Before the US Turns into France: Class Anger and American Capitalism

• In Event: The 2009 Crisis of Neoliberalism: Marxist Scholars on Rhetorics of Stability and Change

Abstract

On October 17, 2008, Bank of America hosted a corporate conference call in which companies were encouraged to spend millions of dollars to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act (a bill that would ease restrictions on unionization in workplaces), before the US turns “into France,” as Home Depot’s CEO put it. This paper will examine this conference call as a shard of class anger from the American ruling class alongside the 2.5-million-strong protests in France against the neoliberal policies of the French government. Specifically I argue that in times of capitalist crisis class anger becomes acute on both sides of the divide (but owing to differential class positions, the ways this is expressed is vastly different). This current crisis has now effectively broken the neoliberal hold on political rhetoric, meaning that neoliberal values can no longer be seamlessly substituted for universal ones—as the BoA conference call makes clear, those at the top of society can now only defend their own class positions when they are at stake.

Author

• Robert McDonald, University of Texas, Austin