Two-Party Duplicity

And yet there never was a more widespread feeling in England than now, that the old parties are doomed, that the old shibboleths have become meaningless, that the old watchwords are exploded, that the old panaceas will not act any longer… But in England, where the industrial and agricultural working-class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working-class, neither more nor less… Yet the English working-class allows the landlord, capitalist, and retail trading classes, with their tail of lawyers, newspaper writers, etc., to take care of its interests. No wonder reforms in the interest of the workman come so slowly and in such miserable dribbles. The workpeople of England have but to will, and they are the masters to carry every reform, social and political, which their situation requires. Then why not make that effort? Frederich Engels, A Working-Men’s Party, July 23, 1881

In the middle of July, the House of Representatives considered amendment 114 to H.R. 580 that would reduce US military aid to Israel by $500 million, the amount designated for Israeli missile defense. Sponsored by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the amendment offered a rare opportunity for our national leaders to show a modest objection to Israel’s genocidal foreign policy or, as in the case of Greene, to voice opposition to an unnecessary subsidy from a debt-ridden country to a country with universal healthcare and subsidized education-- the lack of which account for two of the biggest factors in personal debt in the US. 

Though only a gesture, a yes-vote on the amendment would have brought great attention to the ongoing brutal genocide in Gaza, to the nuclear-weapon-backed bully daily slaughtering starving Gazans as though it were a sport. It would have slowed the flow of US dollars supporting Israeli violence.

A yes-vote would have shown some actual principle behind the hollow slogan of “Make America Great Again” espoused by so many who neither really care about the US people nor have any idea where its greatness would lie. 

But the amendment received only six votes, and few “news” purveyors even bothered to report it. 

Some will heap praise on the four Democrats and two Republicans, citing their courage and independence.

But that profoundly misunderstands the moment.

It is wrong to offer accolades to those who are simply doing what they should do. The fact that there are so few supporting the amendment is less an expression of the moral worth of the six than a measure of the depravity of the many. We expect our representatives to do that which is morally correct. Gratitude is reserved for those who exceed their duty, not those who simply do what any decent person should do. 

Voting no-- as did 422 House members-- is a despicable, scurrilous act. Voting to give the Israeli government even a dollar for its death-dealing enterprise deserves our utter scorn. 

It is important to fully grasp what it means for nearly the entire legislative body of a country to back the genocide of another people, a people virtually defenseless for over eighteen months.

It would be easy, but cynical to see the House vote as reflecting their constituents or their apathy. A recent Gallup poll shows that only 32 percent of US respondents approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza, a substantial decrease since the beginning of Israel’s systematic killing of Gazan civilians. Therefore, the House vote is far from a reflection of the sentiments of all US citizens. 

Instead, it is a result of the corruption of US politics, specifically the two-party system. AIPAC-- the leading lobbying group for Israel’s interests in the US-- distributed $29,078,901 to 335 House members last year, according to Open Secrets. Other Israeli interest-groups contributed to House members, as did US apocalyptic fundamentalists that identify with Israel’s supposed Biblical role. 

Of course, it is not only the issue of Palestine’s right to exist that is shaped by the wholesale purchase of the two-party system. Publicly-run national healthcare, free of insurance companies-- overwhelmingly popular with the people-- never gets a serious legislative debate because of the influence of the profit-sodden insurance industry and Big Pharma. And the unpopular wars and massive defense spending keep coming, thanks to the effective, generous lobbying of the military-industrial behemoth.

My Italian-born grandmother often repeated a saying meant to explain crass opportunism and shamelessness: “Sei come Bertoldo, che mostra il culo per un soldo” (Bertoldo, shows his ass for a penny). Over fifty years of following the Democratic Party has taught me the real meaning of the insult.

Besides our morally corrupt representatives, the US mainstream media has historically thrown its support behind Israeli policies, almost without exception. Only alternative media and a profound distrust of the capitalist “news” outlets nourish opposition to official support for genocide.

What is truly remarkable, given the long standing “bipartisan” toadying to Israel and the high and growing costs of dissent in the US, is the noble actions by students and activists in the US who risk careers, arrests, and even deportation to show that everyone is not bought and sold in political life. 

The old Nixonian notion of a silent majority in the US has been turned on its head. Today, it is not an alleged conservative trend that exists beneath the political life shaped by elites, but a latent pacifism, egalitarianism, and class partisanship smoldering beneath the surface of ruling-class politics (a part of which has defected to right populism out of impatience and frustration). 

That sentiment is ill-represented by the broken, bankrupt two-party system. 

Neither major US political party captures this undercurrent. But this fault is especially true of the Democratic Party that traditionally claimed to be a home for more progressive policy. A mid-July poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal shows how distant the Democratic Party is from the people. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party-- the highest number since the poll was initiated in 1990.

Where the Republican Party broke into negative net favorability in 2005, the Democrats sank into negative territory in 2016 and today stand 20 points below the Republicans, who, nonetheless, also remain out of favor. 

The WSJ article captures well both the decline of the two-party system and the collapse of the Democratic Party in the face of Trumpism:

On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress. 

In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.

By any rational standard, one would have to conclude that voters are dissatisfied with both parties, but view the current Democratic Party as beyond hope. They may disapprove of Trump, but find nothing suggesting an alternative with the Democrats.

The WSJ article quotes Democratic Party pollster, John Anzalone: “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party… Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”

The hope that they will reconnect flies in the face of years, even decades of tailing the Republican Party, locating their platform slightly left of the Republicans, a place that Party leaders felt confident would hold labor, African-Americans, women, and other groups in the Party’s clutches. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats were vigorously pursuing the suburbanites and bedroom communities with lifestyle politics. Democrats gave the people answers to micro-aggressions when they were desperately looking for help with economic macro-aggressions.

Many loyal Democrats and earnest liberals are pressing the Party’s watchdogs to read the polls and repent, citing recent studies that show that working-class voters are hungering for an active social justice agenda. The Democratic Party left represented by DSA and Jacobin hope to rescue the Democratic Party from its leaders by underscoring the recent Mamdani primary victory as well as polling that shows that working people want what Mamdani offers and much more-- better pay, better benefits, cheaper prices, affordable housing, health care, etc.

But experience teaches that the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, Jeffries, and Bookers are determined to steer the Democratic Party ship on the course dictated by its billionaire donors. They are perfectly happy allowing Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to paint the ship with left-wing slogans, provided that they don’t threaten to abandon the ship.

However, there is good news and cause for hope.

A mid-May poll conducted by the ultraright Cato Institute and YouGov found that-- with 18 to 29-year-olds-- socialism is quite popular and-- to their shock-- Communism has substantial support as well. Despite years of indoctrination, the Cato fellows were hysterical to discover that 62 percent of these youngsters had a favorable view of socialism and even 34 percent had a favorable view of Communism. After all the years, the money, and the effort in painting Marx, Engels, and especially Lenin as agents of Satan, the kids still don’t get it! One can only hope that more of their elders will show the same independence and escape the clutches of the capitalist propaganda mill.

But there is more good news, coming from the UK! 

In a bold move, Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana have announced the founding of a new party to the left of the Labour Party. The Labour Party-- since its brief flirtation with left social democracy after World War II-- has been drifting, even rushing, rightward. In many ways, like the Democrats, it has postured as the home of liberal and reformist ideas. And like the Democrats, it will not depart from business friendliness, minimal social advance, and an imperialist foreign policy today. Any deviance from conformity has been met with strict discipline and ostracization.

Former popular leaders of Labour-- counterparts to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in the US Democratic Party-- have signaled that they have had enough by announcing the creation of a new, left party on Thursday, July 24. In first-weekend polling, Corbyn and Sultana’s no-name party drew 15% of the respondents, roughly the same share as the in-power Labour Party polls.

On the following Monday, Morning Star commented enthusiastically: 

Four hundred thousand and counting. Sign-ups to be part of founding the new party initiated by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana already surpass the membership of any existing political party in Britain.

While the appetite for a left alternative to Labour has long been clear, even supporters of the project cannot have expected a response on this scale…

[The] …rejection of the post-Thatcher political settlement is in reality a rejection of the consequences of the right’s policies — privatisation, deregulation and deindustrialisation — since these have been pursued by both governing parties since the 1980s…

[T]his is a very encouraging beginning. The march of authoritarianism and racism across this country, the disgusting consensus behind complicity in Israeli genocide and the attempt to keep public ownership and wealth redistribution off the table can all be challenged by the emergence of a left movement on this scale. No socialist can close their eyes to that.

Of course, we have to temper our optimism by acknowledging the tremendous challenges ahead. We saw how the auspicious start of the German alternative left party organized by Sahra Wagenknecht in 2024 faltered after remarkable early success. Nonetheless, the new German party, while failing to maintain its momentum, succeeded in shifting politics leftward and restoring confidence in a class-based agenda.

In the Corbyn/Sultana party, many see even greater opportunity to escape the stale politics of social austerity and military aggression. The initiative has already rocked the UK political system.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com 

Mamdani and Beyond

It should not surprise that many US leftists are excited by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last Wednesday’s New York City primary election. They should be buoyed by a rare victory in a bleak political landscape.

Mamdani defeated an establishment candidate showered with money and endorsed by Democratic Party royalty. His chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, enjoyed the support and the forecasts of all the major media, locally and nationally. Cuomo fell back on every cheap, spineless trick: redbaiting (Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialist of America), ethnic and religious baiting (Mamdani is a foreign-born Muslim), and “unfriendliness” to business (Mamdani advocates taxing the rich, freezing rents, and fare-less transit). And still Mamdani won.

Admittedly, Cuomo is ethically challenged and tarnished by his prior resignation from New York’s Governorship. One supposes that Democratic bigwigs could easily have seen an advantage in masculine sliminess after witnessing the king of vulgarity-- Donald Trump-- enjoy great electoral success.  

But for the left, the important fact was that Cuomo represented the strategy and tactics, the program (such as it is), and the machinery of the Democratic Party leadership. The left needed a victory against the Clintons, Obamas, and Carvilles to demonstrate that another way was possible. And more pointedly, the left needed to see that a program embracing a class-war skirmish against developers, financial titans, and a motley assortment of other capitalists can win in the largest city in the US. Nearly every major policy domestically and internationally that the Democratic Party considers toxic was embraced by Mamdani’s campaign. And still Mamdani won.

And why shouldn’t he? 

Democratic Party consultants methodically ignore the views of voters-- views expressing economic hardship, a broken health care system, mounting debt, a housing crisis, etc.-- delivered by opinion polls. Mamdani listened. And he won.

Clearly, the seats of wealth and power were shaken, reacting violently and crudely to Mamdani’s victory. A major Cuomo backer, hedge fund exec, Dan Loeb, captured the moment: “It’s officially hot commie summer.” 

We wish!

Wall Street quickly panicked, according to the Wall Street Journal: 

Corporate leaders held a flurry of private phone calls to plot how to fight back against Mamdani and discussed backing an outside group with the goal of raising around $20 million to oppose him, according to people familiar with the matter.

The WSJ quotes Anthony Pompliano, a skittish CEO of a bitcoin-focused financial company: “I can’t believe I even need to say this, but socialism doesn’t work… It has failed in every American city it was tried.”

Others, including hedge-fund manager, Ricky Sandler, threaten to take their business outside New York City.

The Washington Post editorial board scolds readers with this ominous headline warning: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party.

It gets even wackier in the right wing's outer limits. My favorite libertarian site posted a near hysterical call for the application of the infamous 1954 Communist Control Act to remove him from office, even put Mamdani in prison. The never-disappointing, notorious thug, Erik D Prince, calls for Kristi Noem to initiate deportation proceedings.

Yet not so shockingly, many fellow Democrats nearly matched the scorn and contempt heaped on Mamdani by Wealth, Power, and Trumpers. Senate and House minority leaders-- Schumer and Jeffries-- refused to endorse the primary winner. New York Representative Laura Gillen declared that Mamdani is the "absolute wrong choice for New York." Her colleague, Tom Suozzi, had “serious concerns,” as reported by Axios under the banner: Democratic establishment melts down over Mamdani's win in New York. Other Democrats ran away from discussing the victory and, of course, the overworked, overwrought, and abused charge of “antisemitism” was tossed about promiscuously.

Where there is no fear and alarm, there is euphoria. Nearly every writer for The Nation enthused over the primary victory, with the capable Jeet Heer gleefully proclaiming that “Zohran Mamdani Defeated a Corrupt, Weak Democratic Party Establishment”.

Similarly, David Sirota, former advisor and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, wrote-- with understandable gloating-- on The Lever and in Rolling Stone:

Democratic Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York City has prompted an elite panic, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen: Billionaires are desperately seeking a general-election candidate to stop him, former Barack Obama aides are publicly melting down, corporate moguls are threatening a capital strike, and CNBC has become a television forum for nervous breakdowns. Meanwhile, Democratic elites who’ve spent a decade punching left are suddenly trying to align themselves with and take credit for Mamdani’s brand (though not necessarily his agenda).

This breakthrough-- he surmises-- could lead to a “Democratic Party reckoning.”

But wait a minute.

We can’t let euphoria blind us to the track record of other Democratic Party insurgencies. We cannot forget how deeply opposed the Democratic Party’s bosses, consultants, and wealthy benefactors are to popular reforms and even modestly visionary candidates. Party intellectuals fully understand-- as hotshot consultant James Carville bluntly reminds us-- that in a two-party system all the oppositional party has to do is wait for the other party to stumble and then take its turn. Why would the Democrats bother to construct a voter-friendly program leaning towards social justice?

A glance at the crude sabotage of two Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns by the Democratic Party Godfathers should dispel even the most gullible from any delusion that the party will change course.

Should Mamdani actually win the mayoral race-- and we must work hard to see that he does-- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will draw even the most modest conclusion about the way forward. They are not interested in going forward, only in returning to power. Of course, they will-- as they have in the past-- welcome idealistic foot soldiers who want to believe that the Democratic Party is the path to social justice. Generations of well-meaning, change-seeking youth have been ground up by this cynical process of bait-and-switch.

Though the Party’s leadership will not acknowledge it, the Democrat brand is widely discredited. As Jarod Abbott and Les Leopold conclude: “Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.” 

Stopping short of calling for a new party, Abbott and Leopold asked poll respondents in key rust-belt states if they would support a worker-oriented association independent of both parties to support independent candidates. Fifty-seven percent of respondents would support or strongly support such an association. 

This squares with recent polls that show strong disapproval of elected Democrats and the Democratic Party. The recent late-May Financial Times/YouGov poll shows that 57 percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of Democrats in Congress. And a similar 57 percent have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Only 11 percent have a very favorable view of the Democratic Party. 

Whether an “association” or a party is necessary, Abbott and Leopold are correct in recognizing that it must have a strong working-class base in order to break away from the corporate ownership of the Democratic Party.

As Charles Derber has perceptively noted on a recent podcast, the worse outcome of the current multi-faceted crisis is to revert to the earlier times that spawned the Trump phenomena. And that is exactly what the Democrats are offering.

With the Republican Party leadership facing a schism over Iran between war hawks and non-interventionists (Greene, Bannon, and Carlson) and with the growing split between cultural warriors and Silicon Valley libertarians (Musk’s threat to launch a third party), the Democrats may well slip back into power by default.  

Surely, we can do better.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

What is Independent Political Action?

I recently found an unpublished essay written in 1979 by a comrade from Western Pennsylvania who argued passionately for the urgent necessity of independent political action. In The Time is Now: A Position Paper on Independent Political Action, Bob Bonner challenged the left to begin the process of building independent political organizations and to convince the people to support them.

Bob is not a starry-eyed academic or a know-it-all armchair socialist, but a keen observer of local politics, its limitations, and its possibilities. 

He was then a worker, a founding leader of the Clairton Coalition, a leader in a local independent political party that scored some notable electoral victories, and a founder of the Pittsburgh Coalition for Independent Politics. He grew up in Clairton, PA breathing the foul air of the country’s largest cokeworks, a virtual company town that knew every corporate injustice that one found in the industrial heartland. It has become fashionable to refer to people like Bob as community organizers; I prefer to see him simply as a peoples’ leader.

There are many parallels today with the world that Bonner wrote about in 1979. Jimmy Carter had run and won in 1976 on the most progressive party program that the Democrats had offered since the New Deal; but by 1978, he had jettisoned the program and turned to policies that presaged the policies of the soon-to-be-president, FBI snitch and B-actor, Ronald Reagan. By the midterm elections of 1978, Carter had reneged on virtually every progressive campaign promise and was saddled with brutal inflation.

Bonner wrote at the time: “America’s two-party system has reached an all-time low in the eyes of the voters… rendering the concepts of majority parties and representative government meaningless and, to some, a laughing stock… 62.1% of American voters, or 90 million people, stayed home last election day, an increase of another one and a half percent from 1974… Millions more can’t be motivated enough to even register [to vote].”

Citing a New York Times-CBS poll, Bonner notes that “fully half of those who participated in the two-party charade felt that the outcome would have no appreciable effect on their lives.”

Bonner goes on to show that despite dire media assessments of a rightward trend, where progressives or independents offered voters a real choice, they were met with enthusiasm, often victory. 

The then-left-oriented Congressional Black Caucus picked up three new members in the interim election, and arch-reactionary Frank Rizzo was denied a third term in Philadelphia. “The massive monopoly effort in Missouri to pass an anti-union ‘right to work (for less)’ law through a referendum failed, and in some states liberal to progressive tax initiatives won,” Bonner reminds. Communist Party candidates, running as Communists, received vote totals unprecedented since the 1940s. There was a sense that inroads were possible for independent politics.

With regard to the then-emerging danger of the so-called “new right” of Reagan and his ilk, Bonner had this to say: “The high visibility of the ‘new’ right is made possible by the huge gap that exists between the direction of the two main parties and the urgent pressing needs of the people as a whole. The ruling class has recognized this gap and has smartly and opportunistically shoved reactionary one-issue groups into this vacuum in order to confuse and misdirect the voting public.”

Ironically, today’s corporate Democrats have followed this Republican strategy by placing single issues front and center at the expense of a popular program meant to resonate with all working people.

Bonner believes that “[t]he electorate is searching for meaningful alternatives. That is why they vote for ‘mavericks’; that is why Black people voted for Republicans in the last election…”

Forty-five years later, this obvious point is missed by the elite pundits who denounce working-class “deplorables” turning to unlikely “mavericks” like Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. They are surprised and alarmed that polls show many Black and Latino/Latina voters-- ignored by Democratic Party leaders-- leaning toward Trump’s false promises of change.

Today, one-issue groups abound, with foundations doling out financial support, designer NGOs staffing causes, academics offering studies, and consultants mapping strategies. Talk of “intersections” are just that, with more and more divisions denying any basis for common cause, as our common plight grows more desperate.

And when the two parties’ thinkers offer even a hint of prospective benefits in exchange for their votes, it is not a vision, but a reminiscence. The Republicans promise a return to the land of milk and honey before “freedom”-restricting laws on civil rights, the environment, workplace safety, and unions. 

The Democrats, on the other hand, offer an idyllic time before the Reagan revolution-- the so-called Neoliberal era ushered in with the 1980 election-- conveniently forgetting the long, painful, previous decade of stagflation. In essence, we are given two different versions of “Make America Great Again.” Neither promise works for the twenty-first century.

Sounding eerily prescient, Bonner cites the opposition to the unbearable weight of the military budget and the threat of war, actions against the energy monopolies, a militant women’s movement for women’s rights, the fight against police brutality, the miners’ strike, and the struggle for the Dellums National Health Service Act as a basis for bringing together a united, independent movement escaping the political inertia of 1979. “There is absolutely no reason and no excuse for not pulling several of these forces together and entering the political arena…,” Bonner asserts.

Forty-five years later, we have yet to create this needed movement, and the battles of 1979 are yet to be won.

We must recognize that a mere declaration of independence is not enough, as our own US Revolution shows. Achieving independence is an arduous process. In our time, it is a battle against the dependency that comes from taking the money offered from corporations, foundations, non-profits, NGOs, and governments, and from uncritically accepting the influence of think tanks, universities, academic “authorities,” and consultants. 

Most importantly, political independence only begins with a concerted effort to fight capture by the two parties. Far too many left initiatives have been absorbed and suffocated by the Democratic Party. In its essence, independence is always independence from some external force that doesn’t share our values and goals.

We must also judge independence by acts and not rhetoric or posture. The fallacy of celebrity, the fetishism of personality, is a sure barrier to independence. Instead, the steps away from wealth and power should be our measuring stick of independent political action. Where independence exists, we must nurture it; where it doesn’t, we should sow it.

In the forthcoming election, how will we express our political independence?

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Election Fever: A Fever Dream?

With nearly sixteen months to go, we are well into the silly season. The campaigning, fund raising, maneuvering, plotting, and mud-slinging have already reached a fever-pitch. We are told that the 2024 Presidential election-- like every Presidential election in my lifetime-- holds the fate of the country in its grip.

Maybe it does.

But it is almost impossible to see how the existing political machinery-- the two-party system, fueled by vast sums of money, and lubricated with the influence of a toadying, sensationalist media-- can generate any real answers to these challenges. 

The system’s apologists like to write and speak of “our democracy” -- in supposed contrast to the shifty authoritarians. But what kind of democracy requires a billion-dollar-or-more war chest to gain access to the state’s highest executive position? Under those terms, only a handful of rich and powerful people could realistically become President of the US by convincing other rich and powerful people to support and sustain their effort. Isn’t this akin to the “democracy” of the Roman Senate?

Of course, on the lower rungs of the political hierarchy, there are elected officials who are able to fund their campaigns for far less-- entry level costs are much lower. It is possible to parlay social activism, media exposure, and a popular base into a modest fund-raising apparatus that propels some representative faces into government. But they are quickly seduced and obsessed into building an even greater fund-raising machine and locating themselves in the narrowly defined political space occupied by the two parties. The weight of the system and its conventions soon drains their independence. 

It is hard to find optimism under these circumstances.

Faced with a Democratic Party that has inexorably moved to the right from its New Deal roots, many argue for nonetheless uniting behind the Democratic Party to halt the Republican Party’s inexorable movement to the right. It is a strange strategy.

Odd as it may be, it is sold to the left as building a buttress-- a united front-- against fascism. 

It is the word “fascism” that conjures up the notion of a united front across class, across identity, and across political loyalty. For those with some minimal knowledge of twentieth-century history, fascism triggers memories of powerful nationalist movements that arose in response to a potent anti-capitalist workers’ movement and a crisis of capitalist rule, even a challenge to the very existence of capitalism. These were alone or together sufficient conditions for the rise, the threat, or the political success of historical fascism.

The post-World War One economic crisis and the rise of a militant industrial class in Italy and intense class struggle in the Italian countryside gave birth to the first self-described fascist movement in Europe. The Italian ruling class awarded it power when it accepted Mussolini as the decisive barricade against intensifying class struggle.

Similarly, of the many nationalist movements that sprung up in Germany, the Nazi Party was the one best equipped to address the rise of a growing, powerful Communist Party during the economic collapse of the Great Depression. German industrialists showered the Nazis with money, and their representatives expeditiously turned over power to Adolf Hitler.

We may extend the term “fascism” to other 1930s regimes in Europe-- Mannerheim, Pilsudski, Antonescu, Admiral Horthy, Franco, Salazar, Petain, etc.-- because they were puppets of Naziism or shared the same anti-Communist zeal which was sparked by intense class conflict within their respective countries. 

Whether one prefers to confer the terms “quasi-fascist” or “semi-fascist” instead of “fascist” on the military coups-- Greece, Chile, Indonesia, etc.-- arising from political instability and left insurgency since World War II is a matter of little import. Nonetheless, they all share-- perhaps with some nationally specific differences-- the conditions that gave rise to fascism in the 1930s. Significantly, they also all established an “open, terroristic dictatorship” as defined by the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935-- a political edifice built on the ashes of the previous structure.

It would take an enormous stretch of the imagination to suggest that the US ruling class is under siege from a revolutionary workers’ movement, that US politics has reached a stage of lethal instability, that the US economy is on the verge of collapse, or that there is a force empowered and dedicated to the elimination of bourgeois democracy. 

Confronted with these historical anomalies, it is hard to see the danger of fascism as anything imminent in the US. Certainly, there are fascists in the US, even fascist organizations. Moreover, there are many fascist-minded people and people with fascistic ideas, even in positions of power. But fascism is neither around the corner nor on the near horizon.

Yet the unjustified threat of fascism is a useful tool in uniting the left behind a soulless, gutless Democratic Party-- a shell organization built around fundraising and fright-mongering. If there were no fascist bogeyman, or Communist bogeyman, or Russian bogeyman, today’s Democratic Party would have little on which to base a campaign. 

That is not to deny that the people in the US are in crisis. It is certainly true that there is growing dissatisfaction in the US, as in Europe and other advanced capitalist countries. Opinion polls show a broad, deep distrust in long-established institutions. From the courts to the political parties, citizens have lost confidence in the old ways of doing things (for example, in a Quinnipiac University poll, 47% of respondents indicated that they would vote for a third party in the US, should there be one).

Nor should this argument be taken to mean that there is no threat from the right. In response to the mass dissatisfaction, movements and parties have sprung up, exploiting the thirst for the new, speaking to the neglect of various economic, class, and regional interests, and promising to voice the concerns of the majority against the arrogance of elites. Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Professor Thomas Greven of the Free University of Berlin noted that “A right-wing populist backlash… was inevitable.” A scholar of right-wing populism in the US and Europe, the professor then points to the key reason: “For me, it goes back to the failure of center-left, social democratic parties to manage, in a socially acceptable way, increased global competition.”

The breadth of dissatisfaction is shown by the rise of right-populism in many countries. And, as Professor Greven argues, it is the failure of the center, especially the left center, that allows right-populism to grow. Today, as in the 1930s, the cravenness of social democracy creates a political vacuum. The opportunist right has only to fill it. In the case of the 1930s, the ruling classes saw stark choices between revolutionary socialism and fascism. They too often picked fascism and nursed it into power.

Today, there are no stark choices. In Europe, faddish, rebranded social democratic parties like Podemos, Syriza, The Five Star Movement, or The Greens fall as quickly as they arise. In the US and the UK, Labour and the Democrats don’t bother to rebrand, they simply put “New” in front of “Labour” and “Democrats,” offering their services as the acquaintance that you know as opposed to the other that you should fear.

So, if we are to understand Professor Greven, then it would make no sense to embrace social democracy-- including the Democratic Party in the US and Labour in the UK-- when the rise of right-wing populism is itself a response to social democracy’s failings! How can clinging to the Democratic Party-- the party that betrayed the cause of working people-- be the answer to the rise in popularity of its right-wing movement posing as an alternative? Surely, this is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

But once again, as in so many election cycles, leaders of labor, civil rights organizations, environmental groups, and other worthy causes are lining up to support the Democratic Party-- regardless of its betrayal of working people.

Those wise enough to recognize the Democratic Party’s many decades of spinelessness propose that the left conspire to infiltrate or take over the party, to operate both outside and inside the Democrat apparatus. 

But to what effect? 

In its long history, the Democratic Party only embraced working-class interests when pressed by independent forces outside of the Democratic Party who directly threatened the party’s most urgent agenda-- to retain or gain power. That is the story of the Democrats’ moments of glory: the New Deal and the Great Society. In both cases, the social movements led and the Democrats followed. Today’s urgency to rally behind the Democrats is foolish-- counterproductive foolishness.

Plenty of charlatans and hucksters join with the misinformed and delusional to pressure the left to steer clear of third-party movements and back the Democrats for one more round. Like the serial abuser, they ask the victims to give them one more chance.

Another apologist grants the need for separation, but suggests something called a “dirty break” instead of a divorce. Citing the long, tortured break with the UK Liberal Party that spawned the Labour Party in 1906, he recommends supporting the Democrats until the pain is so great that working people will flee the Democrats and form their own party, a process that may need several decades to ferment. Of course, that is the same Labour Party that recently ambushed its progressive wing and banished its left agenda back to the margin of UK politics.

The same author urged the same patience with the Democrats in 2017, then based on the long transitional “dirty break” that the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party made with the Democrats. The Farmer-Labor Party is long gone, but we will probably hear of the “dirty break” again in 2027.

It is a striking fact that most of our self-described left does not want to have a discussion of a third-party campaign. The mere thought of an alternative to the Democrats is seen as an assault on Enlightenment values, endangering the chances of defeating whatever candidate the Republicans turn up! It is inconceivable to them that pressure from the left might even strengthen their candidates in the distant election. It’s too risky…

For the rest of us, there is no way to begin to break the fatal chokehold that the Democrats have on the left other than supporting an outsider, an independent voice. It must be understood that the process will be long, tortured, and with many setbacks. Yet there will never be a better time when it will not be long, tortured, and with many setbacks.

It is not so important that we have the best standard-bearer or that we agree with every position he or she holds. But a good candidate does exist with good positions on the most important questions: Cornel West!

For a strong case for a third party and Cornel West’s candidacy, I recommend Chris Hedges' article: Cornel West and the Campaign to End Political Apartheid.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Return of Anti-Monopoly?

Economic monopolies-- enterprises or groups of enterprises that overwhelmingly reign over a specific economic sector-- have been the target of reformers and revolutionaries since their widespread notice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 

Many keen observers in the most advanced capitalist countries of the late 1800s perceived the development of a tier of capitalist firms in various industries that rose to dominate those industries. Through rapid expansion, ruthless competition, absorption, and consolidation, a few capitalists or corporations acquired a majority share of markets and the lion’s share of profits. 

A classic US example of the process of monopolization was the creation of the Rockefeller oil monopoly, Standard Oil. Like an uncontrollable wildfire, Standard Oil devoured competitors, both horizontally-- in oil extraction-- and vertically-- in the shipping, refining, and selling of the final product. Eventually, Standard Oil was on the verge of completely controlling the petroleum industry in the US.

In Marxist circles, the trend toward concentration in various industries-- monopolization, cartelization, the formation of trusts-- came under serious study in the early twentieth century. Hilferding and, more popularly, Lenin, saw the intensification of capital, the accumulation of capital in fewer hands, as a new phase or stage in the development of capitalism. 

Lenin had the theoretical insight to link concentration of capital to a host of other features of twentieth-century capitalism: the crucial role and powerful influence of finance capital, the export of capital, the division of the world by enterprises and powers, and the ensuing ruthless competition. The term “imperialism” became shorthand for these processes. Imperialism explains why the twentieth century was a century of intense rivalries for markets, influence, domination, and resulting wars on an unimaginable scale.

The era of the growth of monopolies gave birth to two forms of resistance: a popular resistance to the concentration of power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands and an elite resistance to the competitive advantage of monopolies in the battle for market access, pricing, resource acquisition, and the setting of the rules of the business game.

The two forms of resistance have different social bases and seek different goals, though throughout the history of anti-monopoly struggle, there have been efforts to link the goals and there have been attempts to unite the bases. The linkage of the two forms has been a challenging and, often, ill-fated project. It remains an awkward project.

An early example of a popular anti-monopoly struggle occurred with the US People’s Party in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From political origins in agrarian populism, the People’s Party attacked the monopolistic policies of the big banks and the railroads. The Party raised a host of reforms designed to regulate or rein in the power of the monopolies to the benefit of those in the Midwest and South dependent upon the then vitally important agricultural economy.

The new party enjoyed significant early success, garnering 8.5% of the presidential popular vote in 1892 and carrying 5 states. But divisions based on class and race and the allure of fusion with a major party demoralized and splintered the People’s Party. Its leaders were unable to construct a deep appeal to the urban working class or devise a program targeting the real sources of wealth and power, leaving itself susceptible to the demagoguery and shallow solutions of a mesmerizing rhetorician like William Jennings Bryan.  

Anti-monopoly sentiment continually finds a home with populist movements of left and right. The fact that it so easily expresses itself as antagonism toward groups perceived as privileged by status, wealth, power, or ethnicity, accounts for its political flexibility. At the same time, because it is susceptible to demagoguery, it can provide an unstable base for a movement for social change. Too often monopoly power is answered with shallow analysis (“it's the banks!”, “it’s the 1 percent!”), hasty generalization (“it’s high tech”), or even ethnic prejudice (“it's the Jews”). Too often unsustainable, cross-class alliances are carelessly projected as a foe of monopoly without a solid basis for unity. Too often monopoly is viewed as a tumor growing on capitalism that needs to be excised for the capitalist system to resume a healthy course.

Lenin never made these mistakes. 

For Lenin, the anti-monopoly strategy was anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. In other words, attacking monopoly could not be separated from those elements that fuse together in a particular stage of capitalism-- the stage of imperialism.

And because it was a necessary stage of capitalist development, it could not be surgically removed to restore capitalism to an earlier era of “innocence.” With the development of Lenin’s thinking on state-monopoly capitalism-- the fusing of the state with monopoly capitalism-- the idea of such a surgery became even more far-fetched. 

Nonetheless, in the post-World War II era, the idea of an anti-monopoly front or alliance attracted some support from Western Communist Parties. Communist theoreticians argued that small business people, farmers, and workers could be united around a program that targeted monopoly capitalism as a common enemy. In the most advanced capitalist countries, small businesses were driven into bankruptcy or absorbed by giant firms that commanded the heights of the economy. The power of monopoly left their smaller competitors disadvantaged in access to capital, labor, and resources.

Of course, small and middling farmers faced the same disadvantages against mega-farmers like Archer Daniels Midland. Though much smaller in number, farmers today face some of the same exploitative conditions with banks and logistics as did their nineteenth-century forbearers.

Monopoly capital is especially devastating for the working class. With the mobility of capital to the lowest wage regions, with the power of defeating or co-opting unions, with the ability to organize and set consumer prices while employing labor-saving technologies, monopolies exploit workers as employees and consumers.

Left-wing interest in monopoly capitalism likely reached its zenith in the 1960s, especially with the publication of Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s Monopoly Capital (1966), an important book that continues to influence the left to this day.

Monopoly Capital came as a summary of the immediate post-war period of strong economic growth, the dominance of US monopoly capital worldwide, and the rapid concentration of economic activity in the hands of a few US capitalist enterprises. The “big three” in auto production, AT&T in communications, USS, ALCOA, Anaconda, General Electric, IBM, and a host of other industry leaders capturing huge portions of global production seemed to foretell a hierarchy of capitalism characterized by monopoly dominance and the decline of competition.

But matters changed in the decade to come. Corporate competition from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and other countries intensified, challenging leaders in the older industries and spawning new emerging industries. Competition brought challenges to the complacency accompanying monopoly dominance. New products, new product categories, new production methods, and new technologies competed ruthlessly for customer loyalty. 

As I argued in an article in Communist Review (winter 2016/2017), many of us followed Sweezy and Baran in associating the process of concentration with a decline in competition. We too readily accepted the simplistic mainstream economics textbook account that portrayed monopoly as the state-of-affairs resulting from a one-directional process leading to a few mega-enterprises and tepid or non-existent competition or even large-scale monopoly collusion (it bears similarities to Kautsky’s discredited theory of super-imperialism). We, along with Sweezy and Baran, mistook a continuously unfolding tendency for an enduring final state-of-affairs, underestimating capitalism’s dynamism.

While this might have constituted a snapshot of the US economy in the mid-1960s, it was far off the mark with the decades to come. Capitalism proved far more resilient. New enterprises, new industries, new commodities emerged to challenge this simplistic picture, while concentration-- the bankruptcy and absorption of the lesser players-- continued unabated. Concentration and competition are not mutually exclusive.

Marx and Engels understood this well.

Writing in their earliest pamphlet on political economy, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, a work much admired by Karl Marx, Frederick Engel’s wrote:

Competition is based on self-interest, and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition-- indeed, it itself breeds competition.

Thus, is the dialectics of competition-monopoly.

Marx affirms this dialectic in the Poverty of Philosophy:

 

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists.

Anti-Monopoly Today

Interest in curbing monopoly is having a rebirth today. The rise of a new set of huge enterprises dominating their industries and amassing unprecedented mountains of capital has generated a strong reaction. The notion that key financial institutions needed government bailout, that they were “too big to fail,  ” produced an angry reaction from people crushed in the 2007-2009 crash and disgusted smaller businesses left to face collapse without any help. The outrage against banks and other financial institutions persists to this day.

The concentration of corporate power through mergers and acquisitions is expressed through increasing pressure on the state to tilt the playing field in favor of capital and the wealthy (in 1984, mergers and acquisitions totaled $125 billion; in the first 8 months of 2021, they totaled $1.8 trillion in the US, $3.6 trillion worldwide).

Similarly, popular sentiment against the greed and arrogance of the technology giants-- Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook-- is boundless today, leading to several antitrust investigations and proposed regulatory legislation. Their size and importance in the global economy point to both the dangers from the rise of monopolies and the dramatic shift in the towering heights of capitalism from the time of the Sweezy and Baran classic.

The Biden administration’s appointment of two antitrust activists to head the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s antitrust arm is an important reflection of the growing interest in anti-monopoly action.

Dubbed “neo-Brandeisians,” after the former Supreme Court Justice who led the antitrust battles of the early twentieth century, prominent lawyers and politicians are taking aim at the big tech companies. As the two-year study by the US House’s Judiciary Committee concluded, “...there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy.”

Tellingly, the six house bills directed against monopolies say little-to-nothing about the harm that wealth and corporate concentration have on working people. Instead, they charge monopolies with disrupting the smooth functioning of capitalism and with encumbering the competition with The People's Republic of China and other global competitors. In other words, this center-left initiative is meant to strengthen capitalism by regulating concentration; it is shorn of almost any but the most indirect benefit to working people.

The center-left, Democratic Party-centered anti-monopoly strategy contains no assistance in organizing workers, in ensuring better working conditions, or in increasing wages and benefits within the most concentrated industries. It fails to speak to the high prices and shoddy quality that monopolies offer the consumer. Nor does it address the erosion of democracy fostered by the inordinate influence of giant monopolies on the political process. That influence is only amplified by monopoly ownership of the media, misdirecting the public away from the real issues and viable solutions. 

Arrayed against the capitalism-serving program of the center-left are the apologists for mega-business, who argue that the industrial giants-- through the intense price competition that weeds out the smaller players-- are giving consumers better prices, more efficient services, economies of scale. During the so-called “neo-liberal” period, this hands-off position toward big business-- trusts, cartels, monopolies-- gained the allegiance of both major parties. It is only in recent years that some Democrats have contended that monopolies are a hindrance to capitalist growth, competition, and innovation.

But notice that this debate over monopoly is contained and reduced to which strategy better promotes capitalism: enhanced competition versus consumer advantages (see this The Wall Street Journal op-ed). Where is the damage inflicted on the working class by monopolies? Who will address the monopoly super-exploitation of workers like those at the Amazon work centers? What checks are there on monopoly power’s influence on elections? On the media? On pharmaceutical prices? On utilities? Where are the protections of wages and jobs in the era of transnational monopolies and the easy mobility of capital to low-wage areas?

If confined to the two major political parties, these issues will not be advanced. However, they are the concerns of workers and belong on the agenda of organized labor. A vigorous popular campaign against monopoly, if adopted, would energize a labor movement in retreat and unconditionally wedded to the program of the Democratic Party. An anti-monopoly program, though worker-centered, would find allies in other sectors of the economy preyed upon by monopoly capitalism.  

The late Communist political economist, Victor Perlo summed up labor’s interests in joining with others in curbing the monopolies in his 1988 book, Super Profits and Crises: Modern US Capitalism:

Monopolies have--

●the strength to curb workers’ actions, strikes.

●the ability to raise prices to compensate for wage and benefit gains

●capital sufficient to employ labor saving technology and reduce employment and wages

●the power to relocate work to the lowest-paying regions or countries

●the political weight (state monopoly capitalism) to influence government, to extract concessions, to reduce taxes, to extort government funding and government support against the interests of labor.

These issues would well serve a labor movement bereft of ideas and mired in the muck of class collaboration.

Similarly, a people’s anti-monopoly agenda would focus the work of third parties like the Green Party or the People’s Party, while attracting a broad sector of people affected by the cruel lash of monopoly capital.

But let this be a cautionary tale for Communists and socialists who must avoid the trap of equating anti-monopoly struggle with anti-capitalism. Through the dialectic of competition and monopoly, capitalism persists. Smaller, non-monopoly capitals would ravage working people as brutally as does monopoly capitalism. While monopoly capitalism, with its historically evolved features, is the capitalism of our era, the goal post is the ending of capitalism and the construction of socialism. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com