management, they turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click toward state management and the economics of planning....Talk like this, however cynically deployed, was absolutely unimaginable a few months ago. Of course the chatterers on television and the papers will forget all about these arguments when (if!) things improve. But the voters, an ever larger percentage of whom are about to become unemployed, perhaps won’t if they are startled into attention by the shock of what’s coming in the next few months and years.We here at sugarhigh wish we believed this. The fear is that this argument is analogous to the hope that the socialist-baiting of Obama in the pre-election twilight would have the ironic effect of inserting the term, and thus the possibility, into the national discussion — that we would have the spectral presence of the concept "socialism" haunting the White House and the future.
Now of course, because this is CR we are talking about, his suggestion is far more attentive and nuanced — it also has the virtue of referring to an actual process (economic restructuring) rather than mere campaign rhetoric. Nonetheless, we fear one could make what is, in effect, a quite contrary claim. Yes, there is a hysterical leap from "nationalization" to "socialism," and it ain't CR's. But one might be leery of that hysteria — which is, after all, indicative of an already-existing delusion, not a rising understanding — as being any kind of indication of what is suddenly imaginable. And if there is a "new" thought here, it might be quite different.
After all, the 20th century has (at least) two clear traditions of a centralized and planned economy. One is what our patriots call socialism. The other is (tellingly) ever more forgotten and ever more with us, which is something like Alfredo Rocco's (and later Mussolini's) corporatism, which can be recognized in mutations of the developmental state such as Singapore or South Korea. And it strikes us that, of these "two nationalizations," it is the latter that we are swerving toward. Tellingly, Russia's spasm of nationalizations simply makes evident that the Soviet Union's final economic form wasn't communism at all, for there is no return to worker ownership or anything of the sort, but a reversal of their own disastrous neoliberal adventure, state-made oligarchy retooling for global hard times.
One way of describing what has happened in the US is this. Thirtyfive years ago, the state more or less decided to let capital go off its meds and to concentrate on its duties as bodyguard instead. Eventually, capital got too nutty to function, doing extraordinary damage to human lives en route (as well as to the environment where those lives expire, obviously enough). So now the state has stepped in to rescue capitalism — this is the historic mission of the new President and his old economic team — by returning it to a healthier regimen. Because it turns out, just as promised, that capitalism isn't in fact capable of "healthy" self-medication. In the face of a contraction toward a no-growth economy, corporatist state planning is merely necessary. And, to repeat, this is what we talk about when we talk about nationalization, of late.
So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of socialist possibilities into the national discourse, but their further erasure. Every time that we agree that the word "socialism" might refer to something other than, at a minimum, worker ownership if not indeed the end of surplus value extraction; every time that we misrecognize state corporatism as something other than a moment in capital's "equilibrium in motion," we "turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click" away from socialism. We forget what that word promises. Perhaps the most optimistic memory, as Jasper reminded us, is that the corporatist regimes have arisen historically in the fact of popular socialist challenges — but that in no way guarantees the motion will summon forth such a movement via some blind mechanism of counterweights.
To change metaphors: we stand with CR and many others in identifying this as a moment when the chinks in capital's armor are visible. But this talk of nationalization, this strategy of planning, is an attempt to anneal the fissure in capital's domination, not to open it wide. It serves as the sign of an opportunity, but is not itself in any way opportune.