View this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/business/20bailout.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The big news today is that apparently the government is responding to the public outcry regarding the A.I.G. bonuses, so the House just passed (with mostly bi-partisan support) a 90% tax on the bonuses handed out to A.I.G. executives. I also thought this detail was interesting:

Republicans were not to be outdone in expressing disgust, and they had a collective “I told you so” message for Democrats. Representative Ed Royce of California, for instance, said he would vote for the bill on the floor, but he proudly recalled that last fall he had voted against the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the bailout plan that is the source of mounting public fury.

With everyone—even the Right—joining the populist ranks to punish corporate looters and swindlers, I’m feeling increasingly skeptical and uneasy about my initial gut-reaction to the news (“let the fuckers burn!,” or something to that extent). On the one hand, what groups like A.I.G. did was objectively terrible and obviously corrupt, but on the other hand I think the broad governmental support for this kind of punitive measure signals the fact that something is wrong about it—even a number of things wrong.

It seems that the House bill will give the public a little taste of vengeance against the wealthy aristocracy without actually fixing the underlying problem. All the government has done is to eliminate the bonuses, but the executives who helped to bring about the crisis have not even been fired or imprisoned for mass-fraud or anything like that. But even if such measures were taken, it would lead us to conclude that only a few rotten apples were responsible for bringing about the crisis and that, with those few eliminated or punished, the system will be fine.

But obviously the people who committed fraud are not mere “individuals.” That’s a convenient fiction that allows us to misrecognize their their basic function as agents of capital. In other words, these people are hired solely on the basis of their expertise in generating surplus-value, just as the bureaucratic managers of industry under actually existing socialism were social agents (eliminating profits, equalizing income, etc.). In that capacity, their individual subjectivity is eclipsed by their objective social role.

So now we the public can go on sleeping, thinking we’ve awoken. We can cast our hexes and even throw our own populist show-trials against the wealthy public enemies, but this won’t change the fact that we still live in a capitalist society and that crisis will come again, if it is not already in the process of becoming through what Hegel called the “silent weaving of the Spirit.”