Political Crisis Now Stalks the US
You know something is weird when we are supposed to cheer on the FBI in its battle with Donald Trump. Some people even claim that the FBI is now leading the so-called “Resistance”! This craziness is one sign of the political crisis that is rising in the United States today.
One of the first indicators surfaced a year ago when the triumphant Republicans began to hold their traditional “town meetings”. Across the country, Congressmen were confronted by their own base, which was up in arms about losing what little health care they had. In meeting after meeting, the popular rage was palpable and growing. It was quite impolite. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, the Alt-Right, Nazis and the Klan marched in Charlottesville, and amazingly the conversation was changed.
Today the signs of political crisis are unmistakable: The Trump Regime shows little ability to govern, even with control of all three branches of government. Three generals run the day-to-day activities of the Administration. Legislation has all but collapsed. Government is rife with open criminality. Corporations have merged with the State and now everything is changed.
The President is a nincompoop, but rules by decree to carry out the corporate dictatorship.
The “powers that be” seem to be fighting themselves almost daily. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are disintegrating. The unions are losing their legal powers to raise money. Capitalists like the Kochs and the Mercers impose policies through extra-legal methods that operate primarily outside of government. In the face of unprecedented Global Warming, no government dares to address the obvious, that climate collapse is a necessary result of capitalism.
Political crises are not short-term, nor are they reversible. The last real political crisis in the US began with the onset of the Depression in 1929 and ended as the Roosevelt Coalition established a broad plan to build a war economy. Few Americans have ever directly experienced political crisis. It is worthwhile to summarize the characteristics of political crisis, since we will be dealing with it for a whole long period of time, basically until we figure this out.
Political crises are far more than simple partisan conflict, Republicans vs Democrats and vice-versa. Political crises reflect the aggravation and development of very real contradictions between various classes that become ever more acute as each class and political grouping demands a political resolution in its favor.
Over and over, history shows that economic polarization leads to political polarization. Once the political battle is joined, it becomes ever more specific and intense. It becomes a material force in society. Every class in society, every group and strata are drawn into political motion to achieve their program. Political crisis becomes ever more severe as the power of the dominant power to impose a political solution becomes blocked by the other powers. Political impotence and lack of capacity produce political “solutions” that only further aggravate the underlying contradictions. Lacking the ability to produce a political resolution, the ruling powers often resort to war, correctly defined by Clausewitz as the continuation of politics by force and violence.
Bourgeois America has carefully reduced the notion of what politics really is to the de-fanged concept of mere restricted electoral activity; something that polite people do not talk about at the dinner table. The real goals of politics emerge clearly in political crises: the creation of the conditions for the realization of political power, rather than merely addressing partial, incremental improvements in the system. As such, politics must address the root causes of oppression and exploitation, and then analyze issues of property, the real basis for political power in capitalist society.
Political Crisis in The Civil War Era
The 1840s and 1850s are a good example of political crisis here in the United States. Even before the 19th Century, Southern states claimed the lands west of their borders as slave territory. The capitalist Slave economy competed with the rising capitalist industrial economy of the North to develop the western lands into slave or free states. The contradictory interests of each system made coexistence and mutual expansion impossible. An increase for one side came at the expense of the other. Karl Marx described the situation in one of his articles on the Civil War in 7, dated November 1861:
“Thus there would in fact take place, not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganization of it, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy… The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”
By the 1850s, the South controlled all three branches of government. The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision privileged Southern private property in slaves over Northern private and personal property. The rights of slave property were extended into the North and were prioritized in the western territories. Free men were criminalized if they did not catch and return escaped slaves, ie slave property.
The Civil War that followed led to a complete political realignment across the country. The political crisis continued after the war. The North was forced to empower ex-Slaves and poor white farmers to break the political back of the Slaveholders. It was finally resolved, after many twists and turns, with the withdrawal of Northern troops in 1876. The rise to power of Klan forces, financed and supported by Northern capital, created the world’s first fascist state apparatus.
Here we see all the characteristics of political crisis: economic crisis producing political crisis, irreversibility, attempted resolutions that only make things worse, prolonged political struggle that can last for decades and is full of zigzags, a final resolution that often leads to abolishing of forms of property, often by force, a complete political realignment, and the rise of new political parties.
Political Crisis in the 21st Century
Today in the US, just as in the 1850s, one form of property is privileged above all other. It also controls all three branches of government. This is corporate private property, which now has far more rights than individual people, and has legalized money as a form of speech. With the advent of the Trump regime, we now see what corporate dictatorship looks like. Far from resting content, it is on the move and has an agenda that goes far beyond the thousands of regulations that Trump has eliminated.
If bourgeois democracy was bribery, corruption and fraud, backed up by violence, we are now seeing what fascism portends: increasing violence, backed up by bribery, corruption and fraud. The US State after all directly murders at least 1000 innocent people a year, almost never to convict any of these murderers even as it justifies the slaughter with a straight face.
The political crisis has been rising and developing since the 2008 financial collapse. It is driven at its fundamental level by the antagonism between the electronic digital means of production and capitalist relations of production. As before in the Civil War, an objective antagonism drives the process forward.
As computers, robots, artificial intelligence and Big Data reorganize branch after branch of the economy, new technology replaces human beings in the process of production. Laborless production undercuts the ability of capitalists to make a profit since profits can only come through exploiting human labor. This antagonism drives economic crisis to political crisis and makes its reversibility impossible.
This world-historic development in technology means that the long-term capitalist method of control of the working class in the US can no longer work. The economic bribery of the upper strata of the working class is being withdrawn for the simple reason that capitalism will not support what it cannot exploit. Today new means of control by force and coercion are being rolled out by a rising police state, augmented by fascism. This development reflects, and is being organized through, the merger of corporations and the State.
The fundamental reality of political crisis today is that political struggle against the State is now objective. It is a reality that is not going away. People who are not allowed to work at all are joined by a massive number of temp workers, most of whom who will never be able to make enough to live comfortably. This new class of proletarians has no choice but demand the distribution of the necessities of life regardless of ability to pay, for free. They likewise have no choice but to demand that the State guarantees these necessities.
The State, on the other hand, is hardly neutral. The State apparatus of bodies of armed men, laws, courts and prisons has been honed for the new century by the New Jim Crow penal system that jails more people than any othrt country. It is now legal for the army to operate within the borders of the country for the first time in history. Massive surveillance is the business plan of the corporate Internet, and this fundamentally merges with the Surveillance State. The State today is not rigid or passive. It is aggressively entering into the production process to further the agenda of corporate dictatorship.
The State today furthers corporate interests through a global low-intensity war against civilians that is augmented by privatized prisons, privatized mercs and paramilitaries and systematic changes in the State apparatus. Check out the Pentagon’s own 4 minute video which proclaims that the major new role of warfare is to pacify the cities of the 21st Century – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEPdOZbyzbw
Just two examples of the activist State in the economy: In at least 20 states today in the US, student debt slaves can be denied drivers licenses and professional licenses if they do not maintain their debt payments. Secondly, most cities have far more empty housing, including housing for investment purposes, than they have homeless people. Homelessness could literally be ended in 24 hours if cities seized this property. The capitalist State intervenes to prevent this step, effectively guaranteeing a housing market to provide private profit rather than as a public good. The State therefore actively operates to deny people the necessities of life, rather than insuring them.
The result of this economic and political dispossession is that the new proletarian class must unite to fight for the distribution of necessities for free, and it must unite to fight against a very aggressive State as a common enemy. Unity is not an abstract question. It is concrete, programmatic and political. Of all the elements of political crisis cited above, the objective necessity of political struggle is the strongest indicator of political crisis. It determines direction in coming times.
Now that the police are the answer to every social problem, what political solution do the capitalists offer? Can they offer a political solution? One of the hallmarks of political crisis is often the political paralysis of the ruling class.
Globally, transnational capitalism, led by the United States, has been attempting to remake the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The US is able to win every battle on every front, but it loses every war. It has organized massive bombing in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and employs small Special Service squads, joined by privatized Death Squads and drones, in dozens of countries. Yet it has never been able to impose a political solution that leads to peace. Nor can they.
The reason comes from their strategic objectives: the seizure and privatization of all global resources and the remaining commons. At this level, transnational capitalism is doing a great job. Yet the byproduct is the creation of millions and millions of migrants. The International Organization on Migration’s 2015 World Migration Report notes that the world had 232 million international migrants, 740 million internal migrants. Regardless of where these migrants come from, they are not going back to the old Industrial Era social contract of 40 hour a week jobs, with health care, pensions, a house and quality education. In fact they are part of the burgeoning new class of proletarians – the fastest growing new class in world history.
In other words, transnational capitalism is doing precisely what Marx predicted – creating its own grave-diggers. Precisely because the economic goals of transnational capitalism are antagonistic to the working class, neither the transnational class, nor Donald Trump, nor the Democratic Party can meet the needs of the new proletarian class. These hundreds of millions around the globe is a massive political force that blocks the ability of capitalism to broker a political resolution. The same situation is prevailing more and more in the US. Instead of guaranteeing the necessities of life, the State is actively dispossessing more and more people of these necessities.
The struggle for political power will be transformative for the political process in the US.
Implications for Revolutionaries
Economic crisis often passes over into political crisis. This doesn’t mean that the economic crisis vanishes; political crisis adds on as a new layer on top of the economic crisis. No one can seriously hold that global economic instability has decreased since 2008. The situation is profoundly unstable. Anything can set off a major collapse. In the absence of economic resolution, political struggle becomes the driving force. At times, political struggle can pass over into revolutionary crisis. Lenin describes this process in 1915, a year after World War I began:
“To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action.
“Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible. The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation. Such a situation existed in 1905 in Russia, and in all revolutionary periods in the West; it also existed in Germany in the sixties of the last century, and in Russia in 1859-61 and 1879-80, although no revolution occurred in these instances. Why was that? It was because it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over.”
(Lenin. The Collapse of the Second International, CW, p 213-214)
Once again, revolutionaries confront their historic task to bring science and consciousness to the working class. Once again we have further proof that from here on out, everything depends of the subjective. In these conditions, revolutionaries have the responsibility to reveal the political issues that underlie every battle.
This means politicizing the consciousness of the new proletarian class that is the only social force that can transform the situation. It means raising issues of who has the political power, who wins and who loses, exposing how the aggressive actions of private property behind every situation, revealing the structure of corporate dictatorship and how government at the local, state and national level operates to deny human beings the fundamental necessities of life. Politicizing above all means holding government accountable to advance the benefit of people, not corporations. Thus we can move from scattered, separated, defensive battles against features of the system to unified, coordinated offensive battles to end the political power of private property, which is based in the corporate ownership of the tools and technology of society.
Steven Miller writes about privatization, science and historical materialism. He taught science for 25 years in the Oakland Flatland high schools of Fremont and Life Academy. He observed the intense privatization of public schools, out-of-control police, and the growing dispossession of three generations of families from their communities
Signed articles are the responsibility of the author.
Steven Miller
Oakland, CA February 2018
nanodog2@hotmail.com
