Time travelling or does Obama have any kind of deal let alone a new ‘New Deal’?

In the essay by Stanley Aronowitz 'Facing the economic crisis', we read the following summation,

“Progressives have advanced hope that Obama will usher in a 'new' New Deal. But the New Deal of yesteryear was never intended to pull the United States out of the depression. While it did employ more than a million workers in government projects, even considering that these might have produced three times or 3 million jobs, as late as 1940, unemployment hovered at about 20% of the labour force. What the New Deal accomplished went well beyond its relatively modest economic impact; more important was its ideological and political force.

“In contrast to Herbert Hoover and the first New Deal's focus on stimulating economic activity by pouring capital into business corporations, controlling prices and wages in order to foster profits and limiting its direct aid to the unemployed to feeding the hungry, the so-called 'second' New Deal put money in the pockets of the jobless through public works and service programs, promised to save small farms from foreclosure through government purchases of crops and paying farmers to retire part of their growing capacity in a land bank. But it was the farmers themselves who, through direct action and mass organizing, sometimes prevented evictions, created cooperative enterprises to oppose the big processing corporations and, even before the depression became official, created their own political vehicles.

“And, after the mass industrial strikes of 1933 and 1934 conducted without a legal framework for union recognition, in 1935 the National Labor Relations Act guaranteed workers the right to organize unions of their own choosing, established a procedure for official union recognition and collective bargaining, and outlawed company unions and competitive unionism within the same bargaining unit. In short, the second New Deal was a consequence of a popular upsurge, not only the brainchild of FDR and his advisors. It remains an open question as to whether the organizations at the base of the Obama administration will match, let alone exceed, the achievements of the New Deal. There is little or no prospect that, within the current framework of neoliberal, market capitalism, the deepening economic crisis can be significantly reversed. Will the Left urge direct action to address the crisis, open a dialogue about its capitalist roots and propose possible radical solutions?” — 'Facing the economic crisis', Stanley Aronowitz [emph. added Ed]

Dream on folks, with union membership at an all-time low and a barely existent left, the prospects for some kind of comparable action look exceedingly dim. Yet without collective action there is little we can do about the crisis of capital that confronts us. We are doomed to be swept along by forces over which we have no control, let alone the 'masters of the universe'. At best, they take care of their own, hence the trillions of dollars spent bailing out the bankers.

It should surely be apparent now that the 'neo-liberal' counter-revolution has taken us back to a time before the New Deal! Indeed, the current situation is directly comparable to the situation that preceded the Crash of '29 in that, without organized working class actions we are powerless to avert this disaster.

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