All around the world people have seen the images of coastal towns’ destruction and the desolation of the hundreds of thousands left homeless –40,000 in New York City alone.  They evoke the recent memories of last year’s tornado in Joplin, Missouri; of last year’s hurricane Irene; of 2005’s hurricane Katrina, to name only a few, and only the ones that struck the US. Each time the same questions are raised:  Why, with growing awareness of the link between of global warming, rising sea levels, shifting sea currents and weather patterns, and more frequent and violent storms, is nothing done to prevent similar catastrophes from inflicting the damage which is to be expected?  Why are the so-called rescue efforts never enough to address the needs of the population?  Why aren’t the pre-storm evacuations better planned and organized?  Is there even a way to prepare for and then to organize the necessary relief, given the chaotic and irrational way in which urban development is ‘planned’ and implemented?  Each time these questions are raised after a new disaster, the ruling class avoids a direct confrontation with them, resorts to outright lies, or chooses to focus on how to make political hay out of real human loss and suffering.  

Pre-storm preparedness: the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule

Much of the blame for the human hardship in the aftermath of ‘Superstorm Sandy’ has been laid on the choice individuals made not to leave their homes and relocate to shelters.  Indeed, ever since the criticisms prompted by the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the ruling class has been intent on refurbishing the image of its state.  In an attempt to restore the masses’ confidence in its apparatus, it needs to project the idea of a state capable of safeguarding the well-being of its population.  However, cutting through the state apparatus’ byzantine layers of bureaucracy to get the help required in an appropriate time frame has proved impossible time and again.

Even making the communication faster and better between the various federal agencies charged with warning of the potential dangers of a storm is a task that the capitalist state is not able to fulfill.  In the words of Bryan Norcross, a well-respected meteorologist for more than twenty years, “They [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA] made outstanding forecasts.  Their strength forecast was essentially perfect, and their storm surge forecast for New York City was absolutely as good as a forecast can be these days.”   Indeed, forecasts of potentially destructive storms can be made quite accurately one week ahead of their hitting land these days.  But the National Hurricane Center chose not to issue any hurricane advisory until just one day before Hurricane Sandy landed because it kept receiving information that the storm may change its path and weaken to a tropical storm.  By the time it had become clear the storm wasn’t changing its path and wasn’t weakening, and the Center finally issued the hurricane warning, not  enough time was left for people to clearly understand what was about to happen and prepare accordingly. Considering the magnitude of the storm and the fact it was on course to slam into the most populated part of the country, it really was not rational, certainly not responsible, on the side of the agencies and authorities in charge, to decide not to issue the hurricane warning earlier. It certainly is not rational to downplay a storm that was described as a ‘super-mega-combo’ freak of a storm the like of which had never been seen.

NOAA has one set of warnings for tropical storms and another set for northeaster or winter storms.  Partly because Hurricane Sandy was a hybrid-type storm which did not fit the description of any prior storm, NOAA got tangled up as to which warning to issue, not knowing which guideline to follow.  Without a doubt this had the effect of hindering the ability of the Center to issue the most appropriate warning in time.  However, the Center’s decision to issue a clear hurricane warning only one day before the storm’s impact cannot be explained by its sclerotic bureaucracy alone.  It also offers a view into the tattered infrastructure of capitalist metropolises and begs the question to our rulers as to what solution, if any, they have to confront similar storms in the future?  It seems impossible, under the present conditions of urban ‘development’ under capitalism, to organize a rational protection and evacuation of areas at risk for several reasons:  1. the sheer number of people living in those areas; 2. the lack of infrastructures needed to  mobilize them for the evacuation and shelter them in the aftermath of a storm; 3. the destruction of the natural environment and the continued urban development of areas that should not be developed for urban uses; 4. the displacement of financial, human, technological resources toward military goals.  These resources could be used for research, innovation, and building of new infrastructure capable of confronting the threats to the environment and human life posed by climate change. 

In the case of New Jersey, which was hard hit by the storm, most of the communities on the barrier islands along its coast have been developed to attract tourists and summer residents.  For decades, concrete sea walls, rock jetties, or other protective barriers have lined the barrier islands to spur the development of the tourist industry.  This kind of urban development has meant that since 1985 80 million cubic yards of sand has been applied on 54 of the state’s 97 miles of developed coast line:  a truckload of sand for every foot of beach.  Aside from the fact that this periodic replenishment of artificial beaches with natural sand from elsewhere means an increased toll on the highways (trucks filled with sand are extremely heavy) and the depletion of a natural resource, rising sea levels and more frequent storms wash away replenishment projects sooner than expected.  Buildings, houses, and roads also pin down the beaches, which contributes significantly to making these communities more vulnerable to rising sea levels and storms and to the further deterioration of the natural protection once provided by undeveloped beaches.  Undeveloped beaches deal well with storms.  Their sands shift; barrier islands may even migrate toward the mainland, in this way protecting it.  But the need for capitalist profit, rather than a harmonization of nature’s own principles with human needs, is what drives the choice to continue the development of artificial beaches.  In the logic of capitalism, economic benefits, even though temporary, outweigh the cost of protecting human lives.

New York City has suffered a similar fate, but on a much larger scale.  Now that Superstorm Sandy hit and everyone realizes how vulnerable the city and its millions of inhabitants are, the inevitable cacophony about what to do for the future has started again.  Proposals for the human engineering of what used to be the harbor’s own natural protective barriers are being considered.  Some of these proposals are quite interesting and creative; some even take into account the recreational uses of such projects and their aesthetic attraction.  This shows that at the technological and scientific levels humanity has developed the ability to potentially put science at the service of human needs. Storm-surge barriers have been built around the city of St. Petersburg in Russia;  Providence, Rhode Island, and in the Netherlands.  The technological know-how is available.  However, the geography of New York City is such that building a storm-surge barrier to protect Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn could affect tidal flow in such a way that a surge bouncing back against the barrier would double-up its strength against parts of Staten Island and the Rockaway, among the hardest hit by Superstorm Sandy.  It is not impossible that an engineering solution can be found to this problem, but, given the track record of capitalist development and the realities of the economic crisis, it is not far-fetched to imagine that New York City will rather recede in what engineers call “resilience”, a term that describes small scale interventions such as installing floodgates at sewage plants and raising the ground level of certain areas in Queens.  Considering that New York City is a multi-million inhabitant city that runs part of the world economy and whose infrastructure is very complex, old, and extensive, small interventions of this sort clash against the simplest common sense.  It is also not far-fetched to foresee that if the choice will go in favor of a proposal for a storm-surge barrier, the question of who gets included to be behind the gate, and who doesn’t will be answered by the needs of capitalist profit rather than those of human beings.

The aftermath of the storm:  we are on our own

President Obama’s electoral campaign saw in Hurricane Sandy an opportunity to revamp the dispute between the most conservative right wing of the ruling class and its more liberal wing over the role of government.  Of course, it did so to its own political advantage.  It has been claimed that the present administration’s response has been more effective than the response of the George W. Bush’s administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The images of the New Orleans convention center, where thousands were stranded for days and where the most awful conditions of survival set in, have been juxtaposed to the images of the National Guard in Hoboken, New Jersey moving in the day after the storm struck to deliver food and water and rescue stranded residents.  The message was to be clear:  the government is there to help people in need and can do a better job at it if Democrats are at the helm of the state.   It was quite obvious from the publicity the Obama administration received from the supposedly ‘prompt’ response by the mass media, and their bashing of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, that the media were completely open to helping Obama out in winning the election.

But human reason must stand to the test of facts.  Anybody can read or watch the news to get a sense of the real catastrophic conditions in which hundreds of thousands of people are living in two weeks –at the time of writing- after the storm.  From reopening schools that are also serving as shelters, to the continued power shortages for vast swaths of the population across the area, to the fuel rationing and the recent plan by mayor Bloomberg to have the most devastated neighborhoods in the metropolitan area resuscitated through his Rapid Repair program - which promises to be a quick-fix aimed at quelling the population’s rising anger and frustration, the test of facts shows that the ruling class and its extensive bureaucratic state apparatus have hit an impasse and are unable to efficiently and meaningfully address the urgent and long-term needs of its population.

But we do not conclude from this, as the right wing conservatives do, that we need to replace the government with charities and encourage people to save for the rainy days.  This is would link the masses to the whims of the ruling class anyway, either by making them dependent on the magnanimousness of philanthropic and religious organizations, or the capitalist market’s swings between periods of employment and unemployment, with the resulting instability as to the ability to save.  This does not help the exploited masses raise their consciousness from the level of resignation to the system of exploitation they are subjected to, since it makes no difference whether we are directly repressed and exploited by the state, or by the market, or by the individual capitalist who also happens to be a philanthropist.  What we think is needed is the revolutionary and autonomous action of the masses aimed at taking political power.  This is the only way to ensure that all important decisions are made in the interest of what needs to be done to create, administer, deliver, and distribute the resources of society for society’s own needs, and not for the needs of profit, capital, the government, or the philanthropist. 

Probably learning from the experience of the recent climatic events linked to climate change, most notoriously Hurricane Katrina, that the ruling class and its various agencies, such as FEMA, won’t help, or won’t give the help needed, or enough of it, or as promptly as needed, it is the population itself that poured in its resources, time, money in a significant show of real solidarity.  This shows the fundamental and significant sense of identity that exists among the exploited and that it is them who have the potential to create a new world. 

The working class is the only class with a future

In each instance of a ‘natural disaster’, the ruling class has been particularly keen on preventing deeper questions of a more general nature from being posed and given a revolutionary answer:    What is the perspective for the future of the planet and the human species under the rule of a social class that shows no regard for the safety and well being of the classes it exploits? If the future under capitalism has nothing more to offer other than more environmental destruction and greater threats to the survival of the human species, what needs to be done?  What alternatives for the construction of a different, new world?  Because it has no particular economic interests to protect and no position of power to maintain and defend in capitalist society, the working class and its revolutionary minorities are the only social forces who can give answers that are stripped of ideological mystifications and that aim at searching for the truth.  It is only on the basis of knowing the truth about  how economic, social, and political factors determine our human existence that the exploited classes can find in themselves the confidence in their own ability to offer a different vision of the world and ultimately concretize it.

Ana, November 10, 2012

The 2012 Presidential election has come and gone with a positive result for the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. Beating back a firm challenge from his Republican rival Mitt Romney, President Obama has secured re-election meaning the Democratic Party will now survive to guide the ship of state for another four years.

The post-election media narrative has been deafening. Obama won in a landslide they tell us, taking 332 Electoral College votes to Romney’s 206 and beating his rival by over 3 million popular votes. All the doomsday scenarios of another contested election like 2000 came to naught.[1] All of the state level GOP attempts to suppress the votes of likely Obama supporters hardly mattered at all. Obama now has a national mandate to govern and Obamacare is set to remain the uncontested law of the land. The Republicans, still licking their wounds from a trouncing that also saw them lose seats in the Senate, will almost certainly have to moderate their rhetoric and come to the negotiating table. Finally, after four years of obstinate obstructionism, the GOP will be forced to get a grip on reality and strike the grand bargain on deficit reduction that eluded the US bourgeoisie throughout Obama’s first term.

The more rosy pundits even expect that this election will spell the end of the Tea Party insurgency within the Republican Party. They claim the more rational elements within the GOP (Jeb Bush perhaps?) will now be able to assert themselves and regain control of the party, reinvigorating a healthy two party system once again. Still others foresee a civil war in the GOP as it struggles to come to grips with a new demographic reality in which its commitment to race baiting, retrograde sexual politics, anti-science conspiracy theory and immigrant bashing will never again permit it to secure the Presidency.

For our part, against the optimistic interpretations, we feel the results of the election, and the preceding campaign, confirm the analysis we have developed since Obama’s initial election regarding a developing “political crisis” of the American bourgeoisie. We should review what we have analyzed as some of the main features of this crisis:

• The effects of social decomposition have been asserting a centrifugal weight on the bourgeoisie itself leading to an increasing inability for certain factions of it to act in the overall interests of the national capital. However, this process has not affected all factions of the bourgeoisie equally. The Republican Party has suffered disproportionately from an ideological degeneration calling into question its ability to act as a credible party of bourgeois government.
• The inability of the bourgeoisie to find any solution to the continuing economic crisis has only strengthened the tendencies towards vicious factional infighting within the bourgeoisie. The ideological decomposition of the Republican Party means that it more and more abandons any attempt to manage the economic crisis in a rational way falling back on thoroughly discredited conservative economic dogma and aggressively pursuing anti-union policies that threaten to strip the state of its best bulwark against the working class.
• Given its current condition, it is too risky for the main factions of the bourgeoisie to risk putting the Republican Party back in charge of the national government. This is despite the fact that the continuing economic crisis and the accompanying need to enact austerity would tend to suggest that it would adopt a strategy of the putting the left of its political apparatus into opposition in order to capture and divert working class anger into dead-ends that are not threatening to the capitalist social order.
• As a result of the Republican Party’s degeneration, the Democrats are left to run the national government and carry through the needed austerity. This risks upsetting the traditional ideological division of labor within the bourgeoisie making the Democrats responsible for painful cuts to social programs and the Republicans running against the rhetoric of economic recovery.
• Whatever its reservations about the Republicans assuming control of the national government, the main factions of the bourgeoisie are faced with a situation in which it is increasingly difficult for it to impose its will on the electoral process. The ideological decomposition of the Republican Party has been accompanied by a generalized ideological hardening of society itself. More and more, the nation is divided into two—roughly equal sized—political blocks. In a Presidential election, each candidate is assumed to start out with about 47 percent of the vote. With the Republican Party increasingly unwilling to accept the discipline of the main factions, each election is fiercely contested. Election campaigns turn more and more into a zero sum fight over the remaining “undecideds” in which fewer and fewer tactics are ruled out. Moreover, the structures of the US state—the Electoral College, equal representation of each state in the Senate, the management of national elections by state and local officials, tend to favor the less populated, more backward areas of the country, giving the GOP a certain advantage.
• Obama’s Presidency, while providing an initial revitalization of the electoral myth among a population that had been turned off by eight years of the Bush Presidency, has only sparked an even more intense, and much more durable, right wing backlash. With conspiracy theories and racist stereotypes coming to define the President in the eyes of many, his Presidency has faced questions about its legitimacy from the very beginning, threatening to bring down his signature achievements such as the passage of Obamacare.

So, does Obama’s reelection spell the end of these difficulties, what we have labeled a “political crisis’? Are the main factions of the bourgeoisie right to celebrate their victory, believing, as they do, that it will mark a return to political normalcy in which the business of the nation will be the top priority once again? What about the working class? What role did it play in this election? Was the bourgeoisie able to maintain its momentum from 2008 and keep the population convinced that electoral democracy is the best way to protect its interests? What does Obama’s victory mean for the working class? What can it expect from his second term in office? We will try to shed some light on these questions, from a Marxist perspective, here.

The Meaning of Obama’s Victory For the Working Class

We should have no illusions about what Obama’s second term will mean for the working class. We can sum it up in one word: austerity. For all the campaign rhetoric the Obama team spewed, aided by their union and “progressive” allies, about protecting Social Security and Medicare from the right-wing “evil genius” Paul Ryan, it is clear that cuts to both programs have always been on the agenda for Obama’s second term. The only question is how deep the cuts will be and how fast they will be implemented.

It is pretty simple really. The US bourgeoisie, Democrat or Republican, left or right, are all in agreement that the nation’s fiscal course is simply unsustainable. They all recognize that in order to attempt to get the deficit under control “reforms” will have to be made to the so-called “entitlement” programs, which account for a large share of the nation’s budget woes. It is true that the policies advocated by former VP candidate Ryan, such as turning Medicare into a voucher program, were simply too draconian to enact at this time. It is also true that the main factions of the bourgeoisie reject the right-wing trope by which Social Security must be privatized in order to “save it”. However, none of this means that they will endeavor to preserve these programs as they are now. On the contrary, painful cuts are in the offing.

President Obama has already signaled his willingness to slash these programs. It was a major part of the so-called “grand bargain” he was in the process of negotiating with Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner in the lead up to the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011. The only real difference in that matter was the President’s desire to bundles the cuts with certain tax increases on the wealthy in order that he could sell the bargain to the population with the poll-tested language of “shared sacrifice.” It was only Tea Party intransigence that prevented Boehner from agreeing to the grand bargain, forcing the complex machinations that now pose the threat of the so-called “fiscal cliff”: automatic tax increases and draconian spending cuts to kick in at the beginning of the new year unless a deal can be reached.

In fact, the political pundits are already on record that this is the real import of the election. Obama now has the political capital he needs to force the Republicans into a grand bargain that, at the very least, includes some tax increase for the wealthy that can be sold to the population as “shared sacrifice.” We don’t know for certain how deep the cuts will be or how fast they will be implemented, but there is little question that they are coming. The left of the Democratic Party can cry all it wants about “protecting the Big Three[2],” but can one really doubt that in the aftermath of whatever deal is reached, they won’t try to sell us on the idea that it could have been much worse if the Republicans controlled the White House? Or try to make us feel a little bit better that at least the billionaires will be kicking in their fair share? Of course, how exactly any of that helps the Medicare beneficiary who just saw their benefits slashed or their premiums go up, or the 65 year old coal miner, who will now have to wait another year or two to collect his measly Social Security check is never explained.

In terms of the overall economic picture, it is not at all clear that the situation can get any better in Obama’s second term. While the bourgeoisie turns its attention to deficit reduction, any thought of providing more stimulus for the economy is completely abandoned. There is simply no political will for any more government spending, despite the fact that the more serious bourgeois economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have continuously called for another round of stimulus in order to try to pull the economy out of the doldrums.

It’s symbolic of the dead-end the bourgeoisie finds itself in that its focus on deficit reduction runs smack into the face of stimulating economic growth. The best the pundits can do on this score is to hark back to the glory days of President Clinton, who raised taxes and balanced the budget while presiding over the “largest economic expansion in American history.” So ahistorical and short sighted has the bourgeoisie become that they fail to remember that much of the “growth” of the Clinton years was the result of the debt fueled tech-stock and real estate bubbles that led to the current Great Recession! They seem to believe that the recipes of the Clinton era can be resurrected and applied today, regardless of the historical and economic context.

It is unclear whether or not the Obama administration really believes all its campaign hype about how much better the economy is getting under its tutelage. Regardless, even if it does recognize the need for further stimulus, there isn’t a whole lot it can do about it. Whatever new mood of cooperation the GOP may acquire as a result of their electoral “trouncing,” it is unlikely they would agree to a new round of stimulus. With Congress gridlocked on this issue, the Federal Reserve has recently been compelled to act on its own by buying up more mortgage securities, but most serious economists agree that this amounts to nothing more than a peashooter, when what is needed is something closer to a howitzer. In the end however, even if there were political will for such an endeavor, its unclear where all the money would come from—the printing press? Borrow more from China? All of this would fly directly in the face of the pressing need for deficit reduction. The bourgeoisie is truly stuck between a rock and a hard place. Even if they are able to pull off another round of stimulus, this would—in the end—amount to nothing more than kicking the can down the road.

All of this makes it patently clear that Obama’s triumph was not as victory for the working class. On the contrary, he now has enough political cover to enact the austerity he has planned all along and which the needs of the national capital demand. While there remains a certain danger to the bourgeoisie that the Democratic Party will be perceived as the party that presided over the looming cuts, this is tempered to some degree by the Obama administration’s ideological success in selling the population on the fact that under the Republicans, the cuts would have likely been much worse. It is most likely for this reason, rather than through a deep conviction and support for Obama’s policies, that many working class people bit the bullet in this election and voted for the Democrats. The logic of the lesser of the two evils appears to have carried the day.[3]

However, those workers who still have illusions in Obama’s Presidency, who still believe that he can “restore the middle class” or that he is some kind of champion of “workers’ rights,” need look no further than the events surrounding the Chicago Teachers’ Strike to get a real sense of where the President stands on these issues. We must not forget that it was the President’s cronies in Chicago that carried through these assaults on the teachers.[4] Can there be any doubt that this vision for the education sector—indeed for the entire working class—is ultimately shared by the President himself? The original architect for Mayor Emanuel’s plan to reform the Chicago school system was none other than former Chicago School Chancellor Arne Duncan—Obama’s current Secretary of Education!

We must assert against all the possible electoral calculations that the interests of the working class lie elsewhere—in its autonomous struggles to defend its working and living conditions at the point of production. It is understandable that workers fear the Republicans’ draconian attacks. It is quite possible that this party has lost any mooring in reality and would proceed to enact the most retrograde policies at the national level if it ever makes it back into office. However, should this mean we have to find solace in the Democrats? It’s clear that the only real difference between the parties at this point is how fast and how dramatic the cuts will be. In the end, both roads lead to the same place. When we vote for Democrats, it is we workers who are kicking the can down the road. The only real solution for our condition is to return to the road of our own autonomous struggles around class issues.

Is the Political Crisis Finished?

This brings us to the issue of the political crisis of the US bourgeoisie itself. Will Obama’s re-election put an end to the all the rancor within the ruling class as the bourgeois media has been telling us? Will the Republicans’ electoral “trouncing” cause the more rational factions in that party to reclaim it from the Tea Party lunatics? Is a new era of cooperation and progress in the offing in which both parties will turn their attention toward governing in the best interests of the national capital?

In answering these questions, it is first necessary to address the issue of the alleged electoral “trouncing.” It is true that Obama won by a large margin in the Electoral College, but only in the context of recent American politics can a 51 to 48 percent margin in the popular vote be considered a “landslide.” On this level, the election results only seem to confirm the reality that the United States is a deeply divided country. The population is so sharply divided that even month after month of relentless campaign propaganda painting Romney as a greedy vulture capitalist and Obama as an un-American socialist barely moved the final election tallies from 2008, when Obama bested McCain by 53 to 46 percent. So hardened have the ideological lines in society become that the challenge of building a national narrative is more severe than ever.

It is likely true that the emerging demographic trends within the electorate spell serious trouble for the GOP. If it is intent on continuing its brand of hard right policies based in large part in playing to white racial fear and gender based demagoguery, it is unlikely a Republican Presidential candidate will ever be able to build a broad enough electoral coalition to make it competitive against a strong Democratic one[5]. However, can we conclude from this reality that the GOP will necessarily be able to right its ship as the media predicts? This seems unlikely. Having stoked the flames of the white male backlash it does not seem reasonable to expect this element in the party to go quietly into the night. Should the Republican leadership compromise with Obama on comprehensive immigration reform (as most pundits suspect it will try to do), it seems quite possible that there could be a split in the Republican Party—something that would throw a major spanner in the works of the US two-party system. While we can’t say for certain that this will happen, the fault lines within the GOP are clear. It will be torn for some time between a wing of the party seeking to refurbish its image in order to maximize electoral success, and another intent on preserving ideological purity.

However, the Republicans are not the only ones with a demographic problem. Obama lost the white vote by a large margin. Whatever his advantages among blacks, Latinos, single women and young voters, he suffered severe deficits among blue-collar whites (in particular men). While in the context of a high turnout Presidential election, this arrangement favors the Democrats going forward, it remains unclear whether or not this will translate into lower turnout mid-term, state and local elections. The GOP, in whatever form, reformed or retrograde, will likely continue to be a force at these levels. In fact, even in the current Presidential year—largely due to corrupt gerrymandering—the GOP was able to retain control of the House of Representatives. The perspective appears to be one of continued partisan bickering rather than real cooperation.

On another level, the US bourgeoisie will continue to be dogged by the practical “reversal” of its traditional division of ideological labor. If it were obliged to keep the Democrats in power indefinitely pending a resolution of the Republican Party’s meltdown, this would pose serious problems for the legitimacy of the Democratic Party itself. Forced to preside over the coming austerity, the Democrats would have to own the policies they enact. This is something we saw play itself over the course of the recent campaign. What an odd sight it was, in the midst of a terrible recession, for the Democratic candidate to have to run on the illusion that the economy was improving, while the Republican candidate ran as the voice of the long-term unemployed whom the President had failed to help! How long can this situation hold? The Democrats only response to this is to argue that an intransigent GOP forces them into these policies and prevents them from being able to act to their fullest capabilities. While they have had some success with this tactic so far, how much longer can they keep it up before the Democrats become viewed as the party of austerity?

We should also acknowledge that President Obama’s first term was marked by the emergence of a genuine extra-parliamentary movement around the issues of the economic crisis in the Occupy Movement, which captured the public imagination for a period of time in the fall and winter of 2011. It appears that the U.S. bourgeoisie was able to recuperate much of the energy of this movement into Obama’s re-election campaign under the same “lesser of the two evil” logic that moved many workers to support the President. However, now that the election is over, it is reasonable to consider whether or not there is a perspective for the reemergence of similar movements should the economic situation fail to improve given that there will no longer be a pressing electoral campaign with which the bourgeoisie can blackmail it? If the Democrats come to be viewed as the party of austerity, will it continue to be able to divert the energy of future extra-parliamentary social movements into the electoral dead-end?

In the realm of foreign policy, it is clear that the Obama administration will continue to face growing threats to US hegemony, which it will find increasingly difficult to head off. Although foreign policy may not have been a major issue in the Presidential campaign, as evidenced by the third and final debate in which Romney basically agreed with Obama on most major issues of foreign policy, this does not mean that there are no tensions within the US bourgeoisie on these issues. Already, just a week after the election, President Obama is dealing with a major public relations debacle regarding the sexual indiscretions of CIA Director and Iraq surge hero General Petraeus.

While it is not clear what the ultimate import of this crisis will be, it seems the Republicans smell blood in the water and will certainly use this scandal to ramp up their investigations into the administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi consulate attack that left the US Ambassador to Libya dead. However this plays out, the US bourgeoisie will continue to face severe challenges to its imperialist hegemony including the possibility of a wider war emerging from the Syria crisis, continued tensions with Iran, increasing difficulties keeping its Israeli running dog in line and the growing threat to its hegemony coming from an increasingly aggressive Chinese imperialism.

In the end, while we think the main factions of the US bourgeoisie may have won another victory with Obama’s re-election, this does not completely reverse the tendency towards political crisis that has been gripping the US bourgeoisie for over a decade. While we do not have a crystal ball and we cannot tell how this situation will play out exactly, it seems likely that the road will continue to be very rocky. It is instructive that some political scientists who study US politics think we are on the verge of another party realignment. What shape that will take is not quite clear. The reality of decomposition makes it very difficult to predict with any certainty.

From our perspective, the re-election of President Obama does not herald a new era of peace, prosperity and cooperation. While it is true that there will probably be an attempt by the more rational factions of the Republican Party to retake it from the Tea Party, this does not guarantee success. Moreover, it would be a mistake to reduce the problems of the US bourgeoisie to this alone. The challenges facing it are immense and in all probability insurmountable. For the working class, the conclusion is clear—there is no salvation in this mess of bourgeois electoral politics. We can only pursue our interests on a fundamentally different terrain—that of our autonomous struggles around class issues.

--Henk

11/14/2012

 

 

 

Once again, Israeli jets and missiles have been pounding Gaza. In 2008, ‘Operation Cast Lead’ led to almost 1,500 deaths, the majority of them civilians, despite all the claims made about ‘surgical strikes’ against terrorist targets. The Gaza Strip is one of the most impoverished and densely populated areas in the world and it is absolutely impossible to separate ‘terrorist facilities’ from the residential areas that surround them. With all the sophisticated weapons at the Israelis’ disposal, the majority of causalities in the current campaign are also women, children, and the old.

Not that this concerns the militarists at the head of the Israel state. Gaza is once again being collectively punished, as it has been not only through the previous onslaught but through the blockade which has crippled its economy, hampered efforts to rebuild following the devastation of 2008, and kept the population at near starvation levels.

Compared to the firepower wielded by the Israelis, the military capacities of Hamas and the more radical jihadist groups in Gaza are puny. But thanks to the chaos in Libya, Hamas has got its hands on longer-range missiles. Not only Ashdod in the south (where three residents of a block of flats were killed by a missile fired from Gaza) but Tel Aviv and Jerusalem itself are now in range. The numbing fear that grips Gaza residents every day is also beginning to make itself felt in Israel’s main cities.

In short: both populations are held in hostage to the opposing military machines that dominate Israel and Palestine – with a little help from the Egyptian army that patrols the borders of Gaza to prevent  undesirable incursions or escapes. Both populations are in the firing line in a situation of permanent war – not only in the form of rockets and shells, but through being compelled to shoulder the growing burden of an economy distorted by the needs of war. And now the world economic crisis is forcing the ruling class on both sides of the divide to introduce new cuts in living standards, new increases in the prices of basic necessities.

In Israel last year, the soaring price of housing was one of the sparks that lit the protest movement which took the form of mass demonstrations, street occupations and assemblies – a movement directly inspired by the revolts in the Arab world and which raised slogans like “Netanyahu, Assad, Mubarak are all the same” and “Arabs and Jews want affordable housing”. For a brief but exhilarating moment, everything in Israeli society – including the ‘Palestinian problem’ and the future of the occupied territories – was open to question and debate. And one of the main fears of the protestors was that the government would respond to this incipient challenge to national ‘unity’ by launching a new military adventure.

This summer, on the occupied West Bank, rises in fuel and food prices were met by a series of angry demonstrations, road blockades and strikes. Workers in transport, health and education, university and school students and the unemployed were on the streets facing the police of the Palestinian Authority and demanding a minimum wage, jobs, lower prices, and an end to corruption. There have also been demonstrations against the rising cost of living in the Kingdom of Jordan.

For all the differences in living standards between the Israeli and Palestinian populations, despite the added oppression and humiliation of military occupation suffered by the latter, the roots of these two social revolts are exactly the same: the growing impossibility of living under a capitalist system in profound crisis. 

There has been much speculation about the motives behind the recent escalation. Is Netanyahu trying to stir up nationalism to boost his chances of re-election? Has Hamas been stepping up rocket attacks to prove its war-like credentials in the face of a challenge from more radical Islamist gangs? Does the Israeli military aim to topple Hamas or merely to degrade its military capacities? What role will be played in the conflict by the new regimes in Egypt? How will it affect the current civil war in Syria?

These are all questions worth pursuing but none of them affect the fundamental issue: the escalation of imperialist conflict is totally opposed to the needs of the vast mass of the population in Israel, Palestine and the rest of the Middle East. Where the social revolts on both sides of the divide make it possible for the masses to fight for their real, material interests against the capitalists and the state which exploits them, imperialist war creates a false unity between the exploited and their exploiters and sharpens divisions between the exploited on one side and the exploited on the other side. When Israeli jets bomb Gaza, it produces new recruits for Hamas and the jihadists for whom all Israelis, all Jews, are the enemy. When the jihadists fire rockets into Ashdod or Tel Aviv, it makes more Israelis turn to ‘their’ state for protection and for revenge against the ‘Arabs’. The pressing social issues which lay behind the revolts are buried in an avalanche of nationalist hatred and hysteria.

But if war can push back social conflict, the opposite is also true. In the face of the current escalation, ‘responsible’ governments like those of the USA and Britain are calling for restraint, a return to the peace process. But these are the same governments currently waging war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.  The USA is also Israel’s main military and financial backer. We cannot look to them for ‘peaceful’ solutions any more than we can look to states like Iran who have openly armed Hamas and Hezbollah. The real hope for a peaceful world does not lie with the rulers, but with the resistance of the ruled, their growing understanding that they have the same interests in all countries, the same need to struggle and unite against a system which can offer them nothing but crisis, war, and destruction.

Amos , 20/11/12.