Us versus the billionaires and their parties
Joe slaps the socialists!
In a recent interview, Joe Biden was visually irritated when responding to a reporter who asked if his proposed policies are “socialist”. “Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist…I beat the socialist!”
This back-handed slap at Bernie Sanders occurred precisely at the time that Sanders and the self-identified progressives and Socialists in Congress push for the 10-15 million people who voted for Sanders in the primaries to get behind Biden—despite having fundamental ideological differences.
On the heels of the deployment of Federal police in several states to repress Black Lives Matter protests, and Trump accusing him of being soft on the movement against police violence, Biden defensively replied and criticized the protests. At a high-profile press conference at a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with all of its dog-whistle connotation, he condemned the movement as “rioting, looting, and lawlessness…” going on to emphasize: “I want to make it absolutely clear rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting…It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those that do it should be prosecuted.”
He gave this speech less than one week after fascist shooter Kyle Rittenhouse assassinated two protestors in Kenosha Wisconsin with the active support of the police. This was also after rejecting and repudiating the calls that police violence be investigated and departments defunded, and after he callously called for police to instead be trained to shoot unarmed people in the leg when they present a “threat”.
Biden and the leadership of the Democratic Party have also made it abundantly clear that they will block Medicare for All, bury the Green New Deal, keep most migrants and refugees in prison camps and expand funding for ICE, preserving the mega-tech corporations, bolstering police, and a hundred more ways to protect the amassing fortunes of the rich. It’s clear that they are not running as an ideological alternative to Trumpism—only as an alternative to Trump himself.
The selection of Biden to steer the party’s ship at a time of deepening social crisis is not an anomaly for the Democratic Party. After all, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were front-loaded by the party apparatus at the point of economic crises, failed and costly wars, and overall general disgust with the rule of the Republican Party. What is different in 2020 is the scale of the crisis, the depth of the social polarization, accumulated learned experience of the failures of elections to provide substantive change, and the recognition by a larger percentage of the population of the class character of the two ruling parties and the brazen partisanship of their rule. Both Trump and Biden are fighters for their class, not for ours.
Many of the people that will vote for Joe Biden in November stand ideologically opposed to his class positions, but will do so because they feel they have “no other choice.” In the truest electoral sense, this is undeniable. The Democrats have wage scorched-earth war against and electoral challenge from their left. Concurrently, the Democratic Party long ago shrugged off any obligations to the working class, the vast majority of US society. This has occurred in relation to the changing political orientation of the capitalist class—desperate to preserve and expand its wealth and power in a changing world.
The Democrats have positioned themselves as the more reasonable and consistent stewards of capitalist political economy, even as sections of the rightwing of the ruling class become un-hinged in the face of looming threats: deep and protracted capitalist crisis, an empire coming apart at the seems, and black-led rebellion in the streets. The Democrats have tried to mitigate and manage this process, even as their counterparts in the Republican Party have taken off their gloves.
In practical terms, Trumpism—or the phenomenon of far-right capitalist class reaction—couldn’t exist as a growing and institutionalized political force in US politics if the Democratic Party had not moved so far to the right itself in its service to a decrepit system; one that seems to have less need for it. The usefulness of nominal “US democracy” is itself being questioned by billionaires and their underlings.
Unabashedly fascist groups are roaming city streets, building organizational capacity, and murdering people without fear or hesitation. Police forces across the country are doubling-down on their power to kill people with impunity, take public positions against politicians, and otherwise digging in against growing sections the public they ostensibly serve. This is unchanged, even after many major urban departments having been exposed to be thoroughly infested with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
While the political right has chosen bare-knuckled brawling over any pretense of social-class harmony, the Democrats have responded by extolling the virtues of civility and “taking the higher ground”—while simultaneously choking out the handful quixotic socialists trying to move their party leftwards. As a result, we head into the next election cycle with a Democratic Party platform and candidature that is largely indiscernible from that of the Republican rightwing of capitalism. Given the scale of the current crisis, and the evident collaboration of the two ruling parties to once again dump the costs of system-failure onto the working class, the system as it is won’t likely hold.
Unprecedented crisis—intensified class war
The confluence of multiple factors is creating an unprecedented crisis in the United States. An unrestrained and unpredictable pandemic, jarring and prolonged economic crisis, and a degree of social and political polarization not seen since in this country since 1968 or 1937 before that, are making for a highly combustible environment.
Over the next 2 to 5 years, the machinations of global capitalists will likely produce social explosions, rebellions, coups, and wars in synchrony. At the cusp of this period of intense volatility, the U.S. ruling class is forcing through the most overt transfer of wealth in history in order to save their system of capitalism. In other words, knowing full-well of the stakes at hand—and the consequences that will likely follow—the US state has opted for an unmasked form of class warfare without even the pretense of mitigation, negotiation, or obfuscation.
In other words, knowing full-well of the stakes at hand—and the consequences that will likely follow—the US state has opted for an unmasked form of class warfare without even the pretense of mitigation, negotiation, or obfuscation.
The deepening cycles of crisis since the global capitalist downturn of 1973 have changed the equation of class relations and are intensifying at each interval. The US has seen declining control of the global economy, periods of expansion have been weaker, wages lower, profits flatter, and crises deeper. In response the US ruling class has conducted an increasingly aggressive and more pronounced form of class warfare through the state to transfer wealth from workers without concession – a one-sided class war, with each cycle becoming more antagonistic. Through the state, this method of capitalist accumulation through enforced transfer of wealth has been projected internationally through unmatched military power and hegemonic control over existing international capitalist institutions. The perfected functionality of this model of US capitalism has depended on the two ruling parties working in unison (bipartisanship) throughout this process.
It is entirely predictable that Democratic Party funders and functionaries closed ranks behind Joe Biden to be the standard-bearer of capitalist class politics at this crisis point. After all, almost every policy initiative that has served the rich and vanquished the poor over the last four decades has been the handiwork of Biden and other towering figures of the Democratic Party in class-conscious consensus with the Republicans. The nature of class warfare has qualitatively shifted over the last decade, the state has pulled out all of the stops to save the foundering capitalist system.
There navigational trajectory of ruling class consensus into these unprecedented times are to save capitalism and their class rule “by any means necessary.” This has pushed the state and ruling parties into more open alliance with these priorities: administer limitless bailouts to the capitalist class, bolstering the ranks of the state’s repressive apparatus and openly or tacitly supporting the brutal repression of oppositional street movements, and otherwise continuing to elaborate new means to confront, control, and constrain the growing segments of disaffected working class and poor populations being squeezed to the brink.
Economic crisis “resolved” for the rich, deepened for the working class
The crisis of global capitalism preceded the pandemic, and was accelerated and deepened by it. The result of the last six months has been a phenomenal display of ruling class warfare. In the last six months alone, social and economic polarization has reached unprecedented levels as the backdrop to the upcoming general elections.
According to a recent report, the US’s 634 billionaires added $845 billion, or 29%, to their accumulated wealth in the six months since the pandemic began. The total net worth of the nation’s billionaires rose from $2.95 trillion to $3.8 trillion—equivalent to roughly 18% of total US GDP. The S&P stock market index, which measures the value of the biggest 500 firms in US, shrunk by 35% in March. Nevertheless, following the bailouts, the stock market index saw its largest one-month surge (in August 2020) since 1986, and the largest 5-month growth in over 80 years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measures the 30 largest firms, witnessed 11 consecutive years of astronomical growth (Under Bush-Obama-Trump) until the shutdown, but also recovered to pre-pandemic levels in a matter of a few months. “Since then”, gleefully concluded the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. stocks have been on a winning streak that is unprecedented in the modern era of financial markets.”
U.S. stocks have been on a winning streak that is unprecedented in the modern era of financial markets.
This is in stark contrast to the experience of working people. Over 50 million people lost their jobs since March, with about 14 million still unemployed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that the income for the bottom 80% of the private-sector workforce decline by an estimated 4.4% across the board. At the beginning of September, about 30 million people were collecting unemployment benefits, up from 1.6 million people a year ago. Another estimated 4.3 million workers have had to quit their jobs to care for children during school closures, as there is no substantial child care infrastructure available. Families already spend about $42 billion in out-of-pocket child care expenses in 2019, and costs are estimated to have increased 47% since the pandemic.
About 30 million people, or about 8-10% of the population—and including 14 million children—are experiencing persistent food shortages, relying on food banks to stave off hunger and starvation. The rates are double for Latino and Black populations. For instance, when the $600 COVID-19-related emergency unemployment supplement expired in July, family food-spending rates collapsed up to 50% compared to the previous year. This coincides with increased prices for basic foods due to disruptions in “free-market” supply chain production and the failure for state to impose price controls. Videos have circulated of miles-long lines of cars waiting to pick up emergency food rations at different locations across the country.
Furthermore, over four million homeowners could not pay their mortgage by the end of May 2020. When you add renters, about one-third of the US population couldn’t pay their mortgage or rent in July 2021 after federal eviction protections first expired (they have since been extended in 49 states –but programs like that in California require that all existing back payments be paid to qualify for an extension.) In California, the richest state in the US, and the richest region per capita in the world, 44% of the 40 million people residing in the state are renters (not including millions of undocumented workers). For the richest, there has been a boon in home purchases. For instance, the sales of homes valued at more than $1 million increased by 44% so far this year. On the other hand, there is a looming catastrophe for the working class. According to one study,
The United States may be facing the most severe housing crisis in its history. According to the latest analysis of weekly US Census data, as federal, state, and local protections and resources expire and in the absence of robust and swift intervention, an estimated 30–40 million people in America could be at risk of eviction in the next several months. Many property owners, who lack the credit or financial ability to cover rental payment arrears, will struggle to pay their mortgages and property taxes and maintain properties. The COVID-19 housing crisis has sharply increased the risk of foreclosure and bankruptcy, especially among small property owners; long-term harm to renter families and individuals; disruption of the affordable housing market; and destabilization of communities across the United States.
In anticipation of mass foreclosures and restructuring of mortgage markets, capitalist investors (including many flush with bailout money) are pouring funds into commercial mortgage companies and driving a new “boom”. Low-interest rates, government-protected and backed mortgage securities, and infusions of “cheap cash” into money markets (discussed below) are leading speculators to move huge sums into housing in hopes of making big profits down the road when the markets recover. This process is how Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and others in the Trump Administration made huge fortunes after the last recession—and under the Obama Administration.
Meanwhile, 7 million people have been infected with COVID-19 and 210,000 people—disproportionately poor, Black, Latinx, Native American people—have perished. On top of that, 12 million have lost their employment-based health insurance during the pandemic. This will likely increase as more than half of the population, about 158 million people, get their health insurance through employment, the rest by individual insurance market or qualify for Medicaid. They are adding new ranks to the estimated population of 80+ million that have no insurance or are under-insured.
The social crisis has been so acute, that some sections of the state are getting nervous that there will be a major backlash from the millions of poor and destitute workers. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell recently caused a controversy on the right by appealing to congress directly to “to compensate for income losses sustained by unemployed workers and revenue holes facing hard-hit businesses and city and state governments because of the coronavirus pandemic.” He further added that the economy will worsen and “get harder from here” for the working class.
Indeed, the US government has given only part of the 160 million-strong working class a one-time check for $1200 (excluding immigrants and many Black and Latinx workers), temporary eviction relief (while requiring back rents to be re-paid), scant medical services, and only temporary relief from payments student debt. Workers in other rich capitalist nations are receiving job and wage guarantees through government wage payments (60-85% of wages) and keeping employment-based benefits.
Saving capitalism – A bipartisan project
From April to June 2020 US output shrank 32%, three times higher than the highest drop on record (since the Great Depression). Current projections estimate the total annualized decline to be between 20 and 30%, and even the rosiest predictions for a full recovery from the current depression to pre-crisis levels is still at least two years away. Yet, at the same time economists predict corporate profits will increase by up to 25% over the next year. How is Wall-Street flourishing amid such a deep crisis?
The answer is heavy-handed state policy to facilitate an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the US population to the 1% — only about a decade after carrying out the then unprecedented bailout that propped up capitalism and transferred a half-trillion to the richest people.
This time around, US state has been even more aggressive and transparent in engineering bailouts through Congress, the Treasury Department, and the Federal Reserve Bank. In March and April, Congress passed four pieces of legislation amounting to over $3 trillion, the majority acting as a bailout for big business. The Federal Reserve Bank took unprecedented action, indicating its willingness to “do practically anything” in order to “get the markets functioning.”
The Fed has taken these steps to save capitalism this time around by introducing “a new generation of lending facilities to prevent a liquidity crunch from turning into a solvency crisis for American businesses.” In other words, the crisis is so intense that the old monetarist policies are no longer sufficient. The fed has had to redefine its role to try a number of new emergency measures to defibrillate capitalism and push the costs of systemic failure onto the rest of the population into the next generation. The Fed has taken extraordinary steps, including:
- Cutting the interest rates to near zero, making the cost of borrowing very cheap for capital
- Injecting massive amounts of money into money markets by “discount lending” to private banks and removing reserve requirements. In other words, extending cash flows to banks at a reduced cost and without traditional restrictions or limitations
- Purchasing huge quantities of government debt, a process known as “quantitative easing” in which it uses public money to buy up treasury bonds and commercial mortgage-backed securities, which is a process to shore up the largest private investment sectors and discourage runs that could further drive panicked divestment and collapse
- Extending hundreds of billions of dollars directly to capitalist firms in the form of cheap credits and loans, removing practically all collateral requirements, and delaying repayment, allowing many firms to reinvest cheap money into the speculative frenzy and pay back from the earnings at a later point after cashing in
If that weren’t enough, it passed and published a new rule scaling back all “non-critical” oversight of how the money could or should be used. In other words, the U.S. treasury has become the ATM for the capitalist class—no questions asked.
These measures are estimated to amount to a separate $6 trillion transfer of current and future-generated public funds into private hands. When all is said and done, this most recent bailout has a $10 trillion price tag. This has allowed for the speedy recovery for capital. Publicly financed, cheap money and credit have allowed the capitalist class to engage in a feeding frenzy of buy-outs, mergers, and huge speculative investments in the crisis economy. In reality, it has fed new bubbles across the economy that will have to be reckoned with down the road.
the U.S. treasury has become the ATM for the capitalist class—no questions asked.
Congress, including Biden, Sanders and members of the squad all made this possible by voting for all of the bailout legislation and refusing to use oversight powers to review or oversee the decisions of the Fed—which they are charged to do. Interestingly, the vote for the bailout legislation was conducted through anonymous voice vote in the House of Representatives, an atypical practice that removes the obligation of a congressperson to publicly register their vote. With the bailouts, the amount of public U.S. government debt will reach 100% of total GDP by the end of 2020 and surpass it in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The class nature of US Democracy
No matter how acidic and acrimonious the spats between Democrats and Republicans may appear, there is no fundamental difference in major domestic and foreign policy objectives. While it was dramatic when Nancy Pelosi angrily tore-up her copy of the Trump speech during the 2020 State of the Union address. Likewise, the verbal shoving match between congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Yoho over the latter's vile and sexist remarks were fodder for justifiable outrage and indignance, and millions tuned in to watch it unfold. Despite the spectacle, these episodes do not represent any substantial difference on core issues. The narrow line of separation between the two parties allows for inconsequential differences of personality and views to be exaggerated into existential conflict and elevated to the national stage. Within this oxygen-less arena, the theatrics of opposition on both sides supplant any real substantive ideological incompatibility.
The actual ideological divides in US society are purposefully obfuscated to create the illusion of partisan division. The parties and the media portray supposed cross-class alliances that position rich, middle class, and working-class liberals on one side “of the aisle” and the mirror-image of their conservative counterparts on the other. In reality, more clearly delineated political divisions have emerged and expressed themselves outside of the electoral arena, especially in the last two decades.
These are the lines of demarcation between a single partisan ruling class, which operates through a bipartisan electoral framework on one side; and sections of the activist and socialist left, radicalized liberals, downwardly mobile sections of middle-class youth, and segments of the working-class taking politics out to the street into protest movements. This is both a reflection of radicalization in the context of increasing social class polarization—and of the decline of struggle at the point of production over the last two decades especially.
The surge of protest movements includes the global anti-corporate movement of 1999-2001, the mass antiwar movement of 2003, the immigrant rights movement of 2006-7, the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011-12, and the Black Lives Matter movement since the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Each of which have brought hundreds of thousands to millions of people out into the streets, effectively in opposition to the policies perpetuated by both parties in power. In the last six months, for instance, one study estimates that 15-26 million people joined the BLM protests to express their opposition to US policing—while politicians of both parties fervently “back the blue.”
In the last six months, for instance, one study estimates that 15-26 million people joined the BLM protests to express their opposition to US policing—while politicians of both parties fervently 'back the blue'.
Within electoral politics, the Bernie Sanders campaign helped identify a large base of leftward moving people who have been shaped or influenced by events over this period, and that could otherwise be the basis for a third, labor or socialist party. A poll conducted at the beginning of primary season in early 2020 showed that half of Democratic voters favored socialism (15% of the total electorate; not including non-voters), and 76% said they would vote for a socialist for president (23% of the total electorate, not including non-voters). Despite this sizeable left-wing of the population, concentrated in the working class, and disproportionately young, and people of color, there is no perceived political home for them except in the streets at this point. This has become even more apparent after the second defeat of Bernie Sanders and the imposition of Joe Biden.
Battle of the billionaires
In August, Biden raised an unprecedented $364 million dollars in that month alone, building a massive war chest that is larger than the combined $233 million raised by the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in August 2016. At the funding base of the Biden camp are 106 billionaires, while another 93 billionaires back Trump. By September, Biden raised $1 billion and Trump $1.3 billion.
In the past, the business press measured who the capitalist class favored by observing the hedging of donations between parties or by noting the shifting of funds from one party’s candidate to the other based on favorability assessments for economic gain, political stability, or other factors that might impact markets. Another metric of capitalist class behavior in elections has been to document shifting investment portfolios, based on perceptions or calculations by capitalists seeking to maximize investment returns depending on who was likely to come into office.
This last election cycle has indicated a shift away from this behavior and the consolidation of billionaires directly stewarding both parties—instead of merely backing the “better horse”. The astronomically rich finance capitalists especially have so thoroughly colonized the infrastructure of the Democratic and Republican parties through their money flows, that they now see and use them as their parties. Like their parties, this class of oligarchs do not have fundamental ideological differences over questions of capitalism and empire—only strategic and methodological disagreements for how to achieve their aims.
As these campaigns have substantially converged in their commitments to the interests of the capitalist class—in a more self-conscious and overt manner—the measure of “investor” activity and how they reflect or influence politics have changed. Typical financial market fluctuations have diminished as investors appear ensured that nothing will significantly change, regardless of who wins. In fact, the Wall Street Journal observed that the economy has become less significant factor in this presidential cycle—especially as Biden and the Democratic establishment has essentially made the economy a non-factor in this election.
The big capitalist backers of the party are pleased and contented with their bipartisan rescue plan and do not want to further politicize chasmic inequality or run the risk of raising expectations for a similar bailout for working people. This despite the fact that half of the electorate disapproves of Trump’s management of the economy, and 64% of Democratic voters see their economic current situation as worse than a year ago. The dissonance between the oligarchic character of the US ruling class and the majority of people on social and domestic issues is also apparent in foreign policy.
US Imperialism is a bipartisan sport
The two parties co-authored and underwrote the post-war restructuring of the global capitalist system (referred to as the Bretton Woods agreement). This arrangement wired US capitalism as the central nerve center, receptor and transmitter, and arbiter of postwar international economy. The US bipartisan state created the international banking regimes that leveraged aid, loans, and debt to install the “free market” system. It expanded US military forces into every corner of the globe, and built up the Cold War national security state to contain and repress urban rebellions in the 1960s. It also deployed this model as well as to contain, roll-back, and smash nationalist, radical, and revolutionary movements internationally that resisted incorporation into this order.
The two parties backed the Gulf Wars; the War on Drugs that not only criminalized and disappeared whole generations of Black and Brown working class people into the carceral state—but also enabled the re-militarization of whole regions across Latin America. They supported the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and all of the other military invasions and covert interventions around the world; and they collectively applaud drone-assassinations. They have joined in unison to wage the so-called “War on Terrorism,” which among other effects, has dramatically armed and empowered an incessant war on immigrants, refugees, and other internationally displaced peoples. Since 9/11, both parties have funded over a dozen wars that have cost the lives of over 800,000 people internationally at a cost approaching an estimated $7 trillion dollars. Most recently, they have set their sites on China, whose growing economy and military prowess has begun challenging the US in different regions and theaters.
Bipartisan effort against China
Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress have used their position to move the US into a position of confrontation with China, accelerating the pace towards and a new Cold War—and likely resulting in proxy-wars or military skirmishes in the not-so-distant future. While the Democratic leadership has distaste for his methods, the party’s leadership began the process of re-positioning against China and have continue to support Trump every step of the way.
As a senator, Biden was a key supporter of Bill Clinton in backing the entry of China into the World Trade Organization to allow for US capital to massively invest in China’s low-wage workforce. The opening of global economies for capital export and profit repatriation was a shared strategy of the US ruling parties. The bonanza for US capitalism was widely celebrated by both parties, but has reached its limits. The strong intervention of the Chinese ruling party, compelled “technology transfer” (what the US calls theft) in exchange for the plunder of the working class. Also, as China began to challenge “US primacy” in the region by expanding land claims in the South and East China Seas, which the U.S. military dominates.
Perhaps most symptomatic of the crisis in US imperialism began when China began exporting significant capital investments to Asia, Africa, and the Americas—surpassing the US in global trade beginning in 2010. It was at this time the Obama-Biden administration began its “pivot to Asia.” This shifted the arc of imperial politics towards a generational showdown over domination of the Pacific as a precursor to intensified confrontation and conflict across strategic points and regions of the global economy. Obama tapped his Vice President Joe Biden as the lead representative to spearhead the effort.
The Obama administration began engaging in trade restrictions, accusations of espionage, cyber-warfare, and other attacks—not because of the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers, or repression and mass incarceration of Muslims and other Ethnic groups such as the Uighurs, but because US capitalism is being challenged and displaced. Joe Biden dusted of his Cold Warrior credentials and ratcheted up his rhetoric during the current presidential campaign, declaring in 2019 that “The United States does need to get tough on China…” and calling it a “Communist dictatorship.” Revealingly, he has not committed to removing Mr. Trump’s tariffs on China.
Instead, Biden has adopted Trump’s “America First” strategy, and adapted it to his own proposed $400 billion “Buy American” campaign. This campaign pledge—which essentially works in conjunction with from Trump’s tariff approach—is to provide direct subsidies to US capitalists through guaranteed government purchase of US-made manufactured goods.
For its part, a bipartisan US congress has introduced over 300 bills condemning China or restricting economic or military activity in the last two sessions. A former Bush-era State Department official, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass commented, “regardless of who wins [in November] the US policy over China is going to be tougher over the next five years…China has changed…and US thinking has changed.”
Liberal militarism
The Democrat’s commitment to being the better stewards of US empire also plays out over questions of maintaining US Military dominance. The Democrats gave overwhelming support for the “National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)” which gave the US military $738 billion, a $22 billion increase over 2019, when the Democrats increased it with an additional $630 million above the Trump administration’s request.
The bill passed the house in 377 to 48 vote and in the Senate and the Senate by a vote of 86–8 with overwhelming support from over 188 Democrats in the House, and 39 in the Senate to ensure its passage. The legislation was passed at the same time the Democrats were supposedly leading an impeachment against Trump! (Ostensibly for not sending $400 million in congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine during its war with Russia).
The bill included funds for the US-Mexico border wall, Trump’s “Space Force”, funding for a military based in the Arctic, and for direct military aid to Saudi Arabia as it was pulverizing Yemen as part of “Iranian containment”. The Yemeni population had the audacity to rise up and oust US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh as part of the Arab Spring revolutions. The weakening of the US-Saudi Arabian axis in the region was never forgiven, and both ruling parties agreed to use brute force to reassert power by dropping US bombs directed from Riyadh.
When Bernie Sanders led an effort in the Senate to attach an amendment to divert 10% to divert 10 percent of the $738 billion military budget to jobs, health care, and education; the majority of Democrats voted with Republicans to block them—even though their vote could not even shape the outcome either way. Even Biden has even indicated that he may raise the military budget if elected. As one liberal commentator noted in disgust, “There’s no such thing as anti-Trump when it comes to militarism.”
There’s no such thing as anti-Trump when it comes to militarism.
The Democrats have been more consistent in pursuing the traditional interests of empire, that they have become indiscernible from traditional neo-cons. Such that 75 Republican national security specialists recently endorsed Biden, and 500 retired senior military officers, as well as former Cabinet secretaries, service chiefs and other officials, have signed an open letter in support of Biden, seeing him as the solution to a “world on fire.”
Social polarization
The US political system is in deep crisis, as the big capitalist centers (referred to as the “establishment” of each respective party) have lost their consensual hegemony over even more sections of the working class. Already, a large segment of the population doesn’t vote for either party. In 2016 for instance, 138 million people out of 231 million eligible participated, with about 41% or 93 million people not voting for either party (not including millions of disenfranchised people).
In 2016 and 2020, the left and right flanks of the parties’ voters have become even more polarized. The growth of Trumpism has breathed new life into far-right reactionary white nationalism, always a presence and force in the US political establishment. It has also fueled the growth and confidence of fascist forces, who have been aggressively organizing and capacity-building within the context of economic crisis, extreme inequality, and the rise of explosive social protest movements directly confront the state repressive apparatus.
Extreme right and proto-fascist wings of Trumpism have consolidated on the far-right of the Republican Party and are now using that platform to vie for control of the party—goaded into action by Trump and his growing league of congressional and gubernatorial copycats and wannabe-heir-apparents. For instance, at least 24 candidates who have “endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted “QAnon” (22 Republicans and two independents) have won their primaries and a spot on the ballot in the 2020 congressional elections.
Using far-right, reactionary and racist movements as a springboard into mainstream politics is a tried and true method for the far-right in the US; facilitated by the right-skew of national politics in absence of a labor or socialist party. This is also an established practice often supported and funded by sections of the capitalist class. Most recently, the anti-immigrant wing of the far-right tried used this method in 2006-8 but were defeated by a mass immigrant-rights movement; followed by the more successful “Tea Party movement” in 2010.
Rebellion versus elections
As the 2020 election nears, tensions are increasing on the left between those who see the vote for Joe Biden as the decisive factor in stopping Trump, and those who see the movement in the streets as the only force capable of defeating Trumpism. The former is expediency over principle, an urgent act to stop what is unarguably the most dangerous figure in modern political history. The latter is the understanding of the bipartisan processes that produced Trump—and how Trumpism will continue on regardless of who wins at the ballot box. It is also a recognition that class struggle, especially when driven by the most oppressed sectors of the working class, has the power to challenge and confront the capitalist system at its structural core—rather than tinkering inside its parliamentary edges.
Black rebellion is a definitive feature of the US historical and political landscape. It has served as the catalyst for the most significant periods of radical and revolutionary restructuring of US society, advanced great surges of democratization from below, and inspired mass solidarity and activated other movements of the oppressed and sectors of the working class. The current phase of the Black freedom struggle is already laying the foundation for a new radical reconstruction.
In recent years, we have also seen an uprising of Latino-led immigrant workers that defeated a Republican-led Congress in 2005 after trying to pass the Sensenbrenner-King Bill and making it a felony to be undocumented. We have also seen radical indigenous-led movement developing in different parts of the country against oil pipelines and border walls. The convergence of these factors, which have developed outside of the two-party framework, and independent of the gravitational pull of electoral cycles, shows the aggregation of forces with a power and potential far greater than the defeatist politics of lesser-evilism.
Further exposing the contradictions of lesser-evilism, the Democrats championed the legislation responsible for dramatically increasing state and police violence against African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants, and Native Americans. Biden himself oversaw (as head of the Senate Judiciary committee) the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed by a Democratic majority. Biden worked closely with the Clinton Administration and a majority Democratic congress to pass legislation to construct the first 100 miles of the US-Mexico wall (Operation-Gatekeeper). During his tenure as Obama’s Vice President, Biden oversaw the greatest expansion of ICE and the Border Patrol since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. They introduced the first family detention centers and put kids in cages before Trump expanded the barbaric practice. The list goes on.
Typically, the US left, of which a large majority overlaps with or identifies as the left wing of the Democratic Party, demobilizes during presidential cycles. Liberal activists and most radicals take their cues from non-profit groups, unions, and other organizations that are wired into or out from the Democratic Party. They convert their activism into phone-banking, door-knocking, and vote-herding drives that do most of the actual groundwork for Democratic Party campaigns—often without asking for anything in return. This is the case for much of the middle-class base of the Democratic Party, as well as the majority of the ranks of union members.
This election cycle is unprecedented in that the protest movements aren’t demobilizing in the same manner, and yet are still having a significant impact on the elections by exposing the lack of a voice to represent the tens of millions that are calling out for an alternative. Furthermore, the growth of interest in socialism is profound. One poll shows that the level of support for socialism among the US population, registering at 43% in May 2020, is deeper and broader than it was during the Great Depression.
the level of support for socialism among the US population, registering at 43% in May 2020, is deeper and broader than it was during the Great Depression.
This helps explain the growth of the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA), and modest growth of the self-identified revolutionary left. Nevertheless, the socialist left in general in the United States has never been able to successfully withstand the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party and the allure of trying to move it leftwards, “take it over”, or try to enter with the intention of capturing the left and breaking it off into a new socialist or labor party. Going back more than a century, and with even greater forces in play than today, these efforts have failed. Instead they have led to the demolition of the left, the reinforcement of the party's conservative character, and the obliteration of expectations. The end product of this trajectory of defeat has been the elaboration and institutionalization of “lesser-evilism” as the governing ideology for participation in bourgeois elections. This path of demoralization and disorganization has allowed bourgeois parties to govern with disdain and disregard for the interests of working class people.
In the most recent phase of Democratic Party “entrism”, several socialist formations have imploded, have split on the question, or are on course to being gradually absorbed and disaggregated. While this merits a fuller discussion, the failure of the socialist left to capture the Democratic party has many reasons, not least of which it that it really isn’t a party, but rather a highly-stratified and downwardly-regulated set of funding mechanisms controlled from the top-down by billionaires and millionaires. It is the oldest capitalist “party” in the world, and its architects have learned a trick or two about management.
Even Bernie Sanders, who used explicitly socialist messaging to cultivate an army of tens of millions of devoted followers and supporters was not able to take it over, or move its conservative ideological core substantially leftward. Instead, the party leadership used their many tools to defeat his campaign, and then reduce him to the status of second-tier shiller for his principal ideological opponent. The party leadership would rather push millions of leftward moving people out of its ranks–and prefers to lose to Trump than to see the the socialist movement grow. To defeat Trump and Trumpism, and ultimately the bipartisan framework and exploitative capitalist system that undergirds it—socialists, anti-racists, and all other people looking for justice and wanting to build a just world need to immerse themselves in the class struggles of today, tomorrow, and the months and years to come.
Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018).
