The deafening propaganda blitz of the electoral campaign has finally come an end after almost two years. The ruling class media mouthpieces tell us that this has been the most important election in American history, demonstrating yet again the power of "democracy." This propaganda holds that not only do we have an African American president for the first time in American history, but also, above all, the Obama victory embodies the desire for change.
We are told that the "people have spoken," and that "Washington has listened," thanks to the "wondrous" workings of the ballot box. We are even told that America has now overcome racism and has become a land of true brotherhood.
So now Obama is president. But what does it mean? Obama promised to deliver change, but this promise was nothing but ideological sophistry. The whole campaign was a hypocritical lie, that captured the hopes of a population, and above all of a working class increasingly fed up with misery and war, but still unclear as to its own role in society and as yet unable to dispel the ruling class's mystifications.
The real victor in this election was not the fictitious "Joe Blow" of middle America, not the African Americans who are part of the US working class, but rather the ruling class. It is clear that more of the same and worse will be dished out to the workers, increasing the weight of misery. Obama was not a "peace" candidate. His criticism of Bush was that the latter got bogged down in Iraq, spread the troops too thinly, and left American imperialism incapable of responding adequately to future challenges to its dominance. Obama plans to send more troops to Afghanistan and to be ready to strike back against threats to America's imperialist interests. He was fiercely critical of the Bush administration's inability to respond to the Russian invasion of Georgia last summer. Such a peace-nik, is he!
During the presidential debates, Obama explained that he supports strengthening education in America, because an educated workforce is vital to a strong economy and no country can remain a dominant militant power without a strong economy. In other words, he sees education spending as pre-condition for imperialist domination. Such idealism!
For the ruling class this election has been a success almost beyond its wildest dreams.
It has managed to rejuvenate electoralism and the democratic myth, which has taken so many hits since 2000, especially amongst the younger generation, and left so many people disenchanted with the "system".
The post-election euphoria - the literal dancing in the streets that greeted Obama's victory - is testimony to the extent of this political victory. The impact of the election is comparable to the ideological victory that occurred immediately after 9/11. Back then the bourgeoisie benefited from a surge of nationalist hysteria, binding the working class to the bourgeois state. Today, hope in democracy and faith in a charismatic leader, binds large sectors of the population to the state.
Within the black population the weight of this euphoria is particularly strong; there is now a widespread belief that the oppressed minority has now been empowered. The bourgeois media even celebrates America's overcoming of racism, a ridiculous claim if ever there was one. Almost overnight, the black population in the US has gone from being one of the most alienated, disenchanted sectors of the population, to one that is firmly behind the state, through the persona of the new president-elect.
On the international level, the bourgeoisie has benefited almost immediately from a successful distancing of the new administration from the failures of the Bush regime on imperialist policy and the opening up of opportunities to reestablish American political authority, credibility, and leadership in the international arena.
On the level of economic policy, the new Obama admnistration's ability to carry out necessary state capitalist measures to shore up the system of oppression and exploitation will be unsurpassed. Its rhetoric will be that of providing "relief", whereas what will be provided is the highest debt in US history, and a trillion dollar budget deficit, which is placed on the back of future generations of the working class. Local and state governments are already planning to slash social services and programs because of the economic crisis, at the same time that Obama advocates yet more "bailouts" for major corporations and banks and insurance companies, to be financed out of the sweat of the working class.
Almost startled by its own success, aware that it will not and cannot deliver the changes promised in the campaign, the ruling class is already developing a rhetoric that will help "temper the enthusiasm". We have already heard things like "Obama can only try to straighten Bush's crooked policy" "There's a legacy of mistakes." "Change will not come immediately", "sacrifice will be needed."
In the face of all of this, we stand on the historic positions of our class:
The euphoria cannot last long. The coming austerity programs, initiated in a decentralized manner through local and state governments, will serve as an inescapable impetus to class struggle. The failure of the Obama administration to bring the promised "change" for the better will lead inevitably to disenchantment and seething discontent.
Internationalism Nov. 11, 2008
There is no place to hide now. According to the December announcement by The National Bureau of Economic Research - the agency responsible for dating the beginning of a recession in the US - the American economy has been in recession since December 2007. In other words, for most of last year Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Paulson, the White House and Congress were busy denying the existence of, and trying to avoid, a recession that had already started!
But, we are being told, that is all in the past. Who cares about the Bush administration's faulty sense of reality? This is 2009 and with the new year comes a brand new president predicting that the economy will get worse before it gets better, a new congress ready to act where the past one fumbled, and a great new economic team educated at the most prestigious American institutions, with fresh ideas on how to save capitalism from catastrophe.
As if there weren't continuity with the departing economic officials who represented a national capital that, as a rule, white-washed the gravity of the economic situation and often predicted that there was light at the end of the tunnel; the incoming administration seems to be sticking closer to reality, openly acknowledging that the economy is going through the worst recession since the Great Depression, and that there won't be an easy turnaround in the next couple of years. Why this change of language in the dominant class to which both the departing and incoming politicians belong? It is possible that given the stubborn facts of a developing economic catastrophe, the bourgeoisie economic theorists are finding self-delusion more difficult to achieve? It is more likely that this more truthful language is, above all, a political ploy to give the new administration a better chance to manoeuvre in its quest to reverse the current economic disaster. In particular this policy is geared to temper illusions about a better future spread by Obama's presidential campaign rhetoric about "change."
Yet given the fact that so far the bourgeoisie has failed to contain the crisis, the odds for Obama's success are definitely not good. Nothing in the toolkit used by the doctors of moribund capitalism seems to have worked so far. After uncountable monetary and fiscal gimmicks -the Fed's key interest rate is close to being negative, trillions of dollars have been injected into the financial system, the federal budget deficit has ballooned to over one trillion dollars - the economy just keeps getting worse. The financial system is still in shambles, while the so-called real economy is getting worse by the day. Economic production and commodity sales are rapidly falling, bringing with them a wave of company bankruptcies and a massive upsurge in the numbers of workers being laid off throughout all the sectors of the economy. Although there are still no comprehensive figures about the economic performance during the past holiday season, all estimates predict historically low sales, while the last official figures on unemployment have the unemployed rate running at a 7.2 percent, the highest in the last 16 years. If discouraged workers, who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist, and underemployed workers, who want fulltime jobs but are forced by the economic situation to accept part-time jobs, are included, would put the rate of unemployment and underemployment by some estimates at almost 13 percent.
And even if the US economy is at the centre of the storm, this is not an American event, but rather a worldwide economic crisis. The whole world is plunging into recession. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has forecast that the United States, the world's biggest economy, would suffer a huge 2.8-percent contraction in the fourth quarter of 2008. Germany, the biggest European economy and number three worldwide, officially tumbled into recession last November as output contracted for the second quarter running. France with a miserable 0.1 percent growth in the third quarter managed to just avoid a technical recession. Italy is officially in recession and the Bank of England has said the British economy is also probably already there. Outside the Euro zone, the Japanese economy, the world's second biggest, was predicted to be in recession at the end of 2008 and continue contracting in 2009. According to a recent OECD statement, "the OECD as a whole is currently in recession and will likely stay there for some time."
Furthermore, even the so-called "emerging markets," represented by Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Brazil, that until recently where thought to be somehow insulated from the present financial tsunami, are now also treading water, cutting to size these supposed new upcoming superstars of world capitalism.
These massive convulsions rocking world capitalism the last two years have revived the ghost of the Great Depression of the 1930's. The bourgeoisie specialists themselves are talking about the similarities and many are arguing for the same state interventionist policies with which the bourgeoisie back then responded to the worst ever - up to that time - open economic crisis of its system. One can even read in the bourgeois press descriptions of the return of "state capitalism" referring to the economic policies which all national states are enacting in their attempts to contain the present crisis.
In the face of the current earthquake shaking capitalism throughout the whole world, all governments are responding with a flurry of "bail out" programs, nationalizations and "economic stimulus" packages. These policies, which are in open contradiction with the much cherished "free market" ideology, according to which capitalism can, through "the invisible hand" of the market, resolve its own contradictions, are what some economic commentators refer as a return of state capitalism.
The reality is that state capitalism is not "returning," basically because it never went away. But obviously what revolutionaries consider as state capitalism and what this concept means for the specialists of the bourgeoisie are not the same thing. Thus some general remarks are necessary to make clear what we mean by state capitalism. For us:
With the present economic crisis's similarity to the Great Depression in the foreground, the incoming Obama administration is often being compared to the assent to power of FDR in 1933. Obama's promised "economic stimulus" with its blend of tax cuts and government financed infrastructure programs is being presented as a some kind of "New Deal" that is supposed to "jump-start the economy" and save American capitalism.
However, in our view, whatever the similarities of the present situation to the Great Depression, the situation today of world capitalism is much worse than in the 30's. Of course, in a formalistic sense, the collapse of the financial system, the plunge in production, and the unemployment rate, to mention some economic indicators, were much more dramatically affected in the Great Depression than what we have seen so far today. By 1933, unemployment in America had risen to 25 percent of the work force, domestic production had fallen by more than 30 percent, the stock market had dropped close to 90 percent, and more than a third of the nation's banks had failed. By comparison the present 7.2 percent rate of unemployment and the still positive GDP seem insignificant.
But this is not the whole story. First of all what the specialists often ‘forget' is that the present crisis did not begin in 2007. As we have often pointed out the present economic slump is just one moment in the open crisis of capitalism that started at the end of the 1960's, and that has only gotten worse ever since, despite the "recoveries" which follow the progressively worse "recessions" over the last four decades. Throughout these years -up to now - state capitalist policies have been able to avoid a dramatic collapse similar to that of the great depression, but only at the price of aggravating on the long term capitalism chronic crisis. Thus the ongoing recession -in America and throughout the world - with its dramatic shakeup in the financial system and its apparent unresponsiveness to the government economic manipulation, expresses the reckoning with reality of a system in crisis kept artificially alive by state capitalist policies.
Let us be clear, the policies being prepared by Obama's bright boys are not new, they are variants of the same capitalist policies implemented by the state at one moment or another during the last four decades and that were widely used before during FDR's Depression era. However the failure of this state capitalist economic toolkit to work its magic and keep this moribund system alive is what gives the present world economic slump its true historical significance. And this does not bode well for the Obama's administration. If anything, the margin of maneuver that the state has today to manipulate the economy is far more reduced than what the bourgeoisie had in the 30's. In any case, it is a myth that the New Deal constituted a "solution" to the economic crisis in the 1930's. After managing to contain the devastating spiral downturn initiated in 1929 the New Deal run quickly out of steam. There was another ruinous economic downturn in 1937 and the economy only recovered its pre-Depression era level in the context of the war economy during the slaughter of World War Two. Even the prosperity in the postwar reconstruction period was not just a result of state capitalist policies, but a product of unique set of historical circumstances that can't be replicated today -see the series of articles on the reasons for the post-war prosperity in the last issues of the International Review.
As we have said before many times 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 more murderous imperialist wars. State capitalist policies have never been able to overcome the crisis, the most that they can do is to provide a kind of last resort life-support for the bourgeoisie's moribund system.
The solution to the crisis rests on the historical overcoming of capitalism and with it of society's class divisions and exploitation. It is the historical responsibility of the working class to give a true alternative to society. The present upsurge in class struggle throughout the world is a necessary step for the world working class's own solution to the crisis: the overthrowing of capita lism and building of a real human community.
Eduardo Smith 01/15/2009
Dear Internationalism
Thank you for the copies of your press that you've been sending. I read the last issue with particular interest, as the economic crisis makes me more urgent about clarifying positions and developing analyses.
Something that has been interesting to me of late is how the far Left and Right wings of capital have been putting forward largely identical analysis of the current crisis - only focusing on finance capital, claiming the bailout was merely to "pad the pockets of the bankers", allusions to some conspiracy of ‘financial elites' behind the crisis etc. I would call this conspiratorial ‘half-way critique' structural anti-Semitism, and I'm glad to see the ICC is refusing to fall into that dangerous populism. As always, the Left and the Right are enemies, and I think they will be in many ways indistinguishable from each other, at least on the extreme ends of both. I fear the neo-fascist populism of figures like Ron Paul will catch on even more than it has.
How will the working class respond to the crisis? That is the million dollar question. Will capital turn to the unions or is their reach too diminished except in a few vital industries?
It is sad to see some so-called radicals rallying around Obama, but then again, I guess it's good when people show their true colors.
P.S.: This is an entirely different conversation , but I'm curious how you explain/defend the Bolshevik betrayal of internationalism at the treaty of Brest-Litvok? This was in 1918, yet the ICC maintains that the Bolsheviks remained in the proletarian camp for several more years. Isn't this inconsistent with your position of intransigent internationalism as the cornerstone of all revolutionary positions?
P.P.S.: I'm also interested in your take on Andrew Kliman's recent articles about the crisis. November 15th 2008
Communist Greetings, DDear D.
Thank you for your letter, which we received and read with great pleasure and interest. We can't here answer in detail all the points you raised, but we would like to share a few ideas with you.
First of all, we totally agree with your sense of urgency about ‘clarifying positions and developing analysis' regarding the present economic situation. We salute your preoccupation. There is indeed an urgency and great importance for revolutionaries to be clear about what to say to the working class in order to be able to aid it in the process of developing its class consciousness. Particularly today, because, as we have said many times, the crisis is an ally of the working class, in the sense that it pushes it to confront its mortal enemy on its own class terrain. So, we would like to ask you for comments on any of the economic analyses we develop, and above all, about how to intervene in the class struggle. What are your ideas regarding this important issue? We have recently heard a lot of questioning about ‘what to do' in the interventions in the class struggle, and we would like to hear your ideas as well.
Of course, you are right on point when you pose the question of how the workers will respond to the crisis. Capital will have to rely on its faithful ally, the unions to derail the class response. The question is really whether the working class will fall for them. But this depends on the class' ability to struggle on its own terrain, the terrain of economic demands. More importantly, though, it depends on the politicization of its struggle. Will the class be able to extend its struggle? Will it recognize its identify as a class, that is, will it develop class solidarity in its struggles? What do you think? Do you think that the working class can politicize its struggle? Is there a potential for this?
While this issue is extremely important, we regret to say that when we went to the public meeting organized by the New Space and the Marxist Humanist Committee in November, where we heard Andrew Kliman's presentation of his articles on the crisis, no link whatsoever was made between the crisis and the class struggle. So, while the analysis was made from a Marxist framework that emphasizes the falling rate of profit to explain the crisis, it was not able to really clarify very much because of the lack of the connection between the theory and the practice. All in all, it remained on a purely academic level. At the theoretical level we believe, as we have developed in many articles on the theory of decadence and the economic crisis, that the falling rate of profit alone is insufficient as an explanation of the crisis. In our view it is the relative saturation of the global market that accentuates the effects of the falling rate of profit and produces the economic impasse of the global crisis. Kliman tends not to see the current situation as a manifestation of the historic crisis of capitalism, but more as a conjunctural phenomenon, and thus is an inadequate perspective for the workers movement.
We also agree with you that the left and right wings of capital are not different from each other. To us, it is not surprising that their ‘analysis' of the crisis focuses on finance capital, blaming ‘greed' and lack of regulation, since their primary ideological function is that of mystifying the workers' understanding of what is at stake. Better to blame greedy, dishonest capitalists who "need more regulation" than to recognize that what is at stake is the utter bankruptcy of capitalism, the global and deadly crisis of capitalism, which can only lead humanity to destruction unless the working class carries out its historic mission: the communist revolution.
Regarding your question about the Brest-Litovsk treaty, without going into any explanation here, we simply invite you to read our articles in International Review 134, "Germany 1918-19: From war to revolution" [11] and International Review 10, The political confusions of the Communist Workers Organization (UK)." [12] You can read both articles on our website: www.internationalism.org [13]. We have written many other articles on the problems of the Russian and German revolutions, but these two articles should be a good beginning.
Well.....this is it for now. Hope to continue the correspondence with you.
All the best, Ana, for Internationalism 1/09
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/barack-obama
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/us-elections-2008
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/obama-president
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/state-capitalism
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/01/gaza
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/gaza-bombardment-israel
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/134/germany-1918-19-pt2
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/content/2550/political-confusions-communist-workers-organization-uk
[13] http://www.internationalism.org
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/brest-litovsk
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/andrew-kliman