Trumped, Stumped and Dumped

The fear and loathing of the triumph of Trump has called forth the usual load of garbage trying to fathom the causes and consequences. Was it endemic white racism? (Is there any other kind?) Was it the criminal Clintons? No, it’s not about race, or the Clintons, it’s 'about the economy stupid'. The low turnout, the refusal of progressive Bernieites to get in behind Clinton, the switch of the rustbelt deplorables from non-voting to Trump, created the perfect storm for the Stormtrooper.

But these 'facts' cannot be understood unless the deeper causes of the crisis of US capitalism are made clear. These explain why Trump is no more than an evil clown in the circus that is electoral politics, and that he cannot solve the problems of US capitalism dying on its feet. Trumped means Stumped. As Marx pointed out more than a century ago bourgeois elections every four years allow the subject citizens the right to vote for one or other faction of capitalist to rule over them until the next election. The very nature of the bourgeois state is that it is founded on a constitution that defends private property, the essence of capitalism. Because of its ownership of private property capitalists can force workers to work for them and create the surplus-value that becomes their profits. Enforcing that class exploitation is the state's mission.

Therefore, whoever is periodically elected to government rules in the spirit if not name of private property. This charade will repeat until the subject citizens form a class conscious majority and overthrow the capitalist state itself. And the essential aspect to that class consciousness is seeing right through the charade of bourgeois democracy to recognize the necessity to replace it with workers' democracy and a workers' state.

Make America Great Again

Trump won because the working class was divided and subordinated by the Democrats, the unions led by the labor bureaucrats and the fake left that always sucks up to the Democrats. Being locked into electoral politics prevents the working class from uniting around an independent class program to overthrow capitalism.

Yet since politics is no more than applied economics, we can see in Trumps triumph the beginnings of the break of workers from the Democrats. Some of those who backed Bernie did not vote for Clinton. They risked Trump because they hated Hillary’s role enforcing institutional racism and practicing imperial warmongering. But now that Bernie has 'united' with Trump, those who are already on the streets against Trump cannot look beyond this double betrayal to any revival of "progressive" Democrats. Michael Moore is pissing in the wind.

Other workers in the de-industrialised rust belts have not voted for the Clinton Democrats for 20 years. That is where the rhetoric of 'jail her' comes in. Many came out for Obama when US finance capital played the race card of cosmopolitan liberal democracy, before switching off again as Obama turned into another Clinton. So they went for Trump because he promised them a return to the time when America was great not just for the bosses but for the 'middle class'.

The slogan in their minds meant the return to the time when they had secure, well paid jobs in manufacturing and mining before 'globalization', and before 'neo-liberalism'. The so-called 'middle class' workers, is itself an oxymoron. In reality high paid workers in America in the post-war boom were not a 'middle class' but high paid workers who benefited from US imperialism in a period of capitalist expansion.

The 'middle class' in America is a state of mind not an economic category. Especially when the frontier bourgeois ideology of the 'free individual' is designed to write class out of history. Yet classes are constituents of capitalism. We have the self-employed, farmers, small business owners, etc., who are petty bourgeois in the classic sense of living off one’s own labor. Of course many are disguised wage workers or even slaves when exploited by big business as 'independent contractors'.

The 'middle class' workers in America are really labor aristocrats, well paid workers whose wages reflect in part the super profits that the US can extract from its exploitation of labor in developing, or emerging economies. Since labor aristocrats are paid at a rate beyond the cost of reproducing their skill they share in imperialist super profits. Their wages are subject to rises and falls depending on the economic cycle of boom-bust. Just as they benefited from the US empire in its prime during the post-war boom, so they are the victims of the decline of US imperialism since the 1980s.

The End of the Golden Age

As we will see, there can be no going back to the 'golden age' of post-war capitalism, not in the US or in any other country. The Rate Of Profit has fallen in the US since the 1980s apart from a rise in the 90s that never regained the post-war level. Since the 2008 recession, the US economy has stagnated, along with most of the rest of the world. Moreover, that Long Recession failed to restore the conditions of profitability so that the global economy faces a major depression to destroy labor costs and plant and machinery. While such a 'recovery' is possible, that of the labor aristocracy is not.

So can Trump deliver on his promises to Make America Great again? No he cannot. The reason is that the export of jobs from middle class America followed the export of capital away from falling profits to the developing countries to super-exploit cheap labor and raw materials. This is what neo-liberal globalization means; the export of capital from the imperialist countries to open up and economically dominate these oppressed economies in order to pump out super-profits to compensate for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) of US finance capital.

Without globalization, US capitalism was trapped by high wages at home and further pressure on the TRPF. That is why the New Democrats adopted neo-liberal globalization with gusto because their constituency is the new labor aristocracy, employed in the new tertiary knowledge, digital and media 'industries' driven by the logic of globalization to reap super-profits. That is why the Democrats have overseen the export of capital to China to take advantage of its rapid capitalist development since the 1990s.

Therefore Trump's whole retreat to isolationism as a solution to the destruction of manufacturing effects of globalization will cut off the sources of superprofits from offshore that US capitalism needs to survive. A trade war with China will end this flow of US super profits taking advantage of cheap labor and consumer goods. His is a deluded circus trick that will blow up in his face and in the face of those who voted for him. Trumped is Stumped by those who own and control the US state - finance capital-- and sooner or later he will be Dumped by the angry 'deplorables' unless he mobilizes them as fascist fodder to smash the rise of a militant labor movement.

Caught in a Contradiction

Trump cannot break with the 'establishment' any more than the Clinton new Democrats could. The reason is that the US state is not under the control of politicians, even those who do the rounds from Wall Street and the corporate headquarters to Washington, but by the ruling class of finance capital. That ruling class has already proven that it will not reinvest in US manufacturing unless it can cut wages to a China Wage or raise the rate of exploitation by employing robots. Neither can meet the needs of full employment at a living wage of the abandoned "middle class." Thus the ruling class committed to globalization to survive will force Trump to break the promises to his constituency. And this is where the racist, sexist rhetoric comes in.

When it becomes clear that Trump cannot return America to the golden age because his policies cannot restore jobs or profits, this will exacerbate the class struggle greatly. The radical left that is already mobilizing against Trump will be forced to mobilize also against the Democrats who back Trump. These young, multiracial students and workers have already started, and pose a challenge to the state at all levels, on the streets, campuses and in employment. To divert attention away from his economic failures Trump will use the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric that he has employed in the election race to blame these activist minorities for all the economic ills of US imperialism.

Trump in the White House has a Republican Senate and House behind him. Even so he can act independently by invoking the "terror" state created by the Bushes and Clintons to declare a ruling class 'war on terror' at home 'over the head' of Congress. He can build his symbolic wall, boost the police and military, quarantine and deport Latinos and Muslims, ban protests and strikes, etc., and unleash his state forces as well as his paramilitary storm troopers against the attempts by "progressive" forces to defend the rights of minorities and labor.

Trump will be in the position to expand his executive power from that left him by Bush and Obama, and become a Louis Bonaparte standing above the classes to rescue the nation from "terror" at home and abroad. If that fails he is in the position to stage a fascist coup against the constitution drawing on the support of reactionary elements of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocracy against a militant mass labor movement. This means that already Trump poses the question of power rhetorically to a mass working class divided and subordinated to a treacherous labor bureaucracy aligned to the bourgeois Democratic Party.

To overcome these divisions it is necessary to urgently build a working class party that advances a revolutionary action program to lead every struggle against the power of capital concentrated in the Trump Presidency. That party will have to become the leadership in the unions, in all workplaces, in the schools, on the streets, linking all the many, various social movements into one massive united front, creating the organs of workers power, workers councils and workers militias, capable of defeating the state and paramilitary forces, smashing the bourgeois state and putting in place a workers state.

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Corbyn and Sanders: Reformism and Social Imperialism

We don’t suppose Jeremy Corbyn had to pay much of a political price for the flap caused by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, but it does highlight the creepy racist thinking of British ruling class circles that even the Labour Party “left” has entered into.  Along with the anti-Jewish sentiments one finds under their carpet, the dirty open secret is how they support imperialist wars maintaining the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S.A.  Many reformists in the U.S. point to the rise of Corbyn and liken this to the mass support for the Democrat Bernie Sanders. 

We think there is more identity here between these two than the Sanders supporters would want to acknowledge. These two are social imperialists.  What we mean by that is the generation of an illusion of championing a socialist “political revolution” by means of bourgeois electoral contests, while in fact supporting imperialist military, investment and political projects aimed expressly at crushing anti-imperialist revolts by workers and peasants overseas. We will discuss some of the economic theory supporting this political identity further below.

While the vanguard of the Mexican-American population, overwhelmingly working class, blocks and disrupts  Donald Trump’s ‘know-nothing’ rallies, the true “Carlton Cliquers” of the SWP seek to recruit Trump supporters, hawking their press and Pathfinder literature with ‘tables’ at Trump events. One variety of Barnesites-without-Barnes rallies to the reformist North Star e-magazine.  In its latest number, Louis Proyect retails a reformist wet-dream where Bernie Sanders can form an independent third party that runs for offices and presumably president in 2020 to effect their “political revolution.”[1] 

We can assume this means that Bernie’s politics will get a branding as “progressive” for some supporters and “socialist” for others. For unrepentant Barnesite-of-old Proyect, such a party would be all about defense of his own “middle class.”  Proyect dreams of the social imperialist past, the 1932-72 era spanning the New Deal to the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement.  We in the labor movement have had to deal with the pro-imperialist bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations from the Meany era down to the Trumka-Hillary crowd we are saddled with today.

They have uninterruptedly handed us the idealized vision of rising living standards without connection to the real world situation where U.S. imperialism is in decline and confronted with new rivals, economic and military, in the form of the China-Russia alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS project, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB.)  These counters don’t weigh for Proyect, who is dreaming.  What matters is the belief in reform.  We say that lasting reforms cannot be won from imperialism in decline.  Not in Britain and not in the U.S.A.

Ranked alongside Proyect’s dream are the more serious offenders, the reformist economists who know what Marx said and wrote and still peddle a patch-up for capitalism or a socialism arrived at by parliamentary cleverness, legislative stealth or triangulations.  We see Richard Wolff saying the answer to capitalism’s ills are to be found in the Basque Mondragon experiment, in ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Programs), worker cooperatives and smoking a lot of pot on Fridays.

Wolff idealizes the New Deal.  Wolff does not tell you that the New Deal hid behind the wall of Smoot-Hawley tariffs and sold “recovery” until the real recovery came along with the war clouds and employment at producing “the Arsenal of Democracy”. But what Wolff does tell you is just as nationalist.  He calls for municipalities to invoke eminent domain against runaway employers who seek cheaper wages overseas. Lest you think this “Marxist” is suggesting seizing the means of production, a joke among Bernie supporters, Wolff supports burdening the tax-payers with buying out the fleeing bosses with ‘fair compensation.’[2]  We say thanks for nothing, Wolff.

Likewise, Professor Jack Rasmus of St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, wants to sell us reformed capitalism, contending just like the New Dealers that the cause of economic crisis is not the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPTF), but insufficient consumption by the masses.  We wonder what world is responsible for such an ivory-tower view, because all the masses we know spend everything they get and borrow every dollar they can to try to hold the line of their living standard at some level where they can reproduce themselves and house, clothe and feed their offspring.  The masses are consuming all they can and should their children wish to be educated for 21^st Century employment, they have to incur colossal debt to pay for it.  Therefore the underconsumptionist view embraces an idealist picture where a $15 minimum wage will be a panacea if only it were adopted.

The Bernie crowd almost universally endorses the “Fight for $15” campaign.  We declare that a Living Wage is determined by the area standards of the labor movement in its struggle with Capital.  The “Fight for $15” is only the latest version of the Democrat Party promise to the ruling class to exclude many millions of U.S. workers from the American Dream with a new, revised, sub-living minimum wage.  Labor lieutenants of Capital, like the Trumka AFL-CIO bureaucracy, endorse the “Fight for $15” and underconsumptionism out of one side of their mouth, even while admitting that this is a sub-living wage, they admonish class struggle militant rank-and-filers that more is not achievable. 

This last part is what makes them valuable to the ruling class.  They support the “Fight for $15” exactly to forestall or prevent a fight for jobs for all at union wages. They lamely answer Marxist critics saying the proof of the impossibility of delivering more in the pay envelope is the existence of what are in fact ‘sweetheart’ contracts where union members make less than $15 per hour.  The union bureaucrats cynically pose as the heroes of these most oppressed workers; they will get them a big bump up to $15.  When?  Someday.[3]

The real record of reformism is a collapse into the Democratic Party leaderships’ arms every four years. The real record shows the “Fight for $15” takes no account of inflation during the years it will take to win and gain this wage and they have been calling for $15 since 2012 (in some places, before then.)  Furthermore, the bureaucracy is urging you with no subtlety to vote for the Democrat office-seekers who say they will give you the $15 in 2020 or 2022! 

Where union representation has been one of the demands of this movement, this has turned into a separate fight to no one but the reformists’ surprise, and where the workers have won a cost-of-living allowance, this was also won after another battle. No automatic applications of COLA’s to contracts appear in the Democrats’ national plans and no mention of any is to be found in the Administration’s new overtime law. We recall all the ‘Obama is our best bet’ verbiage of bureaucrats and reformists at the January, 2009 Workers Emergency Recovery Conference, and we have to ask, “How is that working out for you?  Do you think everybody has amnesia?”

You can be sure that the bureaucrats’ idealized vision of the 1930’s includes a big rise in dues checkoff dollars, but what this vision absolutely excludes is the truly mass organizing drives, general strikes and sit-down strikes and factory occupations which were the true history of the 1930’s.  The economic emancipation of the oppressed black and brown populations is not in fact on their agenda even as they promote black and brown “pro-labor” operatives of the Democratic Party. These will be future minions of a new Clinton administration that promises to be more aggressively imperialist.

Professor David Harvey gives Capital classes at New York University and is the darling of self-styled Marxists in and around the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Professor Harvey is the sophisticates’ underconsumptionist.  He uses Marx against Marx and derates the centrality of the Law of the TRPTF from Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in Volume III of Capital.  Harvey doesn’t care if you become a Marxist, he says.  He just wants you to know what Marx wrote (i.e., according to him.)  The Law of the TRPTF has a fundamental existence irrespective of these self-styled opponents of Wall Street and in fact was the cause of the rise of the hedge funds that were the mechanism the capitalist bourgeoisie used to tank the U.S. and world economy for private profit in 2008.  Profit we may add from looting banks that were deemed by them and their political operatives to be “too big to fail.”  This put the public and in particular the tax-paying working people on the hook for debts upwards of $60 trillion. 

To expect lasting reforms that ameliorate the living conditions of the working class or even of Proyect’s beloved “middle class” from the political institutions who legalized this staggering robbery is certifiable self-delusion.  But that is the hope-for-the-best mantra of Bernie-ism which does nothing to acknowledge, never mind resist the slide toward inter-imperialist world war. Inter-imperialist world war and not consumer spending is the capitalists’ last resort for restoring the rate of profit.  World wars destroy capital, solving for a time the problem of non-productive capital, both fixed and variable, which is to say destruction of factories and people.  We should point out that inter-imperialist world war and the permanent arms economy were the signature events of the heyday they are pining for.

[1] The North Star,“Bernie Sanders announces plans for a new left party”, Louis Proyect
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12557
[2] Economic Update, “Economic Update: Worker Coops: Why and How”, Richard Wolff
http://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_worker_coops_why_and_how
[3] “A Workers Fight for a Living Wage? vs. a $15/hr Poverty Sub-Living Wage!”, Communist Workers Group – US
http://www.cwgusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2013-0403-LEAF-CWG-LaborNotes.pdf

Reblogged from CWG-USA http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=1636