American workers have been on the receiving end of an onslaught of astonishing proportions, all of it caused by the bourgeoisie which considers the rest of the population to be a free-fire zone.\u00a0\u00a0 In past months, the extra-juridical executions of black people by the police, the deaths of a quarter of a million people from Covid-19, the accelerated impoverishment brought about by the economic crisis and the refusal to send relief to the unemployed and hungry have intensified social distress.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Added to which the elections and events around them have seemingly bludgeoned the population into the most extraordinary mindsets.<\/p>\n
Clearly, faced with this barrage, the workers have been on the defensive.\u00a0\u00a0 So, how do we assess their ability to fight back?\u00a0\u00a0 To do this we have to unravel several themes in the social situation;\u00a0\u00a0 in so doing we encounter its several unusual features.<\/p>\n
Racism, Plague and Poverty<\/p>\n
Throughout American history, racism has been an integral part of the social reality and as capitalism developed so this poison was used to divide the working class.\u00a0\u00a0 The US party system with its Republican and Democratic organisations have each had what we might label their progressive and reactionary wings.\u00a0\u00a0 But, especially since the Nixon era, their alignments have moved.\u00a0\u00a0 For decades up to the early \u201870s, the Democrats were strong in the South with their support for segregationist policies, their high mark personified by Wallace of Alabama.\u00a0\u00a0 However, the Johnson administration\u2019s policy of desegregation, enforced by federal troops and agencies acting against the segregationists, changed the political landscape and weakened the Democrats among white supremacists.\u00a0\u00a0 In their campaigns, first Goldwater\u2019s and then later and most explicitly in Nixon\u2019s Southern strategy the Republican Party decided to forego the black vote.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Together with the predominantly white suburbs developments across the country, the combined effect led the Republican Party to move to the right and to monopolise the political projection of overt racism.<\/p>\n
Although racist dog whistles have been used for years (such as in the elder Bush\u2019s Willie Horton advertisements) Trump and his acolytes have weaponised it.\u00a0\u00a0 The street murders of George Floyd and others have brought massive protests that were corralled and attacked by police and national guards.\u00a0\u00a0 Inevitably, there were reactions leading to rioting and looting, these giving the government the opportunity, as always, to justify state violence by the need for law and order to defend innocent citizens and their property.\u00a0\u00a0 It also gave Trump staging for photo-opportunities.<\/p>\n
The Covid-19 pandemic has created the backdrop for the strangest propaganda.\u00a0\u00a0 In the face of appallingly high and increasing infections and deaths, Trump started by saying it was a Democratic hoax, later that it would just disappear, then that it could be dealt with by injecting bleach and finally, during the election campaign, he just ignored it \u2013 despite being hospitalised himself.\u00a0\u00a0 All this from the man who has admitted publicly that he knew early on how dangerous it would be but decided to play it down.\u00a0\u00a0 His lies have been intensified by several Fox News commentators, supplemented by further conspiracy theorists like QAnon and TV channels such as One America News.\u00a0\u00a0 The deliberate neglect of the disease by the executive has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.\u00a0\u00a0 And, most bizarrely, we see the internalisation of the denial of the very existence of the disease across swathes of the US population \u2013 a mental pandemic in itself.<\/p>\n
In the first half of 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services ran a simulation exercise, entitled Crimson Contagion, \u2013 involving many branches of the American state, including health authorities and private companies, and established the state of readiness for a pandemic.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite the findings showing clearly how unprepared the government and many agencies were, nothing was done; and this led to \u2013 among many other things – the almost universal lack of personal protective equipment.\u00a0\u00a0 Consequently, the bosses put many workers between a rock and a hard place:\u00a0\u00a0 either turn up for work and risk infection or stay home and don\u2019t get paid.\u00a0\u00a0 It was not only health workers in hospitals and care homes that were put at risk:\u00a0 many others such as delivery drivers and supermarket staff risked heightened exposure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This negligence was massively criminal, though not illegal in the eyes of this ruling class.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, Trump went so far as to mandate some industries \u2013 including meatpackers \u2013 to keep production going.\u00a0\u00a0 (And at one such plant, the bosses had a sweepstake on how many workers would contract Covid-19.)<\/p>\n
How did the working class respond to all this?\u00a0\u00a0 As individuals, workers of all colours were involved in the protests against the police murders of black people \u2013 and not just in the US but all over the world.\u00a0\u00a0 This was in stark contrast to previous eruptions of only or mainly black people, such as in the Watts riots or after the Rodney King assault by white policemen.\u00a0\u00a0 In various factories and depots, there were wildcat \u2013 and sometimes union-supported \u2013 struggles demanding PPE or danger money.\u00a0\u00a0 But, collectively, the American workers have not gone into the fray despite the pandemic triggering a tsunami of layoffs across the country.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s democracy<\/p>\n
Elections in bourgeois democracies do not provide measures of class antagonisms \u2013 none of the parties stand for the interests of the proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0 However, they can provide some insight into major sentiments inside the class, which Marxists need to analyse.\u00a0\u00a0 Many elections are characterised by an indifference to outcome as people appreciate how little one or other candidate will change their lives.\u00a0\u00a0 Not this time.\u00a0\u00a0 On this occasion, Trump\u2019s behaviour over four years was a galvaniser.\u00a0\u00a0 He had taken a stand – against the views of the majority of Americans \u2013 against gun control, health care options for all, and on the path to citizenship for the undocumented, including the \u2018dreamer\u2019 DACA children.\u00a0\u00a0 On the other hand, and significantly, he oversaw the passing of the 2018 First Step Act which took legislative measures to dismantle consequences of the 1994 Crime Bill, sponsored at the time by one Senator Joe Biden, which contributed to mass incarcerations of black people.<\/p>\n
The democratic process in the US has become something that every strongman in every tinpot dictatorship would have been proud of (Mugabe, eat your dead heart out).\u00a0\u00a0 In addition to the customary gerrymandering that the parties always engineer, the Republicans have also gone flat out for voter suppression against blacks, false advertising campaigns, removal of drop-off electoral boxes, campaigns against mail-in voting, alt-right threats and armed demonstrations.\u00a0\u00a0 Trump has topped this off with a denunciation of\u00a0 the entire electoral process as being rigged against him.<\/p>\n
The bulk of the election campaigning was over the choice between Trump and not-Trump, rather than between Trump and Biden.\u00a0\u00a0 There was little in the way of policy debated between the parties \u2013 neither between the presidential candidates nor between congressional candidates.\u00a0\u00a0 In the outturn, many more people voted for Trump than in 2016 \u2013 \u00a0even knowing what he stood for now rather than when he was a non-politician vowing to drain the Washington swamp.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet, he was beaten by a record-breaking not-Trump vote. \u00a0\u00a0Overall, the Republican Party did better than Trump did himself and the Democratic Party as a whole weakened slightly from the 2018 mid-terms; they did retain the House majority \u2013 though we still have to see the outcome of the Georgia runoff on 5 January to see who has control of the Senate.\u00a0\u00a0 We see again the long-term paradox of the Republican Party\u2019s electability that, although it campaigns to give working people more post-tax money in their pay cheques, it always gives huge tax benefits to the wealthy.<\/p>\n
A full sociological analysis going into which demographic voted for whom will not be available for some time.\u00a0\u00a0 So, all we have for now are studies based on exit polls all with flaws.\u00a0\u00a0 Nonetheless some broad statements can be made.\u00a0\u00a0 Larger cities and urban areas tended to vote Democrat; rural and rustbelt areas tended towards the Republicans.\u00a0\u00a0 Except for two areas (South Florida and southern Texas) Latinos tended to vote Democrat, as did Asians.\u00a0 Black voters tended to vote Democrat.\u00a0\u00a0 White voters were split.<\/p>\n
Of these latter voters, who did the white working class vote for?\u00a0\u00a0 Even given that not everyone voting for Trump was a worker, there is little doubt that a substantial proportion of workers voted for Trump.\u00a0\u00a0 Clearly, his rhetoric was effective in maintaining his base:\u00a0 against the Washington elite, against the exporting of jobs to China, demanding that allies pay their way, in broadcasting their fears, and showing that their voice was heard.\u00a0\u00a0 All this, for many white workers, over-ruled Trump\u2019s tax breaks for the wealthy, his attack on health care for the working class and the poor, his deliberate avoidance of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and the blocking of a second relief package in the autumn.<\/p>\n
And in his rhetoric, Trump\u2019s dog whistle racism was a landmark issue for many white voters and the rest of the Republican party candidates for the House and Senate had to use Trump as a lodestone to get votes from his base.\u00a0\u00a0 Even taking into account the presence of other strata in this voting category, this is a hell of a statement about the penetration of toxic and divisive ideologies into the working class, one that the ruling class has been pushing since American capitalism began.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One can see the decades-old clashes between minorities and the police again being the excuse for the often-used \u2018law and order\u2019 mantra of the ruling class and that this plays to the fears in the American population about the police being the thin blue line separating Order from Chaos.<\/p>\n
This intensity of belief (in Trump) and disbelief (in the mainstream news media) has a religiosity to it that can\u2019t be dealt with on a rational terrain; an intensity capitalised on by the evangelical Christian churches.\u00a0\u00a0 At least part of the explanation is that these people have been lied to all their lives by the spokespeople for American capitalism which is itself built on the biggest lie: its denial that the activity of the proletariat is the sole source of social wealth in the capitalist system.\u00a0\u00a0 And supporting the big lie are other lies:\u00a0 that in bourgeois democracies the people are in charge; so, we are supposed to conclude, the rulers are really the servants of the population.\u00a0\u00a0 This lie is embedded in the constant propaganda churned out by the print and broadcast media that aims to defend the existing order;\u00a0 over time journalists and politicians have become the two least respected occupations by society at large.\u00a0\u00a0 No wonder that Trump\u2019s denunciation of \u2018fake news\u2019 has been so effective among his base.<\/p>\n
Also, the incredulity of a sizeable proportion of the population on matters such as the reality of the coronavirus needs serious consideration:\u00a0 even in the ICU of a South Dakota hospital dying patients have refused to accept that they had Covid and demanded to be told the truth.\u00a0 The distrust of the mainstream news media is, in some quarters, total.\u00a0\u00a0 Any questioning of Trump\u2019s victory leads to denunciation by his crowds \u2013 to the point where Fox News is now coupled with CNN in derogatory chants.<\/p>\n
The ability to live in denial can persist through strong experience to the contrary; and history provides plenty evidence.\u00a0\u00a0 The question for us is to determine how can events unfold so that the reality of exploitation and of shared working class interest becomes undeniable?\u00a0\u00a0 There are two dimensions to the answer:\u00a0 one is the immanent tendency to crisis in the capitalist economic system, and the other is in the ongoing struggle between the two great classes over the trajectory of that system.\u00a0\u00a0 However, capitalism is not going to collapse by itself no matter how crisis-ridden it is.\u00a0\u00a0 Capitalism can only by brought down by a social force \u2013 and that requires a revolutionary subject, the working class, that consciously and self-consciously struggles against its enemy, the bourgeoisie.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite the forceful protestations against racism and police violence we have seen this year, there was no powerful mass, class action.\u00a0\u00a0 The way was left open for a massive bourgeois assault using their democratic machinery.<\/p>\n
To denounce any racially-motivated campaigning for the Republicans does not imply any support for the Democratic Party.\u00a0\u00a0 Bernie Sanders, much less Biden, no more speaks for the American worker than Trump.\u00a0\u00a0 And it was both Democrats and Republicans who could not agree to a second relief package \u2026 so they dropped it and went home for their fully paid holidays.\u00a0\u00a0 We only point out that while both parties have toxins to prevent the workers from seeing their enemy, at this juncture, it is the Republican Party that is injecting most of the divisive toxins into the working class.<\/p>\n
The situation is very serious for the proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0 We have noted elsewhere the international development of social struggles, their connections, and the growth of class struggle within it. \u00a0\u00a0These augur positively for future struggle.\u00a0\u00a0 But, alongside, there are many dangers and containment by bourgeois democracy is a major trap. \u00a0\u00a0As well as confronting the ruling class, the proletariat must look to itself to deal with the fractures that result from the stressors of bourgeois society.\u00a0\u00a0 Most important is the racism that aims to divide workers.\u00a0\u00a0 And in the US, as elsewhere, we can see the damage it causes.<\/p>\n
Marlowe<\/p>\n
30 November 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
American workers have been on the receiving end of an onslaught of astonishing proportions, all of it caused by the bourgeoisie which considers the rest of the population to be a free-fire zone.\u00a0\u00a0 In past months, the extra-juridical executions of black people by the police, the deaths of a quarter of a million people from … <\/p>\n