Internationalist Perspective

This text is, in part, a reply to the previous one on this site.

During the last four years the crisis of capitalism has steadfastly worsened. The climate disturbances created by its growth addiction and environmental rape have intensified, the spurt of growth and booming stock markets could not hide the growing sickness of the economy, social inequality and class conflicts increased, as well as international frictions. A general sense of dread and insecurity spread around the globe. The pandemic brought the simmering tensions to the surface, exposed the weaknesses of the capitalist global social order.

This would have happened, regardless who the leaders are. This doesn’t mean that there are no choices for the bourgeoisie, only that their choices are bound by those conditions. They can do nothing to solve the crisis, so their choices are essentially limited to how to manage it, how to deal with the tensions it creates. On this, the ruling class is divided. Trump represents a management style that is increasingly popular in the capitalist class around the world. Giving the population enemies to blame and a “he talks like us” strongman to follow, is a proven method of dealing with rising frustration and anxiety. Trump had something to offer to his class and as long as it worked, he stood a fair chance of being re-elected. But in 2020 it did not work so well anymore.

The pandemic gave him the opportunity to blame the crisis on outside factor (China) and to unite the nation behind the ‘cool-headed leader’ a la Churchill, but he blew it in many spectacular ways. Then came the protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd. Trump used them to fan fear and division, but when you look at the reactions of the capitalist class broadly, the big companies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the cultural institutions, the unions and so on, they went overwhelmingly in the other direction , towards appeasement and recuperation, lauding the goal of racial equality while leaving the social order intact. They figured that there is more hope than hate in America and that this makes Trump’s management style inadequate for these times. That is what the majority of the capitalist class seems to think. At least for now. When he loses, Trump will not disappear, he will continue to peddle his hate ware, hoping for propitious conditions to return.

His policies were short-term driven, always with the Dow Jones as barometer for success. And in the midst of a depressed economy, it’s still rising! What is there to complain about! This “Apres nous la deluge” focus on short term profit, requires a narrative, a myth based on denial. Denial of climate change, denial of infrastructural collapse, denial of the growing indebtedness of the economy, denial of systemic racism (while using it), denial of the pandemic’s deadliness, denial of reality. It’s madness, but there is a method to it, contrary to what Marlowe thinks.

Did he hijack the party?

Marlowe writes that Trump hi-jacked the Republican party. That’s not quite what happened. Stuart Stevens, who used to be a Republican political consultant, writes in his recent book “It was all a lie: How the Republican party became Donald Trump” that the current president isn’t “a freak product of the system” but “a logical conclusion of what the Republican party became over the last 50 or so years.” Trump did not hijack the Republican party, rather, the party created him.

It’s true that this party now looks like a cult, bound together by its adoration of the great leader. At the party convention, debate on the platform was scrapped to make more time to praise Trump. It was deemed sufficient to re-affirm the previous platform, the one of four years earlier. For Marlowe, this signifies that the party no longer has a program except to follow Trump. It has lost its conservative soul. But the platform of the previous party convention was not much debated either. It was basically the same as the platform of the convention before that, which was the same as the platform of the earlier convention and so on, at least to the platform on which Reagan was elected in 1980 and the so-called neo-liberal turn of capitalism began. The main points of these platforms have remained: lower taxes on capital, scrap cost-increasing regulations, cut social spending and increase spending on the military and the police, project American power internationally, criminalize the poor, outlaw abortion.

And on these main points, Trump did quite well. True, abortion isn’t outlawed yet, but he still may succeed in tilting the supreme court against it while losing the election. He made considerable “progress” on all the other, more important fundamentals of the GOP. He was useful for his class, until 2020.

According to Marlowe, the Republican party under Trump has abandoned its traditional conservatism. But that is more appearance than fact. What was its conservatism? Small government and fiscal restraint? It never practiced them. As Stevens writes, Republicans never cared about balanced budgets , except when a Democrat was in the White House. The use of racism? The party of Lincoln has a patent on it. Think of Nixon’s “southern strategy”, Reagan’s use of “the welfare queen” myth, Bush’s infamous Willie Horton-ad, of which his campaign manager Lee Atwater later admitted that it was pure race-baiting. It’s true that on immigration policy, Trump represents a shift compared to previous presidents. But not an incoherent one, it is an essential ingredient of his scapegoating ideology. Anti-immigrant sentiment was growing in the GOP before Trump came along. He didn’t invent anything. In the past too, immigrant scapegoating was used many times by the American capitalist class to divide the working class.

Meanwhile, despite Trump’s wall, of which comically small portions have been erected along the southern border, beginning and ending in the midst of nowhere, shoddily built by short time-profit driven companies, their foundations already eaten away by the floodwaters of the Rio Bravo and some of their steel pillars being sold as scrap metal in Mexico, in practice, very little has changed, except that the undocumented workers are terrified and thus willing to accept bad conditions. Much work in the US is still done by undocumented workers. Trump’s companies themselves employed some, until this embarrassing fact came to light. There are no less immigrant workers in the country but they are less mobile, they stay put, they go underground. The threat of deportation, which Trump hung so demonstratively over the heads of the millions of undocumented workers, many of which are in the “essential worker” category, is a potent weapon against the common struggle of workers of all races. That, and the fact that this fear puts a downward pressure on wages, is welcomed by the bourgeoisie.

The fight over foreign policy

Much of Marlowe’s argument on Trump’s incoherence is based on his foreign policy. I will not argue that his policies were the best possible for the capitalist class, only that there is a coherence to them, which is often obscured by Trump’s theatrics. Yes, he has bullied his European allies, he bromanced Putin and Kim Jong-Un, his words and actions were sometimes contradictory, his tariff wars were not in the interests of US capital.

But much of what he has done, has been symbolic rather than transformative in practice. He has disparaged NATO but has taken no action to distance the US from it. He rages against globalism in words but not in deeds. Even his aggressive tariffs must be put in perspective. They had little influence on the trade patterns: the US trade deficit is larger than ever and the biggest deficit is still with China. The tariffs were a camouflaged tax increase on consumers and, to a lesser degree, on foreign producers (some of which had to lower their prices). But the US remained under Trump a nation very much devoted to globalization and more than ever dependent on it.

This symbolism is a very important aspect of Trump’s ideology. The working class feels cheated, mistreated, disrespected and with his combative words and symbolic actions Trump tells them whom to blame.

That includes the European nations who, Trumps keeps repeating, “for too long, have taken advantage of us”. Previous presidents too have pressured the Europeans to increase their military spending (and thus their purchases of American weaponry), but Trump increased the pinch. Naturally, that is not to the liking of Angela Merkel and co. They have another reason to be unhappy with Trump’s leadership. Eastern Europe, the countries bordering Russia, remains the theater of inter-imperialist tension between Moscow and Europe. The Europeans want more support from their American big brother to pressure Moscow but they’re not getting it from Trump.

The Obama administration already opted for a “pivot to Asia” in US foreign policy, but found it difficult to accomplish, mainly because it could not extricate itself from the turmoil in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. But the Trump administration has continued the pivot. Its focus is on confronting its main rival, China. China is not only a useful scapegoat in Trump’s myth-based ideology, it is also in reality the only power with the economic and military capacity to potentially threaten the predominant position of the US in the global order, on which the role of the dollar as international currency, so beneficial to US capital, depends.

One way to counter China’s growing influence was to try to pull allies and potential allies away from Beijing. Hence Trump’s embrace of Duterte and Modi, his love-affair with Kim Jong-un. But more importantly, Russia could be a crucial ally. Its economic base is way too small (its GDP is the size of Italy’s) to become a global rival to the US, but with its formidable military power, as an ally, it could tilt the rapport de forces decisevely in the US’ s favor. Conversely, an alliance between Russia and China could become the biggest threat to the US’ dominance. Russia too, has reasons to fear China’s growing power. As a foreign policy goal, an alliance between the US and Russia against China is not unreasonable, no more than the alliance between the US and Russia against Germany and Japan was in 1941, as McIntosh recently pointed out.

But that strategy ran into strong opposition, not only from the Europeans but also from within the state, including from within the Republican party. Trump might have wanted to give Putin absolution on the Krim, eastern Ukraine and Syria in exchange for common pressure on Iran and China, but he couldn’t. Which shows that the party, while willing to give Trump much leeway as long as he was useful, still could rein him in, was not reduced to a mere personality-cult. Russia, after all, has been the traditional enemy for so long, and, under Putin, it has begun to throw its (military) weight around, making US’s allies nervous. Within the state apparatus there was a lot of resistance, which lead to infights and lots of departures and incriminations, disruptive to the functioning of US diplomacy, as Marlowe emphasizes.

The contradictions in Trump’s foreign policy reflect the fight that is going on about it within the US state, within the capitalist class. It’s a complicated story, in which economic interests and military interests conflict with each other, in which Trump’s hubris conflicts with reality and domestic propaganda value can trump foreign policy gains. This fight is not over. Trump did not have full control over foreign policy, he had to compromise. This, rather than his capricious character, is likely the main cause of his inconsistencies.

He has little to show for after four years. Many in the ruling class’s political establishment think, like Marlowe, that “he is effectively undermining, and perhaps unravelling, the West’s economic and political order built up since 1945.” They want him gone and look to Biden to repair the damage he has done. But that would only be a start, Marlowe writes. Much more has to be done. A return to the state of affairs before Trump is impossible. The crisis is grave, but, in his opinion, something can be done about it.

A new lease on life?

Although he does not explicitely say so in this article, Marlowe, like all of us in IP, opposes the Democrats as much as the Republicans, both of them being integral parts of the web of the capitalist state. Their priorites are the same: defend the profits and global power of US capitalism. When I wrote earlier about the fundamental goals of the Republican Party, it was not to suggest that the goals of the Democratic Party are all that different. Just look at Biden himself as evidence: often he has voted for lower taxes on capital, increased spending on the military and the police, projecting American power internationally, criminalizing the poor (mass incarceration). Not to outlaw abortion, we’ll give him that.

Nevertheless, the present crisis has “novel features” that could be dealt with “in novel ways”, according to Marlowe. The present government couldn’t do it, but Biden might. “In a world of cheap finance and new technological opportunities, the American bourgeoisie may try something new”, he thinks. “They have surprised us before: the New Deal, the Bretton Woods Agreements and the Marshall Plan were all launched in circumstances where the bourgeoisie was able to take longer-term views on regeneration in ways previously thought impossible”. Bretton Woods and the Marshall plan were part of the reorganization of the world economy after world war II, but it was the war itself which created the conditions for regeneration (in the victor’s interests of course), conditions which, fortunately, do not exist today. The New Deal was a success for the capitalist class in regard to the containment of class conflict but it was a failure in regard to the regeneration of the economy. Only the war accomplished the latter.

Marlowe believes the ruling class could come up with “something new” because it “is living in a period of cheap money offering low-cost investment”, because labor power is abundant and new green technologies open a vast target for accumulation. I won’t respond to the last claim, because I have written about it extensively on this site, see https://internationalistperspective.org/hope-or-hoax/ Obviously, Marlowe has a different view of the potential of new tech to regenerate the economy, but that argument is not much developed in his article. I invite him to respond to my text, which goes into this in greater detail and debunks the illusions on which these false hopes are based.

Stating that “the ruling class is living in a period of cheap money” seems to suggest that cheap money is somehow a condition external to the ruling class, like a wind that blows in its sails. But in fact, there is a period of cheap money whenever the ruling clas decides that there is. It’s never cheap money for everybody, it’s mostly cheap money for the moneyed. Still, when too much of it circulates without a corresponding rise in circulating value, increasing inflation is the result. That reins in easy money policies aimed at a general regeneration of the economy. But the bulk of the easy money created since the “great recession” of 2008 did not enter general circulation but was directly handed over to capital, to assure that it maintained its value. The total amount of money is increased, it still represents the total amount of value, but because capital’s share of the total has increased, the share of all those who don’t own capital, their claims on value, has decreased. Inequality sharply rises but inflation doesn’t, because all those trillions do not enter into circulation, they prop up the value of the hoard, of inactive, treasured capital. Were all that money to be invested, in green technology or any other field, its fictitious nature would be revealed and inflation would shoot upwards, speculative bubbles would swell; it would be just a different road to disaster.

Hooked

Capitalism now is more hooked on cheap money than a junkie on heroin. It needs ever more injections, it cannot stop without collapsing. If this was an era of rising profit rates, it would not need it. Despite the giant profits of some, the lack of capitalism’s overall profitability threatens to devaluate capital today. Near zero interest rates and quantitative easing prevent this. They make it easy to make money just by owning it, so all is well for capital. Until it isn’t.

Cheap money doesn’t address the cause of the crisis, it can only alter its manifestations.

It’s true that the US is in a unique position because of the dollar’s role as international money. That gives it more space than other nations have to create money beyond value without feeling adverse effects. But to keep king dollar on his throne, the US must stay powerful and profitable. Owning American debt must remain a sound investment.

Consider the situation that confronts the next president, whether Biden or Trump. The extraction of surplus value (the source of profit) has steeply fallen. Massive money creation has for now checked the devaluation of capital and the contraction of the market. The Fed will continue its low interest rates and QE (the assets it bought to prop up their value now exceed 50% of the GDP) but the government too needs to continue to spend more beyond its income, to compensate for the vanishing profits, to prevent a chain of collapses.

Whether Biden wins or Trump, the president will have to adopt a new stimulus program. More deficit spending is in order, for the economic reasons mentioned above, but also for social ones. The impoverishment of the working class fuels class struggle and rebellion. It affects all parts of the class and has the potential to unite them in common struggle, the nightmare of the bourgeoisie.

So more debt must be created. But the budget deficit now already tops 20 % of the GNP, the public debt is at a level not seen since world war II and corporate and private debt too, have risen to unprecedented heights. So together with the tendency to increase debts, rises the tendency to curtail them, to maintain the credibility of their value. But where to cut? Not in military spending, that is more than ever essential for the projection of American power, for the value of the dollar. And don’t count on Biden to “defund the police”; it too will be more than necessary, with or without sensitivity training. State governments are in the red and have to lay off tens of thousands, so their cut of the pie can’t be reduced either. Tax the rich? Only those making more than 400.000 dollars will have to pay a little bit more, Biden says. He can’t afford to scare capital away. So where will the ax fall? Who will have to sacrifice “for the good of the nation”? Expect the working class to be attacked, whether Trump is president or Biden. One will shake his iron fist, the other will cover it with a velvet glove. Many will vote for Biden for no other reason than that Trump disgusts them. That’s a good reason, for he is truly disgusting. But it won’t save us. It will be cold consolation, when the velvet fist comes down, to hear Biden fans sigh: “Well, at least he’s not Trump…”

All our rulers can do, is to kick the can down the road. Whether their talk is about renewable energy or tough tariffs, there will be no regeneration, there will only be more misery, from which we can liberate ourselves only if we abandon the hope that this or that party will make things better and refuse to play by their rules.

Yes, there is a method to Trump’s madness. And yes, that method can be changed. But only the collective worker can stop the madness.

Sander

October 15, 2020

In September we posted The Rise of Black Counter-Insurgency, a text by Shemon originally published on the website Ill Will. It made a sharp analysis of the “George Floyd rebellion” of past summer and of the efforts to contain it and make it harmless for capitalism. We introduced the text with some critical comments, to which Shemon reacted on the (non public) discussion list Meltdown. We repost his comments below, with his permissioni.

The IP intro raises a lot of good points and shortcomings of what I have been writing.

Some brief comments:

1. No doubt that the struggle has to spread to the workplaces. The question is why hasn’t it in the mass way that it has spread to the streets? The struggle cannot remain at the level of riot and fighting the police. I 100% agree. The question is why do people fight in the streets and not in the workplace? Even if we tell most people of striking at the workplace, they just shrug their shoulders and move on. It must reflect NOT a false consciousness, but their real materialist analysis of where they are strong and where they are weak. Perhaps that is too generous. I would be curious to hear from others what they think? Why do proletarians fight in the street, but not in the workplace?

2. We see the attacks on cop cars, carceral infrastructure as revolutionary abolition. I don’t know if I would call the consciousness of everyone revolutionary, but their deeds are revolutionary abolitionist. This is a particularly US framework for thinking about the relationship between abolition and communism.

3. We focus on the violence because that is what the movement has been to some extent. And a hyper focus can be a problem. Probably resulting in narrow armed struggle stuff which I am against.

4. The next step point that IP makes is very important. I think many on the far left are practically and theoretically trying to figure that out. I thought that an opening might have happened when the NBA players went on strike. The reality is that proletarians pay way more attention and give more respect to the NBA then Ill Will Editions or any of my writings! I thought the NBA strike might have set off a larger proletarian strike but it did not happen.

I cannot emphasize how difficult the next step question is.

Finally, I really appreciate the IP’s serious and comradely critiques. Apologies for the brevity.

There is a lot more to be said, but I am in Rochester, New York right now. It has been very interesting. Maybe a couple thousand people came out last night. It was almost entirely working class, very multi racial. Also some older people. What was most astonishing is the home made character of the shields and equipment. People made shieids out of baking sheets, trash can lids etc. There were not the usual anarchists coming out to protest. Things are going to explode in this country. I am telling you!

Solidarity,

Shemon

I replied on the same list.

Shemon asked: “I would be curious to hear from others what they think? Why do proletarians fight in the street, but not in the workplace?”

First, proletarians do fight in the workplaces. There was a spike of wildcat strikes, in the same period as the mass protests. It’s true that these actions were short and rarely involved an entire company. Not very radical, you might say, compared to the street riots. Except that it takes guts today to stand up to the bosses, at a time when millions of new unemployed are looking for work. Some have paid for it, being sacked by the same companies that declare their support for Black Lives Matter.

Why did these strikes – and the ones going on today – remain so limited? Fear of losing one’s job is obviously a big factor. There is also a sense of isolation. Workers are more than ever separated from each other, and from the streets. It adds to a fragile self-confidence. That self-confidence grows when those who stand up and fight, feel the wind of mass support in their backs. In that sense a mass movement that would have joined them in solidarity, could have catalyzed a dynamic in which struggles in the workplace and in the streets reinforce each other, and self-confidence and class awareness grows in both.

But we’re not there yet. Shemon writes: “Even if we tell most people of striking at the workplace, they just shrug their shoulders and move on.” Why? According to Shemon: “It must reflect NOT a false consciousness, but their real materialist analysis of where they are strong and where they are weak.” “Perhaps that is too generous”, he adds. I think that it is indeed, if by ‘generous’ he means overstating their class consciousness, their understanding of who is on their side, and who is their enemy. In order for a link between struggle in the streets and struggle in the workplaces to be forged, it must be recognized on both sides that their fight is the same. That understanding is still lacking, in the streets as well as in the work places.

Maybe when they shrugged, they figured, quite realistically, that few workers would take the risk to leave their workplaces to join a struggle for ‘Black Lives Matter’. The reactions of the beige-pigmented part of the working class to this slogan have been mixed. I think most, especially the young, are sympathetic and supportive. I may be wrong but it’s my impression that in the protests in most cities young whites were the majority. Others are indifferent, figuring, it’s a black thing, it’s not about us. Then there is also racism, whose past isn’t past yet, that is based on fear and now is inflamed by trumpist propaganda. Conceiving the white part of the working class as a uniform “stubborn” bloc is a mistake, as it would be to see the black part as a uniformly more revolutionary block.

Shemon thought a NBA strike might have set off a larger proletarian strike but that did not happen. It would be sad indeed if the development of the class struggle depended on the example of sport idols. This reliance on black millionaires leading the way implies a recognition that the struggle was still more about race than class. And, as Shemon explained, black politicians and ngo’s, BLM included, worked hard to keep it that way. Nothing wrong with fighting ‘white privilege’, but you can hardly expect the majority of workers to “commit their bodies to the uprising” (as Shemon thinks they should) if the goal does not go further than that.

The goal cannot just be that blacks are treated the same way as whites. First, because this goal is utopian within the framework of capitalism. Capitalism could get rid of slavery. It could get rid of legal segregation. It can make more room in its board rooms and institutions for people of color and women. It can take down confederate statues and forbid the use of the n-word. It is flexible that way. But it will never abandon the tool of racial division because it’s essential to its rule. As Shemon wrote, there’s nothing it fears more than proletarians of all colors and ethnicities fighting together. It will never stop punishing the poor for being poor. It will never stop to use race, ethnicity and religion when in need of a scapegoat.

Second, because being treated the same way as whites is not all that great either. Many in the white working class are in pain, as the higher than ever rate of suicide and opiate addiction illustrate. Their misery is nothing to aspire to.

Third, because, to fight capitalism, it requires a power which can only be generated by a class movement that overcomes the racial divisions, that melts the mutual prejudices because it sees the struggle as a common one, for common interests.

Black identity politics are as much an obstacle to this as white privilege. Which is not to deny that the specific conditions of black proletarians have pushed them to the front of the resistance to capitalism. But they too remain vulnerable to appeasement, to the framing of the conflict in racial terms. For the struggle that we hope will develop, a struggle of revolutionary abolition, as Shemon puts it, the realization that its not about achieving racial equality in capitalist society but about the working class coming together to abolish its exploitation (and thereby itself as a class) is a vital necessity.

The last part of this reply was also a reaction to a new text Shemon wrote, together with Arturo: The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising. In the second part of this article I will discuss their text, and the whole question of race and class in America, in more depth.

Sander

i Shemon added the following comment: I think there is some confusion over the proletariat fighting in the workplace. At one point I do say that there have been workplace strikes. My point was that they have not been as widespread, as decisive, and as powerful as the riots. If the standard is general strikes, workplace occupations, and councils, things are awfully awfully quiet. I just don’t want to be caricatured as some anti-worker communist.

Trump, Xi, Putin, Kim, Johnson, Assad, Erdogan, Netanyahu, bin Salman, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Maduro, Lukashenko, …. this is only the start of the list of today’s global kakistocracy: the government of the worst, the most unscrupulous national leaders. Their military, economic and political interactions drive the direction of today’s global capitalism. The most pivotal at present is Trump.

The US President’s behaviour can be stupefying; but we must not be mesmerised by his repugnant personality and miss what is going on in the American bourgeoisie as a whole. Despite a minority popular vote, he entered the White House through the electoral college vote. His campaign had rubbished the Democratic Party in its entirety and the Republican Party elite, and to this he added an exhibition of an astonishing level of narcissism, buffoonery and indifference to the usual norms of behaviour of his class, Trump has been able to thwart the customary functioning of the institutions of state, political parties and the media – and maintain to a considerable degree the affection of his core electoral constituency.

Domestically, his first three years built on his predecessor’s economic policies, the bringing home of a considerable amount of American investment capital through which he hoped for significant job creation. He maintained his campaign rhetoric regarding race, immigrants and Democrats and showed how much he valued social division for ramping up the hate message. However, the shocking events of 2020 – the extra-judicial murders, the protests against racism and the brutal backlash, the Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis in the economy have already eclipsed everything that went before in Trump’s presidency. Add the wildfires running on the West coast and the hurricanes on the East and we get a metaphorical apocalypse.

While there is no ‘method in his madness’, his adopted role of disruptor has shaken up much received wisdom in the American ruling class about multi-lateral trade arrangements, immigration and, perhaps most of all, foreign policy. And, given that the US has the largest economy and the most powerful military capability, his actions have spread turbulence across the world – not only economically and militarily but also politically and culturally.

With 32 days to go before the 3 November American presidential election, it is timely to consider in a broad way what Trump’s presidency has meant so far, and what might lie ahead.

Trump as Attractor

How did Trump get his constituency?

In bourgeois democracies, the notion that ‘one person, one vote’ is what it’s about is a nonsense. Gerrymandering, negotiation between the parties, funding from powerful interest groups, manipulations of electoral colleges, propaganda – direct and via broadcast and print media – and bribery all have roles. Additionally, rulers take risks by giving votes to what might be fickle electorates. The 2016 presidential election result astonished everyone: parties, pollsters and Trump. But to understand how it came about we have to look back to how the electorate was primed for just such a candidate.

Trump had long been a national, household name in the US because of his reality TV persona. A crooked real estate operator, Trump’s possibilities were recognised by Mark Burnett, a reality TV producer who made him the lynchpin in his urban ‘survival’ programme, The Apprentice. His political following, however, was created for him elsewhere –by the shock-jock programmes. For decades, nationally syndicated right-wing radio and TV hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Alex Jones had been disparaging the Democratic elite who they said were protecting those who they often targeted (albeit coded for welfare recipients and racial minorities). The radio commentators in particular got huge numbers of calls and feedback from their listeners so they knew their audience well over many years – they understood the widespread disillusionment of many of those ‘left behind’ and knew how to amplify it. They also saw that many ideologies in American society were focussed into groupings of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, pro-lifers and Second Amendment partisans. Trump was smart enough to see the possible use of these slices of American society as his base; differences in the drivers animating the various tranches of supporters were no problem – he just aggregated them, and ignored inconsistencies. His campaign-rally style built on the work of these hosts, adding the tricks of American professional wrestlers (which he knew well) such as their classic wind-up tactic of creating a hostile adversary in the audience; for Trump, the media presence at his campaign rallies was a gift which he morphed into Fake News, the Enemy of the People. (As if to acknowledge his debt to this right-wing media cohort, Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his 2020 State of the Union speech in the Capitol.)

The outturn effect has been an amplification of the worst of racist, anti-immigrant bar-room rhetoric together with traditional Christian nationalist and anti-abortion conservatism.

How Did Trump Get Elected?

But Trump was no ‘third party’ presidential candidate; he effectively hi-jacked the Republican Party. The early stages of the campaign for the GOP nomination fielded 17 candidates and through the process to nomination Trump was able to thoroughly disparage all his rivals, making considerable use of his reality TV persona. (He also built on Tea Party vestiges and on the behaviour of Newt Gingrich’s earlier role as Speaker of the House.)

As late as mid-2016, Trump’s chances of success were considered to be low. But after the Brexit referendum result, Nigel Farage (the UK Independence Party leader) went to the US to support Trump, having earlier persuaded Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation and 21st Century Fox of the attractions of supporting Brexit in the UK. Murdoch and Trump came to a shared view on American politics in the period ahead and that summer Murdoch’s Fox News gave its corporate support to the Trump campaign.

The Trump campaign also made use of social media – mainly Facebook and Twitter – to spread disinformation and propaganda, fine-tuned by Big Data consultants. Other agents were also at work: some within the state apparatus were making life difficult for Clinton and from the outside there was also Russian interference on behalf of Trump, hacking the Democratic National Committee computers and exposing Clinton’s emails via Wikileaks. Trump was also helped by disaffected Democrats changing sides or not bothering to vote. Whatever the contribution of the various factors in support of Trump, Clinton still won the popular vote. Nonetheless, she lost the Electoral College vote and so lost the election. (Not for the first time did the vagaries of the electoral system translate a minority vote to victory. In the 2000 Bush/Gore run-off, Gore won the popular vote; but the electoral college process brought it down to who was going to take Florida. The recount got to the point of legal determinations as to how to allocate ‘hanging chad’ on the ballot papers; the Supreme Court finally put a stop to further recounts. The episode showed the value of having the Supreme Court stacked appropriately)

Thus was Trump elected, against (almost) all expectations and forecasts in 2016. Flushed by success his presidential style has continued that of his campaign – broadly, to the delight of his core support and to the despair of everyone else.

Trump as Disruptor

What has happened to the Republican Party?

The political cohorts of the bourgeoisie have long had a history of self-serving; indeed, that is in the very nature of being the bourgeoisie. However, this has generally been interwoven, however cynically, with other characteristics, like patriotism or devotion to public service – at least insofar as was useful in projecting these to the population as a whole. In recent years, for the global class as a whole, the pretences have thinned. In the Republican party, little veneer is left. Recent policies concerning health insurance, DACA and even the politicisation of wearing facemasks during a pandemic have shown this; so, too, has been the attitude of the party to questions of racism and Christian nationalism. More to the core is the abandonment of conservativism, as traditionally associated (ideologically, if not in practice) with small government, fiscal restraint and global leadership. They’ve all gone. There are no more McCains or Ryans in the party who adhered to certain conservative ideologies; almost the only high-profile Republican senator currently defying Trump is Romney! Today, ideologies have been replaced by capricious tweets.

In these changes, the party has ingratiated itself with Trump by following his agenda like bootlickers. Patriotism has been cast aside with respect to Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia; Although, as Mueller pointed out and the Senate Intelligence Committee has recently affirmed, there were contacts between Trump’s campaign and the Russian state, searching for dirt on Clinton before the 2016 election. And even before Trump’s inauguration, Flynn, his then National Security Advisor designate, was making overtures to Russia. After that, Giuliani led the effort to bribe Ukraine to undermine Biden. The whole Republican Party has discarded any pretence at even-handedness on these events; when impeached by the Democratic-dominated House, the Republican-dominated Senate would not call witnesses, one of the basics for even the pretence of a trial.

Almost all members of the Republican Party standing in the 2018 mid-term elections sought Trump’s endorsement, a clear indicator of the assessment they made as to the values of the Republican constituency across the country. To get it, they had to follow his lead on so many issues – on racial issues, immigration, climate change, health care, foreign policy and what-have-you. And many did. Nonetheless, the Republicans lost the House and many state governments too. Several Republican senators and representatives declined to run for offices, effectively cleansing the party of anti-Trump congressmen.

And now, in the run-up to the 2020 election they have continued to follow his policy of politicising the Coronavirus pandemic. Reality has forced them to backpedal slightly on this, but not in time to avoid propelling the US to the worst position in the world’s nations in dealing with the pandemic. How deep will the partisan politicisation go?

Trump personally sees political profit in his incendiary rhetoric, but it is difficult to see what the bourgeoisie as a whole gets from intensifying social division and creating domestic conflict. We can describe the outlines of what has happened, but the big question, to which we’ll return, is why have the Republicans behaved this way?

What has Trump done to the American state apparatus?

Although, like all American presidents, Trump has sworn to defend the Constitution he has more than most played fast and loose with it; of course, the formal split of powers between the presidency, the legislature and the judiciary makes the Constitution ripe for gaming. And, on many occasions during his reign, Trump has claimed absolute presidential authority and power over state governors in unconstitutional ways.

Trump has generated huge uncertainties among the American political class and state institutions. The State Department has been emasculated; the intelligence services denigrated. One of his chronic resentments has been over the requirement for confirmation hearings for his choices for senior posts in his administration. To get round this, he has openly professed his preference for appointing his people to cabinet rank in acting roles. The most senior positions are filled, but there are many unfilled roles at senior (sub-Cabinet) levels.

Trump has installed a cohort of officials right across his administration who either line up with his orientations and whims or get fired. But underneath the top levels there is a growing skills void that has had the effect of removing any tempering of the Republican Party’s embrace of Trump’s governance. This has been accompanied with the denigration of expertise, especially scientific, and its replacement with sycophancy. As well as gouging out some of the innards of the body of the state, the administration consequently undermined its ability to handle the major health and social threats posed by the Covid-19 pandemic – to the detriment of the whole population.

Where is US foreign policy now?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US ruling class looked forward to a uni-polar world in which it would be unchallengeable. Its hubris was punctured by the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the US mainland; its response was to launch enormous military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq both of which initiated a backlash still with us today. And while the US remained incontrovertibly the world’s most powerful military force, lesser imperialisms were able to regroup, adopt new postures and together created an environment in which the US did not have absolute control. There has developed a war-fest of conflicts around the world.

Under the Bush administration, the War on Terror was the rubric for extending American military reach; although its aspiration was global, it focussed on West and South-West Asia. Under Obama, American policy was irresolute. The underlying reason was that his administration recognised the substantial and growing threat of China to American interests and wanted to tilt away from the Middle East and focus more on the East Asia and the Pacific. It also recognised that a large swathe of the American population was tired of these never-ending wars. However, the volatility of the Middle East and the escalation of wars precluded his administration from making a definitive shift. Pulled by competing priorities his administration vacillated – particularly over Syria and Libya – and still the troops were not being brought home. This latter factor gave an in to Trump who then integrated into his 2016 campaigning a call for no more foreign wars. Yet, the prioritisation has still not been resolved.

Trump has never had anything sufficiently coherent to be described as a foreign policy. But he does have certain orientations and preferences on which he tries to act: among these are a distaste for multilateralism and a desire for bilateralism; hence pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, defunding the World Health Organisation, and encouragement for the Brexit process to fracture the European Union. He has pushed for offshore balancing in military deployments, and has shown a strong affinity for and a desire to emulate authoritarians and despots. As his orientations met the strictures of the real world, so his actions have been marked by inconsistency.

However, one man does not a whole national posture make, so how did he get away with it? Traditionally, the American foreign policy establishment has been collegial with flexible boundaries: collegial in the sense that it has structure, a means of discourse across the piece and agreed processes of decision-making; flexible boundaries in that others from academia and business could be called on to share in these processes when additional expertise was thought to be needed. This tradition has been gutted under Trump and was clearly evidenced in the House Impeachment hearings. In its place – and indeed this applies right across his administration – Trump installed a cohort of officials who either lined up with his orientations or got fired. Sycophancy is all. But, again, why has the rest of the ruling class not reined him in?

What has Trump done to Geopolitics?

In Trump’s non-multilateral world, the biggest counterparties are China, Russia and the EU. Each of these is its own case. At the next level are Turkey, Israel, the Arab world, Iran and North Korea. His reaction to events, and his imitation of many of them, have been characterised by vacillation between hard treatment and ingratiation.

China is the single biggest challenge. The US’s largest trading rival, China not only trades across the world but is also developing (through its Belt and Road Initiative) a global infrastructure of investments interests and additional influence. Extension of its military reach is accelerating. While Trump has made most noise on matters that are dear to tranches of his base, he uses tariff increases to do battle with Xi (which, as well as hurting Chinese producers, are paid for by American consumers). He is also invoking national security needs to attack Huawei. And yet, arguing they are too expensive and ignoring how militarily essential they are, Trump has curtailed military exercises with South Korea and Japan – a move that must have pleased Xi (as well as Kim).

Trump’s attitude towards Putin and Russia has been the subject of much discussion. Besides overlooking Russia’s role in Georgia (South Ossetia) and the Ukraine (Crimea) and the Novichok poisonings in the UK, he has tried to get Russia re-admitted to the G8. Yet Russia is pushing against the US – from Venezuela to Syria to Belarus, as well as in cyberspace. With an economy the size of Italy’s, Russia does not have capability to confront the US directly, but it can make life very difficult for its much larger foe. And even if Putin does not have kompromat on Trump, Trump has consistently behaved as if he has.
In South-West Asia – in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and especially against Iran – his actions have been characterised by frustration and impetuosity. At the start of 2020 he looked ready to start two new wars; pulling back from them he went on to kill the Iranian General Soleimani in a drone attack. Declaring Daesh defeated, he abandoned the American allies – the Kurds – to Erdogan’s tender mercies, ignoring all advice concerning the regroupment histories of such jihadist forces.
It’s not just adversaries: against the policy determination of many past administrations (Republican and Democrat) that it was in US interests to have the UK in the EU, he has encouraged Brexit to weaken the EU relative to American economic advantage. He misses no opportunity to fulminate against European countries not paying their dues to NATO – though he’s by no means the first US president to make that point – his impetuosity keeps them on edge. Trump has inserted new levels of unpredictability and instability into what was already a dangerous geopolitical game. At a deeper level, he is effectively undermining, and perhaps unravelling, the West’s economic and political order built up since 1945
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And what has he done to the American working class?

Trump’s campaign offer to American workers was to build a strong economy which would give them jobs. This tied in with his theme that China had been stealing them. In any case, sectors of American capital had been moving homewards because of difficulties of trading in China, and there being more profit in the US where certain manufactures could benefit being close to the more profitable markets. All in all, during 2017 prospects looked to be in keeping with his promises.

His big stimulus to the economy was much less for the working class than advertised. The 2017 tax law was a windfall tax to the wealthy at the expense of the poorer, without enhancing the productivity that the economy needed. In this, he continued a financial syphoning that had been going on for decades.

The threatened repeal of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) has to date proved out of Trump’s reach – mainly because the Republicans have not been able to agree what should replace it. However, as well as pursuing a massive and sustained campaign to discredit the ACA, Trump and the Republicans have been able to reduce access and change tax benefits to disfavour it. At the same time, his effort to demolish it is relentless.

His racist denunciations of Mexican immigrants gave justification to the building of his wall on the southern border. To pressure Congress for the wall funding, he took the US through the longest government shutdown ever, over December 2018 and January 2019, and furloughing or suspending pay for many hundreds of thousands of federal workers. To deflect criticism, his Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, advised workers that they should have taken out bank loans to avoid going to food banks.

In an ongoing way Trump has beat the racist drum throughout his presidency: as well as the wall, travel restrictions on Muslims and denunciations of Black Lives Matter protests continued relentlessly. but reached a whole new intensity following protests over the murder of George Floyd. His ‘law and order’ rhetoric is pitched against black Americans and Democrats whom he amalgamates or separates as convenient using selections from the litany of code words and phrases in current use – such as ‘thugs’, ‘the suburbs’, ‘inner city’, ‘middle class’, ‘welfare queens’, etc. His messages are clear to all Americans.

His contempt for the working class, however, was at its clearest in reaction to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic that began early this year. His own administration had already carried out a simulation exercise – Crimson Contagion – (uncannily presciently based on a threat scenario of a respiratory virus being imported from China); the report detailed the state of unreadiness of the US to deal with such a threat – and no remedial action was taken. This was to lead to chronic equipment shortages (especially of Personal Protective Equipment) and grotesque bidding wars (inside the US and globally) to get it. Despite knowing how dangerous it would prove to be, Trump systematically underplayed the seriousness of the virus and explicitly promoted dangerous social practices, politicising everything he could – from quack remedies to social distancing to face masks. The administration’s contradictory messaging undermined any coherent social response and contributed hugely to the massive case numbers and the more than two hundred thousand deaths (so far).

A Side Trip: The Johnson Government – An Epigone in the UK

The power balance held between the institutions of executive, legislature and judiciary in the UK has undergone profound shifts recently. Through the anti-European Union campaign, the minority Brexiteer faction (the European Research Group) followed up the 2016 referendum (having surreptitiously redefined its authority) by manoeuvring control over the rest of the Conservative Party and succeeded in emasculating the Remainers (those wanting to stay in the EU). After effectively paralysing the May government, Johnson was elected leader by under a hundred thousand members of the Conservative Party, mainly elderly white males in the South East of England. As Prime Minister, he then illegally prorogued Parliament: this latter manoeuvre was struck down by the UK Supreme Court – which attracted the open hostility of the government. Johnson’s crushing success in the December 2019 election – leading a party of MPs who had had to pledge loyalty to his Brexit programme as a condition of being official Party candidates – gave him a currently unassailable majority in Parliament and without rival in government. He also aims to rein in the powers of the Supreme Court.

The Labour Party imploded at the election, having been hijacked by the Momentum movement – led by a coterie of anti-Blairite, anti-Semitic and self-deluded Stalinists – who put forward an ineffectual position on Brexit – and hence immigration – that alienated much of the party’s base in the north of England. The so-called ‘red wall’ of Labour constituencies that ran from the west to east coast then voted for the Conservative Party for the first time in a century. The parliamentary left, having helped trigger the election, gifted the Conservative Party a crushing victory.

The UK is now ruled from Downing Street and already a purging of senior levels of the Civil Service (who, in the British system, are not the administration’s political appointees) is underway. This purge is unusual in the UK. In the US the bulk of the civil service officers are legally appointees of the incoming president’s administration, although direct appointments are usually confined to the higher echelons of the state apparatus. Trump has used this power to clear out what he terms the ‘deep state’ in the state apparatus: that is to say, Democrats.

In Trump’s case, he has also been able to take the opportunities presented (and helped by a supportive Republican Senate) to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court. Likewise, he could rely on the Senate not to convict him following the House’s impeachment. As already noted, at Cabinet level, he has openly said that he enjoys the flexibility of appointing acting Secretaries so that he can avoid confirmation hearings.

Parallels between the Trump and Johnson administrations are striking and pose the possibility of shared underlying processes at work. If so, why?

After the How – Why?

In the above sections, several issues concerning Trump’s actions – rotting the state apparatus, the fickleness of American foreign policy, the bootlickers of the Republican Party, the toxic ideological onslaught on much of the American population, the expanded use of the US racist forces of repression – have been commented upon. I have described in several areas how situations unfolded. That’s the how of it. The big questions concern the why of it all. And to several of those questions there are, at present, only partial answers or speculations.

In the immediate future, the 2020 US presidential election will be a watershed in the development of the American situation – and by extension its impact on the world. At present, Covid possibilities notwithstanding, the two contenders for the next administration are Trump/Pence and Biden/Harris. In past elections, policy differences might have been to the fore in discussions about the political, economic and military directions ahead. Trump’s propositions are that the economic crisis was caused by the pandemic, the social unrest in the US is caused by the Democrats who imported domestic terrorists (such as antifa) into the target zones and who want America destroyed, and who are supporting mail-in voting which he claims is fraudulent to the point that he will not accept a Biden/Harris win; his opponents’ campaign is based primarily on their being not-Trump.

Hatred

Trump’s entire campaign since 2015 (has it ever paused?) has been based on overtly intensifying social – especially racial – divisions in American society with copious inflammatory, toxic and vicious misdirection; in a word, he promotes hatred. Trump clearly thinks that this behaviour benefits him personally but it is difficult to see how it benefits the interests of the rest of the American ruling class. The bourgeoisie as a whole wants a well-functioning and profitable economy and there is little in Trump’s politics to facilitate that; his politics were built on the assumption that that economy would already be there. But the road that this policy choice has opened up – though understandable in Trump’s own calculus – is one that the bulk of the Republican Party has followed to the point where its National Convention decided that it didn’t need a programme or manifesto for the election: in other words, the Republican Party has become gung-ho for more of the same – this is utterly self-serving for them and those close to them, like pigs at the trough. This is unusual; while bourgeois politicians look for personal benefit in most situations it is uncommon for an entire party to do this without regard to the national bourgeois interest. Is the Republican Party ideologically imploding?

Some may argue that it is always in the interests of the bourgeoisie to have the working class divided and thus easier to dominate. However, this year’s events – overt extra-judicial murders, protests and the use of police and military supported by Trump’s hate-pronouncements – all took place in the absence of a mass working class offensive. Here we have to differentiate between what was actually used in the streets to attack demonstrators, and what was a Hate Twitter-storm aimed at the rest of the country. For much of American society, the police are the ‘thin blue line’ defending Order from Chaos, and Trump plays on this existential fear of a swathe of his supporters.

At the height of the demonstrations, Trump took to the White House basement for an ‘inspection’. Broadly speaking, the police did not confront the protestors until the movement had started to wane; this gave opportunities to the police, especially in Portland where the demonstrations carried on for a month after those in the rest of the country had pretty well finished. This should be a lesson for protestors – and workers: seizing the moment when the tide is surging and leaving it when the tide ebbs so as not to be caught high and dry.

Trump’s ‘Law and Order’ calls show more his envy of the Tsarist and Maoist states of Russia and China rather than of the bourgeois democracies of, say, Western Europe who put a higher value on the use of social shock absorbers before committing brutal force against social protest. It appears that the Democratic Party would like to use such shock absorbers. They want social peace and collaboration; this is a more insidious strategy and definitely more advantageous for the bourgeoisie.

Tear, Repair or Reconstruct

The more far-sighted of American ideologues see that dealing with the resistance to the racism of the state apparatus, unemployment and the Covid-19 pandemic are all of a piece. And underlying those are the management of the economic crisis, dealing with China, and putting coherence back into its foreign policy.

The Trump administration has not shown much policy action beyond deregulation moves, and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporates. It has also been foot-dragging on stimulus programmes and support for the unemployed in the face of this year’s crisis. So far this year, the government has spent over $3 trillion in four major financial bills; the bulk of the money has gone to business with only about a fifth going to working class families. The money to business did not go to develop the US economy or its productivity; the lack of audit provision meant that companies given money to protect their workforces often just kept it or passed it on to shareholders, laying off workers where possible. Behaviour like this in a country in Eastern Europe, or South America or South-East Asia would be denounced by the US as corruption – though not if it’s at home. The fact that this syphoning can take place shows that debt levels don’t make the bourgeoisie as anxious as they used to, and that they believe there is still slack in the system.

In the period ahead, some factions of the bourgeoisie will certainly argue for traditional austerity programmes, paid for by the working class with the aim of paying off the state’s borrowing so far in the traditional way – as they did after the 2008 financial crisis. But this economic crisis has novel features that have also to be factored in – after all, the American (and the world) economy is still in crisis, the pandemic is still raging and the social divisions in the country mean that there is no going back to some status quo ante Trump, however strong the desire in the population – and in some sections of the bourgeoisie – for a ‘return to normalcy’ at many levels, even some competence by members of the government would be welcomed. But the actual situation will not permit a simple rewind out of the chaos of the Trump regime.

The past six months has shown some sections of the ruling class the need and opportunity for substantial restructuration in the American economy. Indeed, the nature of this year’s crisis is already imposing some of that restructuration. The Covid-19 lockdowns has shown that, with the technology available even to individuals, the working environment for many occupations can change considerable at lower cost to employers. Particularly in the US, there is generally recognised a huge and growing need for substantial infrastructural refurbishment. The ruling class is living in a period of cheap money offering low-cost investment; and unemployment has generated a great availability of labour. This coincides with the appearance of drivers for change from elsewhere. Looking across the international stage, there are indications of possible actions based on technological and economic changes that various factions have aired over recent years.

Rich oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have announced proposals to diversify their economies so as to reduce their dependency on the traditional petrochemical industries and are looking to invest substantially in renewable energy technologies. Oil majors like BP and Shell say they will commit to being carbon-neutral in a few decades. Some of this is just fluff for glossy company brochures, but not all of it. Historically, the bourgeoisie has at times made huge changes in reliance on what were once irreplaceable technologies – wind, water and horse to coal; coal to oil. We are now in the midst of a substantial change to electrical power from renewables – to an as yet unknown extent and unknown rate. In recent years there have been substantial developments in solar energy and in battery technology and several related industries (such as Elon Musk’s) claim to be on the verge of major cost changes in these technologies; their boasting apart, there is credible substance to such claims.

In a world of cheap finance and new technological opportunities, the American bourgeoisie may try something new. They have surprised us before: the New Deal, the Bretton Woods Agreements and the Marshall Plan were all launched in circumstances where the bourgeoisie was able to take longer-term views on regeneration in ways previously thought impossible. Not that such leaps would seem likely in the immediate future. A Trump administration wouldn’t go there. Biden has so far put forward an unsurprising Democratic style of tax and spend proposals that have been received positively by the likes of Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs. (His ability to pursue these will, of course, be in large measure determined by the election results for the House and the Senate.) But the full force of the crisis is yet to be felt and will impose further exigencies on the ruling class not so far factored in.

But, note well: we are not talking of solutions for the bourgeoisie, but orientations.

Friends and Foes

The economic problems for capitalism go way beyond the US. The interconnectedness of the world economy drives a degree of international coordination to deal with the problems of climate change, pandemics and trade wars. All countries are so interdependent and so porous to infection, economic and epidemiological, that, however they choose to confront these problems, to have any measure of success they will have do it with some concertedness. But the bourgeois order is made up of nation states, national interests, national factional power struggles and what-have-you, all in competition with each other, You can see this clearly in the search for a Covid-19 vaccine; cooperation up to a point, then competition takes over.

While in the US, ‘America First’ has been a useful ideological slogan to address the quasi-isolationist sensibilities of some of Trump’s base, the past seven decades has convinced generations of American state bureaucrats and powerful capitalists that ‘America First’ is best enacted in the context of maintaining alliances involving economic, military and political networks across the globe. We can surmise that a faction of the American foreign policy establishment is alarmed at the turn taken by the Trump administration (as was clearly evidenced during the House impeachment hearings). It is likely therefore that this faction would want to repair the tears in the American web of alliances; this would be consistent with past Democratic policies which Biden represents.

Who Supports Whom?

There are signs that the Biden campaign is getting increasing support from the big bourgeoisie. His fund-raising hit an all-time monthly record ($364 million) in August which seems to be divided roughly 50-50 between large and small donors. His campaign funding has been far larger than Trump’s which indicates some weakening of his support. But where is the balance of support from the big bourgeoisie between the two candidates?

The American economy had shown many signs of growth following on from the Obama administration and levels of employment grew to all-time highs, the core of Trump’s economic policies in his early years gave big capital huge financial benefits. But now?

Many of the biggest companies in the bourgeois democracies have been loosening ties to the political cohorts that rule the state institutions in their native nation states; all these companies use offshore financing and tax jurisdictions that puts them into tension with those states while they are obliged to accommodate the state apparatus so as to operate; likewise, the states have to accommodate themselves to the global companies. This contrasts with China where this imperative has never weakened, and to Russia where Putin’s siloviki continue to tighten their control after the Yeltsin period.

In the US some companies are still tied tightly to the state apparatus – Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, although these are mainly connected to the military. Big Pharma is also close to the state, especially so as to defend its Intellectual Property Rights. The big tech companies – Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft – are less so: You don’t hear maxims like that of Charles Wilson along the lines of “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” in order to proclaim an identity of interests. You don’t get a “what’s good for Amazon or Facebook is good for America” from Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.

In the US there is an ongoing tussle between big capital and the state apparatus – the state wanting to keep their allegiance and the companies wanting to gear the economic policies of the state to their interests. This tension is not new and past experience indicates that the state apparatus always prevails – and state capitalism is, above all other considerations, national.

And the Why?

Several times in this article I have pointed to how? events have unfolded without answering why? There are many processes going on under the surface – economic, political and social – and in considering them we are often restricted to looking at epiphenomena and from these constructing a picture of what is going on covertly. I tried to touch on some of these in my recent article, entitled Resurgence. I won’t repeat what is said there, but I’ll make some further suggestions here.

• Capitalist profit generation is based on the production of more. This is less and less compatible with the restrictions imposed by planet Earth and the effect of capitalism on its climate and ecology. Even the most bigoted deniers, such as Trump, sense it but continue to plough the same old furrows. Some of the deniers may simply be lying because they find it economically advantageous to do so; others may feel an ‘end’ approach – so, ‘après moi, le deluge’.

• Capitalism’s continuation is based on the production of surplus value from a proletariat whose level of exploitation has become extreme to the point of unbearable. And those who cannot be exploited profitably are discarded from production, and when their existence become too onerous, exterminated.

• Competition between capitalist nations has become hugely intense in trading relationships; yet they need each other (such as with their supply chains) in a tighter way than ever before. This produces great tensions, and exacerbates inter-imperialist antagonisms since, for the bourgeoisie, competition trumps co-operation. This is shown in many contexts especially with the US and China. The bourgeoisie is becoming conscious, as a class if not individually, of these contradictions.

• Capitalism is now producing orders of magnitude more fiction – financial products that represent intangibles such as risk, for example – in its economy. It would not be surprising if this is affecting the bourgeoisie’s confidence; this especially since the world’s reserve currency is the US dollar, a fiat currency that relies on the self-confidence of its bourgeoisie.

As I showed in Resurgence, the working class globally is resisting its exploitation and oppression; this must make the bourgeoisie uneasy. The bourgeoisie’s response is to be even more repressive and to worry about its own security. There are many expressions of that repression around the world, from Hong Kong to Belarus. Trump personifies that in the US. In addition to furthering the economic impoverishment of the working class, Trump’s overt oppression is built into the web of everyday capitalist life: the food deserts, the pollution, overcrowding, constant fear of homelessness, no medical care, education out of reach, all the detritus of discrimination, all the no-futures for children. His policies have only amplified the oppression.

The Kakistocracy

This seventeenth century word says it all: government by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. The list in the first paragraph of this article is a sample. For each one displaced there are plenty more to take their place; and it can get worse. In today’s world that government is the bourgeoisie. And over-riding everything is the fact is that whatever the bourgeoisie will be prepared to do to meet future challenges will be done in its own interest, not in the interest of humanity; there is no solution for humanity in this society. And even if the kakistocracy were replaced with the best minds in the world, there would be no way to save capitalism and the planet and humanity at the same time. Sooner or later it will be a choice.

* * * * *

I hope that others in the revolutionary Marxist milieu will contribute to further development of this analysis.

Marlowe
2 October 2020

Post Script:
I have just heard that Trump has tested positive for the Covid virus. You couldn’t make it up.

 

NOTE: A different viewpoint will be posted shortly. Readers are invited to join the discussion.

We publish below an article by Shemon that originally appeared on the website Ill Will. It is an astute analysis of the recuperation of what it calls “the George Floyd rebellion”, which merits reflection and debate.

The movement ignited by the murder of George Floyd is not quite over, but a relative calm has returned. However, in this period, many struggles do not lead to either defeat or victory, but don’t go away entirely. The flames die down, but the embers keep smoldering. And the fuel for the fire keeps building.

At this moment, a lot of attention and energy is being sucked away by the US elections, which offer us the choice between Trump’s naked iron fist and Biden’s iron fist in a velvet glove. The first uses the movement to evoke a specter of chaos and ruin, even provoking battles to underscore its point as in Portland, and being helped by police departments of some large cities which seem to have decided to let more criminal activity (especially gang killings) occur. The second sucks up to the movement and makes promises which he neither can nor wants to keep.

Of course, the election spectacle is not the only reason why the movement lost strength. What was its strength? Most impressive was the speed with which this struggle against police repression (a pillar of capitalist society) spread all over the US and indeed the world, the vast scale of the movement, its multiracial solidarity, the determination it showed in confronting the police and other guardians of the capitalist order, its willingness to break the law and defy the authorities, whether Republican or Democrat. But then what? What’s the next step? It’s one thing to protest against injustice, racism, and repression, it’s quite another to imagine a world in which their cause is eradicated. It is still difficult to imagine a world which is not capitalist. So the next step isn’t clear. As a result, as Shemon puts it, “protests have gone into a zombie-like phase of endless marches”, without target or purpose. The next step could be to go massively to the work places to get our sisters and brothers in the factories, offices, schools, services and so on to join a struggle which is about more than racial injustice. It must become a general refusal of capitalism’s doomsday course. The work places are capitalism’s weakest point because of its dependency on the exploitation of labor. No surplus value, no profit. In the streets, the state will ultimately always have the upper hand. Militarily it will always be stronger, until it itself begins to fall apart. Conversely the work places is where the collective worker has the upper hand. Potentially.

So for the movement to strengthen further, linking with the proletariat in the work places was a necessary step, and one that implies a broader agenda than Black Lives Matter. But despite the fact that during this time numerous wildcat strikes occurred (most because of low wages and lack of covid-protection), this step was not taken.

We’re not there yet.

The absence of a proletarian answer to the ‘what’s next?’ question created room for the answer that reformism proposes, which is not to oppose capitalism but to improve it, to march and vote and sign petitions to force Congress to adopt better laws and so on. As we argued before, this is both futile (given its systemic crisis, the plagues of capitalism will only worsen) and deeply misleading.

Shemon blames the middle class for shifting the movement’s goal “from revolutionary abolition to reformist abolition”.  “A counter-insurgency campaign has fundamentally altered the course of the movement.”, he writes. He blames the black middle class in particular. Although he uses the term ‘middle class’ numerous times, he never defines it. He assumes that it is well-known what it means. In fact it is a sociological term,  based not on social function but on income. ‘Middle class’, then, encompasses all those who are neither rich or poor, and is further divided in an ‘upper middle class’ and a ‘lower middle class’.  Some calculate that 80% of the US population  is middle class. From a Marxist point of view, this is not a useful term. It encompasses both workers (the better paid segment) as  well as (small) capitalists. In reality, capitalism tends to reduce the class composition of society to only two classes, melting the peasant class, to which until relatively recently the vast majority of humanity belonged, to an increasingly marginal size. There is the capitalist class, including not only the owners of capital but also its managers, of the state as well as of the economy, thus also the police and politicians. Opposed to it, there is the proletariat, or, to use a term which does not express its misery but its potential power, the collective worker, which comprises the vast majority of the world population. What exists between those two classes is not a class, but social layers with diverging interests: family-farmers and other independent producers, shop-keepers, food vendors and so on. These layers are not the enemy of the proletariat and should not be treated as such. They may aspire to obtain wealth and status by becoming capitalists, but at the same time they see they’re being crushed by capitalism. They can become allies in the struggle for liberation.

Shemon draws a sharp distinction between what happened in the daytime and at night during the heydays of the movement in late May. The demonstrations during the day were more massive, more white, more “middle class” according to Shemon, less confrontational than those at night. After sundown, “a Black led multi-racial proletarian rebellion burned down police stations, destroyed cop cars, attacked police, redistributed goods”. For him, that was the vanguard of the movement. Instead of begging for reforms, young proletarians attacked the capitalist order heads on.

Yes, that happened. But other things happened as well.  It’s telling that in regard to the “redistribution of goods”, a.k.a. looting, Shemon mentions only (the chain store) Target and (the luxury store) Versace. He doesn’t write about the small stores and restaurants plundered and burned during these violent nights. We don’t want to inflate these incidents a la Fox News but we don’t want to shove them under the rug either. But Shemon does. Neither does he mention the looting for profit, mostly done by gangs, which are, essentially, capitalist enterprises [1] . And he does not criticize the destruction for destruction’s sake, even of useful things such as street lights, or burning bibles and other acts that serve no purpose but to divide the protesters and provide fodder for bourgeois propaganda. The nighttime actions were spontaneous and self-organized, but self-organization must imply a collective self-discipline, a proletarian consciousness reflected in the choice of targets.

Neither the daytime nor the nighttime protests were purely proletarian and neither had an answer to the ‘next step question’. Violently confronting the police is not a strategy in itself. It offers no perspective if it is not imbedded in a broader movement, as Shemon would agree. And that this movement must extend to the workplaces is also clear. The main battlefield is the mind of the collective worker.

The ‘George Floyd rebellion’, both in its daytime and nighttime manifestations, is a big step forward, but there’s a long road ahead. Yet the embers are still hot and capitalism’s crisis keeps adding fuel to what can become an even more intense proletarian firestorm, increasingly conscious of it anti-capitalist content.

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

August 24, 2020

[1]          . On the growth of the criminal ‘shadow economy’, read our article “Resurgence’

 

The Rise of Black Counter-Insurgency 

Introduction

From May 26 to June 1, 2020, a Black led multi-racial proletarian rebellion burned down police stations, destroyed cop cars, attacked police, redistributed goods, and took revenge for the murder of countless Black and non-Black people by the police. By the first week of June, everything seemed to have changed, everyone seemed to have forgotten that any of this happened, and instead we became good protestors, we became non-violent, and we became reformists. Instead of attacking police, we endured countless marches with no point other than to continue marching. From revolutionary abolitionists, we became reformist abolitionists. What happened?

There are many easy answers, all of them incorrect. One potential answer would point to the police repression of the movement, which resulted in over 14,000 people being arrested. Another would point to the white people who joined the movement, and who brought with them all their liberal politics and strategies. Finally, the most ridiculous answer of all maintains that the militant phase of the rebellion was never a real movement of Black and non-Black proletarians to begin with, but was in fact a product of outside agitators.

In reality, something much more dangerous and sinister took place, something organic to racial capitalism, and with roots extending back to the African slave trade and the Haitian Revolution. A counter-insurgency campaign has fundamentally altered the course of the movement. While the retreat and defeat of the movement that it induced may turn out to be temporary, such campaigns present significant obstacles to further radicalization, and therefore must be addressed. This counter-insurgency campaign on the ground was spearheaded by the Black middle class, Black politicians, Black radical academics, and Black NGOs. This may come as a shock to people whose impulse is to think of Black people as a monolithic political group. This conception is false.

This was not a local phenomenon in one or two cities, but a dynamic that has taken place across the United States. A widespread rebellion demanded a widespread counter-insurgency. And while there is no doubt that behind the Black-led counter-insurgency lie billion-dollar philanthropies, universities, the state, and the white middle class, the uncomfortable truth is that a Black-led rebellion could only be crushed by a Black-led counter-insurgency program. None of this could have taken place if there were not a significant layer of Black counter-insurgents across the United States.

The rise of the Black middle class is an organic development of class stratification under racial capitalism. It is the starting point for understanding the counter-insurgency that is presently strangling the George Floyd Rebellion. The latter has its social basis in the Black middle class, who seek at most a narrow reform of the system, namely, the transformation of racial capitalism into simple capitalism.

In the long run, the Black middle class is the enemy of the Black proletariat: the unemployed, waged workers, sex workers, etc. The true partners or accomplices of the Black proletariat are the Latinx and white proletarians, Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the international proletariat. So far, few in this country seem to have figured this out, let alone what political and strategic implications follow from it. Although none of these problems are new, it is worth returning to them once again.

The Black Middle Class

There has always been a tension in the struggle for Black liberation over the question of the Black middle class: doctors, lawyers, professors, managers, and business owners. Not over its existence, but over its political role and behavior in the struggle against white supremacy.

In many ways, the Black middle class is no different from other middle classes. At their core, all middle class politics are electoral, legislative, and reformist. Their strategies are about respectability, the protection of private property, and ultimately about following the law. Middle classes have always felt entitled to speak for and represent their respective proletariats. They advocate for multi-racial unity amongst their class peers, at the same time as they use racial loyalty to advance their own positions under racial capitalism. All middle class analysis sees the proletariat as its threat or victim; none see the proletariat as a revolutionary class. Those few middle class people who see the proletariat as revolutionary either work to repress the latter, or else wind up joining them in struggle.

In 1931, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that so long as Jim Crow limited the Black middle class’s opportunities, the Black proletariat and the Black middle class needed to fight together against white supremacy. By the 1960’s, however, the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were already convinced that the Black middle class and Black proletariat had parted company. With the defeat of Jim Crow in the 1960s, middle class Black people found a path to success, resulting in vast differences between themselves and their dispossessed neighbors.

The movement to defeat Jim Crow did not destroy racial capitalism or anti-Blackness; rather, while it opened up new avenues for a small handful of Black people, their victory at the same time become a devastating defeat for the masses of Black proletarians who remain stuck in their miserable conditions, with the sole difference that their workplaces and neighborhoods are now managed and policed by the ‘victorious’ Black middle class. In this respect, the Black middle class is not entirely lying when it casts itself as the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power. These contradictions existed prior to the movements of the 1960’s, and they have never been clarified on a mass level ever since. The Black middle class has been, and remains to this day, the contradiction of the Black Liberation Movement.

The essential difference between the Black middle class and the white middle class is strategic: the Black middle class uses Black proletarian struggles to advance its own cause. Since it is not strong enough to advance its cause on its own, it leverages the fear of riots and street protests to push its own agenda. The Black middle class cannot completely dissociate itself from the militant phase of the rebellion because it needs to wield riots and violence as a potential threat over the rest of society. At the same time, the Black middle class cannot identify itself with the riot, because to do so would contradict its own desire to be integrated into the capitalist state, whose laws and order secure the existence of private property.

The result is a confused and contradictory relation marked by a triple dynamic: (i) the Black middle class strives to achieve the wealth and power of the white middle class, (ii) yet this requires it be willing to discipline the Black proletariat, (iii) with whom it nonetheless shares a sense of linked fate driven by the police’s and other white people’s inability to distinguish poor Black people from the hood from their suburban counterparts. This threefold dynamic finds expression in the general thrust of mainstream Black Lives Matter protests, whose middle class activists advocate simultaneously (i) for police to stop confusing the Black middle class with Black people from the hood, (ii) for the state to spend more money on social reproduction in the hopes of catapulting more Black people into the Black middle class, and (iii)  to create more positions for the Black middle class in universities, corporate board rooms, etc.

All of Black middle class society is poised to gain from the efforts of Black proletarians. In the coming months, the victories won from the rebellion will come in the form of the new and worthless ‘diversity’ positions, pointless academic conferences and articles, and pitiful salary bumps. For now, the current protests must maintain their parasitic relationship with the initial George Floyd Rebellion. Following the militant phase of the rebellion, protests have gone into a zombie-like phase of endless marches, often through already empty streets and highways. It is as if police stations were never sieged, smashed, and burned down. Protest after protest happens, without a meaningful reflection upon what took place that first week. Whereas 2014 introduced highway blockades to the tactical repertoire of anti-police struggle, we might have thought “burnt precincts” would be remembered as Minneapolis’ contribution. Instead, the advances made in Minneapolis are being buried under the street marches across the country, as Black leadership reinforces reactionary divisions between peaceful and good protesters.

Revolutionary versus reformist abolition

There are two kinds of abolition: revolutionary abolition and reformist abolition. Revolutionary abolition is the self-activity of the proletariat in fighting against the entire carceral logic of the state and racial capitalism. This includes burning down police stations, destroying cop cars, attacking police officers, and redistributing goods from Target and Versace. Revolutionary abolitionism stands in alliance with revolutionary anti-capitalism, since it grasps that abolition is only possible when tied to anti-capitalism, anti-statism, anti-imperialism, anti-homophobia, and anti-patriarchy. Prisons have to be abolished, but so do schools, social workers, and the army of middle-class institutions and do gooders. The expansive dynamism that it names therefore cannot stop with the police, but must extend its attack to the wall separating the so-called United States and Mexico, to detention centers, to courts, and the vast infrastructure of the carceral state and capitalism.

Revolutionary abolitionism quickly reached a boiling point during the first week of the rebellion, with a resurgence again this past week on July 25th. In the interim, revolutionary abolition was largely displaced by a reformist abolition, a current largely defined by the activity and politics of professional activists, NGOs, lawyers, and politicians, and concerned primarily with ‘defunding’, policy, and legislative shifts. This perspective continues to see politicians as the principal historical actors, in relation to whom it positions itself as a pressure group. In this way, reformist abolitionism removes proletarians from the terrain of struggle.

While it is correct to observe the gross injustice of police budgets by contrast with expenditures on health, infrastructure, school and other services, proposals to ‘defund’ amount to little more than a monetary displacement from one portion of the state to another. Moreover, even when reformist abolitionism begins to imagine abolishing the police, as is the case right now in Minneapolis, it cannot seem to grasp that the police cannot be abolished by legislation. What the reformist abolitionism fails to see is that it has always and only ever been actual or feared revolutionary wars that abolished slavery. The shortest path to dismantling police and prisons is and has always been through revolt, as we saw last year when the uprising in Haiti led to entire prisons being emptied. Insurrection forms the centerpiece of revolutionary abolition.

In light of revolutionary abolition surfacing in the country with attacks on DHS offices in Atlanta and the burning of courthouses, reformist abolition is a direct attack on these more militant means of abolition. Nowhere has this tension and relationship between reformist abolition and revolutionary abolition been more fraught than in Minneapolis. Reformists had been preparing for years in Minneapolis and the rebellion provided them with the leverage to make their move. What began as an all out assault on the forces of law and order in Minneapolis has since been transformed into a plethora of anodyne political projects. As the Black proletariat recedes, the Black professional activist comes to the front, until all is good and holy again.

NGOs and academics

Black non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the groups in the Movement for Black Lives, have played a key role in this counterinsurgency campaign. Their social base is not the Black proletariat, but the Black middle class and – most importantly – the white bourgeoisie, through the mediation of  philanthropies. In order to co-opt the movement, the bourgeoisie is throwing money at problems generated by racial capitalism. In the NGO, they have found a willing group of people who will happily accept their dollars. Money is falling from the sky: if you are Black, middle class, and can say Black Lives Matter three times, money will magically appear in your lap. While these NGOs vary politically, they tend to have little or no background in struggle, no particular concern for movements, and ultimately no interest in overthrowing racial capitalism. They are merely a reflection of the various parasites sucking the blood from the historic struggle of Black proletarians. They solve nothing in the long run, and it is unlikely any of them will actually lead the movement, since they have no base. However, because the movement generated by the George Floyd Rebellion is new, many of its participants are still easily confused, and thus continue to display a servile willingness to follow any Black person that shows up with a megaphone. While it is inevitable that some NGO activists will once again split away from their groups and join the more radical elements in the movement, any strategic orientation that centers their potential energy is mistaken. Waiting around for the radicalization of the NGOs is like waiting around for unions to radicalize. Somehow, NGOs must eventually be kicked out of the movement.

And what of the so-called “revolutionary Black intellectuals.” Since the word “revolutionary” is meaningless in non-revolutionary times, and the restricted practice of being an “intellectual” is rendered inoperative during revolutionary times, we’re dealing with a contradiction in terms. Whereas in non-revolutionary times the activities of academic intellectuals reflect the standard capitalist division of labor between thinkers and manual workers, in insurrectional moments the division of labor tends to collapse and be rearranged, such that many proletarians suddenly find themselves engaged in forms of reading, writing, and theorizing that had previously been the exclusive task of intellectuals.

Let it be said clearly: the George Floyd Rebellion is the new criterion to which all theories and politics must be held to account. Not to tenure demands, not to academic journals, not to a community of so-called scholars, but the fire and heat of the proletarian struggle. They must answer to the demands of riots, strikes, occupations, blockades, insurrections, war, and revolution. And in this regard, it must be admitted that the results have so far been a disaster. Black Marxism, Afro-pessimism, Black Anarchism, and Black Feminism have all been put to the test in this uprising, and all have failed. These theories have had little to no meaningful impact on the Black proletariat. In certain cases, they have even enhanced their careers by lending their voice to counter-insurgent NGOs who are only too happy to pay an honorarium.

What happened to Black revolutionary theory? For over fifty years, theories have been hiding in the academy. The university has completely commodified Black radical thought, which has divorced it from Black proletarians by determining who has access to it and who is able make sense of its dense and obtuse language. The issues and questions that matter to the Black proletarian are never addressed on the terms, concepts, and traditions of the Black proletariat, but instead are discussed on the much narrower and reformist terms of the academy. No idea in the academy is accountable to the Black proletariat, against whom a tenured job offers the radical academic the ultimate insulation. This lack of accountability protects outdated and useless ideas, allowing dusty old theories that were long ago defeated in the actual class struggle to continue to live on in the academy, becoming a dead weight on the movement’s brain.

This stops now. The full force of a rebellion has cleared the debris in a manner that critique could never accomplish. Although the political consolidation of the rebellion has fallen to the Black counter-insurgents for now, the George Floyd Rebellion has allowed the next generation of Black revolutionaries from the proletariat, as well as and some renegade middle class people, to emerge and catch sight of itself. In the upcoming months and years, we must do what we can to help them unburden themselves of the false divisions of intellectual activity and revolutionary activity that have long plagued our movements.

Conclusion

If capitalism is ever to be abolished, if a liberatory communist future will ever see the light of day, the proletariat must emancipate itself by force from its dependency on the bourgeois social order. But before the antagonism can reach this point, another battle must also take place, in which the Black proletariat politically and materially settles its accounts with the Black middle class. This is not a new reality but one with which every revolution involving Black people has had to wrestle. So far the Black proletariat has lost every one of these struggles, resulting in a capitalism and state with a Black face.

If the Black middle class has been able to wage the counter-insurgency so effectively, this is in part due to the fact that it has captured key parts of the state. Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta, Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, and Bernard Young in Baltimore offer just a few examples of an aspirational managerial tier that is conscious of its class interests in a manner that the Black proletariat has yet to figure out. They attend the best schools in the country, allowing them to mobilize the kind of cynical arguments that are needed to articulate a reformist and counter insurgent program.

The middle classes have their universities, elections, corporations, and other institutions to develop their version of the rainbow coalition. The proletariat is left outside of the process.

The Black proletariat can lead and spark the struggle, but will win no decisive battles without accomplices in the white and Latinx proletariat, and Indigenous nations. As it cleaned out as many stores as it could, the Black proletariat fought together with other proletarians. For one week, an organic alliance was built, as different oppressed groups rained fire on police and redistributed goods across Turtle Island.

However, these organic alliances do not automatically lead to more permanent alliances. The gigantic eruptions of solidarity in riots and uprisings tend to quickly retreat back into antagonistic relations amongst proletarians soon after. After all, sharing a moment of combat is not the same as forging long-term trust and solidarity. What is more real, one week of shared unity or a life-time of proletarian conflict with one another?

The Black proletariat faces job competition, housing competition, and the struggle for other scarce resources against other proletarians. The respective middle classes promise to secure these goodies as long as Black proletarians continue to vote for Black politicians, Latinx proletarians vote for Latinx politicians, and so on. Although this logic is a dead end for proletarian multi-racial solidarity, it serves short term aims that are often difficult to ignore for dispossessed folks. In this way, the fragile unity forged in moments of revolt are dissolved back into the separated social relationships of everyday life. Proletarians occasionally build solidarity with each other on a daily level, but on the whole they lack the mechanisms or institutions in racial capitalism to develop this unity. This is why attacks on the infrastructure of capitalism are so key and why new spaces of social reproduction are vital.

Nonetheless, our wager must be that the uprising has changed the proletariat. We have to believe that in the possibility that everyday relations are also beginning to change. This is a guess, and must be tested in battle.

Ultimately, some kind of larger process of crisis–war, economic crisis, pandemics, ecological collapse–will be required to force a strategic unity between the different racialized groups of proletarians. Without fetishizing organizations, some organizational forms will be needed to crystalize and concentrate this alliance. The proletariat will have to develop its own class-race-gender interests against the Black and white middle class simultaneously through action, organization, and program.

Since the 2007/2008 economic crisis the entire world has entered a period of mass struggle. It has been uneven, Greece one moment, the Arab Spring the next, Marikana another, or Haiti, with respective counter-revolutions or counter-insurgency as part of the process. The George Floyd Rebellion is part of this ongoing process to deal with the massive inequality, police violence, and other forms of oppression. I have emphasized defeat-retreat in the current moment, because that is what we immediately face. But in the near future, the movement will attack once again, because there will be no other choice. Defeat is temporary, struggle is permanent.

References

While I did not cite any references, the following works informed my argument and analysis:

Bitterly Divided by David Williams

Force and Freedom by Kellie Carter Jackson

The Black Jacobins by  C.L.R. James

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

The Revolution Will not be Funded by INCITE

Black Awakening in Capitalist America by Robert L. Allen

Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson

Top Down by Karen Ferguson

The Negro and Communism by W.E.B. Du Bois

Events over the past months have been breathtaking.   The global Coronavirus pandemic has, at the time of writing, infected 16 million people worldwide with over 630,000 associated deaths.   Many governments took lockdown measures which have had direct, adverse impacts on the world economy and, specifically the standard of living of the working class has been hit hard, not least through massive hikes in unemployment, the worst of which lie ahead.   And then, the grotesque and brazen murder of George Floyd in Minnesota inflamed the entire country and led to extraordinary confrontations between protesters and town, state and federal repressive forces.   Important though these latter events are within the American context, the protests have reverberated across the world and, unlike many other police murders over the years,  led not only to solidarity actions but also to explicit tie-ins to the treatment doled out to other racial groups by colonialists and home-grown exploiters, past and present.

These recent protests have not come from nowhere.   A series of social eruptions has been going on for more than a decade now and have emerged from the specific developments of the capitalist world over the past decades in which the onslaught of the ruling class against the working class has heightened through increased exploitation and accompanied by the most widespread attack on humanity and all aspects of its humanness.   We have been witnessing a blowback against this onslaught since 2010.   However, the protest movements of 2020 have reacted to social conditions with yet more intensity.

Who would have expected, even in 2019, the conflation of a police murder, a politicised pandemic, a forthcoming American presidential election, a burgeoning trade war, the tearing down of statues of slaveowners, colonialists and Confederate generals, and the most widespread civil unrest since the 1960s?   And who would have forecast that the price of a barrel of crude oil could fall below the price of a toilet roll?   These are turbulent times.

There is clearly a need for Marxists to analyse these protest movements and their developments in the context of the evolution of capitalism.   We are in new territory and need get a historical perspective on events.   Where do they fit in this evolution and what do they portend for the struggle and its direction in the period ahead?   Here, I give a broad-brush description of some aspects of recent history to provide context.     This leads on to three key questions:   Where is the working class?   Where is the point of production?   Where is the revolutionary subject?

This article does not aspire to be definitive and comments are welcomed.

The Worldwide Integration of Capitalist Society

The Ties That Bind

The creation of the world market in the 19^th Century did not mark globalisation in the terms we use today.   Our contemporary globalisation is an integrated system of production, financing and marketing.   After implementing the Reagan/Thatcher policies of de-regulation and privatisation in the US and the UK, the world crossed a Rubicon with the unfettering of capital movements and the mushrooming of offshore financial jurisdictions;  these changes facilitated more rapid and widespread investments in the global search for profit, much of which was concerned with the search for the cheapest labour costs.

The market liberalisation that followed in many parts of the world opened up opportunities for Western investment promoted forcefully and ruthlessly by institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF.  But it was also recognised by factions in the ruling class of many countries that major changes had to be made to compete and survive in this new economic reality.   One by one, the old command economies were restructured, the most globally significant being in Russia (by Gorbachev – perestroika), in China (by Deng Xiaoping – ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) and in India (by Narasimha Rao – dismantling of the Licence Raj).

Alongside global financing networks, physical logistics networks also grew.   Accelerated ship and aircraft manufacture further sped up international transportation.   Fast electronic communications (first by satellite and then by fibre optic cable) completed the construction of the infrastructural basis for true globalisation:   that is, where geographic distances shrank to the point where the harmonisation of international production processes could even meet the demands of just-in-time manufacture directly matched to the needs of highly segmented international markets.

Culturally, the population has been drawing together.   Physically, the movement of peoples from the country to the town has now reached the point of more than 50% of the world’s population now live in urban environments.   The use of English as the Latin  for modern times (built on the British Empire, IBM and the American military) enables further connectedness.   Treating the bulk of humanity as an audience, American, Indian and Chinese TV, film and other entertainment industries have achieved a substantial penetration.   The widespread availability of smartphones and the associated use of social media have also woven peoples’ lives together in a manner inconceivable just over a decade ago.

This integration is, of course, one based on capitalist social relations, advancing with what Marx termed the real domination of capital.   This domination penetrates into every aspect of human life in its rapacious search for profit; it aims to commodify and monetise everything and anything into the grotesque world system we have today.   Every aspect of our environment is looted, social relationships deformed and mental lives pathologised – see, for example, DSM-5: Recipes for Madness, in IP 58/59.

Exploitation Updated

Globalisation has enabled not only worldwide production processes but also an accelerated ability to move capital and industrial capability round the world; sometimes this is to seek lower labour costs, sometimes to avoid hostile (political or military) environments, or to embed them into favourable tax or legal environments.   One social effect of these rapid movements is to increase the precariousness of working, and hence social, life.

The world is littered with cities, towns, villages, farming areas, abandoned over millennia – their emptying caused by changes in agricultural, mining or other environmental conditions.   But, under capitalism, changes be made at astonishing rates at the diktat of boardrooms.   In the present day, the movement of industrial manufacture (steel, automobiles, shipbuilding, appliances, electronics) from the West to East, South and South-East Asia is a case in point with testimonials left in the US rust belt, the rundown towns of the North of England and many other places.   Whole societies can be stranded, unable to find livelihoods based on wage labour where there are few wages to be had.   Poverty and hopelessness flourish in such environments, while those who can find solutions elsewhere leave.

Working conditions today can contain novel characteristics:  workers in Amazon’s warehouses are kept under the tightest surveillance offered by today’s technology monitoring all their body movements not only for supervisory purposes but also to refine algorithms used to control their work more efficiently and to increase productivity.    Meanwhile, the use of robots increases as part of the constant search for labour replacement technologies;  these are the passport-less workers.   With the ability to move jobs quickly, previous incumbents can be easily marooned.   Further devices are created to tilt the balance even more in favour of the bosses – such as zero-hour contracts where there is no obligation for the company to give work to its workers yet the employee is obligated to be available for work at any time.    Job security is continually weakening, with precariousness growing as a normal feature of today’s working life.

The Shadow Economy

In traditional examinations of world GDP, a significant proportion of economic activity is ignored.    This is, without going too closely into definitions, the shadow economy – that portion of economic activity that includes smuggling of armaments and other outlawed materials such  as narcotics, blood minerals and people trafficking.    (Confusingly, the same term is sometimes used to cover the off-book activity of workers and small businesses,  which can be a substantial portion of the economy of poorer countries and is essentially a means to avoid being taxed.)   Though difficult to estimate its size, some commentators (including The Economist) reckon the shadow economy is now as much as 20% of the official economy; others express it as 15-20% of global turnover; obviously, this is a significant – and not a marginal – omission and one that has to be recognised explicitly.

The most obvious growth industries in the shadow economy have been in the trafficking of drugs and human beings, the latter for sex, slavery or both.   Trafficking has been stimulated by and contributes to the immiseration of swathes of society by economic hardship and dislocations caused by political and military antagonisms.

Additionally, there has been mushrooming of industries based on the extraction of high-value minerals such as diamonds and various materials used in hi-tech industries.   Many are located in areas where competing forces fight for commercial and political control; among them Africa and West Asia stand out.   The vast monies involved stimulate the market for weapons which make the make the rivalries deadly;  where combined with drugs, trafficking becomes all the more toxic.

Shadow activity goes across the board:   theft of commodities, counterfeit fashion items and electronic devices, trade in endangered animal species for trophies and medicines, logging, …   The list is endless and these sectors have been stimulated all the more by capital movement liberalisation, offshore financial jurisdictions and the ready supply of weaponry and social convulsions.   Together, capitalism’s economic and military warfare generates massive flows of displaced and desperate people.

Again, we can say that while most of these activities are not new, their volume and connectedness has reached an unprecedented degree of integration, a key enabler being the universality of the American dollar.

The Violence of Capitalism

Geopolitical

Unsurprisingly, the geopolitical forces and their militaries wreak the greatest overt physical damage on societies across the world.     Armed conflict has never been a question solely of pitting an armed force against an armed force; populations have always suffered, at the very least, as collateral damage.   But since the American Civil War and the industrialisation of warfare the concept of ‘total war’ entered the bourgeois vocabulary.   Through the remainder of the 19^th and all through the 20^th centuries ever-wider swathes of humanity were drawn into the conflicts as the antagonisms became more global.   The carpet bombing of German cities and the Tokyo fire-storming had brought mass annihilation of civilian populations into morally-legitimised military planning even before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The MAD (mutually assured destruction) philosophy of the Cold War was in part based on this moral legitimisation.

The 21^st Century strategic realignments are still in some flux.   Gone are the two blocs of the Cold War; in their place are alliances that are precipitating out of its residues compounded by economic and political changes.   The hubris of what was heralded as a unipolar world following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its ‘socialist allies’ led to heightened American and Western aggression culminating in the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq;   the social and political reactions have been widespread and included locally-based state forces and jihadist groupings, including the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Daesh.   The turmoil also provided fertile soil for Russia in which to develop a renewed international impact;  and, along with its enormous economic expansion, China is also driven to create a global military reach – raising tensions particularly in the west Pacific..

The scale of the ‘War on Terror’ is rarely advertised.   The US has spent over $7 trillion on this ‘war’ since 9/11.   As well as over a million deaths associated with the fighting, over 21 million people have since been displaced.   The suspension of civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorists has led to unimaginable levels of repression.   The US is currently engaged militarily in counter-terrorism activities in over 80 countries.   Not every war going on today derives from this source, there are always plenty of local antagonisms to keep the tensions high or the carnage going:  such as in Kashmir, DR Congo, Sudan, the Mexican drug wars.

Transnational Organised Crime:   Gangs, Franchises and States

Gangsterism has existed since time immemorial, but it flourishes in today’s world at many levels.   And today it takes on a weightier role than ever because of the way various entities are connected through material and financial networks.

Some organisations have had a strong existence for many years:   such as the Mafia, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, Tongs, Yakuza.    More recently there has been a mushrooming of extortion, drug and trafficking gangs and cartels in the Balkans, Turkey, Israel, South and Central America, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere.    The Russian and ex-Eastern Bloc experiences have provided a model for so many other countries where state institutions have fragmented or decayed:   the old institutions of repression and state security take the opportunity to carve out their own commercial niches and to enter the expanded global cohort of racketeers.    All such enterprises – and rulers, gangsters and other wealthy people – need the (predominantly) Western international banking system.   They use its financial security jurisdictions so as to interface with official financial systems to launder their money, to enable them to participate in the ‘legitimate’ world and to protect their assets which would otherwise be open to theft or seizure in their own countries.

To facilitate their businesses, these organisations need cooperation with parts of state apparatuses, as the state (reciprocally) needs them; whether for profit or to lubricate the management of society and economy, whether at the levels of individual petty corruption or massive criminal syndicates or wholesale kleptocracies.   The boundaries between licit and illicit, legal and illegal, honest and corrupt are all subject to definitions made by bourgeois interest groups.   Through the FSB, the internal security force succeeding the KGB, Putin has effectively given the Russian oligarchs life-rents (ie do what I say or you die), a degree of extortion perhaps matched only by the head of the House of Saud.   Integral to the faction fights that go on incessantly in gangs and states are arguments over the distribution of wealth and these can indicate important power plays as with ‘anti-corruption’ campaigns of Xi in China, Kim in North Korea and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

Taken together, these forces constitute an international franchise of the world bourgeoisie operating via the global financial system.

Domestic

The Chinese state’s fear of internal unrest is well-known (and explains why it spends 50% of its military budget on internal security).   The state’s policies towards the Uighurs in Xinjiang province have led to the internment of a million or so in what are effectively concentration camps under the guise of receiving ‘vocational skills education and training’.   As forced labour they are hired out to other provinces; women are subjected to sterilisation programmes; children are separated from their families and assessed for ‘centralised care’.   (Shades of the American southern border here.)   The Myanmar army launched a campaign to expel the Rohingya people from the Rakhine state bordering on the strategically significant littoral beside the Bay of Bengal; the government has the support of both China and India (both of whom are vying for Myanmar support for their economic and political projects).

The state apparatus is not the only source of violence.   Gang violence accounts for astonishingly high numbers of murders round the world:   in 2016, murders in Brazil matched civilian casualties in Syria; some Mexican provinces are nearly on a par with this.   Across Central and South America there are many similar events.

Capitalism’s violence is not only physical.   It can be highly successful in profitably creating problems for people and then posing solutions in which more profit is generated.   The current opioid crisis in the United States is generating substantial profits for big pharma who pressed doctors to prescribe these drugs and deal with the resulting addictions by increasing dosages – and thereby increasing sales for big pharma;  the only problems for patients and families are misery and death – over 63,000 in 2016.   There are parallel examples in psychiatry where, for example, DSM-5 (about which I have written extensively elsewhere) promotes the prescription of psycholeptic drugs developed (again) by big pharma and used to control behaviours; sort of mental coshes.   The tie-up between doctors, academics and big pharma generates massive, global, revenues in dealing with their patients many of whom have fallen victim to the madness of life under capitalism.

In recent years the development of surveillance methods has affected many aspects of social life.   Big data harvesting of the activities of billions of people – via their use of smartphones, social media, internet browsing and purchasing habits – has brought new insights into human behaviours through the development of analytical techniques (including AI) which combine data from multiple sources along with its metadata.    This technology enables close surveillance of the people contributing the data (knowingly and unknowingly) and feeds into novel applications which in turn enables precise targeting and influencing by all kinds of commercial and political agencies.   Sections of the bourgeoisie are enabled to transmit their various truths as they wish, for commercial and political advantage.   One example will serve.   Trump has famously introduced the concept of ‘fake news’ into bourgeois political discourse, coupling his use of social media with supportive broadcasting networks on television and radio.   This has put the traditional establishment media on the back foot and they have taken years to get their act together to respond to the unremitting tirades against them.   Globally, this is changing the ideological management of the populations by the various factions of the bourgeoisie.

And all the while – Austerity

Examples across the world are legion.   However, it is salutary to look at what American workers – living in the richest country in the world – have suffered over the last decades.   An example from the New York Times Editorial Board, 24 June 2020 : adjusting for inflation the average meatpacker made $24 per hour in 1982 and today (despite a significant increase in productivity) only $14 per hour.   Over this period the US economy has increased by almost 80% (adjusting for inflation and population growth) .   Yet, the after-tax income of the bottom half of earners has risen by only 20%, the middle 40% of earners has risen by 50% and the top 20% by 420%.   All in all, this represents a shift of $1 trillion annually from workers to the owners of the means of production.   There are many measures of wealth movements across the classes over this period but the long and short of it is that the American workers have been living under austerity for decades.

In the UK, currently the sixth wealthiest country, assessments generally agree that around 22% of the population (including 34% of children) are living in poverty.   Austerity in Russia, and several South America countries follow the same general pathway.    ‘It’s the same the whole world over’, one could say.

It is highly likely that to pay for the huge debts they’ve built up to deal with the Covid-19 crisis, governments will again impose Austerity Programmes  – as if so many workers aren’t living under permanent austerity anyway.   Among bourgeois economists, the efficacy of Austerity Programmes has been seriously questioned – since Keynes’ time, in fact – as being counter-productive.   But whether those who follow the Keynes and Krugman’s arguments or those who follow Reinhart and Rogoff prevail, the ‘natural’ class reaction of the bourgeoisie is to look to further extraction of surplus value from the working class as the response to such crises.   Whatever reactions to the current economic crisis the bourgeoisie settles on, you can be sure it will involve bludgeoning the proletariat.

Blowback

In the West, the 1980s brought together several strands of bourgeois political and economic ideas, changes in the strengths of various political forces (in their domestic contexts) and global investment forces – still within the framework set by the Cold War antagonisms between the two Blocs.   Among the most striking was the conflation of the economic policy of monetarism (and the liberalisation of capital markets) and the political policies of Reagan and Thatcher towards the working class.   The resulting recomposition of the working class has been discussed over the years in IP.   (See, for example, IP15, 3^rd quarter, 1989.)

As concentrations of industrial production shifted from the West to other areas of the world so too did the growth of strikes and workers struggles.   This is not surprising – one would expect that similar conditions would give rise to similar behaviours among workers.   China and India thus demonstrated a classic struggle profile with the transfer of a high proportion of heavy industrial production from the West.   It would be followed by strike waves in other countries as they followed on as they took up the role as centres for large-scale industrial production –  a noteworthy example being that in Vietnam from 2006 to 2011.   However, the reaction to capitalism’s ever-increasing strictures on human life is not confined to the factory.   In the past decade, we have seen substantial social movements resisting capitalism’s policies.

 The Arab Spring.   The curtain was raised by Mohamed Bouazizi who self-immolated on 17 December 2010 in Ben Arous, Tunisia;  made desperate by police abuse and poverty, being unable to pay police bribes, this street trader committed suicide in the most painful and public way, voicing the distress of the whole population.   There followed a wave of protests which led to the overthrow of the Tunisian government the following month.

With populations in other Arab countries suffering in a similar way to that of Tunisia, including under the most repressive regimes, protests erupted that January in Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Morocco, Palestine and elsewhere.   The intensity of the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and elsewhere led to the fall of the Mubarak regime.   Further protests then took place in Benghazi starting the Libyan Civil war in which Gaddafi’s regime was finally overthrown in August, 2010.

Demonstrations took place in Bahrain, first in solidarity with the Egyptian population and then for themselves.   In Saudi Arabia, a wave of protests against the government began with yet another self-immolation in Samtah.   In Iran, too, after the quelling of the (Green Movement)  protests in the 2009 presidential election a resurgence of anti-government protests in major cities grew after 2011.   In Gaza, Palestinian youths could protest with “Fuck Hamas, Fuck Israel, Fuck Fatah, Fuck UN, … Fuck USA …”

In Tunisia and in Egypt the ruling class was profoundly shaken by the protests; following ‘advice’ from Western rulers who encouraged them to not to simply resort to brutal repression – as was their custom – ‘softer’ approaches were taken and the unpopular heads of government (Ben Ali and Mubarak) stood down;   however this further encouraged the spread of revolts.    On the other hand, rulers in other countries began to think that these first two had capitulated too readily and determined to resist the popular movements; hence the resistance of Gaddafi (who was ousted) and Assad (who still survives).    Quickly, these individual episodes were further penetrated by the interference of foreign imperialisms looking for advantage by direct  intervention and by the financial and military support of proxies:   Syria and Libya have shown starkly the immense carnage that results.  Heightened repression is used everywhere.   Nonetheless, even in recent months social demonstrations have taken place in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

The Indignados.   The Indignados Movement in Spain was a continuation of the anti-austerity demonstrations and strikes that started in Greece in May 2010.   One of the greatest sources of discontent was the astoundingly high level of unemployment and especially of youth unemployment (which, in March 2011 stood at 43.5%).    The scale of action in Spain further encouraged the upsurge of protests round the Mediterranean, notably feeding back into those in Greece.   In return for a massive IMF/EU loan the Greek government imposed severe austerity measures on the population in May 2010 and these triggered massive demonstrations in the major cities.

The Occupy Movement.   This started off in New York with the occupation of Zuccotti Park next to Wall Street.  Though having inspiration from the anti-austerity protests taking place round the world, the focus was on the exponentially increasing inequalities in society with common cause being identified within ‘The 99%’.   It also saw the key to advancement through ‘real democracy’.   It has been estimated that by the end of 2011 protests had taken place in nearly 1000 cities across over 80 countries in every continent.   (See IP56, Spring 2012)

The Gilets Jaunes.   Thee demonstrations started in October 2018 and continued up to the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic against Macron government’s tax reforms which were seen to fall disproportionately on working and middle classes; the trigger was a fuel tax rise.    (See the article by RV on the IP website – 10 December 2012)

Hong Kong.   The conflicts between the population of Hong Kong and the Chinese state began in early May, 2019, and then intensified each week for many months.   The demonstrations were triggered by the intention of the Hong Kong government (a lackey of Beijing) to enact a law enabling deportation of Hong Kong citizens to the mainland to stand trial.   The police counter-attacks increased anger of  the population and as one rose so did the other.   The demonstrations were further fuelled by the many grievances of the population – including the appalling housing situation and low wages.   Week after week, demonstrations took place involving almost every segment of society, and among them substantial numbers of young people faced down an increasingly violent police force pushed on by Beijing and supplemented by street-fighting water cannons, Tong gangs and a PLA mobilisation over the border.

Over the months the demonstrators widened their denunciations of the ruling authority and their Beijing backers to demands for greater democracy.   However, at the time of writing, the massively increased threat from Beijing has silenced the protests.

And elsewhere …   Scarcely any part of the world has been unaffected by struggle against governments  – whether by the 2019 teachers’ strikes in the US, or by demonstrations in Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey, or Zimbabwe or South Africa over corruption and the poverty and destitution it brings.   None of these elements is new; they have all been long in existence.   However, the current period seems to have brought a remarkable simultaneity.

Likewise, there have long been populist politicians, those who are carried on the emotion of the deprived many against the elite few.    Peron in Argentina and Chavez in Venezuela were exemplars.   However, in their day(s), they acted in local or regional contexts.   Today populism is far more widespread and is simultaneously showing its power in in the right-wing ruling parties of particularly strong economies:   Modi in India, Trump in the US, Johnson in the UK, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Duterte in Philippines, among others.   And elsewhere it shows as a strengthening feature in nationalist politics, as in France and Germany.   Associated with the populism is a strengthening of authoritarianism, to the detriment of liberalism, and the ideological use of anti-elitism (with no sense of irony) and anti-corruption (again with no sense of irony).

All populism encourages the materialisation of the Other, as an ideological construction, usually immigrants or a minority grouping of some kind seen against Us, usually this dynamic is based on a mythological nationalism.   The one common factor is the ideological attempt to define community in a world that is constantly undermining it.   But, one man’s brother is another’s Other.

What Developments in Struggle can be Identified?

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the working class in the West was demobilised slowly, within a capitalist policy framework aimed at reconstruction and the anticipatory undermining of such social unrest as had been seen in the revolutionary wave following the First World War.  The Marshall Plan was the international framework for this.   In the nascent Eastern  Bloc, the working class was subjected to heightened exploitation under overarching Russian rule; its resistance led to confrontation not only with its national state but also with the Russian state.   The balance of forces was hugely against the working class.   In the rest of the world, the major framework was that of colonialist exploitation transitioning to a post-colonialist world.   The working class was adjusting to conditions very different from the 1930s.

By the late ‘60s, the dominant social unrest was characterised by struggles at the point of industrial production in the economically strongest countries showing the world that post-war capitalist development did not solve workers’ problems.   In the West there followed an ideological conflict between opposing state structures which resulted in Reaganomics, Thatcherism and brought the emerging monetarism to the fore.    Implementation brought about heightened class struggle against which, over a period of years, the overwhelming power of the bourgeoisie brought about a quiescence in the working class.   (During this period, several governments attacked their trade union apparatuses in part as a proxy for their real target – the proletariat – and in part as an ongoing conflict between different parts of the state apparatus.)   In the East, struggle was smothered to a considerable degree by the domination of the Russian state, especially its military, thus confusing class matters with nationalism.   Economically, the increased power of the West grew and the Soviet Bloc was taken to the point of near-collapse, although this did not happen until the end of the ‘80s.

Subsequent globalisation of production has brought double-edged weapons into the class struggle.   The ability to move capital and production across the world strengthens the hand of the bourgeoisie;  however, it also has the effect of homogenising social and working conditions that contribute to the potential unification of the working class as it faces capital.   This is an important element for the future.

The War against Terror prosecuted by the West, and especially by the United States, drowned struggle in many parts of the world – especially where the character of struggle has been more widely social rather than narrowly focused at the point of production.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 struggles all over the world have had a more explicit social character.    It’s as if there is a growing recognition of the connections between all aspects of social life under capitalism,   Two points:

• First, class struggle can emerge from the present social conditions in a more integrated way than, say, fifty years ago. Revolutionary Marxists must seek a class perspective on the issues without getting sucked into the protest movements as constituted.
• Second, with the complexities and novelties in capitalist society today it isn’t possible to forecast how clear expressions of the proletarian class will arise; but we do know that they and their activity will be determined in the context of evolving international social conditions.

Three Questions

Where is the working class?

Marx regarded the proletariat as that class in capitalist society owning no means of production and surviving by selling its labour power.   Most of the time, bourgeois society pays it little attention despite the working class being everywhere.   As soon as the Covid-19 pandemic showed itself, so did the reality of who carries out much of the essential work in society:   truck drivers, delivery workers, supermarket shelf stackers;   care home workers;   nurses, hospital cleaners, doctors, paramedics, lab workers.

The numbers are huge – and they are in addition to those who work in industrial and service production:  the builders of ships, aircraft, trains, cars, trucks, electronic devices and those who operate and maintain them;   operators in power stations, server farms, internet management.   If this – though obvious – needs stressing it is because of the emphasis in some corners of academic Marxism on post-Fordism, on cognitive capitalism as if this is a historical phase of capitalism that has superseded all that has gone before.   While technological developments have affected all aspects of economic, political and social life the workers who use the technologies coexist with workers who live under the rule of capitalism’s work-legacies.   A few examples:

• The cognitive workers who develop their ‘immaterial’ products on hi-tech computers are using devices built by workers on assembly lines under exacting, long-used conditions using components manufactured from such metals as cobalt and copper mined for a pittance by child labour in Congo.
• When sewers in Delhi get blocked the companies in the gleaming office buildings hire workers to immerse themselves naked into the shit to unblock them.
• The world today has more people in slavery than at any time in history. These slaves work across many occupations and are the raw material for the global human trafficking networks.

The working class is all around us, acting collectively in every function needed by society.

Where is the point of production?

The term, point of production, is often used to mean the point of industrial production – a mine or assembly line.   Today’s capitalism, however, has a production process which uses a highly complex, global system of networked, overlapping institutions.

Still at the heart of capitalism is the production of commodities, but capitalism has become much more than a straightforward production process.   Education, for example, usually directed by the state is essential – among many other things – to ensure the next generation of workers is equipped to build and operate the material and intellectual processes through which capitalism reproduces and expands.   So, apart from attending actual manufacturing processes, workers extract, deliver, ship, re-work, plan, distribute, take to market, process payments, bill and so on.   They educate children and bury the dead.   In the health system they diagnose, test, scan, transport, clean and care.   Depending on the country and the health system they are dispensing part of the social wage or working in a major industry that delivers huge profits to its owners.   There is no point of production but a web of production and support processes interwoven with myriad social institutions.

Where is the revolutionary subject?

The short answer is: gestating.   The remarks above highlight the global integration of the capitalist system, the global onslaught of the bourgeoisie against humanity and the blowback from the population in general, especially over the last decade or so when substantial protest movements developed  – sometimes slowly, sometimes spectacularly.   The protests have covered a multitude of issues:   wages, unemployment, racism, environmental matters, climate change, warfare and mass murder, repression, extra-judicial state murder, rigged elections …    In other words, everything and anything in social life today.   They absorbed more people, more widely, and for a longer time, than for many decades before.    This, then, is the background for this year’s events in which the social conditions and the international response to them represent a real difference from the past.   And today there is more acceptance that the social conditions of our time aggregate into what is an existential crisis for humanity.  How, then, to go from ‘popular protest’ to class action?

Evidently, a major issue today confronting the proletariat across the world is that of racism whose foremost function for the bourgeoisie is to disunite the working class.   This has been especially powerful in the US  where the murder of George Floyd has been the spark for waves of anger at the actions of the repressive forces of the state and the terrible effects of the pandemic falling disproportionately on working class communities and the callous indifference to it of much of the ruling class.   Positively, the demonstrations and protests have been truly multi-ethnic – across the world and not just in the US.   There are deep rumblings in the working class as many workers are trapped between staying at home on no pay or going to work and risking infection by the novel coronavirus.   Indeed, the American ruling class has concretised this by Trump using the Defense Procurement Act to force the meatpacking facilities where the virus has rampaged (see above) to continue production.   However, unions and bosses aim to keep the focus on race.   Unions launched a campaign – Strike for Black Lives – supported by the Teamsters, Service Employees International and others, as well as assorted politicians.   They attempt to hide class behind race.   In contrast, in various strikes and proto-strikes in the US and elsewhere workers have struck for greater protection against infection, pay increases for risk, and paid sick leave.   The struggle of the working class enables a unity of races.

In the course of these struggles and protests, in the context of a capitalism that pushes to extract the maximum surplus value it can, the connections between the specificities of the protests and the condition of the protesters as members of the working class can become explicit.

The emphasis on class, though emanating from a particular economic relationship in society, highlights the shared interest of the members of the working class – which are not only economic but also moral and therefore aspirational as to what sort of society we want to live in.    This dovetails with Marx’s and Engels’s words in the German Ideology:   “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fit to found society anew.”

The actions of this year appear to be a substantial move forward even over the events of the past decade and there is clearly the potential for further development in future.   There is no blueprint for the way ahead.    There will be evolution from the past together with spontaneity – a characteristic of the working class that can always surprise us.

Marlowe
31 July 2020

No need to recount those awful images. Everybody saw them. They instantly became a powerful symbol that resonated all over the world: “We’ll keep our knee on your neck until you die”, they seemed to say. It soon appeared that many felt that knee pressure on their necks: The pressure of disrespect and discrimination; the pressure of being robbed of a future; the pressure of brutal repression and control. For the second time, the desperate cry of a man being murdered by the police for having transgressed the rules of commerce, was taken over by thousands: “I can’t breathe!!!”

But now the cry is much louder, resounding in seven hundred American cities and around the world. Its symbolism too is powerfully resonating. “We can’t breathe” is a particular apt slogan for today.

We can’t breathe because you stoke hate and violence, racism, nationalism and xenophobia to divide us so you can rule;

We can’t breathe because you take away our means to make a decent living and our hopes for the future while you make the rich ever richer;

We can’t breathe because you poison our environment, as you destroy life on earth for your profits;

We can’t breathe because you facilitate pandemics, and then lock us up and send the lowest paid amongst us, more often than not black or brown men and women, to work in dangerous conditions;

We can’t breathe because, while exalting freedom, your state is an octopus extending its arms into all aspects of life; you spy on us, your police are armies, trained to harass, hunt and kill and most of all, to intimidate us, to keep us small;

We can’t breathe because while you claim to be devoted to justice, you sweat injustice from every pore. The more your system sinks in crisis, the more corruption, oppression, exploitation, hate, discrimination and violence it engenders.

What this worldwide cry is saying, even if most of those shouting it may not be conscious of it, is this: capitalism, you’re suffocating us.

Except for a backwater mayor in Mississippi, who saw nothing wrong in the murder, the entire ruling class quickly and unanimously condemned it. Even hard-line supporters of the police were ‘horrified’,‘appalled’, ‘disgusted’, ‘sickened’, ‘outraged’, etc. “He’s not one of us!”, they wanted to assure us, “Look, we got him behind bars!” And indeed, never before was a killer cop fired and arrested so quickly. That we thank in no small part to the ubiquity of smartphones. If it hadn’t been filmed, this murder would only have been a local tragedy. A mere statistic. American police kill on average about 1,100 persons each year, the majority black and brown. George Floyd was not the first black man killed by Derek Chauvin. Nor was the way in which the cop killed exceptional; his choking ‘technique’ is used by cops all over the world.

The ruling class did not want to throw oil on the fire, but the fire spread anyway. The movement erupted like a volcano, unpredicted by the political seismologists. The police were mobilized to contain it. There are 700,000 police officers in the US. In recent decades they have been heavily equipped with military hardware and training. Initially, they held back. It didn’t seem smart to try to quench a movement triggered by police violence with more police violence. But as tensions rose, the restraint often gave way to brutal forms of crowd control. Countless protesters were beaten, a few even killed with live ammunition. Tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets were used in copious amounts. The owners of the companies that produce this stuff must have watched it with glee.

Sometimes we saw police officers lay down their batons and march with the protesters, raise their fist or ‘take a knee’ in solidarity. Don’t be fooled by this. There will come a time when some policemen will refuse orders and join the struggle, but this is not what is happening now. While these ‘good cops’ appeased the demonstrators, their colleagues were standing behind a corner, armed to the teeth, ready to crack some skulls.

The police was not enough: the national guard was mobilized in 32 states, four regular army divisions were put on standby, and all sorts of other enforcers like ICE, the DEA and the riot police of the Federal Bureau of Prisons were thrown into the battle. The military police were called to help defend the White House. Curfews were imposed (not very successfully). Still, the protest demonstrations swelled, and the looting increased.

The ruling class again was unanimous in its condemnation of the looting but its attitude to it varied. For the right, it was an opportunity to change the narrative: the murder of George Floyd became a side story, the real story now was nothing less than “a battle between civilisation and barbarism”, as Tucker Carlson, a talking head on Fox News put it. An iron fist is what is needed. The hater-in-chief in the White House, when he escaped from his bunker, joined in, threatening to deploy the army, to unleash “vicious dogs”, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization (Antifa, if it were an organization, should return the favor and declare his government a terrorist organization), exhorting the local authorities to dominate the streets, clearing a path with tear gas to wave a Bible in front of a church, and so on. Clearly he hopes to be re-elected as the law-and-order candidate, the unwavering, implacable strongman we need in this time of rising anxiety and chaos.

For the left (to use this term very broadly), the protest against the murder of George Floyd remained the main story. Most mainstream media and politicians made a sharp distinction between ‘the peaceful protesters’ and ‘the violent fringe elements’. Branding the latter as evil outsiders, professional troublemakers, leeches on the movement, they all exhorted the protesters to stay away from them and seek change through peaceful means, like voting and praying. But the second most popular slogan of the movement is “No justice, no peace!” How can the movement be peaceful and refuse peace at the same time? By ‘peaceful’ the Democrats and others mean harmless for capitalism, respectful of its rules. They want us to believe a better, more humane capitalism is achievable if we vote for them. They turn reality on its head: capitalist society is not inhumane because of bad cops and bad politicians, the latter are the product of a system that is inhumane at its core.

As for the looting, some context is needed. Capitalism is based on looting. From its very beginning until now it has looted human labor and the earth’s resources relentlessly for the sake of accumulating profit. Just recently, its stimulus program showered hundreds of billions of dollars on the owners of capital at the expense of everyone else. It has kept its knee on the necks of African Americans in particular, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow terror and in our time through mass incarceration. Let’s keep things in proportion.

So we shed no tears when we see the police station of the killer cops of Minneapolis go up in flames, when the windows of the bank of America and Manhattan Chase are shattered, when police are pelted and patrol cars are burned, when big chains like Target (with a name like that, they asked for it) who underpay their workers and overcharge their customers are plundered, when kids who barely make enough to survive gleefully empty luxury stores that cater to the rich. They deserve what they get.

But there’s also the senseless violence, such as the attacks on small groceries, restaurants, barber shops etc, many owned by black people or immigrants who sometimes, when defending their stores, were beaten and even shot to death. There is no excuse for that. They victimize the innocent. In poor neighborhoods of Minneapolis, the only places selling food were destroyed. With the bus service halted, the people there now live in a food desert.

Who are these looters?

Many are young people unemployed or earning a miserable wage, who grab the chance to get things for free, even things they never could save enough to buy. They are school kids, enjoying a giddying moment of freedom. They are people who take food, shoes, clothes and of course, toilet paper, because they need them or can sell them to survive.

Then there are the professional criminals, seeing an opportunity for windfall profit. They come well-organized in teams, with crowbars, bolt cutters and guns, loading up vans while enforcers deal with any resistance. Sometimes they compete over looting territory with other gangs.

Further, there are misguided anti-capitalists who romanticize violence and ruin for ruin’s sake, believing it will undermine the system. In practice, they are hard to distinguish from the white supremacists who long for a race war and want Trump re-elected and believe that chaos will contribute to both ends. The white men who drove through Atlanta’s poor neighborhoods giving bricks to teenagers could be either. Who were the people in Davenport driving around shooting, killing a protester? Rarely are they identified as did happen in the case of a twitter account named ANTIFA_US that tweeted: “ALERT Tonight’s the night, Comrades Tonight we say “F**k The City” and we move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what’s ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica.” It was retweeted by many rightwingers including Donald Trump jr. who called it proof his father was right to call Antifa a terrorist organization before it was revealed that it was a fake account set up by white racists.

Initially, the police often seemed to take a hands off approach to the looting. It concentrated its efforts on confronting the demonstrations. Police officers were observed in their cars, doing nothing, while looting was going on under their eyes. We can only speculate on their motives. Were they scared (not unreasonably), waiting for backup that didn’t come? Were they angry for being scapegoated for everything? Did they want the looting to occur in the hope that it would discredit the movement? Or show “the people with a stake in society” (to borrow another expression of Tucker Carlson) how badly they are needed?

Increasingly, protesters began to resist the looting and wanton acts of destruction because they saw them as senseless and taking attention away from their cause.

But that cause is vague. Obviously, in this case, everybody agrees that the killer cops must be punished, and the authorities gladly will sacrifice them, if that calms the mood. They also concede that the police need better training, although in practice that will likely mean making them more aware of how they come across when they’re being filmed. They increased the charges against the main culprit and leveled charges against his accomplices. What more do you want?, they seem to be asking. But still, the protests are swelling.

What do we want? We’re not sure. More than this. Freedom. Respect. Liberation of worries of how to survive. Continuing the joy of being together, black, white and brown, believing in and fighting for our common future. That’s what we want, to be together, to fight together. Don’t tell us to go back inside, to go back to normal, to vote and pray.

But being together carries risks today. We witness an unprecedented contingency: an explosive spread of social discontent and an explosive spread of a pandemic at the same time. The pandemic played a role in the events. On the one hand it fanned the protest in different ways. The disproportionately high number of Covid-19 victims among black and brown people fed the anger. It put the spotlight on the grievous underfunding of healthcare in poor urban areas, on the unhealthy living conditions there and on the fact that many essential workers were forced to work without adequate protection. It’s no coincidence that in New York for instance, the richest borough (Manhattan) has the lowest number of Covid-deaths per capita and the poorest borough (the Bronx) the highest. Another factor is the relative emptiness of the streets, which makes it easier for the protesters to occupy them (and for the looters to do their thing). Then there was the urge of many people, especially the young, after months of relative confinement, to be out in the streets, to end their isolation and be with others. For many, the joy of fighting together is an exhilarating experience which they will not forget.

Social distance practices went through the window. How could it have been otherwise? Still, the fear of infection keeps many away from the protest, especially older people. The vast majority of the participants are under 35. Most wear masks but are very close together. Especially when they get arrested and locked up in overcrowded jails, as thousands have. Then there’s the tear gas, so abundantly sprayed: it can damage the lungs and make people more vulnerable to the virus.

Health experts warned that a second wave of infections is likely, already before the present upheaval began, because several states started to ‘re-open’ the economy with imprudent haste in their eagerness to get the profit-machine running again. That is the main reason why infections will increase again, because the risk is the greatest in indoor spaces. But when this second wave materializes, no doubt Trump will blame it on the protesters.

The street protests will end. Will that mean a return to normal?

At least, the participants in this global movement will take some valuable lessons home.

One is a lesson of empowerment. They learned that by fighting together, they can put the state on the defensive and focus everybody’s attention on their cause. A new generation has discovered the power and joy of collective struggle. And it won’t be derailed by racial division. There has probably never been a social mass movement in US history that is as diverse in its racial composition. And it did not let itself be captured by organizations and leaders speaking in its name, although the “Black Lives Matter” Network, which has chapters in many cities and has received funding from some big companies, plays a big role in organizing many marches. Most of the action is spontaneous and fluid. There is no fixed set of demands, the goal posts are moveable. But so far, they have not moved beyond the aim of ending police mistreatment of racial minorities. In recent days, demands to “defund the police” and even to “abolish the police”, have grown louder.

Some politicians, like the mayors of New York and Los Angeles, have expressed sympathy for the defunding campaign but what they mean by it is that a modest amount of city funds would be shifted from the police budget to some social programs. Given the size of police budgets in the US ($115 billion in 2017, according to the Urban Institute; the budget of the NYPD alone , $ 6 billion, is larger than that of the World Health Organization)) that would not change much at all. The demand to abolish the police is interesting because it encourages us to try to imagine a different social order. What would a world without police look like? MPD150, a Minneapolis-based group which promotes this demand, explains that it would be a step by step process “strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.” But it does not make sense to want to abolish the police without wanting to abolish capitalism as well. The problem with this and other radical sounding plans such as the Green New Deal or open borders is that they are at once too timid and utopian. By themselves, they solve nothing and they are also impossible to realize within capitalism. We too want to abolish the police, have open borders, and production that does not pollute. But these are not optional parts of capitalist society that can be lopped of. We have to take the bull by the horns.

This movement is a big step forward but there is still a long road ahead of us. Many illusions will have to be shed. Those who expect that, as a result of this movement, the police will become nice, the poor will be treated with respect, and racial discrimination will end, are in for a rude awakening. Of course, a lot of respect will be paid to the idea that black lives matter. Most major US corporations have posted messages claiming they’re devoted to it. Scores of politicians have ‘taken a knee’ in support of it. But in reality, lives only matter in capitalism to the degree they are useful for the accumulation of value. Many millions in this world are not, and their lives don’t matter very much. That won’t change. Capitalism always has used racism and xenophobia to cut off the poorest part of the working class from the rest. That will not change either.

The normal we are returning to after this movement is a world of pain and misery. Capitalism makes it impossible to use the human creative powers directly for human needs. Generally speaking, needs are only met if it is profitable to do so. But that profit mechanism is in trouble. Capitalism is in crisis and will remain in crisis after the present pandemic has ended. The normal that awaits us is a world of soup kitchens, evictions, anxiety and depression, of high unemployment while social wealth gravitates from the working class to the rich and governments prepare for war.

Crimes of poverty will increase. Remember why the two men whose last words are now so famous were arrested. Eric Garner was accused of selling loose cigarettes (stealing tax money from the state) and George Floyd of paying in a grocery store with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill (a sacrilege). Crimes of poverty. They died because they were poor and black.

Social unrest will increase. Class contradictions will become more glaring.

And the police will be the police. Despite the reforms that now may be implemented, the laws that may be concocted, the confederate statues that may be taken down, the police will do what it has to do, protect the capitalist law and order. That’s what it is for. It will be violent, and it will be brutal.

What we hope that will happen, after this movement ends, is that many refuse to return to normal.

That the fighting spirit survives the mass demonstrations.

What we hope is that the understanding grows that racial discrimination, poverty and police brutality will only end when capitalism ends.

What we hope is that the struggle will spread from the streets to the working places. Only then will it gain the power to change the world.

What we hope is that the sheer absurdity of the world will agitate the imagination to the point where we are compelled to ask a collective question: what does the world we want to live in and leave behind look like?

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

6/7/2020