The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 9)
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Fascism: The material basis of the alt-right neo-fascist reaction:
While hard to pin down exactly between 5-10% of American companies are zombies, they are now the walking dead because the loans they are dependent on have had their interest rates jacked up as the Fed has inflated the prime lending rate. By 2008 the reality of the terminal crisis of capitalism, expressed as the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), had exploded the American Dream for the lower quintile capitalists (the broader service economy, small shops, trades people, small farmers etc.). Low interest rates for the last decade sustained the zombies but dependency and debt have a brutal impact on social consciousness. Government interventions and handouts could not keep them all afloat during COVID, increasing the pressure on the state to open up the economy. This phenomenon of fiscal failure affects a massive petty bourgeoisie which is the material basis of the Trumpian reaction. But the Trumpian base is nothing new, its material and ideological origins are long in the making.
The post Civil War Reconstruction interruptus never compensated ex-slaves for generations of unpaid labor and created a permanent under caste of landless Black workers. White southerners generally fared better but struggled to adapt to the facts of the end of the slave economy. Having lost the right to enslaved labor, controlling ‘freedmen’ in the reconstructed economy gave rise to the pre-fascist racist Ku Klux Klans, which became a permanent underbelly of reaction in the American body politic.
The industrial revolution brought millions of European immigrant workers to the U.S. and the seething racial hatred of the dispossessed losers of the Confederacy seeped into the frustrations of the immigrant workers, sowing racial divisions which the labor movement and the socialists were too weak and inept to overcome. Often, too often, the U.S. labor leaderships until after the Russian Revolution were content to leave the relative privilege and racist scapegoating to the “blind hand of the market” to deal with. This was a racism accommodation that was maintained as a separate division that still existed when the AFL and CIO united in 1955. The “Operation Dixie” organizing drive to unionize the South never succeeded and no thanks to those who would not confront the Jim Crow laws and the leadership that converted it into a left wing purge of the CIO. The ‘American Dream’ was an idealized mythology used to paper over the frustrations of the racially and ethnically segregated workers.
Today the reactionary elements align with Trump and they voted for him with 74 million votes in 2020. At best guess maybe half of the Republican Party members are small “d” democrats not prepared to embrace a Trumpian authoritarian constitution ceding all power to the executive. Across the aisle are flummoxed Democrats harkening back to a bygone age. The old world is dead, just not buried. And the corpse stinks!
The capitalist class does not need its Trumpian avenger. It can do its work with a Biden, but not for long we hasten to add, because the economic crisis driven by the TRPF, the climate catastrophe and inter-imperialist conflicts, like rust, never sleeps. Ultimately, and sooner than many think, Capital will have to resort to destruction of surplus Capital, by war, depression, or both. And these threaten right now.
Only the working class can resolve this death march and for that we need a new revolutionary workers party and international that advances a Transitional Program for socialist revolution.
Fascism: MAGA OR MAWA, nostalgia on the right and the left!
Liberal and ‘progressive’ Democrats have long deluded themselves that an ideal, mythical American/western march toward democracy as humanity’s salvation, will unerringly prevail against all authoritarian threats. Yet the authoritarianism of the western imperialist democracies is just a pin prick below the surface. Chickens come home to roost, which is to say the behaviors of imperialist agents, company men and mercenaries, in the lesser developed countries infects the metropolis. And just as in the present and former colonial countries, fascism is making its appearance on the streets of the U.S.A.
A harkening back to the ideal past is the dream of the right, left and middle. The doddering politicians are propped up as they fall asleep at the podium while the unhinged rabid MAGA fascists brazenly apply the method of the Hitlerite big lie and ‘strategy of tension’ with gunfire. For the centrist and “left” Democrats their big lie is more insidious, less obvious as it is hidden in the commodity form where labor exploitation is perceived as free exchange; and the workers and capital meet on equal ground sharing the bounty of western expansion, colonialism, imperialism and modern democracy. So that fairytale goes.
The MAGA slogans’ appeal of nostalgia has never been more than a minimally veiled desire for a return to the days of white sheets and “strange fruit.” A racist version of the past when Black people ‘knew their place’, Indigenous people were disenfranchised and isolated, Asians were quiet, submissive or deported and did not complain about Japanese wartime internment, 2nd wave feminism was far over the horizon, and unions and labor regulations were non-existent. Think 1880’s. The Gilded Age for Capital; for the information of the MAGA suckers, was a decades-long depression for working people.
Trump and MAGA love that they dominate the media stream and claim they “owned the libs.” Like the con man P.T. Barnum, Trump knows there is a ‘sucker born every minute’ and that there is no bad press, just free publicity. The ideological patriarchal white supremists love his innuendo, his bravado, his attack-dog style and world of alt-facts. Objective reality matters little to them and the old ways, which kept senators and congressmen from slipping each other the shiv in the Senate’s sauna are eroded. Cheering “Hang Mike Pence” the January 6th insurrectionists brought the shiv to the sauna!
Two, three, many Red Brown alliances???
Realpolitik and pundits, like economics professor Jeffery Sachs, who identifies the Chinese BRI as a form of “sustainability planning” and a path out of the capitalist crisis, plus broad swaths of the Stalinist milieu, along with a smattering of ex-Trotskyists and fair-weather pacifists, uncritically defend Russia in the current Ukraine proxy war. They are not blind to the new bi-polar world (which they call multi-polar, despite there being only two real poles that form two blocs behind them, the U.S.A. vs China). Within this milieu the Stalinists and Maoists have long made their peace with capitalism, first under the guise of the anti-revolutionary theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ which rejected Marxist internationalism, then the myth of the progressive national bourgeoisie in semi-colonies-which left the semi-colonies in the hands of a comprador class, and nowadays the big ticket item known as market socialism or ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.’ Russia and China for them are now leading an anti-imperialist bloc which stands up to the declining hegemon.
Other Red Brown alliances, MAGA and Fake Socialists
Here we find those who are especially, even fetishistically defenders of the democratic rights and legal prerogatives of the whole MAGA milieu, top to bottom, and these include ‘national bolsheviks’, pro-Bolivarians, and the Barnes SWP, now orienting toward MAGA and Zionism. More ‘brown’ is the ‘populism’ of radio provocateur Jimmy Dore, retailed as a voice of blue collar America, and recovering sex addict Russel Brand, until recently promoted by ultra-lefts who see a red-brown alliance as a path forward for social progress. Needless to say there is no shortage of organizational expressions of the petty-bourgeoisie in the pro-Trump camp, and we only need make note here of the various “Right To Life” anti-abortion groups and the anti-woke constellation aggregating around them.
Electoralism & Democratic Rights: The Right to Vote and right wing voter intimidation and negation/ “nullification”
Dirty tricks have long been part of the bourgeois electoral carnival. Alabama’s gerrymandered congressional districts are not only a national shame even the Trumpian Supreme Court majority cannot abide, but reflect racist practices the present day Republican leaders are proud to stand by. Poll taxes and grandfather clauses were overturned in the struggle against Jim Crow segregation and for voting rights in the last century (1964 Voting Rights Act and its expansions.)
The reactionary 21st century follow up has been swift and effective as felony convictions suppressed the franchise, particularly of Black, Brown and poor ex convicts. A soaring prisoner population from the 60’s to the present threw millions off the voter rolls, many for life. This is punishment for the civil rights uprisings of the 50’s-70’s. The CIA cut deals with mobsters, Cuban gusanos and Nicaraguan Contras to flood the inner cities with addictive drugs. Then the Rockefeller and then Reagan Wars on Drugs, the Mandatory Minimum Sentencing guidelines, the Three Strikes laws, the Broken Windows, Stop and Frisk and aggressive policing (terror) tactics in the Black, Brown, poor and immigrant communities act as a whole in denying working class and oppressed people the right to vote.
In 2020, 5.2 million Americans were disenfranchised because of felony convictions. Poverty is the crime. Rising rates of living convicted felons correspond not only with the end of Jim Crow but with the end of the post WWII economic boom, the falling rate of profit, the stagnation of wages, and the decline in investment in productive forces. Not surprisingly, incarceration has fed a Prison Industrial Complex which corresponds to a lack of jobs for urban youth and the establishment of a school-to-prison pipeline, both of which sap tax revenue, funding highly profitable prisons employing slavish labor practices in both privately owned and publicly owned prisons. We are not saying there is a conspiracy, but the coincidence is damning and feeds the needs of the ruling class to eliminate poor, Black and Brown people from the voter rolls.
Poor Black and Brown fill the prisons.
Dehumanization As A Profession: Who Can Be Union, Who Can’t And Who Decided
Uniformed cops and prison guards are unionized and the Labor federation tops are glad to have them. While liberalism and anarcho-Democrats call for reliance on police, the Courts and the ballot as the only permissible anti-fascism, we note how the Democrat handmaiden labor tops do exactly nothing about police membership in and infiltration by fascist organizations. A number of fake left outfits accommodate these labor leaderships, saying cops and screws are workers. We dispute this entire setup.
No argument can be made that cops and screws are anything but the hired guns for Capital’s capitalist mode of production and they never have produced a penny of surplus value. They are not workers. Their job is to alienate whoever an “offender” is from society and dehumanize them to the degree legality and/or social pressure will allow. Our U.S. Labor tops live on dues and initiation fees, while at the same time their charter policy prevents prisoner organizing, stipulating that no one with a felony record can be a Local Union officer. The result dovetails with the racist non-organizing policy detailed above. It never enters the minds of the ‘leaderships’ that it is the prisoners who are the workers, the producers of surplus value, whether in private prison or the state system employ! Attica still means FIGHT BACK! Organize Prisoners Unions! Throw the cops and screws out of the Labor Federations!
Capital’s war on women: The Right to abortion and bodily autonomy
Capital’s comprehensive defense of the patriarchal mode of production, if we listen to MAGA candidate Ramaswamy, includes the defense of the patriarchal family and we know why. The patriarchy dictates that the man determines the woman’s participation in social reproduction in and out of the home. Women become a sex-class subordinate in the patriarchal mode of production, a precursor maintained and encapsulated within capitalism.
Philosophically it’s a program; if they are not united forces, they are an expression of one reactionary phenomenon, the decline of the U.S. empire which triggers scapegoating marginalized populations while the central thrust is to keep women in the workplace as a low-priced 2nd class, to keep housewives as a reserve army of labor, to drive out militant women organizers and maintain servility as a rule of business culture under a glass ceiling. However much the entry of women into the workforce has been driven by the cost of living, this growth is seen by capital as a threat to the preservation of the nuclear family, where unpaid labor is the norm. In the U.S. there is no federal law granting paid family leave.
In this circumstance and atmosphere the right has negated the Roe v. Wade decision and abolished women’s right to abortion. This is a signal that meritocracy is for males in terms of promotions and careers. The Washington Post on Sept. 5 reported that 70,000 day care centers are facing bankruptcy. Moms can’t afford what it costs to keep them open. Federal subsidy funds have suddenly been allowed to run out. This means employment for women is less possible. We see this as a contributing factor in the school-to-prison-pipeline, due to the enforced poverty, and likewise as a direct gender-based attack, the flipside of the Dobbs Decision’s abolition of the right to abortion. As it was before 1971, have a baby (and you WILL) and your choices are made for you by the social norms of the employer class. This for long has been the brownshirt goal, not just in terms of defining adult womens’ lives as kueche, kirche, kinder, but also to demonstrate how they are the effective arm of “conservatism” both inside parliamentary halls and as strong arms in the streets. The befuddled Democrats, having demobilized and running scared from the ME TOO movement discovered they have no power over what the Supreme Court likes and can’t find a way to restore Roe.
In contradistinction to the 3 failed waves of bourgeois feminism we champion the objective needs of working class women and all women. This requires a comprehensive revolutionary program, transitional to socialism, specifically as well as logically rejecting ‘single-issueism.’ We insist this is far more important to do on the job, in the streets and less so in the courts.
Humpty Dumpty
Social Democrats, liberals and progressive reformers are incapable of resolving the structural crisis of capitalism in its terminal decay. So the masses get all filled with hope that they, in particular the workers, don’t need to make a socialist revolution to get past the crisis, and layers of labor fakers line up to tell them they don’t. The next inaugurated president, whoever that may be, will answer the question as to whether the immediate future world situation will be war or world depression. These are the only options capitalism has left. So instead of building a revolutionary workers’ party that fights for workers’ political independence in every workplace and mass struggle, they tell us to vote Democratic over Republicans as a solution to the declining empire’s problems and to stop fascism. Only problem is that capitalism is the root of the empire and it holds the fascist solution as an option for when the workers get out of hand. Thus it is the crisis of the leadership of the workers movement which sheepdogs workers into the capitalist political parties who open the road to fascism and endless wars for empire.
Socialism or Extinction! For workers to live imperialism must die!
— Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA), Nov 2023
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