Swan's song out of tune

Vanguard September 2012 p. 7
Nick G.

Wayne Swan’s August 1 lecture citing the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen was a brave risk designed to breathe life into the ideological corpse of social democracy.

Swan performing CPR to the beat of Born in the USA is not the first image that comes to mind of the sober-sides controlling the nation’s Treasury, and whether or not the patient revives in time for the next federal election is unlikely to be a matter on which bets are laid.

Besides being quite a personable stroll through Swan’s youth, the lecture is quite revealing of the differences between a social democratic perspective and a revolutionary Marxist perspective.

This is most clearly seen when Swan replies to those who have accused him of fomenting class war in his previous criticisms of individual members of the bourgeoisie (Reinhart, Palmer, Forrest).  He states: “…far from relying on class warfare, my argument is one whose central economic imperative is actually to avoid the class warfare that is fomented when inequalities of wealth, opportunity and living standards are allowed to mount unchecked.”

Earlier he had decried the “rising influence of vested interests (that) is threatening Australia’s egalitarian social contract”. 

“Egalitarian social contracts”, like the Chinese concept of “great harmony”, is a myth that obscures the reality of class contradictions, of exploitation, of the state as the instrument through which one class rules another.

It seems that Springsteen despairs of such a social contract, singing on his latest CD Wrecking Ball that:

The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin
It's all happened before and it'll happen again
It'll happen again, yeah, they'll bet your life

(“Jack Of All Trades”)

The sting in the tail of that part of his lyric is “they’ll bet your life”, an obvious reference to the US ruling class’s penchant for wasting the lives of the US working class in its wars of conquest, but also a reference made clear in the song defiantly titled “We Are Alive”:

A voice cried I was killed in Maryland in 1877
When the railroad workers made their stand
Well, I was killed in 1963 one Sunday morning in Birmingham
Well, I died last year crossing the southern desert
My children left behind in San Pablo
Well, they've left our bodies here to rot

This is further reinforced on the album in the song “American Land” which is a tribute to immigrants and “illegals” alike:

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out

Swan’s preparedness to continue his attacks on the three individuals who together represent some of the wealthiest and most reactionary elements of our ruling class  is of course welcome, but it is also a means of exempting the ruling class as a whole from any threat of expropriation, from any real threat to their property or wealth.

“We are all wealth creators,” he says, as if wealth is spread over all of us like a warm electronic blanket under which the lowest SES and the highest SES persons  can cuddle up and  share a good night’s sleep.

Swan sleeps so well that his dreams feature the “overwhelming majority of Australian entrepreneurs and businesspeople (who) are to be absolutely commended for the risks they take and the wealth they create for our country.”

How can you fight Gina Reinhart when her words keep coming out of your mouth?

Springsteen is not singing to make friends of the rich and the poor:

Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill
It's still fat and easy up on banker's hill
Up on banker's hill the party's going strong
Down here below we're shackled and drawn

Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn
Pick up the rock, son, carry it on
Trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong
I woke up this morning shackled and drawn

(”Shackled and Drawn”)

He sees clearly that the bankers and finance capitalists are not doing anything for the common good, and that the “risks” they take speculating in the financial casino are paid for by the working class.  This is the same attitude he takes to those who have destroyed so many working class communities in the USA:

Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves who came around
And ate the flesh of everything they found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Who walk the streets as free men now

Ah, they brought death to our hometown, boys
(“Death To My Hometown)

Swan claims that the Labor Party shares Springsteen’ s “egalitarian vision of patriotism” but he doesn’t quite manage to quote or endorse  the following lines

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought, now we'll stand the flood
There's a new world coming, I can see the light

I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

So you use what you've got and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

(“Jack Of All Trades”)

I have no doubt Wayne Swan values his Springsteen collection, and that he sincerely believes that he shares Springsteen’s social concerns.

Nor is Springsteen a Marxist.  He’s just a lot more cynical about capitalism than Swan. 

And he’s not trying to breathe life into social democracy.

He’s just trying to breathe.