The Sinking Ship of American Capitalism

For over a year now American capitalism has gone through a protracted economic malaise of proportions unseen since the Great Depression of 1929-35.  There isn’t a month that passes without a dramatic new event in the life of the system, from head-spinning gyrations in the stock markets, to the widespread failure of the most reputable financial institutions, yesterday’s symbols of capitalism’s alleged vitality.  And things have just gotten worse since the summer!

In recent weeks there has been an aggravation of the economic crisis that has shaken the confidence of even the most unrepentant cheerleaders of American capitalism. The official line of the White House has gone from a self-assured defense of the "good fundamentals" of an economy that’s just going through a momentary hiccup, to a hysterical call for "all hands on board" to shoulder the task of saving the sinking ship.

Without doubt the bourgeoisie is right to be concerned. What started as the infamous bursting of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007, has become the greatest financial disaster in 70 years. The pile of failed institutions is growing by the day:  the investment banks Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers; the mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the world’s biggest insurance company, AIG; Washington Mutual, America’s largest savings and loan; and the commercial bank Wachovia — just to mention the more famous cases. The whole financial system is in shambles.  The air is filled with the poisonous odor of capitalism’s rotting body, and amidst this agony, we are being  given a window into the rarified world of high-stakes gambling that characterized the multi-trillion casino-like-economy centered around Wall Street.  

Yet even though the center of the storm is the US economy, its effects are rapidly extending throughout the world. In Central Europe, Russia, Japan, Asia…. everywhere, the financial system is going bust, forcing governments to scramble to the rescue, repeating the American experience, except for the specificities of the local details.  

Faced with a dramatically worsening situation, the "collective capitalist", the State, has done its best to manage the economic crisis.  But the balance-sheet so far is negative. The State has proved once again unable to stop the blood-letting. And the current so-called "comprehensive bail out" of the financial system at the staggering cost of 700 billion dollars could well go the same way as other measures put in place in the last year.

Behind the financial crisis, the economic crisis of capitalism

The whole bourgeois media is having a field day covering the financial crisis. Newspaper reporters, economic columnists, TV commentators and all kinds of economic "experts" are outdoing each other in their colorful description of the storm blasting the high temples of the American financial system.  The message is one of high alarm. The predominant view is that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, and credit - the lifeblood of the system - is drying up, endangering the well-being of everybody. In short, the turmoil on Wall Street, the financial system, is now menacing Main Street, the real economy. There is a lot of moral outrage expressed against the "excesses" and "greed" of the Wall Street crowd that recklessly brought this calamity to themselves and the rest of society. It’s almost comical, that this condemnation is coming from the same media that not long ago servilely celebrated the seemingly unstoppable record profit making of the high-flying Wall Street financial industry and the lavish life style of investment bankers, traders, hedge fund speculators, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and other parasitic so-called entrepreneurs.

What the media is not saying - and can’t say because its main function is the mystification of reality through conscious choice or self-delusion - is that the current financial crisis is clear and simple an expression of the economic crisis of capitalism, a chronic crisis that is rooted in capitalism’s own contradictions and for which the dominant class has no real solution to put forward. On the contrary each remedy put forward to manage the crisis in the end winds up aggravating the malady. This is expressed in the fact that what the economists called recessions are each worse that the preceding one, while the so-called recoveries are increasingly phony.

Four decades of economic crisis

The immediate chain of events behind the current financial crisis is very well known. The American bourgeoisie got out of the recession of 2001 just the same way that it had done before during previous recessions: through state capitalist policies of cheap credit and lax fiscal policies. And just as during other "recoveries," in time these policies feed the illusion of growth and finally end by creating the conditions for a new crash. Thus, the celebrated housing boom became the current housing bust, just as the Internet "revolution" ended in the dot.com bubble being popped in 2001.

This is the basic short story of how the American economy ended up where it is today:  with a financial system in total disarray, weighed down by an unstoppable wave of mortgage defaults, housing foreclosures, downward-spiraling real estate prices and mind-blowing gambling bets going bad.  The bourgeoisie has yet to recognize officially that its economy is in recession, but given the extent of the carnage, that hardly seems relevant.

The "basic short story," however, is a very poor reflection of reality. Actually, what gives the present financial crisis its historical proportions is the fact that it expresses the accumulation of decades of contradictions of a decadent economic system that has become in all senses a menace to the very survival of humanity. A permanent state of war and economic crisis, with a relentless worsening of standards of living, chronic unemployment, rampant inflation and growing insecurity for the working class and other non-exploiting sectors of the population -  this has been the history of capitalism for most of the last century. This is a system that has put humanity through two devastating World Wars and the Great Depression, a dreadful worldwide crisis to which the present turmoil is often being compared.

After the brief respite during the post-World War II period of reconstruction, the economic crisis came once again to the forefront, shattering the vision of unlimited, crisis-free prosperity put forward by the system’s acolytes based on the record setting economic growth of the post-war period in the central countries of capitalism.

The economic malaise that started at the end of the 1960’s exploded in a full blown worldwide economic crisis at the beginning of the 70’s and has since persisted like a slow growing terminal cancer at the center of the body of capitalism.

It is not an accident that the US economy is today, just as it was in the ‘70s at the center of the storm. In August 1971 Richard Nixon reneged on the U.S. commitments under the American-brokered 1943 Breton Woods System that had guaranteed the dollar convertibility to gold and that had given the post-war financial and commercial systems a semblance of stability.  This turnaround of the American bourgeoisie left the use of the dollar as a world currency without an economic rationale and has contributed greatly to the fragility of the world financial system showcased in today’s crisis. The world’s banks are awash with paper dollars. The currency reserves of most countries are held mostly in dollars. In fact there are, by far, more dollars circulating around the world that in the US economy. This insane situation is based on a simple collective delusion: that behind the dollar stands the so-called "full faith and credit" of the US government, which amounts to an overt overestimation of the U.S. creditworthiness.  If the present U.S. financial turmoil does not bring a reality check to the global financial system, then nothing will.

The lack of solvent demand relative to the needs of capitalistic accumulation – the root of the current open crisis of capitalism dating back to the end of the sixties – is illustrated by a twin feature of the life of capitalism in recent decades: the perversion of credit and the explosion of speculation.

Faced with a lack of solvent markets to absorb its production, capitalism has found the way to square the circle: give it away on credit.  Not an economically rational credit based on a reasonable expectancy of repayment of a debt with a profit — a normal capitalist practice and a powerful tool for the development of capitalism — but instead, credit as a way to keep the system artificially going to prevent its collapse under the weight of its historical crisis.  This is the reason behind the reckless explosion in recent decades of both individual debt (credit cards, auto loans, student loans, personal loans, mortgages) and corporate and public debt (which in many cases will never be repaid). After so many years of abuse of the credit-debt mechanism, it is not surprising that the financial system is now cracking up.

Furthermore, faced with a diminishing rate of profit in the process of production, capital has been turning the world over towards the sphere of speculation, creating a virtual casino economy where - on paper - fortunes are made and lost with the mere tapping of a computer keyboard in the comfortable rooms of traders, hedge fund managers and other investment specialists. All this without the bothersome creation and sale of commodities in the process of production and circulation that defines capitalism as a mode of production! Thanks to the collapse of the real estate bubble and the current financial turmoil, a rare window has been opened into the secret world of high stakes gambling on such immaterial things as the so-called "credit default swaps," and the now radioactive "mortgage securities."  It is no wonder that the global financial system is falling apart.  Sure, speculation has always been a component of capitalism, but the amount of capital involved in it today, its weight on the economy as a whole, the extent to which it has managed to permeate increasing layers of society — even the working class‘s future livelihood is being made dependent on pension fund investments on speculative schemes - is unprecedented and is itself a condemnation of capitalism as a viable mode of production for society.

The show must go on

Mr. Paulson, the US treasury secretary, and Mr. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, are the men of the hour, the media reporting their every word, change of mood and actions 24/7.  All this for free, while McCain and Obama have to pay millions to get their electoral message across - surely, the candidates can’t be happy about it!

Evidently, the men in charge of managing the economic crisis are very busy these days. But the real question is what has the State accomplished and what can be expected from the policies so far being put forward?

The first thing to note about the bourgeoisie’s response to the early signs that the housing boom was over in 2007, was, judging by its actions, that it was a total underestimation of the gravity of situation that was going to unfold. Following the beginning of the housing bust and the financial system turmoil during 2007, the Federal Reserve responded with its conventional policies of monetary manipulation, sharply reducing in record time the Fed interest fund rate to lower the cost of credit and pumping in tons of money directly into the financial system, trying to shore up the deteriorating finances of banks and other financial institutions. For their part the White House and Congress also made use of their traditional fiscal tools in the management of the crisis.  At the beginning of 2008, they passed a so-called "stimulus package" composed of tax rebates for consumers, tax breaks for businesses and other measures directed at reviving the slumping housing market. These measures were supposed to avert a recession. As the somewhat upbeat economic forecast of Bernanke in mid-February put it, "My baseline outlook involves a period of sluggish growth, followed by somewhat stronger pace of growth starting later this year as the effects of (Fed) and fiscal stimulus begin to be felt" (USA Today, February 15, 2008).  

A few days later, the collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth biggest investment bank in the country, would raise the stakes and foretell the current financial tsunami blasting the American and global financial system, which has already totally changed Wall Street financial landscape.

According to public declarations emanating from all corners of the State, the bourgeoisie is now truly worried about the dangers posed to its system by the present situation and has decided to bring in the big State guns to fix the situation. This is the sense of the so-called 700 billion dollar, "comprehensive" bailout program that the dominant class has finally agreed upon.

It remains to be seen what effects this new program will have in the bourgeoisie’s attempts to manage the crisis of its system.  Nonetheless, clearly, this program is an attempt to make the working class - both current and future generations - pay for the financial debacle.

On the other hand, this bailout, which in essence will be financed in the short term by public debt, could easily backfire, fueling inflation and further economic turmoil.

Finally, there is one more important thing to underline in relation to the bourgeoisie’s policies of the last year:  on the one hand they make clear the purely ideological character of the so-called American "free market" economy, and on the other, they overtly demonstrate the dominant role of the State in the economy - what revolutionaries have long characterized as state capitalism.

And the working class?!

Faced with the deepening economic crisis, the bourgeois media’s message to society is that "we are all in this together". Yes, it argues, some CEO’s are guilty of excess and greed, but we ALL are more or less responsible for the financial mess. "Everyone" took advantage of the good old days of easy and cheap credit of the debt functioning economy and we all have to line up in a common effort behind the State efforts to save the economy. This is nonsense. The working class has no say on how the bourgeoisie runs its decaying system. The fact is that the condition of the working class has known no improvements over the last four decades of bourgeois gimmicks aimed at keeping its economic system afloat. Unless they want to consider all matter of suffocating debts -credit cards, auto loans, student loans, sky-high mortgages, etc. - a change for the better that workers are obliged to incur in order to partake of the increasingly elusive "American dream".

Politicians, in particular those belonging to left wing, want workers to believe that they are concerned about the suffering of the working class. Both the bourgeois left and right want us to believe that the answer to rising unemployment, eroding salaries, the sorry state of the health care system and deteriorating pensions lie in the ballot box, that all is needed is the right president or congressman.  However the reality is that the bourgeoisie has no solution to the crisis of its system and no future to offer society other than an increasingly devastating crisis and murderous imperialist wars.

The hard reality is that workers have been paying for years for the crisis of capitalism. And today face with a barrage of attacks from all directions they have no choice but to oppose capitalism’s assault on their working and living conditions on their own terrain, the terrain of the class struggle - fighting against the logic of capitalist exploitation. Against capitalism’s future of crisis and war, the working class must put forward its own perspective of a society based on human needs.

Eduardo Smith, Oct. 3, 2008.

The Immigration Question in the Workers’ Movement in the US

In confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences between workers, the workers’ movement has historically been guided by the principle that "workers have no country."  Any compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois ideology.

A hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, an attempt by the opportunists to support the restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that the opportunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution. Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the workers movement in all countries. In reporting on this Congress, Lenin wrote, "(T)here was an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the "civilized" countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are therefore inclined to forget the need for international solidarity. But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of revolutionary Social Democracy."[1] In the US, the opportunists attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart Congress and voiced support for the American Federation of Labor’s opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One delegate admonished the opportunists that for the working class "there are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers’ movement must not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the leftwing of the Socialist Party that went on to found the  Communist and Communist Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism’ we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[2]

Historically immigrants played an important role in the workers’ movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later constituted vital links to the European center of the First International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which while accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities of American revolutionary movement. Frederich Engels was concerned about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier, which served as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and immigrant workers, in terms of economic opportunities and the inability for radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist émigrés in America for not learning English, he wrote that, "they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all learn English."[3] It was true that the there was a tendency for German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical work in the 1880s and to disdain mass work with native, English speaking workers. It was also true that the immigrant-led revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the movement  implicit in these remarks proved to have disastrous consequences for the workers’ movement, as it eventually pushed the most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers into secondary roles, and put leadership in the hands of poorly formed militants, whose primary qualification was being an English-speaking native. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy perspective was pursued by the Communist international with even more disastrous consequences for the early CP. Moscow’s insistence that native American-born militants be placed in leadership positions catapulted opportunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leadership positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist leanings totally outside the leadership, and accelerated the triumph of Stalinism in the US party.

Similarly, it was also problematic when Engels remarked that the "great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers…(The native working class)  has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades."[4] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant workers were divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that was responsible for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working class, in the 1960’s the new leftists interpreted it as a basis for the "white skin privilege theory."[5]

In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself disproved Engel’s view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central characteristic of the workers’ movement at the turn of the 20th century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different languages.  In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8 foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly newspapers, and 10 English and two foreign news monthlies in the US, and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it: Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian,  Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lettish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinanvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukranian, Yugoslav. These federations comprised a majority of the organization. The communist and communist labor parties founded in 1919 had immigrant majority memberships. Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) membership in the period before World War I came disproportionately from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native" membership, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in their ranks.

The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers strike of 1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where workers worked under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were teenage girls between 14-18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry. The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers, which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized under the leadership of the IWW, included two representatives from each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-five languages. When the authorities responded with violent repression, the strike committee dramatized the situation by sending several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100 children were being sent to  worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in a national outpouring of solidarity.

In 1913, during the silk workers’ strike in Paterson, NJ, the IWW used a similar tactic, sending strikers’ children to stay with "strike mothers" in other cities, once again demonstrating class solidarity across ethnic lines.

As World War I unfolded, the role of émigrés and immigrants in the left-wing of the socialist movement was particularly important. For example, a meeting on Jan. 14, 1917 at the Brooklyn, New York home of Ludwig Lore, an immigrant from Germany, to plan a "program of action" for left forces in the American socialist movement included the participation of Trotsky, who just arrived in New York the day before; Bukharin, who was already resident as an émigré working as editor for Novy Mir, the organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other Russian émigrés; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a colleague of Pannenkoek; and Sen Katayama, a Japanese émigré. According to eyewitness accounts the discussion was dominated by the Russians, with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain within the party for the moment but should advance its critique by publishing an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the left-wing of the American movement.[6]  The co-existence of many languages was not an obstacle to the movement; to the contrary it was a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky addressed the crowd in Russian, and others in German, Finnish, English, Lettish, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[7]

We must stand for the defense of the international unity of the working class. We cannot   even appear to legitimize irrational fears and distrust of immigrant workers, or the bourgeoisie’s attempt to use immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems that are squarely the responsibility of an economic mode of production that has outlived its usefulness. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic pollution," "national identity,"  "distrust of foreigners," or "defense of the community or neighborhood." Our intervention cannot be that "you are right to be concerned about the threat to American culture, or national identity, or that it is terrible that you feel like a stranger in your own ‘country’," which would give credence to bourgeois ideology on the question of country, nation, culture, national identity, etc. and strengthen the bourgeois attempt to foster division within the class. On the contrary, our intervention must defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement that workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat, that we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to undermine working class unity. We must stress the unity of the proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. Anything else constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle.  - Jerry Grevin, 6/24/08.

[1].- Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart," Proletary No.17, Oct. 20, 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 13, p75. (We leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of "aristocracy of labor" that Lenin implies.)

[2].- Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League, Nov. 9, 1915. In Collected Works, vol. 21, p423.

[3].- Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in Draper’s, Roots of American Communism.)

[4].-Engels, Letter to Schluter, op cit. In Collected Works, vol.49, p392.

[5].-White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the 1960s new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were victimized by racism and discrimination.

[6].- Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. pp. 80-83

[7].- Ibid. p.79

US Elections: Reviving the Electoral Myth

The hype about the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary seems overwhelming. But it is still too early to tell what consensus will emerge in the dominant circles of the American ruling class about the political division of labor that will best serve its interests in the period ahead. However, it is clear that what is at stake for American capitalism in the coming presidential election are a) a break with the Bush administration’s disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level, and b) a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Restoring American Imperialist Authority

Even before the November election, the bourgeoisie has made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic imperialist policy of the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration’s bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration’s bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy, regardless of whoever wins the White House in November. It is perhaps noteworthy that Huckabee, the surprise winner in the Iowa Republican race, was the only candidate to denounce Bush’s foreign policy as "arrogant, bunker mentality." Likewise, in the Democratic race, Obama, who has emerged as the main alternative to Clinton, was the only candidate who could claim that he had been opposed to the war in Iraq from the very beginning. Regardless of who wins the nomination, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism’s growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored in the general population, including the working class. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration’s continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle, the idea that participation in its elections is the means to achieve peaceful change in the direction of society. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie’s dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification.

Sensing inevitable victory at the polls, Democratic politicians with presidential ambitions started the electoral circus so early this time around that they pose the potential of mutually destroying each other’s political prospects by the time the primaries are over. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, most of the major Democratic candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time.

Prominent politicians from both parties are openly pondering whether the traditional two-party system is now too badly bent or broken to effectively serve the political interests of the ruling class and is considering support for a serious independent candidate. In their call for a two-day conference in Oklahoma in early January, former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Democratic Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote, "Today we are a house divided. We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available - without regard to political party - to help lead our nation." They went on to state, "Most importantly, we must begin to restore our standing, influence and credibility in the world." Other prominent participants include: former Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb of Virginia (son-in-law of President Lyndon Johnson); Bill Brock, former Republican Party chairman and former Tennessee U.S. Senator; Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa; former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, who also served in the U.S. Senate; departing Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and denounced the Bush administration’s Iraq policy as the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history; and ex-Democrat, ex-Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire ready and able to not only offer himself as the nominee but also able to spend $1 billion of his $12 billion personal fortune to fund the campaign.

Whatever the outcome, the stakes are high for the bourgeoisie, but will mean nothing for the working class except that we will be subjected to a more finely tuned political propaganda used to manipulate us to accept the austerity policies employed to make us bear the brunt of the economic crisis and the imperialist policy that uses us as cannon fodder for American capitalism. — Jerry Grevin, Jan. 5, 2008

Election Revives the Democratic Mystification