Continued from Part II: What new world order?
The far right has been with us since the lead-up to the Civil War, but it has grown tremendously since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2008 economic crisis. It has grown across the world, forming an organizing principle for Putin and Trump. That growth has also been fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis and international migration due to climate and war.
Many analyses have linked Trump’s destructive actions to his psychology, his lack of empathy and need to dominate, his thirst for attention and for revenge, his apparent dementia and stunning incoherence. Some have instead focused on his class position, not only as a billionaire but as a businessman whose career was built on inherited money, racism, mob connections, cheating, and swindling. There may be a great deal of truth in these analyses but it is necessary to step back and ask: What is it about this moment of this capitalist society that brought such a creature to the top?
The reasons begin with the low growth the world economy has experienced since the mid-1970s global economic crisis, worsened by the 2008 crash. The rate of profit, which is crucial to capitalism, has not fully recovered, which acts as a drag on investment and productivity. Capitalists have felt this viscerally, and tried to make up for it with increased exploitation and attacks on workers.
Despite rosy official economic statistics, conditions of life and labor for the U.S. working class have been trending downward since the crisis of the mid-1970s. To shore up their declining rate of profit, capitalists attacked unions, wages, benefits, and the social safety net, and won tax breaks. They shipped jobs to low-wage countries and used technology to cut skilled and semi-skilled labor and intensify surveillance and control. Precarious, part-time, and unpredictably scheduled jobs became much more common. As a result, one in four workers is unemployed, can only find part-time jobs, or earns a poverty wage, even at a time when the official unemployment rate is very low. And if we exclude things that only the rich buy, inflation is more than double the official measure, so that actual purchasing power fell by 4.3% in 2023. That is why people working multiple jobs have become common. One out of eight millennials work three jobs and one out of six work more than three.
ROBBER BARONS’ BILLIONS COME FROM THE LABOR OF OTHERS
Rent has risen four times as fast as income in the last 40 years, leaving soaring homelessness. Photo from Skid Row in Los Angeles: Russ Allison Loar, CC BY-SA 4.0
At the same time, credit card debt has soared, millions cannot afford healthcare, and rent has risen four times as fast as income in the last 40 years, leaving soaring homelessness and over 12 million households paying half or more of their earnings on rent and utilities. Part of the problem is that billionaires have bought up millions of housing units as speculative investments. Private equity firms own over 2.2 million units. They are now buying up units in other countries like Spain and Portugal. Besides leaving thousands of units vacant or turning them into airbnb’s while people are living on the streets or in cars, a report found that “corporate landlords have concentrated their predatory investment practices—flipping, rent gouging, habitability violations, and evictions—in lower-income communities of color.”
BEYOND ECONOMIC MEASURES
The crumbling of society goes beyond economic measures. All of our bodies have been contaminated by toxic forever chemicals, microplastics, hormone disruptors, and more. Corporations exploited the science of addiction to push people into unhealthy diets and relationships with technology that have well-documented harmful effects on physical and mental health, especially to children. Isolation, atomization, and loss of community deeply infect our society. In a vicious cycle, they add to and draw from algorithmic manipulation by social media, which pushes people into propaganda echo chambers. Irrationalism and paranoia are normalized. A similar dynamic is at play in the rise of the far right across the world.
The symptoms are everywhere of a system that increasingly does not believe in its own future. The symptoms include nihilism, expressed as the purely negative urge to destroy everything with no positive in the negative, or expressed as “Get mine, to hell with everyone else, after me comes the flood”—two core elements of the Trumpist coalition.
That helps explain the administration’s rush to destroy, including even some of the sources of their own global power, from scientific research to trade relations to the agricultural workforce.
INADEQUACY OF DEFENDING THE INSTITUTIONS
The Democratic Party, like the centrist parties in Europe and other places, is too wedded to the status quo to provide effective opposition and keeps trying to channel resistance that erupts into its own limited, pro-capitalist agenda. That was seen in the presidential campaign, when first Biden and then Harris framed a defense of democracy very abstractly as a defense of the current failing institutions. It still continues, as seen in Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s support for the reactionary Republican budget and his milquetoast fightback strategy that seems to consist of writing “very strong” letters.
Rosa Luxemburg
Clearly, the Democrats’ muddled resistance to Trumpism can only be supported with whips and kicks, as Rosa Luxemburg put it:
“Marx supported the national struggles of 1848, holding that they were allies of the revolution. The politics of Marx consisted in this, that he pushed the bourgeoisie every moment to the limits of the revolutionary situation. Yes, Marx supported the bourgeoisie in the struggle against absolutism, but he supported it with whips and kicks….”[1]
It is crucial to grasp both the continuity and the discontinuity in the situation.
Those who dogmatically repeat that there is no difference between the two bourgeois parties have lost touch with reality. The drive to destroy solidarity movements, free speech, dissent, independent media, independent labor unions, and independent educational institutions have precedents in the hobbled and distorted democracy we have known, it is true, but it marks a sharp departure that threatens the ability of any social movement to organize and act.
At the same time, the fact that this drive grows so naturally from the soil of our capitalist society, and takes advantage of powers of surveillance and repression that were put in place with bipartisan support, such as the 2001 Patriot Act, underscores how fascism is always lurking in capitalist society, ready to strike when conditions are right. How could it be otherwise when the social relationship at the heart of capitalism—the labor process—is no kind of democracy but a dictatorship by the despotic plan of capital always striving to suppress the emergence of the cooperative plan of freely associated labor?[2]
Continues with Part IV: Where is the Left?
[1] Quoted in Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya (University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 9.
[2] See “The Despotic Plan of Capital vs. the Cooperation of Freely Associated Labor” in Marxism and Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya (Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 92-94.