Where is Britain Going?

After 9 years of bitter austerity, how did the Tories turn an entitled, lying clownish toff like Johnson into such a winner, and an avowed parliamentary socialist like Corbyn into a weak chump? The answer lies in the failure of Labour to stand up to Johnson’s Trumpish rally to ‘make Britain great again’. Fatally, Lexiteers like Corbyn tried to meet Brexit halfway with a ‘Socialist’ Brexit, or Lexit.

The Tories were split over Brexit but the Brexiteers fought inside the party to defeat the Remainers, so the campaign was all about Brexit. Labour was also split, but refused to take a position and compromised on a second Referendum. So, Labour broke the stalemate by allowing Johnson to turn its Brexiteer working class voters into his pawns.

Never mind. Brexit is far from over, and Johnson’s hard Brexit will explode on the streets and workplaces rendering parliament impotent to stop the breakup of Britain. It will push Scotland towards independence, and give Northern Ireland every reason to join a united Ireland. This will pose for socialists the test of their ability to organise the working class against reactionary bourgeois chauvinism and for proletarian internationalism.

To understand why this election will launch an open class warfare that can only be resolved by fascism or socialism, we need to explain how Britain’s existential crisis, as part of a wider terminal crisis of global capitalism, has forced Brexit to the top of the bosses’ political agenda.

Brexit stalemate

The stalemate over Brexit is a symptom of the paralysis of the British ruling class facing the dilemma of its future as a declining imperialist power maneuvering between the US bloc and the Russia/China bloc. The rise of Russia and China threatens the waning US world hegemony. The EU is torn between the two but increasingly drawn towards Russia/China.

This poses a problem for the UK ruling class: to remain in the EU as it gets pulled away from the US towards Russia and China, or to leave the EU and stick with the US come what may. The British ruling class is split between the finance sector, the legacy of Britain’s rentier role in the world economy, and the national bourgeoisie who are now in partnership with US, EU and Asian transnationals.

Both fractions are globalist in outlook and make their profits in a multilateral world where capital and labour know no borders. Johnson in copying Trumps ‘exceptionalism’ is acting contrary to Britain’s globalist role. There is no case for abandoning the EU for the US – since Britain profits from both – unless Britain is so uncompetitive and sees no future in the EU allied to Russia/China and is desperate to gamble on the declining US. So, what part of the ruling class has an interest in writing off the 20th century and building a fantasy of reclaiming the glory days when “Britain ruled the world”?

None except a small section of British capitalists that wants to share in a US takeover and asset stripping of British assets including the remaining state assets such as the NHS. This is the Trumpist strategy to save the US that the reactionary Tories endorse.

The trade deal being negotiated with the US will reduce Britain from the status of declining imperialist power to a client lackey state. Those who stand to gain from a hard Brexit are those who blame Britain’s decline on EU membership and want to become the servile junior partner of the US. They are a tiny, backward chauvinist fraction that rejects globalism to make Britain great again. But this slogan actually means becoming mere neo-colonial compradors (agents) of US vulture capital. This is the reason that the Brexit comprador fraction needs to manufacture a populist movement of chauvinist workers and petty bourgeois social imperialists to give it parliamentary legitimacy.

Lexit succumbs to chauvinism

The left is mightily confused over Brexit when it puts itself into the camp of the comprador Brexit faction of the British ruling class. While the left propagandizes that Brexit creates a Left-exit (Lexit) for workers to take power, in practice they are acting as stooges to call on workers to side with British imperialism over German imperialism. What’s more they sign up to ‘their’ ruling class to defend Britain from all foreigners, migrants, militants, and revolutionaries to defend ‘glorious Britain’. The bankruptcy of this ‘social imperialism’ (socialism at home paid for by imperialism abroad) explains Labour’s defeat by the Brexit populists.

The problem with the Lexit position is that it takes a historical construction of the bourgeoisie, the nation state, and defends it as timeless. But since the arrival of the age of imperialism early in the 20th century, capital has known no borders. It has had to expand globally to boost profits at home. Giant monopolies backed by their nation states have gone to war to make their rivals and the world’s workers’ pay for their crises of overproduction.

Thus, excess capital is destroyed in depressions and wars, while workers’ wages have been driven down by depression and their resistance defeated by conscription to fight the bosses’ wars. The 20th century proves that workers used as cannon fodder must mutiny and unite with workers everywhere to overthrow crisis-ridden global capitalism. In the place of bourgeois nation states workers will create socialist republics that replace chauvinism with internationalism and a global federation of workers’ republics.

Fascism or Socialism

The extreme logic of bourgeois nationalism leads to the rise of fascism to smash workers refusal to pay for the bosses’ crises. This is where we are again today, in a full blown, terminal crisis of global capitalism, where new movements are beginning to rise up against global capital. And once more the bosses are encouraging fascism to raise its ugly head to smash workers struggles for basic democratic rights from Algeria to Hong Kong.

Within this framework, the situation in Britain is consistent with a declining imperialist power reverting to imperialist xenophobia, led by a reactionary comprador clique of the bourgeoisie that has been defeated by monopoly capital. In its desperation to protect its wealth it exploits the fears of workers against migrants to ape Trump in backing imperialist Britain against imperialist Germany and France. And in many European countries the same centripetal forces of national populist movements are creating the swamps in which fascism breeds.

There is nothing progressive in defending bourgeois nations in the name of the ‘left’. It leads to the enlisting of workers behind the national flag to fight workers in other countries in the interests of the ruling classes and against the interests of humanity and nature. Against the populist/fascist movements that are forming to divide and smash working peoples, the only left position that can lead to the end of capitalism, is that which unites workers across national borders into one international revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism and building socialism.

NZ: Labour fails 100 Days in Government Test

Shaw, Ardern and Peters, the different faces of the Caring Capitalism popular front

We take a look at the promises from the Labour party when campaigning and on taking office – what will these really deliver for working people? As we argued in previous issues of Class Struggle, Labour forming a Coalition with openly capitalist parties means it cannot claim anymore to be a party that represents workers. It has an excuse to betray its working-class voters by trading any real gains for workers in exchange for becoming the government. 

That is why our balance sheet of wins and losses for workers in the first 100 days is boringly predictable. Once Labour signed the fiscal responsibility deal with the Greens it meant it can’t even adopt Keynesian spending to stimulate economic growth (boost profits) let alone spend on what workers need (living wages). 

And to win Peters to form a government, Labour and Greens had to trade away some of its promises to appease his populist, conservative supporters.The result is that Labour now openly betrays workers on behalf of predatory, parasitic, international finance capital - most dramatically by signing the TPPA11! Labour is fully exposed as a open bourgeois party. We need an independent mass workers party!

Cash trickle downs to profits

Tertiary fees will be dropped a year at a time. But fees themselves are less of a barrier to poorer families accessing tertiary education than living costs. Raising student allowances by $50 a week will be pocket money for some students able to access a student allowance, the rest will have to increase their student loans, or continue to work part time to survive. The rent subsidy has gone directly into rent rises.  

• Only a free, universal education from pre-school to tertiary paid for by taxing profits and rents can deliver the education we need!

Increasing the minimum wage to $16.50 an hour is an insult to low paid workers. We need a living wage for all workers. And even $20 is not enough! 

• Only workers and students organising union-based wages and prices committees can decide what wage, allowance or benefit they need to live on!

Tinkering with Workplace Law

Labour’s tinkering with the workplace law doesn’t even undo the worst of the last National government’s attacks in favour of employers. And doesn’t help most workers employed by small businesses with 20 or fewer workers. They still face the 90-day fire at will scenario. Labour’s workplace policy is based on the ideology of fair shares between labour and capital. Yet global capitalism’s terminal crisis can only be solved by capital at the expense of cutting wages. To defend wages and conditions we advocate strikes and occupations. 

• Putting people before profits means expropriating the means of production under workers control!

Fiddling with the Housing Crisis

Labour proclaimed a housing crisis when attacking the National government, but what do they actually deliver? Nothing substantial. Subsidising private landlords instead of taxing capital gains means that the cause of the crisis is left untouched. The market cannot solve the problem. This just perpetuates property speculators parasitic on workers’ wages. 

• We are for minimum standards for all houses, homes, apartments, accommodation (boarding houses, motels, lodges, etc) to be set by working people. Increase secure tenancy for tenants to have longer term guarantees.

Banning overseas ‘speculators’ from buying existing houses will reduce demand but it won’t stop speculation in new builds whether the landlords are Chinese or Kiwis. We are stuck with workers making speculators rich. Why not tax the speculators? The tax working group cannot address this as their terms of reference exclude it. Too many MPs owning multiple rentals to allow Labour to entertain this radical solution. 

• We say a 100% capital gain tax on all speculative rental profits to drive the parasites out of business!

State Houses for all who need them!

Gov’t will stop the state house sell-off. Should we be happy? Not when there is no serious attempt to replace those sold off by previous Governments. We are against “social housing” as a thinly veiled return to capitalist philanthropy and a quasi-market substitute for state housing. 

• A state house with rent pegged to 20% of income should be a right for all those who need it! 

The “KiwiBuild” programme cannot produce affordable homes when the building industry is beset by profiteering monopolies like Fletchers, exploitation of subcontractors, terrible health and safety records, poor employment records (including super-exploitation of illegal migrants, cash jobs –tax free) which have driven up the costs and made housing unaffordable to most workers. So, Labour dodges the issue and sets up another committee - the “Affordable Housing Authority”.

Obviously Labour refuses to put working people before profits. It won’t challenge the property-owning democracy where land grabbing and speculation has always been a shortcut to wealth. Driven by the banks, property speculation will remain a fact of life enriching landlords and banks.  

• We say we need a massive public works scheme to provide jobs for unemployed youth in the building trades and a crash program in state house building until the demand for rental houses is met.

Fiddling with Family Incomes

Working families get a few crumbs.  Paid parental leave, and $60 per week for the following year is too little, and if it has to be applied for, then it won’t reach those who need it. A winter energy bonus is welcome relief to some, but a stopgap in the absence of warm and healthy homes. So, in effect it is a bonus to (privatised) energy companies.

Child poverty. Labour expresses liberal concern. Sets a child poverty reduction target and budget reports on child poverty statistics. Goals are good but where is the action?  

• We can’t solve child poverty without full employment, a living wage, and decent, affordable, healthy housing. So, we are back to the spending constraints of fiscal responsibility!

Mental Health, Prisons and Cannabis

Mental ill-health is a symptom of capitalist society that is broken and is alienating of the majority of the people. We know that most of the prison population have mental health problems or are in for drug offenses. Labour wants to cut the numbers in jails but won’t look at the obvious measures to achieve this. So far it plans to build the Mega prison at Waikeria. We say No Mega Prison! One alternative to new prisons is legalising cannabis. That would cut the prison population by half at least. But the deal done with NZ First will put decriminalisation or legalisation to a binding referendum only in 2000. 

• We say legalise cannabis now! Close the prisons! Rehabilitate offenders in socially useful work or training on union pay rates!

Climate catastrophe

The “nuclear issue of our age”? Oh please. Zero net carbon emissions goal by 2050. We will all be dead or dying by then. Capitalism is the cause of climate change.  

• We say the alternative facing us is survival socialism or human extinction!

Global capitalism is in its terminal crisis and all Labour can do in its first 100 days is tinker and fiddle. We get more committees, reports and talk shops: a Ministerial Inquiry to fix our mental health crisis, an inquiry into the abuse of children in state care, a Tax Working Group, a Clean Waters Summit, an independent Climate Commission, an Affordable Housing Authority.

But talk shops don’t create change especially when they fiddle with symptoms and don’t touch the real causes of these problems. For example, tax evasion by the rich, profiteering at the cost of substandard housing and damaging the environment are all symptoms of capitalism in its terminal decline.  

• We say Destroy capitalism before it destroys us!

TPPA11 cancels all the 100 days hype

The signing of the TPPA11 (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement) is a sell-out of NZ workers to the global monopolies like Google, Microsoft or Apple who have the power to sue governments that tax or regulate their profits. What to do? We say national sovereignty means nothing if the working people do not control the economy. The profits from the TPPA11 will go into the pockets of the foreign and NZ capitalist class, the losses will empty the pockets of the workers.

Therefore, against the power of Big Pharma or Big Tech to monopolise patents and supply we say:

• ·         Socialise the health and communications industries under workers control to provide full access and free health and communications for all!

Against the power of monopolies to dictate economic, social and environmental policy by refusing to pay taxes on capital gains and profits we say:

• ·         Repeal the Fiscal Responsibility Act and tax profits and capital gains to pay for free comprehensive health, education and welfare!

• ·         Organise workers committees and councils to determine economic, social and environmental policy to meet our needs!

• ·         Nationalise without compensation the big four private banks and turn Kiwi Bank into a single State Bank under workers’ control!

• ·         Nationalise without compensation all foreign and NZ corporates that sack workers or close down!

We are for an independent workers party with a program for a Workers Government to expropriate capitalist property, socialise the economy and plan production for need and not profit!

John Key – Agent of Finance Capital

Emmerson - NZ Herald 6 December 2016

Prime Minister John Key’s sudden resignation has created a flurry on the surface of NZ politics. Left, Right and Centre are writing political obituaries about his “legacy”. Legacies refer to what politicians have done to establish their reputations in history. But what are the hidden assumptions behind the evaluations of political reputations? Unless these assumptions are tested and critiqued, John Key’s actual historic role as an agent of the international finance capital cannot be understood.

As usual the Left is wallowing in superficial chatter. Key’s reputation is as a smooth operator who kept a fragile coalition majority lined up over a 3-term government. Therefore, his departure becomes an opportunity for the opposition to improve their chances of winning in 2017. Little has to “step-up” and Labour-Greens plus a rejigged Mana/MP combo, and even a ‘populist’ NZ First, could combine to form the next coalition government.

Much of the Left’s animus is directed at Key as if he was personally responsible for the failure of the left to win support and remove National from power. The left failed because they could not put up a leader who could compete with Key’s popularity. This is because the left sees their failure as the direct consequence of his success. Yet Key’s success can only be explained by the way he represented the interests of his class, not his personal attributes as such. And that can only be explained by first acknowledging what those class interests are.

Of course, this is equally true of the Left’s representation of certain class interests. And we have always argued that the true difference between Key and his various Labour, Green and NZ First leadership rivals, is that Key understands and knows how to serve his capitalist class masters, while the Left continues to subordinate the interests of working class to those of the capitalist ruling class by appealing to a classless “middle NZ”. We will develop this point in the section ‘Left Opposition in Capitalist Politics’ below.

Economics determines politics

As we have argued in Class Struggle before, bourgeois democracy is a false representation of reality. It presents capitalism as based on the equal opportunity of sovereign individuals who delegate their sovereignty to their political representatives in parliaments or congresses where they legislate to manage the economy in the supposed ‘national’ interest. Thus, the exploitative capital relation based on a fundamental class inequality in the ownership of property, and the conflict and crises that result, are obscured by the fetish of ‘representative democracy’ based on the will of sovereign and equal individuals.

Politics therefore is an extension of economics, where parliament is no more than a “committee to manage the affairs” of the ruling capitalist class. The best capitalist politicians are ‘selected’ (trained, co-opted) to manage those ruling class interests. They do this in two ways. The first is the use state power to advance, protect and subsidise private property and the production of profits. Second, is the role of political leaders to manage the destructive social consequences of capitalist economic policies.

In simple terms the success of Key in managing capitalism then comes down to his performance in advancing the conditions for economic growth as the basis of profitability, and presenting the growing social inequality arising from this as no more than the failure of individuals to make the best of their opportunities in the market. The radical critique of “crony” capitalism does not penetrate this veil because it poses a “non-crony” or egalitarian capitalism as the Left alternative to the ‘capture’ of capitalism by “cronies”.

To assess Key’s performance in serving not just his “cronies” but internationalist finance capital, we have to understand both the place of the NZ economy in the world capitalist economy and the state of the world economy as a whole. These structural conditions determine the tasks of managing NZ capitalism, and Key’s success or failure, as with all politicians, as a political manager. For an analysis of why Trump cannot overcome the Terminal crisis of capitalism or suppress the social conflict it creates without turning himself into a Louis Bonaparte-type dictator, see our article “Trumped, Stumped and Dumped”.

NZ: Neo-colony in global Terminal Crisis

The difference between the US and NZ is that the former is an imperialist state while NZ is a semi-colony of the US and, in the 21st century, of China. China, along with Russia, is now part of an emerging imperialist bloc in competition with the US-led bloc. In relation to the US and China, NZ has an economy that is integrated into the global economy as a producer of mainly primary produce and tertiary services open to foreign investment, ownership and control. Trump’s task to overcome the decline in US imperialism means making weaker imperialist powers such as China, and the neo-colonial countries like NZ pay for the crisis. This is turn determines the task of neo-colonial or “comprador” capitalists like Key to act as the agents one or other imperialist countries.

When most of the NZ Left shares the superficial view that NZ is a minor imperialist power, why do we insist that NZ is a neo-or semi-colony? We can only summarise NZ’s capitalist evolution here. For a fuller Marxist account see the Development of Capitalism in NZ. NZ from its settler colonisation has always been some form of colony dominated by imperialism. The extraction of surplus from agriculture etc., and export of raw materials consigned the colony to underdevelopment, rising inequality, and finally a shift from protectionism to neoliberal counter-revolution from the 1980s to today. Rogernomics called for a new comprador class that rejected economic nationalism as no longer in the interests of international finance capital. From that point on, NZ deregulated its protected market to open it to the global capitalist economy.

A new set of politicians committed to neo-liberalism or its left variant “third way”, or Blairism, were now thrust forward to manage the deregulated economy. So, John Key inherited the neo-liberal legacy of managing a neo-colony a full 20 years after the neo-liberal turn in 1984. He was uniquely suited to that task as no other National Party leader had his background in international finance. This is why some of the conspiratorial Left has seen him as an agent of Wall St, and may well be behind Winston Peter's response to Key’s resignation that he jumped ship before the ship hit the fan. Key represents international capital and knows that NZ is not a healthy, Rockstar, capitalist economy and that the global economy is about to crash. It is a fragile, dependent economy for which Terminal Crisis will pose a new set of tasks, complementary to those of Trump, of making NZ neo-colonial workers pay for the crisis with their livelihoods and lives.

Left Opposition in Capitalist Politics

Instead of basing its strategy on the demise of Key freeing up the “middle ground”, the Left Opposition should rethink its bourgeois assumptions about politics. If Key is an agent of international finance capital, and performed well in advancing its interests, then the Left Opposition policy should counter-pose the interests of those who work for a living and produce a program that fights finance capital. We don’t mean ‘finance capital’ as Wall St speculators, but the Marxist definition of the fusion of banking and productive capital. Instead of playing its classic role of boosting illusions in a reformed capitalism, the Left should understand that the coming economic crash fused together with abrupt climate change has exhausted the potential for capitalist reforms. In the face of Terminal Crisis, we need a Left Opposition that turns to socialism to solve the crisis.

The Left has to give up on the failed utopia of Social Democracy, and more critically, bourgeois democracy serving all citizens and nations equally. The history of bourgeois democracy is that it acts to defend capital and prevent the independent mobilisation of the working class internationally. Worse, it softens workers up for fascism and imperialist war. The delusion that class can be legislated out of existence has to be exploded. The Left has to overcome its failed legacy of reforms now destroyed by the neo-liberal counter-revolution, and go forward towards the working-class majority building its own organisations outside parliament, and increasingly committed to overthrowing the capitalist state and the ruling class it represents. This is what we mean by Survival Socialism!

For a Workers’ Government, capable of expropriating capital and building a socialist economy and society as part of a Pacific Federation of Socialist Republics!

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