Why Class Matters

After the last election, Democratic Party functionaries were puzzled that voters-- usually attuned closely to the economy-- failed to show proper appreciation for the Biden economic miracle. They cited the billions in federal money flowing toward economic growth; they repeated aggregate growth figures more robust than other advanced economies; they showed that consumer spending continued to show surprising vigor; they noted that aggregate incomes grew faster than inflation; and they reminded us of the often-mentioned markers of rising stock market and housing values.

Baffled by the voters who shunned Bidenomics and complained about the economy, Democratic Party pundits are convinced that voters are simply ignorant of the facts.

Today, perhaps more than ever, the failure to recognize social-class divisions produces ill-informed, arrogant judgments like those prominent within Democratic Party circles. While aggregate numbers may tell one story, they fail to tell the story of the economic well-being of the classes and strata that make up the aggregate, even the by-far-largest segment of that aggregate. Could it be that Biden’s economic victory was a victory for the wealthiest, the most generously compensated among the US population, while leaving the majority of US citizens (and voters) in the rear-view mirror?

The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’

And the answer comes, not from a left-leaning think tank, but from Federal Reserve data by way of Moody’s Analytics and summarized in The Wall Street Journal.

As reported in the WSJ, the top 10% of “earners” -- those households reporting $250,000 in income or more-- are responsible for 49.7% of consumer spending. In other words, nearly half of all consumer spending is accounted for by those in the top 10% of all those reporting their incomes. This is the largest share for this elite segment since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989. In just three decades, the top 10%'s portion has increased from over a third to nearly half of all consumer spending.

According to the WSJ:

Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more…

Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.

Democratic Party consultant James Carville likes to say “it's the economy, stupid!” that decides US elections. If he is right, the celebration of Bidenomics was widely off the mark. During the Biden years, for 80% of US voters, their economy was stagnant, at best. In that light, the election results are far more understandable as reflective of pocketbook issues.

US economic growth is often portrayed by the major media as driven by household consumption (around two-thirds of gross US economic activity comes from household consumption). However, these reports are deceptive if they fail to acknowledge that nearly all of the consumption growth impacting GDP growth comes from the wealthiest 10% of the population. Arguably, so-called luxury spending is the driving force behind economic growth in the US in our time.

Thus, the widely heralded mantra of capitalist apologists that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has it backwards. In fact, the privileged 10% of all boats that rise constitute the tide.

Economy 101 preaches that working people spend nearly all that they make (or need to borrow more to make ends meet). That same conventional wisdom tells us that the rich reinvest or save most of their earnings. Both may be and are true, though inequality of income has grown so much that the richest 10% can save and reinvest while spending lavishly and conspicuously.

Since late 2021, the excess savings of the bottom 90% has dropped from about $1.1 trillion dollars to $300 billion at the end of 2024. In roughly the same period, the uppermost 10% has maintained an excess savings of about $1.3-1.4 trillion, according to Moody’s Analytics. Clearly, the bottom 90% was forced to draw down savings over the last four years in order to get by. It is important to notice that the concept of the “bottom 90%” masks the reality that each successive lower decile of household income below the top 10% has fewer means and lesser savings to meet a reasonably adequate standard of living. In short, the pain induced by a system maintaining such vast income inequality grows more acute as the level of income declines.

While not a proper class analysis of US society (not to be expected from official government statistics), the Federal Reserve data, as interpreted by Moody’s Analytics, provides a material basis for understanding the most recent US election.[i] As opposed to dire conclusions of a fascist mentality sweeping the country or wild celebrations of the revival of a mythical conservative past, the economic unraveling of the last period fed the electorate's profound thirst for change, any change.

In the wake of a deep economic collapse in the first decade of a new century-- a crisis unlike any seen for generations-- US voters turned, at that time, to a fresh-faced Democrat promising change. He won voters with his earnest, unbounded hope. He produced little change, but more of the same blindness to inequality.

Now, in the wake of the economic stagnation and hardship for the majority 90% struggling through the Biden years, another snake oil salesman returns, capturing one of the two decadent parties with another message of change-- Make America Great Again.

And again, voters act out of desperation.

Don’t blame the voters, blame the bankrupt two-party system and the economic system dominated by and for the rich and powerful.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

[1] A proper economic class analysis will not evoke income or wealth-- simply contingent, quantified signifiers of inequality-- but qualitative indicators of socio-economic position or status. For Marxists, class is defined by an agent's function within a particular mode of production with regard to the economic relation of exploitation. Thus, under capitalism, class is a division between exploiters-- capitalists-- and the exploited-- workers. One class commands the means of production, the other class sells the former its labor power.

Of course, there are strata within and outside of the two classes: the haute and petit bourgeoisie, the ‘labor aristocracy,’ industrial workers, lumpen-proletariat, etc.

In general, income and wealth inequality are a result of class division and exploitation under capitalism and not its cause.

Venezuela: Where Next?

We must speak the truth: therein lies our strength, and the masses, the people, the multitude will decide in actual practice, after the struggle, whether we have strength. VI Lenin, 1905

Hugo Chavez will live on as one of the most outstanding foes of US imperialism in our time. His defiance of successive US governments was truly remarkable. Situated in the US backyard, Venezuela-- under Chavez’s leadership-- brought joy and admiration to millions throughout the world and inspired others in Central and South America to mount their own response to US domination. Faced with foreign intervention, coup attempts, and a vicious domestic opposition, Chavismo will be honored for rebelling against US arrogance and aggression long after his death.

However, Chavismo was not socialism, nor did it construct a path to socialism. Chavez brought a Christian love and respect to the poor and disadvantaged and offered a dash of utopian “socialism” gleaned from Western leftist “advisors.” The movement was multiclass, with the working class playing no special role. The transformation of the state into a peoples’ democracy was never projected. In short, a radical transformation was not and is not secured against the maneuvers of the domestic bourgeoisie and foreign intervention.

Consequently, Venezuela’s path is very susceptible to detours, reversals, and backsliding, especially in the face of potent domestic reaction and foreign intervention. History has shown that mobilization and empowering of the working class is the most important barrier that a government can erect against the machinations of hostile class forces. The ready cooperation of the parties of the most militant workers-- the Communists-- is essential to this effort.

Yet, the Maduro government not only rejected the collaboration of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), but effectively banned the PCV and obstructed its electoral participation. This unprincipled attack on the PCV is well documented; no one among the international solidarity community has disputed its veracity. 

Yet those who know of the complicity of the Venezuelan Supreme Court in enforcing the ban choose to ignore the Court’s failure. They choose to look away from the denial of any hint of due process or transparency in the Court’s slavish toadying to the Maduro government. 

It speaks poorly of a left that indignantly rallies against comparable politically tainted decisions of the highest courts in their own lands.

The recent Venezuelan election is the object of intense contention. Ultimately, the Venezuelan people will resolve the question of its legitimacy, as they, and they alone, must do. 

Does it help Venezuelans find the truth for some to pretend that the most recent electoral process measured up to the past practices applauded by a number of recognized international observers? One prominent left commentator appealed to the Venezuelan Constitution to sheepishly note that the Constitution did not mandate that the electoral council respect those past practices-- hardly, a ringing defense of the results that he, and many others, stoutly maintain.

Of course, it is scandalous that the Maduro government marked “Paid” on the election results through the same compromised Supreme Court that attempted to arbitrarily shape the outcome beforehand by denying ballot status to some parties, including to the Communist Party.

To be sure, the Venezuelan people will overcome this blemish on the legacy of Hugo Chavez and return to a political process that will welcome the most ardent champions of working people, the Communists.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 

And They Call this Democracy?

The idea of the US as a citadel of democracy is based on an enduring myth. The frequent references, even on the left, to “saving our democracy” or “protecting our democracy” from Trump, the Russians, the Chinese, Islam, or any other forces lurking in the cabinet of popular demonology, is sheer nonsense. There is little to save or protect, and the threat resides elsewhere.

The idea of invading, occupying, or undermining the governments of other countries to promote “our” democracy is, therefore, equally nonsense.

Certainly there are many ready to vigorously contest these claims. How can a country that has the longest unbroken history of regular elections not be democratic? What could be more democratic?

But consider the following nationally relevant policies that opinion polls consistently show represent the wishes of over 60%-- at least 6 out of ten-- of US citizens:

• A public national health care program modelled after Medicare (single payer)

• A $15/hour minimum wage

• An answer to racism, especially police violence (police violence is a problem 89%/racism is a serious problem 72%)

• Free college education

• An answer to income inequality

• Some measure of gun control 

• Corporations and the rich should pay more in taxes

• Not privatizing the Postal Service;  establishing postal banking

• Stronger antitrust laws that could break up the largest companies

• Support for labor unions and organizing

• Environmental action

• Covid safety over economic activity

Yet, they are all unrealized and out-of-reach.

Beyond these specific policy positions and public stances, opinion polls show a strong general preference for the public good over the interests of corporations and other private interests. In essence, the majority of US citizens are wedded to policies that coincide, whether consciously or not, with the policies associated most closely with the Scandinavian social democracies. 

This profile of majority “progressivism” is even more striking in light of the rare and thin support, the often hostile reaction to these ideas in the mainstream media. The major news and entertainment corporations paint and support a different, more conservative set of policies. Nonetheless, a robust progressive agenda remains popular.

At the same time, barely 1 in 5 US citizens express trust in government most or all of the time. Not surprisingly, in light of the apparent broad support for egalitarianism, the high point in trust over the last sixty years coincided with President Johnson’s Great Society reforms that purported to eliminate poverty and lessen the social and racial inequalities of US society. At that time, nearly 8 out of 10 US citizens said they “trust the government in Washington most or all of the time” (Pew Research Center).

These same polls show that most people want the US government to play an active role in ameliorating social problems and guaranteeing a better life, while, paradoxically, showing little confidence in their elected representatives.

Despite the fact that urgent, central policies advocated by a solid majority of the people are never realized or even seriously debated, despite the fact that the channels of information so vitally important for democratic decision-making are corrupted and in ill-repute, despite the fact that the institutions established to deliver democracy are mistrusted, our rulers and their trusted servants expect us to believe that the US is a thriving democracy.

At the same time, they throw up every roadblock to dampen voter participation and effectiveness: workweek elections, registration hurdles, qualification challenges, gerrymandering, etc.

 If democracy is a political system or political process that serves the will of the people, then the US system is demonstrably undemocratic. It may appear to be a shiny instrument, but it produces extremely poor results for the people.

Apart from the ineffectiveness of the electoral system, the US Constitution and its subsequent amendments are said to guarantee certain democratic rights. In effect since 1789, the original constitution established the rules of the political game in a way unprecedented by any other historical document to that time. It advanced popular democratic procedures unlike any enacted before it. The Bill of Rights, ratified two years later, strengthened US democracy even further (with the fatal caveat that millions of US citizens-- women, slaves, indigenous people were denied these rights). 

 As a result of a bloody civil war, a tenacious women’s movement, and a bitter, violent civil rights struggle, the original democratic achievements have been strengthened further. Yet the enemies of democracy-- the economic royalists, as FDR so aptly called them, and the bigots-- have unrelentingly chipped away at those rights, employing a larger and more damaging hammer until the present. Today, little is left to celebrate.

The rights to be free of religious tyranny and to speak freely without fear have been undermined by religious zealotry and police-state vigilance. The right to a free press has been trivialized by the corporate domination and monopolization of the media.

The right to privacy and discretion is erased by a totalizing security state that hears and reads every out-of-step opinion of its citizens. The technical means and resources of the US security agencies put every previous charge of “totalitarianism” to shame. 

The formal judicial guarantees of the Bill of Rights are stripped of force by the commercialization and marketization of justice. The rich buy the best lawyers, while the rest of us secure representation commensurate with our wallets. Moreover, the laws are written, enforcement geared, and the punishments devised to crush the poor and shield the rich. With only 24% of those polled showing “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in the criminal justice system (Gallup), it hardly stands as a pillar of democracy.

In the midst of an election that vets its candidates through a costly primary process only available to the rich and famous, an election that ultimately rides on candidates collecting billions of dollars, an election that allows only two narrow paths (two parties) to snatching the golden ring, talk of democracy seems cynically misplaced.

It may well be true that what remains of “our” democracy may be at stake, but it bears reminding that what remains is far removed from what people deserve. The battle for democracy is really only in its infancy in the United States and it must be launched against a long tradition of anti-democracy waged against popular forces. 

The erosion of democracy emanates from the power of wealth. Democratic procedures have been hijacked by wealth. 

And the power of wealth emanates from inequality. 

Further, inequality emanates from an exploitative system. 

Therefore, democracy only grows where the exploitative system is corralled or eliminated. 

This simple, but logical truth escapes the many celebrants of our tissue of democracy, long on procedures, but short on results.

In the end, the will of the people is the ultimate measuring stick of democracy. The US falls far short.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Where Hope Collides with Reality

The electoral failure of Center and Center-left parties in Europe and the US has brought forth a tentative turn to the left and a modest renaissance of the “socialist” option. With the marginalizing of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, France’s Socialist Party, and Italy’s Democratic Party by voters angry at the parties’ rightward turn, it was inevitable that some shocked party leaders would consider a new, somewhat leftward direction. Whether that sentiment is genuine or will be implemented is yet to be seen. Consistent with that sentiment, the Labour Party in the UK and Spain’s Socialist Party have made popular gains based on a left posture. In most cases, the content of the changes reverts back to the mid-twentieth century social democratic formulae.

In the US, the reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election generated both left rhetoric and a significant, moderate social democratic faction within the Democratic Party. Driven by energetic and youthful veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign (so-called “Sandernistas” gathering around Democratic Socialists of America), the new-found left in the Democratic Party is seeking to transform the party. Its limited, but surprising electoral successes serve to underscore their program for revitalizing the Democratic Party.

Opponents of this leftward tendency from both within and outside the Democratic Party have attacked it, resorting to everything from crude red-baiting to derision. The less scurrilous objections revolve around electability-- the supposed disconnect with mass sentiment.

Most recently, that argument draws upon a comparison with the failed 1972 Democratic Presidential run of Senator George McGovern, defeated handily by Richard Nixon. As Gerald Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor, reminds us: “Richard Nixon, a Republican figure [was] as despised on the left as President Trump is now.”

Seib relies upon the odious Dick Morris-- a former close confident of the Clintons-- to underscore the danger: “The election of 2020 is showing distinct signs of being similar to that of 1972.” Morris adds that the Sanders and Warren “candidacies [are] energized by the same kind of rage as animated that of McGovern in 1972.”

For Seib and others, “[t]he question is whether Democrats are about to repeat that unhappy history.” Seib skillfully draws parallels between the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party before 1972 and the rise of a left within today’s Democratic Party. He calls upon top Obama advisor, David Axelrod, to affirm the comparison. However, “Mr. Axelrod thinks that Democratic voters’ top priority this time isn’t likely to be ideology, but rather the ability to defeat Mr. Trump.” Axelrod counts on the oft-repeated warning that electability must outweigh any and all ideological considerations, the same mantra that drove the center and right forces in the 1972 Democratic Party to oppose McGovern.

Similarly, the former communications director for the Democratic National Committee, Brad Woodhouse, doesn’t fear the rise of the party’s left: “I don’t think the discussion we’re having in my part of the Democratic Party has lurched way far to the left… Our primary electorate has tended to favor more establishment, more pragmatic, more mainstream candidates. I trust our primary process to sort this out.” Like Axelrod, Woodhouse is not overly concerned with the left-leaning candidates and their ideology.

Establishment figures submit that the McGovern comparison demonstrates that a similar left candidate today would be overwhelmingly rejected by voters. They see the 1972 election as foretelling that Sanders and the Sandernistas are out-of-touch with the electorate.

Democratic elites are taking no chances. They are counting on the primary process to sink any insurgency from the left. The fact that nearly 25 candidates have stepped forward avoids any head-to-head face-off between Sanders and, say, the establishment’s Joe Biden. The sheer number of candidates guarantees that delegate counts will be diluted going into the convention, allowing for the moderate, centrist candidates to throw their votes behind a “safe” Joe Biden after the first ballot.

Normally in an election against an incumbent, a party tries to discourage a multi-candidate blood-letting. But for this election, the Democrats are threatening to mount open, retaliatory opposition to only one candidate-- the most radical candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. They are counting on a diffusion of votes and superdelegates to stop Sanders.

But that stop-the-left-at-all-costs stance is also the explanation of the 1972 election sweep. Democratic treachery, and not mass antipathy, best explains McGovern’s resounding defeat.

While McGovern and his team made harmful blunders and moved persistently rightward during the course of the campaign, betrayal by Democratic Party elites contributed most to his defeat. George Meany and other top labor leaders held back support. Big city mayors like Chicago’s Richard Daley either cut-- worked against-- or gave only tepid support to McGovern. 

New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 17, 1972—The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.

CHICAGO, August 24, 1972-- Timed to coincide with Senator McGovern's peace overtures to Mayor Daley, the luncheon was designed to open communication with campaign contributors friendly to the Mayor. Only two representatives of the regular Democratic organization showed up, and, a source close to the situation reported, they were there only to observe and report back to the Mayor.

Certainly the South was moving away from the Democrats and out of the traditional coalition, but, as the 1976 election shows, the Democrats were gaining liberal, suburban bedroom communities. 

While the McGovern candidacy makes for an easy, but misleading comparison for Democratic Party leaders bent on smothering the left, the truth is that they are so completely owned by corporate interests that they would rather risk defeat than accept a candidate minimally challenging to their capitalist sponsors.

It is worth noting that in the McGovern era, the Democratic Party had a sizeable bloc of leaders still wedded to New Deal politics, still associated with Lyndon Johnson’s reforms. Yet McGovern was too radical for them.

Now, after several decades of a persistent rightward drift, the Democratic Party establishment is far more hostile to left ideas and far more dependent upon Wall Street and other capitalist institutions for support.

It is not a question of whether voters are ready for left politics. Rather, it is a matter of whether the Democratic Party’s corporate masters will allow left politics to live in the house that they own. I think the answer is that they will not. The left may visit, but it can’t stay.

This, of course, raises the question of where does the left go. In the US, the failure to secure deep roots for an independent, principled, internationalist, and revolutionary socialist movement that is not totally absorbed with two-party electoral politics means that genuine left politics must suffer through the next 17-18 months of the two-party circus with a guaranteed unsatisfying outcome. And with the distractions of the backwash of the absurd RussiaGate, impeachment-mania, twitter wars, and celebrity missteps, the fate of ordinary Venezuelans, Iranians, Palestinians, and many desperately poor and exploited here will be left to the crazed Trump policy team, a group that the Democratic Party is shamefully reluctant to tackle.

But it’s never too late to plant the seeds of a new politics-- a politics that we need and not the one we have.

The political soil needs to be prepared by drawing lessons from the past. Certainly the McGovern campaign of 1972 speaks to the corruption of the Democratic Party and its leadership. Answers will be found elsewhere.

But there are useful lessons from the European experience as well. The trajectory of the powerful Italian Communist Party (PCI) of the 1970s-- by membership, the largest CP and, arguably, the largest left party in Western Europe-- affords a useful lesson, a caution. By committing without reservation to the course of bourgeois politics-- parliamentarianism, coalitions or alliances across classes, “responsible” governance-- the CPI exposed a Paradox of EuroCommunism and Social Democracy. Writing in 1981, two US academics, Larry and Roberta Garner, took note of “the limits of structural reformism” as exhibited by the PCI in 1978.

Despite their sympathies and hopes for the PCI, they noted that the reformist defense of workers before capitalism’s ravages requires that “moves to bolster the public or national interest must become moves to bolster the functioning of the capitalist firm… Moves that narrow capital’s profit margins, that reduce capital’s ‘space,’ run the risk of precipitating failures or flight within the capitalist sector… Specifically, structural reforms-- if they are genuinely structural-- weaken capitalism and contribute to a crisis… Individual firms fail, large firms have lowered profits, reinvestment does not take place, and, finally, deliberate political actions are taken by capital, such as flight abroad and investment strikes.”

Thus, under the weight of the crisis endured by capitalism in the mid-1970s, the PCI felt compelled to “call for restraint in pressing the traditional working class demands” that are portrayed as contributing to the crisis and jeopardizing job security and capitalist growth. 

In other words, the PCI was caught between advancing the “national interests”-- determined by sustaining capitalism’s health and capacity to supply jobs and benefits-- and advancing the cause of the working class at the expense of capitalism. The PCI, under crisis conditions, could deliver neither the short-term interests of the working class (structural reforms that burdened capitalism) nor the long-term interests of the working class (socialism). The party’s commitment to bourgeois institutions denied it an escape from this contradiction. As the Garners note, pressing forward with structural reforms would mean that the PCI would be blamed by its petit-bourgeois coalition partners for deepening the crisis. To not do so would disaffect its working class constituency.

Today there is neither socialism nor the PCI in Italy.

This should bring to mind the governance of SYRIZA in Greece. The “left” party folded its boasted militancy and joined the mavens of austerity to guarantee the survival of capitalism, while shirking the duty to defend the working class from its enemy. They choose reviving a dying capitalism over hastening its demise.

Managing capitalism, as the Greek Communists insist, betrays the working class and blocks the path to socialism. The tragic collapse of the once powerful PCI demonstrates the fate of social democratic movements that plan to dance with multiple partners and to sing different tunes.

History provides many invaluable lessons. They are ignored at our peril. They allow us to move forward without any illusions. They remind us to choose our political friends and our tactics carefully.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Lemming Effect and the Left

 With two weeks before the mid-Presidential-term US elections, the number of Democratic Party political solicitations in my e-mail inbox now approaches fifty a day. The curious-- “cynical” might be a better word-- thing is that none mention a genuine issue, none suggest an argument for a cause. All come with a folksy tone, an easy familiarity (from Bob, Chuck, Nancy, or Michelle) and all presume that I’m on their “team’  with cash at hand. The cheap emotional card is pulled frequently-- “Do you want to wish President Obama/Michelle Obama/Nancy Pelosi a happy birthday?” or “You didn’t respond to our request, do you HATE Bob Mueller?” Some are scolding: “TRAGIC ENDING. I [Nancy Pelosi] e-mailed yesterday. Barbra Streisand e-mailed. Harry Reid e-mailed. Now I’m e-mailing again…” And some are foreboding: “This is bad news…” One of the hilarious best: “Hi Friend, I just got off the phone with Senator Menendez, and he asked about you specifically.” Sure, he did...

But not a serious issue, an urgent cause, or a principled stand revealed.

Despite the lack of issues, not to mention a program, the Democrats fundraising tactics are working: ActBlue reports that Democrats raised $385 million in the third quarter alone, more than they raised in the entire 2014 midterm effort. Clearly, Trump-hating, even in its most visceral form, pays off.

However, the fund-raising orgy comes with a cost to democracy. Over 60 contested house seats sought by Democrats drew over a million dollars in campaign-fund donations in the third quarter alone compared to only 3 in the same quarter of 2014. The price of running a competitive campaign has risen dramatically (Source: WSJ, 10-16-2018).

Texas Senate Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke, a frequent solicitor appearing in my inbox, raised $38 million in the third quarter.

To date, Democratic House candidates have scheduled $122 million in TV commercials (Republicans $67 million) (WSJ, 10-16-18). It should be obvious that such fund raising is beyond the reach of truly independent candidates. The financial bar is set far too high to forego support from corporations, other well-heeled organizations, or wealthy contributors and expect to wrest power from Democratic or Republican incumbents. Accordingly, democracy is further stifled.

The notion of an authentic grass-roots campaign has nearly disappeared from the arsenal of the two major parties.

While posturing as a “people’s party,” the Democrats have largely substituted emotion for issues. Hatred of Trump and fear of Russia have served as the catalyst for the 2018 campaign. The Democrats have crudely sought to fold the two emotions into a brew disconnected from the sinking living standards, growing insecurity, and uncertain future of working people. A truly meaningful assault on Trumpism would necessarily target Trump’s pro-capitalist measures, cast light on betrayals by the Democratic Party, and underscore the failings of the two-party system, consequences that Democratic Party leaders dread.

It is no wonder that some commentators are describing political behavior today as “tribal.” In place of principled differences, the two parties have urged an amalgam of brand loyalty and blind faith. Stoked by a corporate media with its own interest in masking class-based issues and promoting imagery of class harmony, personal invective, anonymous charges, rumors, and internet gossip constitute the substance of political debate today. We have a reality TV-star President for reality-TV political theater.

After many decades of rightward drift by the two-party monolith, it is exceedingly difficult to find even a glimmer of hope that either party can be wrested from its corporate mooring. Yet hope does spring again and again with large sections of the US Left which attempt to pry open a door and commandeer the “people’s party,” a task now embraced by the youthful veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Our Left

With the last Presidential election, growing dissatisfaction with centrism found a home with Trumpism, a process that previously fueled the Tea Party movement for the Right. The Left experienced a similar distaste for centrism, a counterpart process that fueled the Bernie Sanders campaign-- a candidacy quickly subverted by the Democratic Party leadership.  

After the election, disenchanted young Democrats found expression in the nominal political residence of their pied piper: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA provided an organization; its burgeoning numbers provided energy and impact; but it left the youthful activists in ideological limbo, torn between a slapdash socialism and a decadent Democratic Party.

Like endless numbers of their predecessors, the youthful idealists are preparing to exhaust their principles and vision on the bastion of hypocrisy, the Democratic Party. Inexperience may excuse this illusion, but older veterans of the Left know no similar excuse. They have witnessed the subversion of George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, rallied around an exciting 1976 Democratic national platform, only to see the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter quickly run away from it. They have observed the Democratic Party leadership wilt in the face of right-wing reaction, abandoning the New Deal gains piece by piece. They have supported “insurgents” like Jesse Jackson or Howard Dean, only to see the dissidents pacified and escorted back into the fold.

It is a long and tortured history of failure, Don Quixote-like journeys to wrest the Democratic Party from the grip of its corporate owners. Sadly, many who embarked on these journeys were lost by the Left; disappointment bred inaction and cynicism.

Beyond the socialists (DSA), the US left is a small, largely electorally irrelevant motley mix, stretching ideologically from center-left liberals disenchanted with the Democrats to committed Marxist-Leninists.

Despite the fact that their endorsements or support will have virtually no effect on the outcome of the interim elections, the predictable stampede to support the Democrats has begun. Grandiose exhortations to stop Trump will serve as coded messages to support Democrats in the interim election. The ideological bankruptcy that fails to put promoting third parties, independent candidacies, anti-monopoly coalitions or advocating for socialism ahead of unconditional support for Democrats guarantees that the rightward two-party drift will continue, Trump or no Trump.

Unconditional support for Democrats reinforces the two-party stranglehold in two ways:

1. It acquiesces to the already prevalent view that there is no other route to progressive change.
2. It thwarts the development of third parties or actions that will disrupt the grip that Democrats have upon the Left.

That grip is continually strengthened by the insidious material influence (money!) spread by foundations, nonprofits, think tanks, right-wing labor organizations, etc. that enables the Democrats to capture the Left. And of course many reluctantly support the Democrats because they fear the ire of their allies in the broader mass and labor movements.

For decades, Leftists have explained their support for Democrats through a clumsy, misappropriation of Marxist-Leninist theory. Many have advocated a “United Front” tactic in the face of what they perceive as the threat of fascism. Specifically, Republican Presidential candidates-- Nixon, Reagan, Bush II, and now Trump-- are seen as harbingers, if not bearers of fascism. It is a bitter irony that much of the 1968 Nixon-era Republican platform would appear largely acceptable to today’s Democratic Party leadership.

But the fascism of the first half of the twentieth century does not figure in the crises facing the US today. Fascism was a ruling-class response to a dire challenge to its rule spawned by disillusionment from a bloody, but meaningless World War, crushing economic crises, and, especially, the political challenge from a powerful revolutionary Left.

Those conditions simply do not coalesce in the US at this time.

Instead, the ruling class in the US (and many other countries) faces a crisis of the legitimacy of the centrist parties that have ruled throughout the Cold War until today. Opinion polls in the US (and many other countries) show nearly non-existent confidence in the long-standing ruling parties. The Trump phenomenon and the Sanders experience demonstrate that dissatisfaction, no matter how imperfectly. The electoral successes of non-traditional parties in many other countries equally demonstrate a popular desire for a new course, a new direction.

One can bury one’s head in the sand and refuse to recognize the mass shift in political allegiance; one can continue to slavishly tail the Democratic Party or the now-discredited, corrupt parties of social democracy; one can choose to embrace the myth of containing the barbarian hordes; but this moment is different, demanding different strategies.

The Left must discard the unproductive, out-of-touch approach of defending the left flank of capitalism and begin an earnest search for a new, independent politics. The growing mass rejection of the old politics demands it.

The Left cannot grow in size and influence if it continues to attach itself to a rotting Democratic Party.

Paradoxically, continuing to support the discredited Democratic Party and failing to offer a credible alternative will only encourage more people to look rightward for inspiration and answers.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?

With both the Italian elections and the German effort at a so-called “Grand Coalition” in the recent news, much attention has turned to political developments in Europe. For those of us in the US, interest comes not only from the impact of European politics on our own affairs, but also from the fact that US and European trends have often traveled parallel tracks.

For example, in much of the post-war period, governance in Europe has revolved around two centrist political poles that can be roughly characterized as Christian democracy and social democracy. Insofar as both poles defend capitalism and oppose Communism, support capitalist institutions, and are content to peacefully alternate rule, they mirror the US two-party system without the stricter institutional backstops that preserve the electoral system for the Republican and Democratic Party in the US.

Certainly, the Western European political systems were nominally multi-party after the war, but the dynamics of those systems steered political developments toward the center. The far right was appropriately neutered by the discrediting of Nazism and fascism as a consequence of World War II. The revolutionary left-- the Communists-- were overtly and covertly thwarted by the Cold War, the NATO consensus. Where the Communists enjoyed formal legality, the centrist parties, the US, and the NATO allies worked hand-in-glove to deny participation in government.

While both European Christian democracy and social democracy were firmly committed to the capitalist course, social democracy wittingly served as a buffer against the attraction of a workers’ state by advocating a kind of faux-socialism, a socio-economic safety net. As an insurance policy against the ascendency of European Communist Parties, Christian democracy tempered the right’s conventional economic liberalism of minimalist government, unfettered markets, and austere budgets, grudgingly accepting social spending and a more “humane” social contract.

Frustrated with the de facto barrier against Communist parliamentary success, many European Communist Parties began a process of concessions, of shedding revolutionary principles and prospects, creating a left-social democracy dubbed “Euro Communism.” A few Parties resisted this opportunistic path.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states proved to be a watershed for European politics and, particularly, the left. The Euro Communist left, stripped of its untenable raison d'être-- Communism without Communism-- collapsed, leaving a void to the left of social democracy. Social Democracy, in turn, cast off faux-socialism for public-private partnership under the direction of monopoly capitalism: markets, and not social policies, were to provide for the masses. And, without the threat of Communism, the right returned to its fundamental character, aggressively pressing unrestrained class politics: anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and chauvinism.

Without the fear of Communism, capitalism found no need for an accommodation with the working class.

In the 1990s, Continental Europe followed the path blazed in the UK and US over a decade earlier by the Thatcher/Reagan axis. Faced with shifting alignments and the 1970s failure of Old Labour/New Deal policies (specifically, the Keynesian economic framework underlying both approaches), a new consensus began to emerge in both countries.

From the mid-1980s into the next decade, the new consensus spread to nearly all major political parties and around the globe. In its essence, it was a return to Whiggism, the political, social, and economic ideology of the bourgeoisie: parliamentarism, negative rights, and the economic liberalism of minimal regulation, preference for private over public initiative, and markets as decisive of all matters and in the last instance.

Pundits are fond of labeling this development “neo-liberalism,” a statement of the obvious. But the superficiality of that term obscures the fact that the turn is more than a mere policy. In fact, it is a response to the failings of the previous consensus and it constitutes the capitalist norm when the specter of Communism does not loom large over the future.

Social democrats in the US and Europe promoted the notion of a “third way” to mask their capitulation to classical capitalism and its totalizing influence over all aspects of society, over every global nook and cranny. In fact, after the demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist neighbors, there was the one way in the US and EU.

With capitalism marching triumphantly into the twenty-first century, most of the US and European left conceded that capitalism was resilient and here to stay. An inflated memory of a kinder, gentler capitalism might be the best that could be imagined.

But the triumphant project ran aground, crashing on the rocks of economic crises. The capitalist accumulation process imploded in 2000 and, again, even more severely, in 2007-2008. “Recovery” re-established accumulation, but left millions of broken, desperate people in its wake. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, insecurity, and alienation afflicted millions in the US and the EU (and, of course, the rest of the world). Capitalism recovered, but the people did not. For the people, the entrenched ideological options of conservatism and social democracy offered only the thin gruel of austerity.

Mesmerized by rising equity values and restored profitability, and impressed with the growing wealth and well-being of the bourgeoisie and the visible and vocal petty bourgeoisie, ruling elites labor under the illusion that all is going well. In Europe and the US, the never-changing meal of celebrity-worship, sports, anti-social social media, and other distractions nourish a false sense of security and satisfaction.

But in towns and villages, neighborhoods and suburbs, people are suffering. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictions are taking a demographic toll, unseen by high-income, physically segregated elites. As insecurities and dysfunctionality grow, millions feel a growing difference-- an often poorly expressed class difference-- between the beneficiaries of the capitalist economy and themselves, the losers.

Anger seethes.

Without the compass of a revolutionary ideology, without the vision of socialism, this anger remains unfocused, directed vaguely at government, the media, existing political parties, and, too often, convenient scapegoats.

As the anger emerges politically, it is met with elite derision, contempt, or condescension. It is seen by their “betters” as a product of the uneducated, the backward, the uncultured. As Hillary Clinton so famously put it: “the deplorables.”

The insularity of US and European elites-- divided from the masses by culture, social practices, power, status, and wealth-- leads directly to the political crisis that spawned Brexit, Trump’s election, the rise of “populist” or alternative political parties, and most decidedly, the discrediting of historically centrist parties. This last week’s desperate attempt to preserve a coalition of the center in Germany and the collapse of the center left and the shocking success of the Five Star Movement and extreme right in Italy only underscore the distance between the masses and the political parties carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie to contain the aspirations of those masses.

Behind these political developments lies a stagnant, sputtering global economy. It is apparent that segments of the ruling classes are uneasy with or reject the globalist ideology of open markets and are moving towards economic nationalism. The failure of growth to return has led many in the capitalist class to call for a change in direction: protectionism. The emergence of support for nationalism and protectionism has energized the Euro-skeptics, the extreme right, and Trump.

Of course, the other side of this political coin is the failure of the left, especially the left that is yet untainted by the stain of ineffectual social democracy. For the most part, the non-establishment left has failed to deliver a militant, persuasive message to the working people in Europe and the US. And where there is a still a credible militant Communist left, the waters have been muddied by false prophets-- for example, SYRIZA in Greece.

In many countries, the retreat from Marxism became a rout after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, ideologies like anarchism, utopian socialism, and cooperativism-- ideologies that had long been discredited by Marx himself-- are revived. The peculiarly North American mania for procedural democracy-- the view that justice will flow spontaneously like a natural spring when we unleash a radical version of Robert’s Rules of Order-- has returned to prominence as shown by to the now collapsed Occupy movement. And of course, left-lite liberals immerse themselves in the battles for self-identity and against “micro-aggressions” while minority identities are actually ravaged by the macro-aggressions of class war and capitalist exploitation.

In light of recent poor electoral showings, some have sought to explain the sorry state of the US and European left as a result of structural changes in capitalism. They see a new working class, the “precariat,” as superseding the traditional proletariat (even The Wall Street Journal has fancied the term). The “precariat” notion derives from the realities of a changing workplace of part-time, contract, temporary, and dispersed employment, an optimal realization of the classical liberal economic dream. This trend in employment has made organizing workers difficult, certainly more challenging than with the world of the traditional worker engaged in one lifetime or semi-lifetime job under a factory roof.

Of course, the structural changes cited are, to a great extent, the result of the failure of trade unions and political parties to defend the interests of workers against predatory capitalists. Moreover, the difficulties that these changes bring forth are obstacles to union organizing, less so to political parties. And history teaches that establishing militant political parties precedes organizing militant trade unionism. No task before the union movement today presents greater impediments than was the task of building industrial unions in the US in the 1930s. The challenge of establishing the CIO was only met, was only possible, because of the leadership and effort of Communist and socialist workers.

Needed is the return in influence of historically informed workers’ parties that draw upon the social theory of Marx and the organizational insights of Lenin (that is to say, parties that reject the backward Cold War dogma of Anything but Communism), Without the strong option of Communist or Workers’ Parties, the European and US working class will continue to face the repellent choice between decadent, rotting centrist parties and a host of new charlatan parties offering fool’s gold policies, magic elixirs, and vulnerable scapegoats. 

Only an independent, working class-oriented movement informed by Marxism-Leninism can provide a “third way” apart from the disaster of free-market globalism or the trap of economic nationalism.

The old saw that workers deserve their own party is more true today than ever-- an authentic anti-capitalist party that returns to the revolutionary legacy surrendered to opportunism and parliamentary illusions.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com