Under Capitalism, a Pandemic Is a Time of Political Awakening

By Matthew Dolezal

To say that the Trump administration responded inadequately to the COVID-19 pandemic would be the understatement of the decade. Trump’s response was chock-full of misinformation, racism, dangerous proposals, dangerous policies, and a strain of conservative anti-intellectualism that ignores public health experts. It has even been compared to former president Ronald Reagan’s botched response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. This comparison also contains an important historical lesson: Reagan and Trump represent the beginning and end points of the American political tradition marked by deregulation, austerity, and corporate-funded governance.

Though many liberal pundits decry him as an uncharted divergence from “normalcy”, Trump is simply the hideous, unmasked expression of neoliberalism — a ghastly gremlin our decaying society has vomited up after four decades of germination. In short, neoliberalism created Trump. Year after year we witnessed the dismantling of unions, the passing of job-killing trade deals, the gutting of social services, and the continued stagnation of wages. These policies tilled the political soil for an outgrowth of right-wing populism that attempts to harken back to the “great” white supremacist legacy of America. It is a faux-populism that scapegoats immigrants and minorities, blaming the most marginalized for the societal rot produced by the implementation of free market fundamentalist ideology. Trumpism as specific historical phenomenon is certainly new. But, in terms of the systemic nature of this barbarism, Trump is not an “aberration” — he is an inevitable extension of the existing system.

During the spread of the coronavirus and the subsequent economic crisis, Americans are learning the true nature of neoliberal disaster capitalism, or what journalist Naomi Klein has referred to as “Coronavirus Capitalism.” This current iteration is part of a disturbing historical trajectory. In short, corporate entities and powerful individuals have repeatedly exploited crises by swiftly implementing policies that further enrich the ruling class at the expense of everyone else — a phenomenon Klein has elucidated more broadly in her 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine.”

As we are quickly realizing, the entire system is callous and predatory, and the tattered safety net that once existed has vanished long ago. But, just like the virus itself, political consciousness is rapidly spreading. Every day on social media, I am heartened to be reminded of the true heroism of cashiers, sanitation workers, first responders, warehouse workers, grocery stockers, and delivery drivers during these perilous times. While these seemingly undesirable jobs are proven to be essential by this crisis, it has also become evident that the captains of industry don’t have any verifiable role other than extracting profit from our labor. As Jasmine Duff reminded us in a recent Hampton Institute column, “these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.”

During a time of crisis, the wealthy can hibernate in the midst of their infinite resources. But to average workers, every dollar counts. Many will have to decide which bills to pay in order to leave enough money for groceries and other essentials. Because of this traumatic situation, the very concept of a student loan payment is being re-examined. People are realizing that education should be a right, and that it is profoundly immoral to enslave college graduates with insurmountable debt simply for the crime of seeking knowledge to improving their life prospects. There are currently 45 million Americans saddled with a cumulative $1.6 trillion in student loan debt — an enormous burden on both individuals and the economy as a whole. In times like these, the burgeoning student debt strike has the potential to gain significant momentum toward its ultimate goal of student debt cancellation and free public college. 

In addition to the inherent injustices of the student debt crisis, our current pandemic is also laying bare the glaring inhumanity of a for-profit healthcare system. As Senator Bernie Sanders is fond of pointing out, the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, yet we are the only major industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare as a human right. This “profit over people” mentality leads to tens of thousands of annual deaths and immeasurable suffering. But, when a deadly virus is expanding across the nation, these realities are magnified. When young people are dying of COVID-19 simply because they lack insurance, and when people are continuing to work because they don’t have guaranteed sick leave, we realize the terrifying truth of the old labor slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

During a pandemic that is exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism, people are quickly becoming radicalized. We are realizing that we don’t actually need landlords, or bosses, or CEOs — these parasites that bleed the working class dry. They are, in other words, “non-essential.” In any civilized society, housing, healthcare, food, and education would be provided as a prerequisite to the mere concept of justice. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” This means industrial production and technology should be directed toward meeting human need first and foremost. We are human beings, and our lives can no longer be commodified.

One concrete action American workers can participate in is an ongoing, nationwide general strike beginning March 31. Organizers and activists are committed to withholding their labor, their rent payments, and their student loan payments until their demands are met. As the General Strike 2020 website explains, “We are a grassroots, decentralized, non-hierarchical movement of the working class. We are a diverse, inclusive organization dedicated to building a coalition of organizations and individuals of various political tendencies to save the lives of vulnerable, marginalized people in the USA and around the world.”

The demands of the general strike include:

• paid leave for all non-essential workers through the duration of the pandemic

• personal protective equipment and hazard pay 

• the suspension of rent, loan payments, utility payments, and interest accrual

• the distribution of free meal assistance, free medical care, and free protective equipment for all — prioritizing those most at risk, including front-line healthcare workers

• an end to immigration raids and sweeps of homeless camps

• the release of all occupants of detention camps and holding facilities 

• guaranteed housing for all persons lacking shelter to self-quarantine

At this pivotal time, American workers are once again realizing the power of our labor and our strength in numbers. We’re realizing that our participation is literally essential to the functionality of our society and that simply withholding that labor, that rent check, that student loan payment, can bring the entire system to its knees. 

Indeed, there is great revolutionary potential in this time of heightened class consciousness and political awakening. Even Britney Spears gets it.

Revisiting Kropotkin: Mutual Aid in the Time of Coronavirus

(Pictured: Volunteers in Washington help prepare food packages for people made suddenly unemployed by the pandemic. EPA/Erik S Lesser)

By Ruth Kinna and Thomas Swann

Republished from The Conversation.

Empty supermarket shelves and panicked government briefings have become the defining images of the coronavirus crisis. But the community response, however, may well be a more enduring feature. The virus and the enforcement of social isolation have sparked uncertainty and anxiety. But a range of local volunteer-run mutual aid networks have also emerged.

Many of the people involved in these groups know that the term “mutual aid” was made famous by the 19th-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He used it to attack Social Darwinists who described nature as a competitive fight between self-interested individuals. “Survival of the fittest” became their catch phrase and was used to describe antagonistic relationships between people, races and states. This way of thinking normalised aggression as a natural response to scarcity.

In the present context, the implication is that scrapping for the last bottle of hand sanitiser or roll of toilet paper is a programmed, inevitable response. If only the strongest survive, then others should be seen as rivals or even enemies and we are right to take all necessary measures to preserve ourselves against them.

Although Kropotkin accepted that competition was a factor determining biological fitness, his argument was that cooperation – or mutual aid – was as significant.

As an ethical idea, mutual aid describes the efforts people make to help others without seeking reward. It thrives in local, voluntary organisation. The Lifeboat Association, initiated in the UK by William Hillary to support the foundation of a national institution to save victims of shipwrecks, was an example of the ethical self-organising that Kropotkin had in mind.

Hillary appealed to the king in 1825 to support his project, explaining that his aim was to aid “people and vessels of every nation, whether in peace or in war”. His cause was at once “individual, national, and universal”. He imagined that the establishment of a British association would inspire the foundation of sister organisations across the world.

Kropotkin liked the Lifeboat Association because it relied on “cooperation … enthusiasm … local knowledge”. It rescued anyone in need and because it depended on local action, it could be replicated easily elsewhere. It was a template for global networking to build solidarity.

Working together in a time of crisis

This is the spirit we see in the support networks emerging as people confront the coronavirus pandemic. Neighbours helping neighbours. Those who are able to leave their homes are collecting prescriptions and essential supplies for the vulnerable. Groups networking across towns and cities are pooling resources so that no one is left without.

Community support has always been a core aspect of human social life. Research looking at the way people go about their different everyday tasks shows that far more time than we might imagine is spent on unpaid community support. Mutual aid and cooperation – such as neighbours looking after each other’s children or helping each other fix their cars – run through society. It is a mistake to think that the prospect of profit motivates our behaviour.

A statue of Peter Kropotkin in the Kropotkin House Museum, Dmitrov, Russia. Ruth Kenna, Author provided

Mutual aid is often seen in times of crisis or horrible catastrophe – for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the US and the Grenfell fire in London. Its emergence now bears out Kropotkin’s observations about the capacity for everyday solidarity. The question he would ask is: how can we expand these practices to rethink our social organisation?

Kropotkin described the Lifeboat Association as “perfectly spontaneous”. This did not mean that he thought it was unplanned. It meant that it was not forced by law. Trust and practice were essential to Kropotkin’s vision of the world remade through cooperation and respect for local self-determination.

With resources stretched to their limits, governments all over the world are relying on mutual aid networks to help those most at risk by shopping for those in isolation or sending virtual messages of support to prevent demoralisation.

Perhaps, then, we can start to think about how to preserve community-based organisation in the post-coronavirus world.

There is a significant difference between the politics of mutual aid and neo-liberal projects intended to privatise government services. Kropotkin did not want to see responsibility for government services devolved to big corporations or cash strapped volunteers. His aim was to attack existing power structures. Mutual aid thrives in conditions of equality and it is a necessary part of an anarchist drive towards decentralised federation.

If business-as-usual austerity returns after the crisis, the fertile ground of mutual aid may well dry up. The maintenance and extension of basic income, in contrast, may help preserve and promote grassroots social change in the longer term.

The Future of Unions During COVID-19

(Pictured: Railroad workers in Chicago)

By Cameron Mancini and Brendan Muckian-Bates

When the pressure of the moment becomes untenable, it is the working class that has continued to muster the strength to hold the business class accountable. Strength in numbers alongside the panic of immediate loss of income and employment are an organizer’s best weapons. However, meeting the challenge of the present means that we must be strategic about what type of world we want to see once COVID-19 is over.

One hundred and one years ago, as American soldiers returned to the US following the end of the Great War, the pandemic of the H1N1 strain of influenza, known as “Spanish Flu” at the time, began ravaging the world. Between 1918 and 1920, it is estimated that around 17 to 50 million people died from this pandemic.

At the same time that millions were dying, workers began striking across major industries. The 1919 Steel Strike was one of the first attempts to organize basic industry by the mainstream labor movement, with the assistance of radicals like William Z. Foster and Mother Jones. In Seattle, WA, “nothing moved but the tide” as workers took over the city for a week. Coal miners struck and won a 14% wage increase.  In all, 1919 saw 4 million workers - 1/5 of the workforce - walk off the job in the US. But it did not end there; Winnipeg, Canada saw a massive General Strike, and in Italy and Germany, workers struck in the industrial centers of their nations, seized factories, and declared socialist republics.

At times of economic and social crisis, mass labor actions are not uncommon. Workers demand immediate changes to their living conditions when those conditions become unstable. Already in 2020, we’ve seen wildcat strikes shut down the Big 3 automakers, longshore workers threaten a walk out in Bay Area ports unless there is proper sanitary conditions in the port, grocery workers demand and win hazard pay in the Puget Sound area, Pittsburgh area sanitation workers refusing unsafe working conditions until they have proper protective gear, and tenants in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood threaten a rent strike.

It’s impossible to say how long or the effects to which COVID-19 will have on the US economy, but here’s what we know so far:

• On March 17th, White House officials briefed Senate Republicans that the unemployment rate could reach 20 percent. For context, at the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was around 25%.

• Two weeks ago, the Imperial College of London released their model for how to combat the spread of COVID-19. Without severe disruptions to our daily routines, and the possibility of long-term, periodic quarantines, COVID-19 could return, killing an estimated 2.2 million people in the US alone.

• The Dow Jones dropped almost 10,000 points in the span of a month, from a high of 28,992 on February 21 to 19,173 on March 20. The percentage of the drop on March 16th is on par with that of the infamous Black Thursday of 1929.

The likelihood of COVID-19 disrupting the everyday living habits of Americans, not to mention the profound and unexpected impact it has had on everyday workers, would have been impossible only a month ago. Now, it is all but certain to have unforeseen, devastating impacts on everything it touches.

At times like these, we often remark with platitudes such as, “If only there was something we could’ve done.” It is clear at this point that President Trump’s handling of the situation has been abysmal. Every morning briefings are given downplaying the impact of this crisis, as though you can cover your eyes and ears and see no evil, hear no evil. The two capitalist parties in government haggle over relief efforts, each trying to outflank the other for electoral gains in the upcoming general election. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve doles out trillions of dollars to attempt to keep the economy afloat. It all amounts to covering up the reality that the economy is simply a juggernaut of immiseration for the working class. Keeping this juggernaut from sinking is the primary objective of the capitalist elites, which is obvious from the framing of the debate around what to do: keep the economy going -- but human needs and comfort are complete outside the scope of understanding for those in control of society. We need a cooperative commonwealth governed by the principle, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

While political pundits are seeking to negotiate policy proposals to mitigate this disaster, unions are organizing workers in the here and now. Take, for example, some of the recent actions by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Just last week, IWW members in Portland, Madison, and Milwaukee took direct action against their bosses to demand specific changes in their workplace conditions. In Madison and Milwaukee, union members at CapTel Industries engaged in a one-day sickout over pay. Although these workers are classified by the state of Wisconsin as Telecommunications Service Priority Level 3, the same level designated for state and local first responders, their pay is far below those of other essential personnel. In Portland, when workers at the historic Crush Bar were told they would be laid off during the city’s lockdown, members of the Crush Bar Worker’s Collective marched on their boss, demanding they be paid their sick time and provide half-pay for their scheduled shifts. Instead of meeting their demands, management called the Portland Police Department on their former employees, despite the order from PPD that they would not respond to calls unless for severe, life-threatening emergencies. Following this action in the city, Wobblies at Voodoo Doughnuts, a popular tourist attraction, formally announced their plans to unionize. This coincided with management’s recent decision to temporarily lay off over a dozen employees. According to one member, management at Voodoo doughnuts is not paying out accrued paid time off in accordance with their store’s own policy.

In each of these cases, workers won some or all of their demands.

CapTel workers won a ninety percent adherence at work, meaning they have less time they need to be on call at their desks. Crush Bar workers won their accrued sick time after the bar closed. Voodoo Doughnuts workers are pushing for, and winning the fight on, union recognition, despite Trump’s NLRB suspending union elections.

Now, workers in several other industries are calling for actions to shut down their workplaces, too.

Whole Worker, a grassroots movement seeking to unionize Whole Foods stores across the country, are calling for a mass sick out on March 31st to protest lack of protection for workers and consumers.

On March 23rd, workers with the Starbucks Solidarity Movement called a nationwide sick out to protest corporate’s desire to keep stores open despite being deemed “non-essential personnel.”

First, these actions signify a shift in the thinking of many low-income workers. For workers in low-wage industries like food and beverage production or distribution, a missed paycheck can mean the difference between making end’s meet and skipping bills. Fast food and distribution workplaces are notoriously difficult to unionize. Few workers in these settings have connections to unions, and fewer attempt to help organize them. The mass surge in workplace actions in these industries shows that workers are beginning to understand the motto that, “Direct action gets the goods.”

Second, building unions that can continue organizing after a major crisis, continue to win demands, and continue to accelerate class consciousness need a legal framework from which to win. Many unions are bogged down by “no strike” clauses in their contract. A “no strike” clause means that during the duration of the contract, no union member is allowed to engage in a strike or sympathy strike against the employer. If they fail to abide by that, the union is legally required to denounce the action or face stiff fines and penalties. This can quickly drain union coffers, making union leaders more like business bureaucrats negotiating with management rather than with membership. Yet, these actions are often done without the use of these union contracts, and are therefore not subject to the same rules. Strikes and slowdowns can be called almost immediately, leaving management in a more vulnerable position.

Lastly, working people need institutions that can provide organizing capabilities in the most hard-to-organize industries. Around 36% (57 million)  Americans participate in the “gig economy” in some way, and around 10% of them work full time in this sector. A decade ago, the AFL-CIO dedicated almost thirty percent of its budget to organizing. In its internal budget for 2018-2019, however, the AFL-CIO dedicated less than ten percent of its budget to organizing. Its largest budget by-line is for political activities, which account for more than 35 percent of the budget. The #RedForEd movement that saw impressive statewide and citywide strikes across more than five states and multiple cities, winning millions of dollars from intransigent, conservative legislators and boards of education is a stark reminder that direct action gets the goods, while political lobbying is an expensive and distant form of organizing.

Too few workers are in formal unions at the moment. Only about ten percent of the overall workforce in the US is currently a dues-paying member of a union. Of this, over one in three public employees are in a union, but only around six percent of private sector employees are unionized. As COVID-19’s outbreak has shown, low-income private sector workers are the most at-risk for any financial or biological crisis that can strike at a moment’s notice, yet are also the most underrepresented unionized workforce.

A massive revival of the US labor movement is needed to circumvent the impending crisis we’re facing. An astounding three million Americans submitted unemployment applications in just the first week of major federal, state, and municipal actions designed to flatten the curve. If the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic continues as it has, we can expect even starker unemployment numbers to rise. As this happens, the strain placed on those deemed “essential” will continue. The federal government could, in all likelihood, place a federal restriction on strike actions in those industries deemed essential for the continued health of the country, as happened during WWII. Should this take place, these workers could be placed in greater risk of contamination, placing their well-being at risk for the sake of company profits.

We must be prepared for the coming crisis. We must be building for something better in the here and now. The working class is already showing how to do that. C.L.R. James wrote in his classic book Facing Reality that it was the duty of radicals to “observe and record” the actions by the working class. Given the stark reality we are facing, we can observe, record, and now take action. Here is what you can do:

1. Find out what your coworkers issues are concerned about. Meet together (perhaps a phone or video conference to be safe) and make a plan with them to get concessions from our boss. Get in the habit of practicing democracy with your coworkers.

2. Do a petition, or get a group of coworkers together and confront your boss as a group.

3. Walk off the job as a group, but state clearly you are not quitting, but you are refusing unsafe working conditions under section 502 of the National Labor Relations Act.

4. Contact the local IWW branch in your area, or our Organizing Department. Organizers from the union are ready to walk you through the steps of organizing something immediate, but also for the long haul. After the Coronavirus pandemic settles the crisis of unfair treatment, low wages, understaffing, and more remain. Organizing your coworkers into a militant, independent  collective action based union is the best chance to have power over your life at work and beyond.

Cameron Mancini is the General Secretary Treasurer of the IWW.

Brendan Muckian-Bates is the National Press Officer of the IWW.

COVID-19 Proves Workers Are Essential and Capitalists Are A Drain

(Photo: Johnny Louis / Sipa USA via AP)

By Jasmine Duff

Republished from Red Flag.

The Marxist argument that it’s the labour of workers, and not the supposed intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of bosses, that keeps society running, has long been ridiculed by defenders of capitalism. In the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the truth of Marx’s claim has been brought into sharp relief.

Those whose work has been deemed essential under the current restrictions aren’t the CEOs, bankers, mining executives – or the politicians who serve them. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to anyone but themselves, that these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.

The rest of us would be better off without them. The people we depend on in this crisis are those whose labour we depend on in everyday life: nurses, teachers, those who grow our food and those who transport it to the supermarket shelves, and the people who, despite the health risks, continue to serve us in the supermarkets and chemists.

We’re told that corporate bosses like Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and mining magnate Gina Rinehart deserve their immense wealth because they play a special role in the economy. Typical of this perspective is the argument made by Forbes columnist and “leadership strategy” expert Rainer Zitelmann in a 2019 article. “For entrepreneurs, who usually earn far more than top-tier managers, high earnings are usually a reward for particularly good ideas”, he wrote. “The richest people in the world are those who have the best ideas.”

The ideologues making these arguments want us to believe that workers are unimportant and replaceable – nothing more than a “human resource” to be exploited at the whims of the capitalists. If you’re a worker, they think, it’s because you’re not smart, creative or driven enough to have climbed through the ranks. That’s why you deserve low wages, poor job security, a shitty education in chronically underfunded schools and a lack of decent health care.

The COVID-19 crisis has torn this argument to shreds. The global economy is grinding to a halt because many workers have to stay home. The CEOs self-isolating in their mansions can do nothing to save the situation. All their supposed creativity and intelligence is useless without the labour force that their wealth was built on.

The actions of our political leaders confirm this. The only creative and intelligent thing they’ve thought of to do to stave off the prospect of a deep recession is to keep as many workers as possible at their posts – recklessly sacrificing our health to protect the profits of their corporate masters. Prime minister Scott Morrison gave the game away when he said in a press conference on 24 March that while all “non-essential” workers would be sent home “everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker”.

As Morrison put it, “It can be essential in a service whether it’s a nurse or a doctor or a schoolteacher, or a public servant who is working tonight to ensure that we can get even greater capacity in our Centrelink offices, working until 8:00pm under the new arrangement in the call centres, these are all essential jobs. People stacking shelves – that is essential.”

When the basic functioning of society is on the line, it’s not the Alan Joyces or Gina Rineharts who are deemed essential. It’s the shelf stackers. Without workers, the capitalists are nothing.

The flipside of this equation is expressed in Marx’s description of the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism. Workers are the engine that keeps society running. When our labour stops, society comes to a halt.

Already, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen numerous examples that illustrate this potential. Thousands of Italian workers in the auto and metal industries have walked out in wildcat strikes to enforce social distancing, refusing to risk their health and the health of their families for Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte had made clear his desire to keep profits flowing despite the country having a 10 percent mortality rate from COVID-19 infections – tweeting on 14 March that “Italy doesn’t stop”. Workers, however, had other ideas.

Workers in Argentina who took over a factory in 2017 that previously sewed police uniforms are now using it to produce surgical masks. Another group of Argentinian workers who in 2011 took over one of the largest printing presses in Latin America are now using it to print 3D protective masks and produce hand sanitiser.

There has even been some action by workers here in Australia. Early in the morning on 27 March workers at a Coles warehouse in Melbourne’s western suburbs walked out in protest management’s refusal to provide adequate protective equipment. The industrial power of these workers is immense. A three-day strike at the same warehouse in 2016 resulted in supermarket shelves across Victoria and Tasmania lying empty for weeks.

Workers have the power to prevent capitalists exploiting our skills as pickers in warehouses, shelf stackers in supermarkets or as truck drivers. In a world without bosses, we could collectively and democratically decide how our skills should be used to advance the interests of everyone. We could distribute food, for example, according to human need. This would end the barbaric reality that exists under capitalism, where millions starve to death every year despite enough food being produced to feed the world 1.5 times over.

We could use our skills as construction workers to rapidly build hospitals, rather than, as this the case today, endless luxury apartments and shopping malls for the rich – so that in any future health crisis no one would be forced to go without a bed.

Working class solidarity, democracy and collectivity: these are building blocks of socialism. Socialism is a society in which workers can democratically decide, using all our skills and creativity, what kind of world we want to live in, rather than allowing a wealthy minority of capitalists to run society in the interests of profit. The bosses need us. We don’t need them.

Right now, capitalism is in crisis. Workers have more power than ever, but we’re being forced into more barbaric conditions every day. To quote German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the context of the of the epochal slaughter of World War One, we now stand at a crossroads, “Either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

Every day, new sacrifices are made at the altar of corporate profits – whether it’s the destruction of the environment, or the destruction of human health. The task of organising for a socialist future has never been more urgent.

Resistance in the Time of Cholera: Preliminary Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

In Gabriel García Márquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera, cholera is both literal and metaphorical. So too is COVID-19. Not the virus itself necessarily (though its complicated emergence and uneven spread and effects surely implicates our current system), but the massive and largely preventable or treatable harms of the virus that have thus far gone largely unprevented and untreated are the metaphor. Not merely a metaphor, of course. Not a metaphor in the sense of being immaterial or unreal. Metaphor in the sense of representing something much more than itself, symbolizing that which is beyond itself.

Metaphor. Representation. Microcosm. Heuristic. Epitome. Choose your label. The key point is that we must pay attention to the important reality that if we focus exclusively on the COVID-19 pandemic from a medical or public health perspective we are going to miss most of what we must learn from and through this crisis. Unlike the bacterial cholera, the viral COVID-19 is not as easily treatable or preventable, though with an eventual vaccine it can become more preventable. Cholera persists for the same systemic reasons why COVID-19 and the flu persist. This is what global capitalism’s demands of sadistic efficiency and perverse profit-seeking produce. What these infections share is their dialectical imbrication within the same system that contains the potential technical means to humanely resolve various harms, but profits off of their continuation.

COVID-19 is only on our radar such as it is because of the inability of our unjust, unequal, irrational, sadistic, and undemocratic political economic system to care for all the people who need and deserve care in this world. It is the match on an accelerant-soaked woodpile. We should be paying attention less to the match and more on the precursory conditions. And this isn’t a suggestion we don’t also pay attention and attempt to organize around the specifics of the harmful effects of COVID-19 and the systemic failures specifically related to the current crisis. To not prioritize these immediate concerns would be ethically unconscionable and politically unsound. People have immediate needs. This is instead a call, as I’ve written before in a different context, to focus on the forest and the trees.

What can resistance look like before we regain the option to gather in public together and protest and lead campaigns for the necessary radical reforms needed in the short-term? What can it look like given that we then must necessarily aim towards the more systemic, revolutionary changes needed to produce a democratic, egalitarian post-capitalist world – a genuinely democratic, socialist world?

Theodor Adorno wrote of the splinter in the eye that becomes a magnifying glass. Who has the splinters in their eyes right now (beyond the everyday splinters that all precarious workers, poor, and oppressed peoples have in their eyes)? The immunocompromised. The elderly. Those without insurance or are underinsured. The otherwise at-risk. The already-infected. Our healthcare workers. Logistics, factory, and warehouse workers.

These people are already facing the tip of the spear. For many, the spear has already pierced the skin. These are the best sites of contestation and struggle at the moment. For those in other industries who are not on the front lines of the current crisis, what can we do? We can prepare for the post-social distancing struggles. We can support those who are in need and in struggle today. And we can engage in a wider array of solidarity-building activities that reach those people who are waking up politically during this pandemic. These are our best tools—and they are tools that are not unique to this crisis.

Right now, basically all forms of conventional public resistance would do more harm than good—perhaps with the exception of strikes (or preferably, strong strike-threats that are more likely than ever to be acceded to without need to resort to an actual work stoppage). It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of workers at the moment, with greater power to inspire fundamental systemic change, than our front-line healthcare workers. So long as they are put at disproportionate risk, not wholly different from their pre-pandemic workplace experiences no doubt, they could and should demand the world.

This isn’t just about leveraging this crisis to win previously needed workplace safety reforms and benefit increases though, while “essential workers” have much more power that they have ever had before (or at least experiencing a greater awareness of their latent political-economic power). The fights that were on-going before the crisis remain. In the US, we have immigrants in concentration camps. We have a racialized mass incarceration system. Endless warfare remains endless. Most people are struggling week-to-week to make ends meet, often to no avail. We are also seeing states like Texas and Ohio prohibit abortion procedures under the guise of bans on non-essential medical procedures. Shove a fetus inside one of these wealthy white, straight male GOP lawmakers and see if they don’t think its removal is essential. We need to keep our eyes open and voices loud, however we can.

While there are many aspects of the variable and uneven government responses to stopping the spread of COVID-19 (“flattening the curve” through differentially enforced “social distancing” and “test, track, and trace” approaches) that are absolutely vital to avoiding a more massive death toll than anyone wants to think about; they should not be viewed as permanently inviolable rules that all should follow as long as they’re told. They are also not innocuous, even so long as we are participating. Even a necessary policy is not necessarily wholly virtuous. There are questions of privacy and data-profiteering to be concerned about. While we should always be skeptical of enhancements to the power of the national security state, it does seem like compliance is the lesser evil at the moment. That may change, if things get far worse and governments fail to response adequately and justly. I write this not be produce this outcome sooner. I write it so you will be prepared to think differently about the current public health demands being placed on billions of people around the world. No one must stay home to die when acting publicly can save lives.

That said, people won’t—or shouldn’t—long withstand the demand from the capitalist class and their ideological snake oil salespeople that people go to work and die for the short-term profits of corporations, nor will they stay home and suffer, perhaps to death. At least, I see enough reason to be optimistic that people will not tolerate either of these developments. People have been made—conditioned—to withstand much over many, many decades of capitalist violence and exploitation, suffering irrationally without any sense of what possible alternatives are achievable in practice. While it is possible people will “choose” to suffer more, I have hope that this time things will be different. Either genuine socialist demands are won, or capitalism should not be allowed to be resuscitated. Either the people are resuscitated and healed, made more whole than capitalism ever allowed before, or capitalism should be allowed to die—and a new order built on its ungrievable ashes.

We are in a paradoxical, indeed dialectical, moment (though, within capitalism, when aren’t we?). The response we need to this crisis—the twin-crisis of COVID-19 and capitalism—is organized, collective, mass democratic action. Yet this is precisely what good public health guideline compliance prohibits. Still, we must comply. Compliance today is solidarity. Even if that may change, today it is undeniably true. Stay home. Wash your hands. Use the technologies available to check-in on others. This is what we can do. But the contradictions of organizing within capitalism, the extreme difficulty in getting people to show up and stand out, are not particular to the COVID-19 pandemic. We cannot do what must be done, but too many people weren’t doing what was politically necessary two months ago either. This is something we must reflect on and be honest about. This is not an indictment. It is a call for political growth.

We can use technologies to do some things, but not what is fully-required in this moment. If you’re reading this right now and are thinking, “he is wrong and I have the answer,” please speak up. We need questions and critique as ever before, but we also need answers and alternatives perhaps more than ever before. At least as much as before.

Of course, it is a cruel irony that for many people for whom work is a major time and energy occupier during “normal” times, for whom work is the primary barrier to more fully committed organizing and activist, that these people who have more time to spend on political activities are now required to stay home. I know for many people there is no irony at all; either their work responsibilities have remained unchanged (or increased) or their care and home labor obligations have increased in precise quantity to the amount their waged work requirements have diminished. For many, both sides have increased. This is not a cruel irony. It is, simply, a cruelty.

However, the cruelest irony is that we continue to live in a global society that could, actually quite easily provide for all the basic needs, and possibly beyond, for all people on this planet, and yet we are compelled to live within a system that prevents that from becoming a reality; a system that actively undermines that possibility at nearly every turn.

Postscript

I was wrong several weeks ago when I compared COVID-19 to the flu (though at that time the data was so sketchy and testing so incomplete, the 1% morality rate seemed like an exaggeration. Globally, today the percentage is closer to .5%, which is still roughly five times higher than the flu). When I said what I said, it was not to diminish the suffering or severity of COVID-19, but a somewhat misguided attempt to highlight just how many people die from the flu every year. Compare the typical response and outrage to annual flu death to that of COVID-19, and you would be left with the sad truth that no one fucking cares if people die from the flu, apparently. COVID-19 is both more contagious and deadly, but at some point we should probably have a conversation about why so many people die unnecessarily from the flu….

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University and also teaches as an adjunct professor at Florida International University. He is a contributing editor for the Hampton Institute and founding curator of  LeftHooked, a monthly socialist media aggregator and review powered by the Hampton Institute. Bryant is also the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power. He is the co-editor (with Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; Haymarket 2020), and author of “Dialectical Ends and Beginning: Why Barbarism at the End of Capitalism Means Barbarism Beyond Capitalism” in Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope (eds. Adam Fishwick and Nicholas Kiersey, forthcoming with Pluto Press).

Marx, Nature, and Political Morality

By Ben Stahnke

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread: A Scholarly Journal of Revolutionary Theory and Practice

“It is singular that all of the political economists of England have overlooked the fact that man is a mere borrower from the earth, and that when he does not pay his debts, she does as do all other creditors, that is, she expels him from his holding.” [1]

It is not trope, nor is it particularly controversial, to assert that global environmental change and climate change are among the most pressing issues for the earth and its biotic communities. Climate change—inclusive of its present anthropogenic drivers—is, by no small stretch, not only the most important environmental issue facing human communities to date, it is overwhelmingly accepted as fact by international ecological, geological, and climatological experts. The primary anthropogenic drivers of such change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are demographic, economic, sociopolitical, and technological in nature. Such drivers can only be intimately connected to the ways in which extant societies produce and reproduce their material existences.

As the climate continues to warm, negative impacts not only reach towards biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, sea-level rise, glacier-mass balance, sea-ice thickness, and snow cover, but towards the behaviors of biological systems as well. On the human scale—exacerbated by violent conflicts—climate change negatively impacts agricultural production, development processes, health, wellness, and water resources; often affecting poor and subaltern communities in disproportionately impactful ways.

As the climate continues to warm—a warming which now may be measured during the span of a single human lifetime [2]—ideas regarding the degree to which human impact has affected natural climate variability have become increasingly politicized. When environmental regulations have the ability to both impact and curtail human industrial activities, and where industrial activities—under the capitalist mode of production—largely control political policymaking processes through extensive lobbying, regressive politicking, and the appointment of partisan industry heads into regulatory positions, the hope for effective policies diminishes to a hopelessness.

Under capitalism, and especially in the United States, business enjoys a “special relationship with government.” [3] And, according to Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom: “government officials know this. They know that widespread failure of business […] will bring down the government. […] Consequently, government policy makers show constant concern about business performance.” [4] As such, under U.S. capitalism, ad hoc regulations not only fall sway to the back-and-forth of the two-party structure; regulation remains, ultimately, subservient to business itself.

If one presidential administration can simply retract and withdraw the environmental protections set in place by prior administrations, the policymaking processes of U.S. federalism as such appear in a futile and circular—if not regressive—light. Lacking a central vision, and without the effective extra-partisan regulatory mechanisms in place to enact progressive, long-term, and sustainable environmental protections, U.S. capitalism as a mode of production thus sets itself against the earth.

However, capitalist production, as Karl Marx observed in Capital, also “creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation.” [5] In other words, capitalism, for its failings, is not only an historical, social, and evolutionary improvement upon the feudal-manorial socio-economy which it replaced, it also contains within itself—as a mode of production—the seeds of a future, socialized mode of production; waiting only for an historical actualization. As Antonio Gramsci noted, “it contains in itself the principle through which [it] can be superseded.” [6]

The failings, as well as the dangers, of the present mode of production lie bound up not only within its endemic social exploitation, nor within its environmental exploitation; but within the rift which has occurred between human society and the earth at large. Well known for his insightful work on Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, political scientist and sociologist John Bellamy Foster observed that:

“Marx employed the concept of a ‘rift’ in the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth to capture the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence—what he called ‘the everlasting nature-imposed condition[s] of human existence.’” [7]

Such a rift in the relationship between the human species and the earth has not only led to a capitalist mode of production which—following directly on the heels of the plundering of the Americas and of Africa by European imperial powers—continues to destroy ecosystems and human populations in the quest for profit; it continues to drive regressive environmental policymaking in ways which only act to reproduce extant social relationships of production and power, as well as the economic means of production and distribution.

Following the waves of Inclosure and Commons Acts which dispossessed peoples from common lands towards the coasts and towards increasingly populated city centers, and driven by changing economic and social pressures, capitalist production has, as Marx observed, done two things:

1. it has “concentrated the historical motive power of society” [8] away from the manors to the towns, thus creating the sociopolitical conditions for a new hierarchical stratification, with the emergent bourgeoisies on top; and

2. it “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing.” [9]

On a finite world, with essentially finite material resources, and in light of a productive mode predicated upon a logic of profit and growth at all costs, Marx saw the rift in the metabolism between human organism and land—as well as the endemic alienation from the productive activities entailed by mankind’s species nature upon the earth—as not only a primary failing of the capitalist productive mode, but also the mechanism through which capitalism may be superseded.

Such a rift, for Marx, was not biologically nor economically sustainable and as such would lead to its own demise, as well as to its transcendence—towards a new ecological and economic sustainability. Such a sustainability was, for Marx, possible only through a socialization of polity, policymaking, and governance. On this, Marx noted that:

“Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” [10]

Such a socialized governance not only entails materially oriented policies and political structures, but also necessitates an ideological structure focused upon such goals as ecological sustainability, human harmony with the Earth System, and a deconstruction of the logic of profit which presently guides human political interest.

That the earth itself is “a single system within which the biosphere is an active, essential component” [11] should be a primary focus for political and environmental policymaking. The variegated and numerous communities of the earth’s species interact via biotic, abiotic, chemical, physical, and climatological factors within and with the biosphere and, as such, operate metabolically with the earth itself, where metabolism—in both the Aristotelian and the contemporary sense—denotes both change and a circulation of matter. For Karl Marx, the metabolic interdependence and interconnectivity of the human organism and the earth was, as noted in Capital:

“a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature … Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” [12]

Such a metabolism—the circulation of matter for the production and reproduction of human species-existence—was, for Marx, not an abstract idea but one which was grounded in a material conception of the identity between organism and environment. For example, “The German word ‘Stoffwechsel,’” Foster noted, “directly sets out in its elements the notion of ‘material exchange’ that underlies the notion of structured processes of biological growth and decay captured in the term ‘metabolism.’” [13] Such a conception, for Marx, was implicitly dialectical: a “unity and struggle of opposites.” [14]

The striving towards a positive-dialectical and sustainable metabolism between the human species and the earth was thus, for Marx, a central focus of the entire theory of political communism—a theory which “differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production … [and which] turns existing conditions into conditions of unity.” [15]

Such conditions are inherently communitarian, for only a community-oriented humanity can collectively respond to the dangers and impacts of a rapidly changing world; guided, as they are, by direct, lived knowledge of community needs and requirements. Effective policy creation thus requires community involvement; further, it requires not only socialized command and control (CAC) regulation guided by a singular vision of sustainability, but a dialectic of CAC thus unified with (and struggling for) bottom-up community input.

A changing world evolves not in the presence of a static humanity; rather, a changing world both impacts and modifies its inhabitor-species. The Holocene Extinction, presently underway, evidences that in light of a changing world, species either adapt progressively or perish en masse. With regard to environmental policy, political inquiry, and socialized governance, theorists and policymakers should turn their attention towards the articulation of policy built upon a conception of the world which is radically different from the present, capitalist conception of the world as both separated and static; a world which, for the capitalist, exists as naught but a collection of resources exploitable for the profit of a dominant class.

However, policy makers and political theorists cannot make progress through a changing of ideas and conceptions alone; such change must coexist with a radical political-economic restructuring:

“by the action of individuals in again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” [16]

Policy makers and political theorists inside of the U.S. should seek to look towards extra-national polities who successfully deal, and who have dealt, with rapid changes in climate; polities who have successfully utilized CAC to confront climate change, such as China and Cuba. In the midst of not only a rapidly changing world, but a world with a great extinction underway, national rivalries and ideological patriotisms in the political-environmental fields only work to undo and to thwart progress.

We must—as philosophers, scientists, and researchers of politics, economics, and policy—work towards a greater goal; indeed, no less than the greatest goal—the adaptation and progressive response to a world undergoing quick change, so that we might secure a sustainable existence for the children of humanity for as long as the earth will have us.

To end with the words of the late Marxist political philosopher Scott Warren, “We must be involved in nothing less than the discovery and creation of a world worthy of the human spirit to inhabit, as well as the discovery and creation of a human spirit worthy of the world.” [17]

NOTES

[1] Henry Carey, The Slave Trade Domestic and Foreign (1853), quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 152.

[2] Lee Hannah, Thomas Lovejoy, and Stephen Schneider, “Biodiversity and Climate Change in Context,” in Climate Change and Biodiversity, eds. Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 4.

[3] Charles Lindblom and Edward Woodhouse, The Policy-Making Process: 3rd Edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 90.

[4] Charles Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process: 2nd Edition, (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 73.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I , 637.

[6] Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 371.

[7] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 163.

[8] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, 637.

[9] Ibid., 637.

[10] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 959.

[11] Will Steffen, et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, (Berlin: Springer, 2005), 1.

[12] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, 283.

[13] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 157.

[14] Eftichios Bitsakis, “Complementarity: Dialectics or Formal Logic,” in Nature, Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 2002), 276.

[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011), 70.

[16] Ibid., 74.

[17] Scott Warren, The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 198.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Beaud, Michel. A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000. Translated by Tom Dickman and Any Lefebvre. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1999.

Warren, Scott. The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.

Capitalism, COVID-19, and Crisis: A Class Analysis

(Photo Credit: Mark Lennihan, Associated Press)

By Ikemba X

The Capitalist/Imperialist Class

In the past week, the global economy experienced its worst week since 2008 (following a series of “Worst Weeks”, it keeps getting worse), and the economic crisis is sure to deteriorate as time marches on. Three years of growth in the market have evaporated, unemployment has seen a spike, multiple industrial sectors have slowed to a crawl or stopped moving altogether, and the trillion-dollar injection into the market by the Federal Reserve did almost nothing to stop the free fall (other than transfer toxic assets to the public). If the recession hasn’t already hit us, we’re in for a catastrophe when the bills are due. The following is a brief outline on how we got here, and how much worse it's going to be this time around.

The modern capitalist economy simply cannot function without large amounts of fiat currency in the form of government-backed loans. As the bourgeoisie continues its song and dance of improving the means of production, increasing production of commodities, and better perfecting the division of labor, the price of operating such vast and complex industrial armies and machines is simply too much. In order to compensate for this massive cost, the bourgeoisie in the global core have forged an alliance between industrial and finance capital, exporting ever increasing amounts of production overseas, so that cheaper labor can be exploited. At home, the use of credit, loans, and ownership of companies into shares have allowed capitalists to continue their operations, though the market has grown more unstable than ever before. The financial crisis in 2008 drove capitalism to the brink of collapse, and it was caused specifically by inherent contradictions in the system. The rate of profit has continued to fall, production has become more expensive and commodities are produced in greater volumes for lower prices. Any panic in the market has a ripple effect, and the harsh truth is that a large majority of the world’s “wealth” is artificial, mere symbols in a computer program that rely solely on blind faith. If the bourgeoisie becomes scared enough to taking out its money and halting production, the whole rotten structure collapses. If not for the action taken by the Feds over the past few decades, including multiple bouts of quantitative easing under Obama, the global market may very well have imploded long ago. It took almost a decade for the economy to mostly recover from the 2008 crisis, for the working class a recovery never really came, and some of its effects are still felt in more isolated sectors of the economy today. 

Leading up to the COVID-19 scare, there was an already existing crisis in imperialism and capitalist production. Notably, the Trade War between China and the United States has had negative effects on the rival imperialist powers, who were willing to threaten economic crises while jockeying for hegemony in the world market. The global energy sector was also entering a crisis, with Russia and the OPEC countries at an impasse on restricting oil production, which had the effect of flooding the market with oil. The overproduction of commodities in this critical sector of the economy was causing problems for the bourgeoisie in the United States, who have responded by seizing oil fields in Syria and beating the war drums, threatening Iran with invasion. Meanwhile, European nations are experiencing a contraction of unified dominance as Brexit causes a fracture in European imperialism, and a potential crisis in the UK with the looming threat of a No-Deal Brexit. This would have significant ripple effects on the global market, as the UK is one of the largest economies in the world. 

It is important to remember that this crisis was caused purely through the anarchy of capitalist production. Once the capitalists were bailed out following 2008, imperialist plunder continued and the bourgeoisie recovered, leaving the proletariat to fend for themselves and foot the bill. This time around, production really has stopped, and the effects on the capitalist economy will be disastrous. The Chinese economy today makes up 16% of global Gross World Product, is the second largest economy in the world, and has the largest pool of cheap labor, as well as being a rising imperialist power, offering predatory loans to African countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, factories responsible for 70% of China’s exports have simply ceased to operate or have cut production massively, and travel to and from the country has been shut down completely. Several other countries have shut down massive sectors of their economy such as the airlines, and Italy has shut down its country altogether. Therefore, this latest crisis isn't caused by capitalists being unable to pay for their ventures, but rather there simply is no movement of capital, and no production of commodities. With this monumental economic halt/slowdown, we are staring in the face of a crisis the likes of which we have not seen in almost a century. The COVID-19 is sending the capitalist system into a freefall, and as always, the bourgeoisie and their governments will do everything in their power to make sure the workers absorb the brunt of this fall.

The Proletarian Situation

The situation in the United States is dire for the proletariat. For starters, there is a debt crisis, $14 trillion consisting mostly of mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards. Deepening wealth inequality has accelerated the fall of real wages, and today (even before the arrival of COVID-19) most proletarians are in dire straits. Half of Americans make $30 thousand a year or less, and 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a $400 crisis. Real unemployment was sitting at about 5% and has now spiked to almost 20%, and underemployment or those who have given up on finding jobs represent a forgotten sector that the US government is fine keeping in the dark. With the COVID-19 scare, layoffs are rising at an unprecedented rate, and those who aren't being fired are having their hours cut. In a country where health insurance is tied to employment, a pandemic which causes a spike in unemployment is probably the worst-case scenario for a proletarian.

The COVID-19 scare has also affected the mentality of the working class, who have begun panic buying commodities. This almost immediately resulted in a shortage of goods, which has ripped away the veil which hid the scarcity that does exist in capitalism, just like any other system. Lean manufacturing, or Just-in-Time manufacturing, provided us all with the hallucination that there was always an abundance of products for us to buy. However, after being put under pressure, the lie has been exposed for what it really is. In a nutshell, the transportation system has been developed enough that capitalists can rely on the nomadic lifestyle of proletarians in that industry. There is no large-scale storage of goods, but rather far-away sites that remain available whenever products are needed. Such a system is incredibly volatile, and any disruption in the distribution chain can cause an immediate and drastic shortage. We saw a glimpse of this with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when the natural disaster destroyed the colony of Puerto Rico. The result was that there was a global shortage of IV bags, since Puerto Rico was the hub of production for these goods. Now, imagine a crisis like this, but in multiple industries on every level of the production process, and not just based on production itself being shut down, but also on the transportation industry being paralyzed (like what we’ve seen with the decline in airline traffic and mass layoffs of truckers). China produces most of the world’s steel and, as stated before, their industrial production has been slashed in 70% of factories. And that is just one country. Globally, we are already seeing crippling shortages of medical supplies, most notably in Italy, the United States, and Iran, which has been the hardest hit of the three due to imperialist sanctions.

There has also been a growing trend of social distancing and self-isolation as a result of the pandemic. The cultural effects of this have the potential to negatively impact us all. Sowing fear and distrust of each other, the COVID-19 scare threatens to further divide us, further alienate us, and further fuel xenophobic and racist tendencies among white proletarians, as indicated by the recent uptick in racially-motivated attacks against proletarians of East Asian descent. This directly plays into some of the most reactionary and chauvinistic ideas in the US, expressed clearly by the Bourgeois slogan “China Lied, People Died” and scapegoating, such as labeling COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus.”

In December of last year, the service sector accounted for 97% of new hires according to the Labor department. Additionally, the US economy relies heavily on consumer spending, and while the rush on grocery stores and online shopping may offset this in the short term, less and less people will be able to sustain this spending as incomes dry up in the coming months. Couple this development with the above-mentioned fact that most workers live paycheck to paycheck, and we see a crisis in consumption of commodities, one of the basic causes of capitalist crisis.

In short, the situation looks bad for the proletariat. Congress can’t even pass basic measures, and the clock is ticking. There have been discussions in Congress about a potential UBI bill, but if this crisis continues for several months, one-time checks will not be enough to stop the bleeding. Successive monthly checks may stop the bleeding in the interim, but the ripples effects of mass unemployment are sure to carry well into 2021, if not multiple years beyond. In other words, we’re going to see a crisis the likes of which the world has never seen before.

What Can We Do?

There have been some policies proposed by Social-Democratic elements of the Democratic Party in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures proposed are attempts to treat the symptoms, and not cure the problem. Things like Medicare for All and nationalization of the healthcare system, as well as nationalizing any industries which seek government bailouts, do not get rid of the underlying economic problems which lead to the crisis we are faced with today. Medicare for All in theory protects us all from the virus, but we have seen clearly that the capitalist system of production and distribution has utterly failed the Italians, who have been hit by a chronic lack of medical supplies for their patients. In other words, what good will universal healthcare be if the medical industry itself cannot handle the demand. Currently, the for-profit system in the US offers less than 1 million hospital beds, in a nation of 330 million people. Additionally, our aim should not be to simply treat the sick. We must have a centrally-planned economy, with systems in place that prepare large storages of medical supplies we need for when viruses like this are unleashed on the world. We need an economic system that does not collapse after one month of a fraction of its production being cut. 

Activists should be cautious moving forward in their political work. The most important thing we can implement right now is Serve-the-People survival programs, specifically in terms of food and medical supplies. In doing our work, make sure to have hand sanitizer, gloves, and masks on hand for use and distribution. We should also not allow social distancing and hygiene practices to be spurred on by panic, and use them with clear heads, knowing full well that we are protecting the lives of others through these actions, not just ourselves.

The large-scale demonstrations are coming. No society can have mass unemployment and shortages of basic materials without intensifying the class struggle as a result. We must be prepared to go among the masses where they organize, and organize our own demonstrations, building strong links with the people. Go to the masses, learn from them, and educate them. Most of all, stay safe. Use the time given to us in this crisis to study theory from revolutionary teachers such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Do not hesitate, and do not be afraid of study. Study the conditions of the people. I strongly recommend we all crack open Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done” again, in preparation for the coming months.

The Great Bernie Bust and Why It Was Seemingly Inevitable

By Daniel Lazare

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

It is now all but certain that Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate. 

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? The Bernie Sanders boom captivated the global left. Everywhere else, social democrats seemed to be on the rocks. Britain’s Labour Party was a shambles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise was losing steam, while Syriza and Podemos were hardly more than memories of radical opportunities lost. Only in the United States did the story seem any different, thanks to Sanders’ long march through the Democratic Party.

But that was before the ‘Super Tuesday’ cataclysm on March 3 and then ‘mini-Tuesday’ a week later, when six states voted, including the all-important Michigan. After losing 10 of 14 states in the first, Sanders needed a sharp rebound in the second to remain viable. He did not get it. He came in 16 points behind Joe Biden in Michigan, 25 points behind in Missouri, six points behind in Idaho, and a whopping 66 behind in Mississippi. Only in North Dakota and Washington state did he eke out victories by 6.1 and 0.2 points respectively.

Sanders will still have a sizable bloc of delegates going into the Democratic national convention in July. But since he has promised to rally around whoever gets the nomination, he will have no choice but to pay homage to the odious Biden on bended knee.

This is certainly a dramatic turnabout. Hillary Clinton messed up so badly in 2016 that even the most skeptical Marxists assumed that the nomination was Sanders’ for the asking. But they proved to be wrong. What happened?

One possibility is that American exceptionalism turns out yet again to be nothing more than a myth and that any notion of the US left bucking international trends is a pipedream. Comparisons with Britain are striking. Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide leadership victory in September 2015 presaged Sanders’ dramatic breakthrough in the 2016 Michigan primary, while Corbyn’s disastrous performance last December paved the way for the latest debacle.

But in another sense the Bernie bust shows that the US is exceptional after all -- in a purely negative sense, that is. Not only is the American two-party system exceptionally old and suffocating, but it is exceptionally entrenched. In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, he was able to gain ballot access in all of the then 48 states. Today, the same feat would be impossible, thanks to sky-high registration requirements, designed to cripple upstart parties before they can even get off the ground.

Indeed, 1912 would be the last time that one of the two top vote-getters would be anyone other than a Republican or Democrat. (Roosevelt came in second behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson, while Republican William Howard Taft was third.) Since then, Americans have voted ‘Repocratic’ with depressing regularity. Since polls show overwhelming support for a third-party alternative, it is not because they want to, but because they effectively have no choice.

But the US system is not only restrictive, but exceptionally regulated. “Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association,” the social democratic website, Jacobin.com, observed in 2016. “But US state laws dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its leadership structure, leadership selection process and many of its internal rules ...”1  Rather than parties, as the rest of the world understands the term, the result is more akin to a couple of state-sponsored churches with intricate government-imposed rules concerning the selection of bishops and parish priests, weekly services, and so on.

It is a travesty of democracy every step of the way. Nonetheless, Sanders hoped to use a free and unbiased primary system to somehow leapfrog to a higher stage of development. He was wrong, not only because the party establishment turned against him at a crucial moment, but because primaries turn out to be shaped by moral assumptions that powerfully affect what voters say and do.

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist blessed with occasional moments of insight into America’s unique political system, summed up the problem neatly in the wake of Super Tuesday. The primaries, he wrote, showed that:

“Democrats are not just a party; they’re a community. In my years of covering politics, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what happened in the 48 hours after South Carolina - millions of Democrats from all around the country, from many different demographics, turning as one and arriving at a common decision. It was like watching a flock of geese or a school of fish, seemingly leaderless, sensing some shift in conditions, sensing each other’s intuitions, and smoothly shifting direction en masse. A community is more than the sum of its parts. It is a shared sensibility and a pattern of response.2 ”

All those geese and fish call to mind Edmund Burke’s famous description of the people as “thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak,” as they silently chew their cud. But Brooks is right: rather than rational and deliberative, political parties in America are indeed leaderless mobs, held together not by a common program and ideology, but by a shared sensibility. In the case of the Democrats, that means devotion to the tradition of Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Martin Luther King junior, even though they stood for very different things. But anyone who dares point out that FDR refused to support an anti-lynching bill or that King opposed LBJ’s war in Vietnam will be accused of failing to participate in the higher consciousness that the Democratic Party demands.

Worst candidate

That is why the party leadership was able to turn the race around so neatly. The process began two days after Sanders’s impressive 47% win in the Nevada primary, when house majority whip Jim Clyburn intervened on Biden’s behalf. When CNN asked Clyburn what he was “hearing from the Democratic caucus in the house about having, potentially, Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, at the top of the ticket,” he replied:

“I was in Texas about three weeks ago … I talked to the faith community down there, and they were very, very concerned about whether or not we’ll have somebody on the ticket that will cause down-ballot carnage. That’s our biggest problem among my members. We want to see somebody on the ticket that will allow us to expand our numbers, not having to run as some kind of a rearguard campaign, in order to keep from being tarnished with a label. So our candidates are really concerned about that.3 ”

They were concerned, in other words, about seeing their careers go up in smoke, thanks to someone using an s-word that they regard as irrelevant, threatening and unnecessarily disruptive.

But it was Barack Obama’s phone call to Pete Buttigieg four days later that really did the trick. Despite Obama’s disastrous later years, Democrats remember his administration as a golden age, especially after Trump. Hence, his influence is overwhelming. After months of Yoda-like silence, therefore, all he had to do was make a single phone call to Buttigieg on March 1, telling him to withdraw in favor of Biden to trigger an avalanche. Suddenly, word was out that Sanders was getting ahead of himself and had to be reined in.

With that, David Brooks’ school of fish reversed course. As he says, the response was not deliberative or rational, but intuitive. Democrats felt that Sanders was heading in the wrong direction and that Biden would be the wiser course. So they acted on instinct -- and radical-left hopes were dashed.

The debacle bears out American exceptionalism in another way as well: ie, by showing that the direction of American politics is now exceptionally disastrous. To be sure, the US is not facing national break-up the way the UK is. But it is hard to imagine a worse Democratic nominee to go up against Trump. The list of Biden’s Jerry Lewis-like pratfalls and missteps is too long to go into. Suffice it to say that he joined with the notorious southern racist, Jesse Helms, to oppose school bussing as a remedy for de facto segregation in the 1970s and then authored key legislation in the 1980s that ramped up the war on drugs and led to the mass incarceration of millions of poor people and members of racial minorities. He voted in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as vice-president, backed US intervention in Libya, Syria and Yemen -- all of which have turned out to be catastrophic. Thanks to a motor mouth he can never quite control, he let the cat out of the bag in 2014 regarding US policy with regard to Syria and al Qa’eda: “Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” he told a Harvard audience:

“The Turks … the Saudis, the emirates, etc - what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and al Qa’eda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.4

The fact that Obama ordered Biden to apologize to the Saudis and others for his indiscretion confirms that the administration was not only unable to control their pro-al Qa’eda activities, but was determined to cover them up.5 ”

All of which will provide Trump with more than enough ammunition in the fall. But Biden suffers from another problem as well: significant cognitive decline. The contrast with the smooth-talking politician of just a few years ago is startling. Words tumble out chaotically, non-sequiturs abound and ideas break off in mid-sentence. Here he is trying to explain how to make up for the effects of school segregation in a presidential debate in September:

“…Make sure that we bring into the help the -- the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need - we have one school psychologist for every 15 hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy … now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four and five-year-olds go to school - school, not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want - they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the -- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.6 ”

Exceptionalism

There are dozens of examples of such garbled word salads. Trump will undoubtedly make full use of them, just as he will make full use of Biden’s disastrous misadventures in the Middle East and his role in the Burisma scandal in the Ukraine. This does not mean that he will win -- after all, a lot can happen in the eight months prior to the November election. But, even if Biden prevails, he will be the American equivalent of a Konstantin Chernenko -- the semi-comatose commissar who ran the Soviet Union for 13 months in the mid-1980s and helped drive it into the ground.

That will be the final expression of American exceptionalism -- a brain-addled serial war criminal who is rushing the empire with exceptional speed to its demise.

Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso).

Notes

1. . S Ackerman, ‘A blueprint for a new party’ Jacobin August 11 2016.↩︎

2. . D Brooks, ‘Biden’s rise gives the establishment one last chance’ The New York Times March 5 2020.↩︎

3. . The full exchange can be viewed at www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/28/rep-james-clyburn-democrats-concerned-down-ballot-carnage-sot-newday-vpx.cnn.↩︎

4. . The quote begins at 53:30 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKVCtg5dxM.↩︎

5. . M Landler, ‘Saudis are next on Biden’s Mideast apology list after Harvard remarks’ The New York Times October 6 2014.↩︎

6. . The full quote is available at www.youtube.com
   /watch?time_continue=6&v=4AYVwgcAOMY
   &feature=emb_logo.↩︎

Everyone's a Socialist in a Crisis

By Tom Bramble

Republished from Red Flag.

One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang.

Every student with the misfortune to have studied economics at school or university will know that “the market” is the god before which we must all kneel. Markets bring consumers and producers together to ensure an equilibrium of supply and demand, the textbooks tell us. We may all be individuals each pursuing our own private interests, but this selfish endeavour miraculously results in an optimum outcome for all.

You don’t even have to step inside a classroom to have received this lesson. It’s rammed home in normal times in every newspaper, in every news bulletin on the TV, in every politician’s speech. Just listen to them. Governments can’t expand spending on Newstart because “the markets” won’t allow it. Governments shouldn’t ramp up public housing because that will throw property markets into a spin. Competition should be opened between universities because a market in education will sift out the bad providers from the good.

The champions of the market, if challenged to explain how it is that markets consistently result in supplies of goods lurching from shortages to gluts, point to the economic dysfunction of the old Soviet Union as proof that if “planning” replaces the market, a much bigger disaster ensues.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see what rubbish this is. The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally.

But there’s another angle to this. Capitalists preach “the market” for the working class – stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government – but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments in Australia. The vehicle manufacturers raked in hundreds of millions a year from the Australian government for decades until deciding it wasn’t enough and went overseas. This is why big companies and industry groups hire armies of former politicians to lobby on their behalf in the offices of premiers and prime ministers – there’s money in government coffers and they want it.

And while the capitalists talk about “the market” setting wages for workers, in reality, they don’t really allow the market to do the job. They use the whole apparatus of state repression, the industrial tribunals, the police, the courts to suppress workers’ rights to organise to pursue their demands.

But when a crisis hits all the bullshit about the market is thrown to the winds. And that is just what we are seeing now. Faced with the collapse of the capitalist economy, for the second time in a dozen years, with massive bankruptcies on the table and the stock market plunging by more than 30 percent and more to come, fervent advocates of the free market are now embracing government intervention to save their skins. As the Financial Times put it on 18 March, “World leaders have been forced to tear up the traditional economic playbook in response to the historic jolt to the global economy”.

In the United States, the heart of free market capitalism, capitalists and politicians alike are demanding huge government handouts. As the New York Times explained on 17 March: “Business groups, local and state leaders and a growing chorus of lawmakers and economists begged the federal government to spend trillions of dollars to pay workers to stay home and funnel money to companies struggling with an abrupt end to consumer activity”.

Politicians and their advisers who just a week ago were scorning the idea of “helicopter money”, government payments to businesses and consumers to stimulate the economy, are now trying to outbid each other to push the figure up. The Trump administration, proclaiming a state of war in the fight against coronavirus and the economic crisis, will shortly launch a huge fiscal stimulus program pumping more than US$1 trillion into the economy in two stages, including potentially $1,000 handouts to spur spending. And there will be more to come.

In other times, Trump might have denounced his proposals as “socialism”. Not today. He now boasts that his new package will be “big and bold”. His chief adviser, Larry Kudlow, says that Trump has agreed to do “whatever it takes” to address the crisis. Senator John Cornyn, second highest ranking Republican in the Senate, for whom government intervention is normally anathema, explained: “Our economy, our whole economy is in jeopardy”. Some in the Democratic Party, which in recent years has become the favoured party of Wall Street, are proposing a monthly payment to every American for the duration of the crisis. Alongside this direct injection of funds into the economy, the US Federal Reserve Bank is pumping trillions of dollars into the banks.

As in the US, so too in the rest of the world. The European Commission, which has long insisted that member states keep their budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, has lifted limits on government borrowing. In 2015, it refused to allow the Greek government to hike spending when faced with unemployment of 20 percent, but is now telling governments it’s open slather. The future of European capitalism is at stake, so nothing is off the table. The Swedish government is allowing businesses to defer tax payments for up to a year at a cost equivalent to 6 percent of GDP. Britain has unveiled a £330 billion package of emergency loan guarantees to business and £20 billion in fiscal support.

Tory chancellor (treasurer) Rishi Sunak, said: “This is not a time for ideology or orthodoxy, this is a time to be bold ... I’ll do whatever it takes”. Pedro Sanchez, Spanish prime minister, triggered what he called “the biggest mobilisation of resources in Spain’s’ democratic history”, including €100 billion in state loan guarantees. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has put up €300 billion in state loans to business, told the press: “I will not hesitate [to use] all the means available to me”.

The European Central Bank, which estimates that the crisis might result in the euro area economy shrinking by more than 4 percent this year, is set to inject more than €1 trillion into the European banks in the next nine months. “Extraordinary times require extraordinary action”, says ECB president Christine Lagarde.

In Australia, the Coalition government which has made “balancing the budget” a central feature of its platform, is now spending $18 billion, three-quarters of which will go to business. It is now lining up a new wave of spending commitments for business, both of a general nature, valued at more billions, and also to specific sectors like tourism, sports, arts and entertainment and the airlines which will total more than $1 billion.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is urging the federal government to provide wage subsidies to workers, equivalent in value to Newstart to all businesses experiencing a sharp downturn. It is also asking the government to provide concessional loans of up to half a million dollars, with 80 percent of the debt guaranteed by government, as well as wage subsidies to cover sick leave entitlements. Nothing but corporate welfare of a kind that they have long decried when applied to workers themselves.

In the short term, working class households will get some benefits from this cash splash. In Australia welfare beneficiaries will be getting $750 in their bank accounts. In the United States it is likely that Americans will receiving close to $1,000. But this is just short term relief to get the economy moving. The long term benefits will go to the capitalist class in the form of tax cuts and other financial concessions.

The current crisis demonstrates not only that all the ideological nonsense about the virtues of the free market is quickly thrown overboard when capitalist interests are threatened, but also that the idea that governments are essentially powerless in the face of the markets is rubbish.

Governments are not helpless victims who cannot do anything in the face of “economic reality”. In the normal course of events, when we demand things like better welfare, health care or education, governments tell us that it isn’t possible.

Workers every day face their own personal crises – lack of money to pay the rent or the possibility of defaulting on their mortgage because the boss didn’t call them in for work this week, overdue utility bills that must be paid or risk being cut off, expenses for children’s education that fall due, the fear of redundancy. These are crises that are experienced personally but are really a collective crisis of everyday life for working class people. But when we ask for governments to respond, we are told that addressing these things collectively is not possible, and that this is just the way things are.

But when the capitalist system goes into crisis, governments act promptly. It turns out that political decisions about the economy are possible and it is wholly possible for governments to tell the markets to go jump. The president of the eurozone financial ministers committee summed up the prevailing attitude today: “Rest assured that we will defend the euro with everything we have got”. European finance ministers are looking at deploying a firefighting fund set up during the last eurozone crisis, with €410 billion of capacity. In the case of Spain, the Financial Times reports that an inner circle of government has assumed “command economy powers”. The Spanish government will take responsibility for guaranteeing medical, food and energy supplies.

Most of the time we’re told that “the economy” can’t afford a decent standard of living for workers – higher minimum wages, liveable Newstart allowances, a massively expanded public housing program to get people out of the private rental market, free university education. Budgets have to balance. Businesses have to be competitive. Taxes have to be kept low.

And now, all of a sudden, we’re finding that the economy can, apparently, afford things that we have long demanded. Governments around the world are now laying out money on things that just weeks ago they would have attacked as unaffordable.

The Morrison government has been attacked even by the Business Council for not lifting the Newstart allowance. And now it’s spending $4.7 billion on a one-off $750 payment to millions on welfare. State governments too are ramping up health spending. In Western Australia, the government is freezing utility bills and public transport charges, doubling energy assistance payments and making sick and carers’ leave more available for public sector workers who either have the virus themselves or who need to care for others.

The Hong Kong government has handed out $1,000 payments to citizens. The Italian government, faced with one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19, is suspending mortgage payments. In New Zealand, the government has raised all welfare benefits, permanently, by NZ$25 a week and doubled winter energy payments to beneficiaries and age pensioners. In France also, benefits are being hiked and made more widely available.

It’s not that governments have suddenly discovered a big pot of gold in the basement of the central banks. They say that they are taking these measures to both protect public health and to save the economy. But it’s obvious which takes priority. The new measures constitute the largest bailout bonanza in world history, carried out through state-administered transfers of public wealth and current and future debt to billionaires and big business: socialisation of losses, privatisation of profits. The outcome will be to further transfer, consolidate and concentrate wealth, just as has occurred since the GFC. While there is discussion about small handouts, nothing serious is being proposed to halt the mass layoffs now gathering steam.

In pretty much every spending package, subsidies to business, government loans and tax concessions account for two-thirds or more of the funds outlaid. Things that directly benefit workers – the big majority of the population – account for only one-third of the money. Just think of Australia: $13 billion to business, $4.7 billion to those on welfare.

When you think of the humiliating restrictions imposed on Centrelink clients, business is being showered with money with no strings attached. In Australia, the federal government is offering subsidies to bosses to keep apprentices and trainees. But all that does is encourage bosses to sack the trainee at the end of the six months and take on another one, with another government subsidy. No real jobs created, just a steady flow of money flowing into the bosses’ pockets.

But it’s not just a question of the money being disbursed. Other sacred cows are being slaughtered. The sanctity of private property, for example. The Spanish government has announced that it is requisitioning private hospitals and healthcare providers for the duration and developing plans to house and feed the homeless.

President Trump announced a series of extraordinary measures on 18 March, seizing on the powers vested in him by the Defence Production Act to steer production by private companies to overcome the shortage of masks, ventilators and other health supplies. Playing catchup on testing for COVID-19, Trump is deploying two Navy hospital ships to New York City and the West Coast. Astonishingly for the United States, whose president made his fortune in real estate, the Housing and Urban Development department will suspend foreclosures and evictions until at least the end of April. The federal government is also requiring employers to provide sick leave to workers infected with the virus. In California, the governor has announced plans to buy hotels to house some of the state’s 150,000 homeless people.

In Austria, healthcare workers with children are provided access to free childcare to allow them to continue working. In South Korea, the government is offering emergency child care to parents still at work, with class sizes limited to ten and supervised by trained teachers. In Australia, according to the Guardian, discussions are underway to underwrite home mortgages and even employment guarantees.

It turns out that these things, too, can be done.

So, in an economic emergency, few of the usual rules apply. Governments can marshal the resources and can threaten the narrow interests of private businesses. Hardcore libertarians despise these measures as rampant socialism. From their perspective, they’re right: the very existence of such programs is condemnation of the free market capitalist model that they promote. But they are best seen only as another approach to the management of the capitalist economy.

The fact that governments across the OECD are now prepared to spend trillions of dollar to save the financial system from collapse only confirms that the world economy cannot be left safely in the hands of “the market”. And, the situation clearly confirms that when the capitalist class and governments deem it necessary to save their system, lots of measures they once denounced as “unaffordable”, not permitted by the condition of “the economy”, are actually affordable and permitted. Governments can act when required. The ideological justifications of yesterday are revealed as threadbare. But nor are government interventions of this nature geared towards the interests of the working class, only the interests of the bosses.

The New White Moderate: Liberalism, Political Coercion, and the Failed Electoral Strategy

(Illustration by Nat Thomas/St. Louis Public Radio)

By Joshua Briond

There’s a Jacobin article circling around titled, “Where Do We Go After Last Night’s Defeat?”  published a day after Bernie Sanders’ defeat on March 11th, 2020. The author writes, “the bad news is that the Democratic Party isn’t going anywhere. The good news is that today’s common-sense political demands are, almost unthinkably, democratic socialist ones.” The overarching theme of the article is that the almost undefeatable nature of the Democratic Establishment, in an historical context, is not a reason to move beyond bourgeois politics, but rather justification for being reluctant to look outside of the realm of the two-party system for solutions to our current reality. According to the author, this argument is supported by the fact that the Sanders’ movement, or rather moment, has won the “battle of ideas,” as if that’s something worthy of boasting. As if winning the “battle of ideas” within this arena has ever fed an empty stomach or liberated anyone. The article displays a lack of understanding of what socialism entails, far beyond mild liberal reforms, further proving Sanders’ moment has widely led to a miseducation of socialist ideals. In the end, the author provides the perfect encapsulation of self-congratulatory American chauvinism, symbolism, and unearned arrogance, largely present on all sides of the electoral political spectrum.

To begin, the article credits what is referred to as “five years of “Sandersism” for the “genuine leap forward in politics in the United States, a leap that dwarfs the past half-century of liberal stupidity and backwardness,” unknowingly and unapologetically depicting the vast disconnect present between Sanders’ moment (electoral canvassing) and colonized people (and our organizing and movement efforts). Which precisely demonstrates why national electoral canvassing, specifically as it relates to bourgeois elections, cannot be categorized as “working-class” organizing or movements when it is systematically disconnected from, and neglects the, most marginalized among us. For example, the article takes a braggadocious tone to make a note about how “in five years, we’ve moved forward fifty,” entirely neglecting to mention how state political repression and mass media’s anti-communist smearing following Black radical movements and uprisings in the last 60 years or so affected the political psyche of millions of people. And also how movements and moments, such as Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and others, took place within the last five years and were instrumental in the shift in public discourse and moving politicians, including Bernie Sanders, further left (even if only performatively), with regard to racial and economic justice and state violence. 

The article, in true social-democrat fashion, reeks of liberal idealism and exceptionalism while complacently lecturing us on how our material reality is bad, but not so bad that we can’t endure our continued social and political subjugation with patience while waiting to vote for the next seemingly progressive politician(s) during the next election cycle. There is no emphasis on the local grassroots organizing (beyond campaigning among the electorate) that is already being done by non-white people who receive little-to-no support from the white moderates masquerading as “allies” and “progressives,” who chronically neglect organizers until it’s time to convince us to vote for their preferred candidate. The author tells us we should “reject” the “fantasy that now is the time we all throw ourselves into third-party work or militant protest activity” and that “there is nowhere for us to go.” Which prompts a question: who is this “us” he speaks of? C.L.R. James once wrote, “What Negro, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth [principle] of bourgeois democracy.” The entire article reflects an approach that is not only a product of a widespread culture that lacks political imagination beyond liberal idealizations but has not intellectually or politically struggled with persons of the Black race before, at least not ones who are poor. The author is clearly not from the same hue as the colonized and oppressed people, in desperate material need of far more than even what his beloved Democratic Party is willing to offer, on their best day. But what’s fascinating is just how confident the author is throughout the entirety of the piece with his shit-eating and ramming the politics of electoralism down our throats. And all of this despite the disappointing losses by the most popular progressive politician in the US in back-to-back elections to morally and politically inferior candidates. I pondered on the possibility that maybe this article wasn’t written for me, or us, as in non-white people—but its “colorblind” and race-neutral approach clearly depicts otherwise. However, even the worst of what the white-American community has to offer is undeserving of such a disturbingly bleak and imperious political outlook. 

In his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes about the white moderate who will constantly say, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action" and who “paternalistically feels [he] can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a more convenient season." And I ask, how is this descriptor laid out by the late great MLK, regarding the white moderate in the 1960s, any different than the rhetoric displayed by liberal reformists masquerading as “leftists” in the article? By telling us we need to remain patient for the US political stratosphere to miraculously adopt a conscience and allow moderate and largely temporary reforms through the electoral approach and the Democratic establishment. This is telling the most oppressed people that you can paternalistically set the timetable for our liberation.

The author writes that there are 12 million members of the Democratic Party, the largest membership number of all parties in the US—as a means of emphasizing an unfounded and irrelevant point about the American people’s reliance on the party—while failing to connect the dots to the lack of alternative political options being presented for people to resort to, which leads to a coerced “support” for millions of people who consistently “vote blue.” The author deliberately fails to recognize that the US has a population of over 300 million, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that there are millions upon millions of people who are not members of the establishment and/or simply do not vote—due to disenfranchisement, socio-political status, and/or strategic disinvestment. Millions of people, largely made up of the colonized and/or racialized, who are disinvested and have long rejected the two-party system and are desperately looking for an alternative to their current social, political, and economic material realities. Instead of defeatism under the guise of electoral hopefulness within the Democratic Party, we should be proving to them that socialism, beyond the electoral and welfare statist approach that Bernie offers, could serve as that alternative. 

We, in America, never truly “choose” our political representatives—the ruling class does—even with the largely performative and symbolic facade of allowing some of us to cast votes every couple of years. Sure, we’re granted the opportunity to emblematically “choose” our next plantation owner or subjector-in-chief, but only after having our beliefs filtered and heavily influenced by the stranglehold that mainstream media, or rather mass propaganda machine, has on our psyche. With that, the electoral college stands as a means of allowing ruling elites to have the last say of who they want as their figurehead of empire run by corporations—oftentimes regardless of the popular-vote results. This, along with the fact that we’re constantly forced to choose between possibly slightly improving our material reality and the continued brutalization of those in third-world and global-south countries. It’s nothing more than constant political coercion. A democracy is not just being “allowed” to “choose” your representatives but having representatives that actually politically and morally align with its peoples’ material interests, with a fighting shot to win. If we can understand this illegitimate process and American hypocrisy, as the often “transporter” of democracy, we have to understand how the game is rigged from the jump—and we end up losing every time regardless of who is occupying office, as the ones with the most power and influence are oligarchs and corporations, and their financial interests. So how can you, as a self-proclaimed leftist, progressive, or radical, advocate for the continued reliance on a system that is inherently rigged against us? 

The fact of the matter is: Bernie Sanders is losing. And unless something drastic happens in the coming weeks, he will not be the democratic nominee. The electoral strategy has proved, once again, to be largely ineffective as a legitimate threat to capitalist exploitation and imperialism. So, you would think the most obvious solution would be to align ourselves with organizers, movements, and ideologies that can bring about the radical shift that marginalized people need to survive, right? But no, the new white moderates, leeching onto a party that has proven time and time again that those of us who want something radically different than milquetoast neoliberal establishment candidates and politics, are not welcomed. And honestly, it’s about time we listen. This conception asserted by the author, that somehow “we’ll get ‘em next time,” despite not offering much of a historical context or substantial answer as to why we should be optimistic about this approach or how we could achieve such a thing, is not just politically naive but downright potentially fatal—especially as we approach pending human-induced climate doom and deteriorating material conditions. It’s leading people into a burning building indiscriminately with little care for the lives that’ll be harmed and/or lost, in the meantime. 

Bernie Sanders should be seen as the compromise candidate that he truly represents. A physical embodiment of capitalism’s last hope, the “peaceful” alternative to sustain capitalism, imperialism, and pending climate doom, beyond its life expectancy and to avoid addressing the actualities of what this country is, at its roots, for a couple years longer. Instead, it’s clear that these self-proclaimed “progressive” political figures are considered end-goal saviors to many of these white moderates who claim that the Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s of the world are merely a means to an end. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, their work will be finished if and when they succeed in electing them to the most powerful office in the world. If the DNC will not accept the mild reforms that Bernie Sanders is offering then that should tell us all we need to know about the reality in which these gains will not be attained through the ballot.

The new white moderate bombards us with disingenuous questions such as, “what’s your solution then?” when they encounter those of us who do not vote, as if opting not to engage in the coercive nature of lesser evils every election cycle, or refusing to vote for and electing the next terrorist-in-chief, is somehow more morally repugnant than the contrary. As if divesting from national electoral politics and not electing imperialists who are sure to enact terror on colonized people globally isn’t a substantial alternative, in and of itself. The new white moderate is desperately clinging on to the glimmer of hope that the Democratic Party and the United States of America, in their entirety, are not beyond redemption. They constantly tell themselves this because believing in the contrary would force them to reckon with not only their sense of identity, which they’ll find is inextricable with Americanism, but also with the reality that everything they think they know about their beloved country, and all of its institutions and global affairs, is categorically false. The claims implied in the article, that the Democratic Party is just simply incompetent, are not true. But minimizing their structural issues to something like incompetence largely lets their existence as a for-profit-over-all-else political party off the hook for its crimes while implying that these issues can be fixed with a slight overhaul in leadership. Democrats heavily rely on the lesser-of-two-evils approach that we see every election cycle. It is all they know and is very much deliberate; it’s not incompetence. As the author notes, they are perfectly fine with masquerading as the “opposition” party to Republicans, even in the Donald Trump regime era—while resisting little-to-none of their fascist policies or acts—as long as it means disallowing even the most mildest of reforms that could potentially come from a Bernie Sanders presidency. 

White moderates are no longer just raging, traditional centrists intent on maintaining the capitalist, white-supremacist status quo, but instead are also self-proclaimed “progressives” and “leftists” telling colonized, racialized, and oppressed people to wait our turn to begin building something revolutionary, something bigger than us all, while they continue underperforming and flat-out losing their electoral strategies. These new white moderates, masquerading as “progressives,” “leftists,” and oftentimes even “radicals,'' are very much keen on allowing the US—with their beloved Democratic Party at the forefront—to maintain its status as the unjust global police of the world, as long as they’re reaping the benefits of such a position through minimal “domestic” progress through welfare statism. And this is why they can so easily advocate for the continued dependence on the liberal establishment. With a condescending smugness, the author writes: “And, of course, there will be some wacky proposals that promise us a shortcut to power. Sectarians will encourage everyone to funnel their rage into ill-fated third-party efforts, and some will demand an insurrection at the Democratic National Convention.” But what’s more “wacky” or “ill-fated” than proposing to reconcile oneself to age-old tactics that are bound to continue to fail—with little-to-no evidence that a different outcome is even remotely possible? What is more doomed than sitting on your hands while people continue dying, and allowing the rage derived from the disappointing defeat of the most well-known progressive politician since FDR to funnel into more electoral opportunities coming along in the future instead of taking said rage and strategically and politically putting it toward building a sustainable movement toward people power, on the ground and in the streets? This failed electoral strategy, while disguised as being optimistic and pragmatic, is nothing more than a politically-naive and deliberately-obtuse attempt at preserving the dead end that is the Democratic Party, an organization that has historically served as a hindrance to radical movements because of its subservience to capital. It justifies futility. Because god forbid we do something beyond gathering signatures, door knocking, and bar-hopping between book clubs.