Yesterday Keith Olbermann on his Countdown show on Current TV interviewed one of the organizers of the Oakland Occupation. (The Oakland General Strike was a rousing success, by the way.) Towards the end of his interview, Olbermann asked about where the movement was going from there. The organizer replied that Oakland’s General Strike (the first since 1946) was likely going to spread to other cities and that the movement in Oakland was talking about occupying foreclosed homes and schools that have been shut down in the name of budget cuts.

This got me thinking about how we are seeing in very tiny ways the evidence of a nascent dual power emerging to contend against our existing government and corporatized society. Related to this subject I wrote in my new book, Globalization and the Demolition of Society:

Anti-state entities … are taking over many state responsibilities because the state is either failing to deliver on its traditional responsibilities or it has, by its actions (and inactions), become illegitimate in the eyes of growing numbers. Thus, neoliberalism, by undermining social services and fracturing the social compact, increasingly forces into being both anti-state terrorist groups and grassroots responses to take up the vacuum created by neoliberal policies.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast in 2005, gang members broke into stores and distributed water and food to people whom the state had spectacularly abandoned. The two most organized forces in the disorder after Katrina hit New Orleans, in fact, were Blackwater mercenaries and gangs.

In the burgeoning slums worldwide that are growing explosively in the utter absence and/or malign neglect by the state of any regulatory, supervisory, or service offerings, residents have adopted various stratagems. As Teo Ballve relates:

In poor cities around the world, millions eke out a living by scavenging recyclable materials from the streets that can be exchanged for fractions of a cent. They are at the lowest rung of consumer society, the very rock bottom of globalization. And they know it. “If we were any poorer, we’d be dead,” said Jorge Eliécer Ospina, a trash recycler in Bogotá, Colombia.

Ospina lives in a hillside slum on the outskirts of the city. Like a modern day hunter-gatherer, he leaves in the early morning to see what valuables city residents have thrown out in the trash. Ospina is part of an organization of self-employed, or informal, scrap collectors [numbering 18,000] called the Bogotá Association of Recyclers (ARB), one of the oldest waste picker organizations in the world.[i]

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has gained so much power because they have been able to deliver social programs and services as well as prove themselves a determined and capable military and police force.

This transition to the privatized state has been accomplished through a combination of (a) subterfuge—much of the awarding of government contracts and services to private corporations has been out of the public eye; (b) overt, insistent, propaganda campaigns touting the supposed virtues of private business over state programs; and (c) outright fraud, accompanied at times by force.

In the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries and in the formerly socialist China, for example, state assets were appropriated by private capital through theft, forming the foundational assets for both criminal underworld enterprises and legitimate, latter-day robber baron billionaires. In Moscow today the neoliberal dystopia exists: those with money can get anything they want, including illicitly obtained human organs; the mafia runs wild; and the dispossessed suffer immensely. Moscow today has been compared by a number of observers to the American Wild West. 

In the US, this shift has occurred through corrupt, bloated, over-budget sweetheart deals, with Halliburton being the poster child and Jack Abramoff and Bernard Madoff its most famous disciples.

The $787 billion bailout of Wall Street investment bank giants [subsequently revealed in response to a FOIA request to have been $16 Trillion], passed in October 2008 by Congress after doomsday warnings by the White House and by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson et al represents one of the most spectacular examples of the passing of private debt onto the public’s already overburdened backs.

Why privatize the state? According to the neoliberals, private concerns outperform the state, doing things better and cheaper. As was revealed by the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal of 2007 (in which medical care for wounded veterans was farmed out to private companies leaving the veterans in egregious conditions) savings to taxpayers is not the point. The private contractors were charging more for their services to run Walter Reed than it had previously cost the government to run it itself.

To the extent that private entities take over previously state-run activities, profit-making opportunities expand for those private entities. Rather than the revenue (sometimes out-right subsidy, sometimes partial subsidy) going back to the state, these revenues now (generally more expensively offered than when the state did them) go to corporations or to “faith-based” groups for both material and ideological profit. Thus, corporations and those favored by public officials wield ever-expanding power in the world being shaped by global capital.

And why not? If the so-called free market is The One, then why should it not directly take over the reins of power of the state? When Dick Cheney was vice-president he convened a cabal of exclusively energy company executives to draw up America’s national energy policy. When some members of Congress objected, Cheney refused to acknowledge their right to supervise the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, dominated by conservatives, upheld his defiance as “executive privilege.” The Congress and the nation did not have a right to know who was writing our national energy policies!

But this is only one feature of this new landscape, albeit a remarkable one in and of itself. An even more important process at work relates to the ways in which the neoliberal state is plunging us headlong into a heartless world, what Polanyi had in mind when he warned of what would happen if “free market” measures became the sole criterion for society: the demolition of society. (Pp. 182-184)