Tilting at Windmills?

Two months have passed since the 2018 midterm elections, yet Democrats are already jumping into the 2020 Presidential race with many more candidates on the way. Typically, candidates are reluctant to go against an incumbent, but the Democrats smell blood in the water with the Trump Presidency.

This is another “new face” moment when Party leaders sense that Democratic Party voters are angry at nearly all of the US institutions and disgusted with past choices.

Earlier moments of flagging voter confidence necessitated fresh faces to bolster class rule. For example, in the wake of the Nixon fiasco, the Democrats found a relatively unknown “aw shucks” peanut farmer/governor from the South. Jimmy Carter, a “Mr. Clean Jeans” with an unblemished record as an administrator, served in sharp contrast to the Nixon sleaze machine. By 1978, he had betrayed the last iteration of a progressive, New Deal-like Democratic platform and roused the somnolent then “lion of the Senate”-- Ted Kennedy-- to run against him in the next primary.

Bill Clinton, another governor, but this time with youth and charm, rode the health care issue to victory. It is easy to forget that universal, low-cost healthcare was the number-one issue nearly thirty years ago and still remains unsolved. And every Democratic candidate will run in 2020 again on healthcare reform, though the Democratic Party leadership is working overtime to stealthily dilute any popular “Medicare for All” program in order to make it corporate friendly.

The twin catastrophe of costly wars and a collapsing economy associated with the Bush administration drove public confidence in US institutions to a new low. Once again, ruling class legitimacy required confidence builders. Seizing the opportunity, the Democrats offered both a reliable, established policy hand-- Hillary Clinton-- and a new fresh, untainted face-- Barack Obama. Both came with a bonus appeal to urban social liberals and identitarians: first woman President or first African American President.

Obama proved better suited to ruling class purposes, raising and spending over twice as much money as McCain in the general election.

Like Carter, Obama was all promise and little change. Despite two years of rare command of both the legislative and the executive branches, Obama only delivered on a Rube Goldberg health care bill written by the insurance industry. Of course, its failings are the reason that the healthcare crisis remains at the top of national issues.

Frustration with “hope and change” opened the back door to the vile Donald Trump and his military/con men coterie. Trump became a gift to the Democratic Party and the deeply discredited media (polls show that most people thought that the media was a monger for “fake news” well before Trump coined the term). With Trump’s bombast and crudity, Democrats and cable news windbags can trash Trump without wrestling with deeper issues. Moreover, they could invent a few issues of their own and further their saber-rattling, militaristic agenda. If your corporate masters won’t allow you to tackle inequality, systemic racism, and deteriorating living conditions, then resort to fear and distraction.

Presented with the prospect of a campaign against a bumbling, egomaniacal Donald Trump burdened with falling approval ratings, a herd of Democratic Party politicians and officials are scraping together cash and scrambling for operatives and supporters. Some are really only jockeying for a Vice-Presidential anointment. Still others, for future consideration or a step up in job title. An announcement and a tour of the hinterlands serves as a beauty contest for some future considerations. But there are still many with sufficient self-regard that they plan to run for a shot at Trump.

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What’s new in this election-- or appears to be new-- is a sizable, pesky left wing in the Democratic Party. To be sure, the Party’s left today is a tepid left by historic or international standards. But economic duress often generates a left turn. It is established that younger people’s fate was the most damaged product of a decade of halting growth, greater inequality, and fewer opportunities for better jobs in the wake of the 2007-2008 collapse. So it is no surprise that “socialism”-- ill-defined socialism-- is more popular with youth than it has been in many generations.

Bernie Sanders brought the idea of socialism into a Democratic Party that had even cast off the term “liberal,” embracing “progressive” in its place. Cold War Democrats rivaled Republicans in denouncing socialism.

Of course Bernie embraced Scandinavian-style social democracy, but his use of the forbidden word was welcome indeed.

It is worth remembering that the Sanders primary campaign in 2016 garnered 46% of the delegates at the Democratic Convention despite the widespread sabotage of his campaign by the Party leadership and the powerful effect of conservative superdelegates. Sanders polled well against all of the Republican candidates and in states later critical to Trump’s victory. Nothing demonstrates better the dissatisfied mood of the country two years ago.

But since 2016, the Democratic Party establishment has shown no interest in embracing, even tolerating Sanders-style leftism. They have marshalled a host of arguments-- pragmatic, technical, seldom ideological arguments-- about electability, diversity, demographics, experience, etc. They muster a slew of “realities”-- budgetary limits, need to compromise, unintended consequences, etc.-- that hinder change. They aim to paternalistically keep the Party’s left within the tent without even remotely advancing a left agenda.

To a great extent, Sanders has made their work easier. Aside from some minor Convention reforms, he has neither asked nor demanded any substantial programmatic changes in the Party. He has loyally supported the Party, its strategy, and its candidates since the last Presidential election. Unlike insurgent counterparts in the Republican Party, Sanders makes no non-negotiable demands; he refuses to elevate principles above accommodation to the Democratic Party center. Whether Sanders consciously serves the Party (“sheep-dogging”) or naively believes that he can maneuver among shameless corporate Democrats is irrelevant. He has crippled his effectiveness.

The current face of the left ‘insurgency’ within the Democratic Party is the youthful, attractive and very able Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What is not surprising is how the Democratic Party establishment and its media henchmen have lined up against her. What is surprising is how deft she has been in meeting their often ridiculous attacks. Tainted Democrats from millionaire Whoopi Goldberg to Neanderthal Joe Lieberman have dismissively scorned her.

Where she wants to go, where she will be allowed to go with her streak of relative independence is yet to be determined. But surely, her challenging of the Democratic Party leadership is an exciting development.

Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of a 70% marginal tax rate for mega-salaries was a surprise, a welcome and politically shrewd surprise. For the Democrats who speak “progressive” when they are out of power, this idea presents an embarrassing problem. Pelosi and her cohorts have indignantly attacked Trump over his tax breaks for the rich and corporations, but they will never embrace a real, concrete, and popular tax policy as a centerpiece in the coming election.

Ocasio-Cortez has also drawn attention to the notion of a “Green New Deal.” Despite the fact that the term remains more of a slogan than a policy-- how much Green? how much New Deal?-- Democratic Party policy wonks and the new House leadership are blocking anything even remotely related to crafting such a policy.

For those who were snookered by the contrived faux-progressivism of the “community-organizer” legend, Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez presents a more credible role model.

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Of the early Presidential prospects, the hollow corporate Democrats would likely be most happy with Beto O’Rourke, the upstart who raised a record $83 million dollars to run a Senatorial campaign that advanced virtually no serious issues. With a name that is instantly a campaign slogan and with overflowing congeniality, O’Rourke defines the “moderate” candidate sought by empty suits.

In the Obama mold of attractive, youthful and flamboyantly moderate candidates are Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar. All are ambitious, anxious to please, and ill-disposed to advance a peoples’ agenda.

Similarly, the avuncular crowd-- Joe Biden and sleepy Bob Casey-- are dependable centrists and accommodators, but not likely to answer to the “new face” moment.

Representing the Party’s left, Sanders remains the most viable candidate, though the media has already begun to dig up dirt to undermine his chances. Should he falter, Elizabeth Warren offers a Sanders-lite candidate with a credible record of assailing the bankers around the financial crisis, but little policy-wise beyond repeating that she is an advocate for the “middle class.”  

The most intriguing candidate is Tulsi Gabbard, the only Democrat to dare to challenge the Democratic Party foreign policy consensus. Gabbard has courageously and vocally defied the apologists for US wars and US interventions throughout the world. Nearly alone, she has stood against the war mongers who stoke confrontations and aggression, and she has even defended Syria’s right to peacefully determine its own future. Measured against almost any Democrat, her congressional record and her public positions today are decidedly the most radically advanced.

Yet the attacks on her candidacy began almost immediately after she announced plans to run. Rather than weigh her legislative record, her projected issues, critics dredged statements made in her youth and misstatements since renounced. They accuse her of being “left hard-realist” in outlook, “homophobic,” “virulent anti-gay activist” (CNN, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Daily Kos etc., etc.), loved by the “Conservative Media and the Far Right” (The Daily Beast) and on and on. ad nauseum. Many liberals and the moderate left-- especially the speech moralizers-- shook their fingers in Gabbard’s direction over past indiscretions. Significantly, one of Gabbard’s openly gay House colleagues, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, came to her defense. Her voting record with the organization that claims to represent the greatest number of sexually diverse members is 100%.

But it can’t go unnoticed that the same standards are not applied to other candidates. No one has challenged Elizabeth Warren for being a Republican until an epiphany in1995. No one is probing the past views of the many “liberal” Bible-thumping Christians who populate the House and Senate and run for office. If they attend churches that oppose abortion or same-sex marriage, does that not disqualify them? Or do we judge them on their own current public posture, as we should?

And recall the sickening obituaries by these same news sites a month ago of ex-CIA chief, Reaganaut George HW Bush, eulogies that found nothing to fault in his loathsome history. All was forgiven.

No, the real grounds for the attack on Gabbard lie elsewhere. Gabbard dared to question the official narrative that Assad is a butcher and the US should push to overthrow him. She also criticized Israeli apartheid, another foreign policy disqualifier with the media, the pundits, and the Democratic Party leadership.

It should not be lost on the Democratic Party left that no other candidate will speak as boldly on these issues, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And it should not be lost on the left, in general, that no prominent Democratic leader has stepped up to defend Gabbard’s foreign policy positions, her right to legitimately hold them, or her right to run for President on these issues.

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Denied a sense of history by 24-hour cable news noise and suffering social media addiction, it should come as no surprise that most voters demonstrate no grasp of the history of reformism, of insurgencies in the Democratic Party. As some left pundits like to remind us: “The Democratic Party is where good ideas go to die!”

There is much truth in this epigram. With the exception of extraordinary moments like the Great Depression and the 1960s mass insurgencies, the Democratic Party as an institution has shown overwhelming resistance to any movement to change its character from fealty to the capitalist agenda. Its existence as an opposition force is based solely on cultivating an image moderately distant from the other more shamelessly pro-corporate, unabashedly capitalist party. For the most part, the Republican Party has established the capitalist, ruling class line and the Democrats have occupied a position minimally to the left of that line, an option available when the preferred line falters. That would appear to be the logic of a two-party system when both parties are capitalist.

The details of history support this thesis. Within a few years of the close of the Second World War, the Democrats were in retreat from Roosevelt’s New Deal vision, especially its foreign policy. The turbulent sixties were dampened by assassinations that effectively disrupted electoral politics and frightened potential insurgents who likely suspected that the spate of assassinations was more than a coincidence.

When Senator George McGovern secured the Democratic Party nomination in 1972 and promised to further democratize the process, extend the Great Society, and revise US foreign policy, the media, the Democratic Party establishment, a conservative labor leadership, and Cold Warriors subverted, sabotaged his campaign and emboldened the re-elected Nixon administration.

When that same Nixon administration was disgraced and the Republican Party damaged, the Democrats enjoyed a rare freedom of action with a veto-proof House and Senate domination in 1976. The platform promised a reduction in military spending, full employment, a low-income housing policy, comprehensive national health insurance with universal coverage, acceptance of busing for racial integration, rejection of nuclear energy, and a host of other progressive reforms. This was to be the last New Deal-like Democratic platform. It was betrayed within two years.

By the mid-1980s, the Democratic Party was reborn as Reaganism-lite. As The New York Times noted, virtually all of the reforms of the 1976 and 1980 platforms were discarded. In their place was a new focus: “The [1984] platform contrasts in a number of key areas with the 1976 platform on which Jimmy Carter and Mr. Mondale were elected, and the differences say a good deal about the path the party has chosen this year. Abortion and Homosexual Rights.”

In place of welfare-related programs, the Democrats offered “Cost containment.”

“The 1984 platform mentions marijuana for the first time in its section on crime and drug control,” signaling the Democrats’ developing fixation on criminalizing drug use. “What may be the only overt mention of liberalism in the 1984 platform,” The New York Times notes, “maintains that the answer to crime is 'neither a permissive liberalism nor a static conservatism.’”

Similarly, the Democrats’ fascination with global, unfettered markets emerged at this time: In the view of The New York Times, “The party is more concerned about world trade now than it was in 1976, with attention rising from two paragraphs to nearly 2,000 words. Very little of the campaign protectionist language survived into the final draft, however, which observes that ‘the international economy is the area in which we must compete.’”

As the grand liberal chronicler, The New York Times, underscores above, the 1984 Democratic Party platform marked a watershed in the abandonment of New Deal thinking in the party, a change that entrenched even further in the ensuing years. By the election of Bill Clinton, the process was completed, allowing the Democrats to successfully attack and dismantle the New Deal welfare system. An attempt by Clinton and Newt Gingrich to privatize social security was only derailed with the distraction of Monica Lewinsky.

Of course, there were insurgencies along the way-- some shallow, some Quixotic. The Kennedyesque Gary Hart campaign was hollow and symbolic; Jesse Jackson successfully broke through the racial barriers constraining a Black national candidate by projecting a remarkably radical economic and peace program in the primaries, only to be buried by corporate fundraising funneled to the Democratic establishment; the Deaniac campaign of Howard Dean was innovative and boldly challenging of the war consensus, but was sunk by a corporate media exercising its powers to submerge Dean under waves of derision.

History suggests that the Democratic Party is a corporate monolith only moved to change in order to meet profound crisis coupled with extreme mass pressure. Even then, it remains a capitalist party, a party that puts the interests of capital before all else. And when it is forced to make concessions, its corporate masters move as quickly as possible to reverse them.

History shows that these moments of concession are extremely rare. Nonetheless, new generations of well-meaning activists are intent upon foregoing the more radical-- actually the more promising, but more tasking-- alternatives of independent, revolutionary politics. As insurgents have in the past, they will attempt to reform the nonreformable.

One can only hope that when the new generation, excited again by the idea of socialism, recognizes the futility of transforming the Democratic Party, they will not fall into cynicism and settle for polishing the capitalist apple. One can only hope that they will find a home where they are more welcome.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Coarse Politics

How can it happen that an unpopular right wing US President can, in effect, call to end seven years of an undeclared war against the government of Syria, a UN member nation, inducing most of the liberal establishment to recoil and challenge the prospect of peace?

 

How is it that a Marine General who earned the sobriquets “Mad Dog” and “the butcher of Fallujah” can be canonized by large sectors of the left as a role model for reasoned sobriety and judgement?

How can US left icon, Noam Chomsky, often an outspoken opponent of US aggression, oppose the removal of US troops from Syria when the troops have no legitimate role in that country?

Surely, these sensible questions signal that some political thinkers have lost their way, that widely accepted, firmly planted political alignments have become unmoored.

On the surface, the Trump presidency and the intense, sharply divided response to it have forced all events or actions-- from the most innocuous to the most menacing-- into ill-fitting, pro- or anti-Trump boxes.

For example, the recent deaths of two young migrants in Federal custody have been laid at the doorstep of Donald Trump with his loud, vulgar, and racist anti-immigrant banter. While no tears should be shed for Trump, singling Trump out exculpates the bi-partisan, near-universal support for creating the draconian ICE in 2002. Further, it neglects the prior documented questionable deaths at the hands of ICE (107 deaths from 2003 to 2007, for example). Nor do the self-righteous Trump foes acknowledge the long enduring corruption and no-bid contracts plaguing ICE. Much of the anti-Trump crowd were silent during the Obama years when 2.4 million immigrants were deported by the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Of those deported in 2015, around 40% had no criminal convictions. Apparently, the plight of immigrants is only of interest to “resistance” liberals and their media cheerleaders when it can be used against Trump and his gang.

The current government shutdown-- snagged on Trump’s insistence of funding for an anti-immigrant wall-- has generated howls of indignation from the Democratic Party’s “resistance” fighters and the cable television warriors. They rightly see the Trump wall as a draconian affront to the dignity of immigrants and an hysterical response to exaggerated fears. And yet these same human rights indignados fail to acknowledge the infamous wall constructed by the Israelis to deny access to their Palestinian neighbors, stripping them of their dignity and their well-being. The parallel escapes them, achieving no traction in the corporate media.

Similarly, the brutal killing of Khashoggi, the Washington Post writer, at the hands of Saudi officials has become-- thanks to Trump’s clumsy, outrageous defense of the Saudi Crown Prince-- a stick to beat Trump.

Trump’s pathetic defense of Saudi criminality coincided-- a remarkable coincidence-- with the release of a study by a CIA-linked organization that announced that 85,000 children had been killed by the Saudi military and its allies in Yemen’s civil war. The shock wave rolling through the corporate media was worthy of Claude Rain’s wry movie discovery of gambling in Casablanca’s Rick’s Cafe.

Never mind that independent, but marginalized media has been chronicling Saudi atrocities in Yemen for the war’s nearly four-year duration. Never mind that US support for Saudi intervention, as well as actual clandestine US intervention, pre-date the Trump administration.

And there is the big lie of RussiaGate: unsubstantiated charges of interference in US domestic affairs lodged by the same US intelligence agencies and their cohorts that have mounted large-scale subversion, influence-peddling, corruption, and even military intervention in the affairs of uncounted governments for decade after decade.

The interminable Mueller investigation still gives hope to the liberals that Trump can be linked to the evil Russians as well.

It is easy to dismiss the inconsistencies, the selective blindness of US liberals as mere hypocrisy. Undoubtedly, it is that. But something deeper is behind the hypocrisy that commits liberals to side with the neo-conservatives, the FBI, the CIA and the other intelligence agencies that spy on our citizens, the war-mongering generals, and the monopoly media that gave us “weapons of mass destruction” and fairly elected Venezuelan “dictators.”

The hypocrisy emerges from the deeply embedded bi-polarity of the US political system and its ill-fit with the political realities of today. The two bourgeois parties that define US politics constitute a narrow continuum that can neither confine nor give coherent meaning to the ongoing crisis of decadent US capitalism. And two-party thinking casts little light on the crisis.

In today’s terms, the permitted political norms fail to explain and address Trumpism without resorting to conspiracy theories and bizarre alignments. Trump’s rise requires a wholesale examination and possible exposure of the profound corruption and dysfunctionality of the two-party system and its monopoly capitalist base. To explore Trump’s meaning (beyond his raging ego, his country club bigotry, and his unbounded ignorance) and delve into his administration's restore-the-empire nationalism, its faux populism, and its inconsistent foreign policy requires a commitment to candor that the political leadership and the corporate media are not prepared to make.

The dramatic loss of legitimacy by the media, the two parties, the judicial system, the Congress, the banks, and other institutions over the last decade is a well-established fact substantiated by numerous polls. Yet poll respondents still show confidence in the military and the intelligence services. It is no wonder that political leaders and the corporate media cling to these institutions like long lost lovers. It is no wonder that politicians seek out veterans for office, wave flags at every opportunity, and promote unceasing militarism. It is no wonder that the media rely on stables of ex-generals and retired intelligence operatives. Rather than address the collapse of legitimacy, US rulers choose the road of sleazy opportunism.

The once widely touted and grudgingly accepted post-Cold War US global dominance is now challenged on many fronts. PRChina and Russia and other countries and blocs defy US demands and policies and assert their own interests. It’s a different world-- less compliant than the world that GHW Bush found in rallying allies to the first war with Iraq. The ever-increasing number of international sanctions attest to the desperate attempts by the US to stem the tide of defiance. US elites in both parties and in the media refuse to recognize a world without US hegemony. Instead of striving for global parity, US elites resort to contriving aggressive, irredeemably evil villains.

Neither the political parties nor the corporate news/entertainment complex acknowledge the devastation wrought by the long continuing march of economic inequality and the catastrophic destruction rendered by the 2007-2008 crash upon the security and well-being of working people in the US. Blinded by stock market euphoria and class arrogance, elites in both parties neglected the interests of millions of voters who proved pivotal in the 2016 election. They prefer to dismiss grievances and lecture the working class on accommodating the stark, new realities of market morality.

Shrewdly, Trumpism advances its dishonest, unrealistic promises to the forgotten, its pledge to restore the US to greatness, its demand of global leadership, and its caricaturized scorn of real political cynicism and media shallowness. It appeals to a constituency unrecognized and unrecognizable by the liberal elites who have reduced political discourse to a very narrow conversation uncritically friendly to both monopoly capitalism and its institutions.

In the political void left by Democratic Party barrenness, the Trump circus thrives. With a Democratic Party beholden only to corporate interests. along with the issues troubling the bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie, the attack upon the Trump malignancy takes the absurd forms that we witness daily.

While another election may send Trump packing, it will not magically reverse the many decades of bankrupt and decadent politics that opened the door to Trumpism. It is foolish to count on a corrupted Democratic Party leadership to pave a new course different from the tragic road travelled by both parties from Reagan to Trump.

Recall that many in Europe longed for a time when the embarrassing absurdity of Silvio Berlusconi would vacate the electoral scene. But without an authentic and committed movement against monopoly capital, Italy is today saddled with the equally ugly and perhaps even more dysfunctional Lega and Five Star Movement.

The lesson should not be lost on the US liberals who are prepared to sell their integrity to the enemy to secure the exit of Donald Trump.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Where to Begin

“...they take from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie, ...cast aside only the living soul of Marxism, ‘only’ its revolutionary content.” VI Lenin The Collapse of the Second International

Standing with me on a cold corner with a sign urging bank disinvestment, a venerated comrade reminded me of the lasting value of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. Food for thought: while we read this classic in our political youth, does it retain its relevance as we gain experience and mature?

What Is To Be Done? began as a promissory note to expand a polemical sketch written in May of 1901 entitled “Where to Begin.” The question lingered in Lenin’s mind for nearly a year before the lengthy pamphlet emerged.

What Is To Be Done? is not an easy read. It is filled with esoteric references to journals, personalities, and events specific to turn-of-the-last-century Russia, as well as unusually named political tendencies. It is easy to confuse the various “Rabochaya” or “Rabocheye” (workers’ newspapers) or forget the meaning of “Economism,” “Narodnism,” or “legal ‘Marxism’.”

But Lenin’s goals can be put rather simply:

● Identify the political trends or tendencies that are obstacles to advancing to socialism.

● Establish conditions necessary for the advancement to socialism.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” Martynov “The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.” Bernstein

For Lenin, the epigrams pronounced by A.S. Martynov and Eduard Bernstein-- a German theoretician of socialist gradualism-- were symptomatic of an infection to the body of revolutionary socialism. For those “socialists,” socialism was simply the product of the struggle for reforms, an inevitable final step or stage in the evolution of the workers’ movement. Set in motion, political and economic struggle would-- on its own-- through “timid zigzags” (Lenin’s characterization) ultimately lead to socialism.

In Lenin’s words, they and their adherents imagine that movements “...pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’.” They submit that it is bureaucratic and foot-dragging trade union and political leaders who retard the natural evolution of reformism toward discarding capitalism and constructing socialism.

Democracy+continual reforms=socialism, in the minds of Martynov, Bernstein, the French socialist Millerand, the German socialist Georg von Vollmar and their ilk.

Lenin regards these views as a sharp departure (revision) of the theory of revolutionary socialism, a departure based upon the unjustifiable faith in spontaneity. He views ‘spontaneity’ as a key concept in understanding both the potential of struggle and its limits. Using the industrial strikes of 1896 in Russia as an example, he shows that the working class movement and the people’s movement will always generate a fight back, a response to exploitation and oppression. But it will always be limited to immediate grievances and immediate remedies without the further introduction of a conscious element, a leap to attacking capitalism itself. The idea that spontaneous political motion will, by itself, find its way to socialism is a false and harmful illusion.

Defiance, resistance, sabotage, demonstrating, civil disobedience, etc. are largely spontaneous responses of individuals or groups; strikes, planned actions with demands, political initiatives, and other collective actions are often spontaneous, in Lenin’s sense, but “nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.” Because they have elements of planning and goals, though limited and immediate, these struggles offer the potential for more radical, more profound change. They lack only ideology, organization, and a program of advancement, elements that must come from a united, disciplined, and committed group of socialist partisans. Those partisans must bring a vision beyond simple reformism to provide the tools for overthrowing the grip of capitalist social and economic relations.

[R.M. writing in Rabochaya Mysl says:] “That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment. This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adopts itself to spontaneity.” (Lenin) [my emphasis]

The embrace of spontaneity as the wellspring of political and social change is identified by Lenin with withdrawal from the struggle for qualitative change, from meaningful engagement with the source of exploitation and oppression. This surrender to “realism,” pragmatism, the “possible” is opportunistic because it courts respectability or an easy legitimacy and compromises the fight for the liberation of working people from the chains of exploitation to garner the nearest goals of the closest moment.

“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic [socialist] consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism… arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.” (Lenin)

Lenin’s distinction between trade-union consciousness and socialist consciousness holds true, over a hundred years later. No events since have shown Lenin’s assessment to be wrong. No working class or popular movement has taken up socialism without its introduction from outside the movement, typically through a socialist political organization. In a world dominated by the ideology of capitalism, in the course of “the drab ordinary struggle,” the idea of socialism is alien. It is the task of dedicated socialist revolutionaries-- armed with a program and of one mind-- to bring socialist consciousness to the popular movements.

Those like the Russian acolytes of Bernstein in Lenin’s time-- the Economists, the “legal” Marxists, the Socialist Revolutionaries-- “...kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe (to take an expression from Plekhanov) upon the ‘posterior’ of the proletariat.”

The Communist movement coined the term “tailism” to more politely capture Plekhanov’s vivid description of political opportunism. Slavishly deferring to the “drab, everyday struggles” of the trade union movement or the spontaneous peoples’ movement will get us no closer to socialism.

Political forces will invariably arise that promise to spur spontaneous action by the popular masses through acts of terrorism; they intend to “excite” the working class, to give it “strong impetus” to press its supposedly latent radicalism. For Lenin, this is equally a departure from sound revolutionary strategy. Like reformism (Economism), the anarchism of the act (early Narodism and the Socialist Revolutionaries) fails to recognize a role for determined agitating and organizing the people for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism.

Revolutionaries are not aloof from the fight for democratic reforms: “He is no Social-Democrat [revolutionary] who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question.” [Lenin’s emphasis]. But Lenin also emphasizes that this practice must not “for a moment [conceal] our socialist conviction.”

But revolutionaries should not be confused into thinking that the fight for democratic reforms is more than it is: “Trade-unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class.” [Lenin’s emphasis]

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!”

Lenin’s famous proclamation is not an idle boast, but a concise statement of the necessity of an organization of committed, dedicated revolutionaries placing the struggle for socialism above all.

The task before the revolutionary movement is to develop and maintain working class leadership of the popular movements while shedding the patronizing attitude of delivering only that which is “accessible” to the masses. Recognizing the “excellently trained enemy,” Lenin insists that revolution must be a profession, combining the skills of propagandist, organizer, and agitator. The revolutionaries must develop tools: leaflets, pamphlets, books, etc., but most importantly a national organ (newspaper, website, etc.) that serves as a collective propagandist, agitator, and organizer, a tool for raising a definitive political line and rallying and making contact with followers.

Of course socialist revolutionaries must come together as an organization, as a party, as a vehicle for overthrowing capitalism. A loose-knit, independent scattering of even the most dedicated revolutionaries could hardly pose a threat to the forces and resources defending capitalism and its ruling class. That party must bring to the masses a program, a road map leading to socialism above all else.

Lenin stresses that a revolutionary organization cannot be seduced by the sirens of “primitive” or “toy” democracy, the false radicalism of direct representation so often advocated by young intellectuals and anarchists. Lenin cites the experiences of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Fabian Society) and Karl Kautsky (German Social Democratic Party)-- two sources at odds with Leninism-- on their negative practical experiences with the folly of strict referenda democracy. Lenin recognized that direct democratic decision-making under the harsh, war-like conditions imposed by battling capitalism was sheerly utopian.

These are the answers that Lenin gave in his time to the question What Is To Be Done?

Twenty-first Century Relevance?

Does Lenin’s revolutionary theory hold relevance for the struggles of today?

Over generations, Lenin’s insights, admonitions, strategies, and tactics have been muted, diluted, or revised by many prominent left-wing thinkers in capitalist countries. The seduction of parliamentary politics, the burnished image of bourgeois democracy, doubts about the working class as a force for change, the rise of cultural and life-style radicalism combined with many other factors to distract the left from the revolutionary socialist program. The Cold War and the demonization of Communism further prodded the US and much of the academic and student Western European left to distance itself from Leninism. The ABC phenomenon-- Anything But Communism-- became deeply embedded in the “radicalism” of the late twentieth century. A “new” left-- purposefully new in order to dissociate from Leninism and Cold War ostracization-- sought new forms of radicalism, new approaches to struggle, new types of organizations.

Ironically, the New Left found answers that already failed in the past, in the kinds of politics toward which Lenin had earlier targeted his ideological weapons. And today’s US and European left reproduces many of the same tendencies.

It has been a common thread weaving through the US left that so-called participatory democracy is the foundation of radical politics and emancipatory or empowering for oppositional movements. From the New Left of the sixties to the Occupy and Indignados movements, this approach has been foundational. The fetish for procedure has not only overshadowed establishing a common program, but often blocked the achievement of one.

Organizationally, the insistence upon participatory democracy is stiflingly rigid. It fails to acknowledge the various types of democracy: direct, representational, ballot, referenda, etc.; it fails to recognize the appropriateness of the different types by time, place, and circumstance; and it fails to grasp the organizational fit of different democratic modes.

Accordingly, obsessive participatory, direct democracy becomes an obstacle to the establishment of an effective revolutionary organization charged with the tasks of building a movement for socialism to face the gale forces of the immensely powerful resources and the security apparatuses of a ruthless ruling class. Revolutionary movements must respect democratic norms, but not the cult of procedure that Lenin mocks as “toy” or “primitive” democracy.

Occupy and similar movements have floundered on the rocks of organizational chaos grounded in procedural sectarianism, a failure to establish efficient and effective leadership channels. Many once-promising movements fall as quickly as they rise without the appropriate, effective democratic standards.

It is a commonplace with today’s left to assume that removing the brakes that are thought to be restraining broad movements-- typically bureaucratic, entrenched leaders-- will in itself unleash worker or mass action. On this view, existing popular institutions-- trade unions, political parties, advocacy organizations, etc.-- only need fresh, democratically elected leaders to unleash the march toward a better world, towards socialism. Rather than tackling the difficult task of planting the germ of socialist thought into the movements, modern-day US leftists too often expect to see the idea of replacing capitalism-- the commitment to socialism-- flower spontaneously.

History knows of no serious challenge to capitalism emerging automatically, without the intervention of a revolutionary organization. Nonetheless, many in the US left deny the necessity or the desirability of a Leninist “organization of revolutionaries.” Instead, they count on the magical, spontaneous emergence of a socialist consciousness where none existed before. Swayed by Cold War dogma, they unthinkingly fear the ogre of “vanguardism.”

Despite many lifetimes of shredded hopes of taming capitalism by working for change within the Democratic Party, a new generation of idealistic youth are placing their hopes in the Democratic Party and a class collaborationist trade union movement. They follow modern day “legal” Marxists and other theorists of social democracy who ask them to “kneel in prayer to spontaneity,” expecting a radical vision to spring forth without the intercession of a revolutionary organization. Tailing bourgeois institutions and workers’ organizations umbilically linked to bourgeois institutions can only bring bourgeois politics, paraphrasing Lenin.

With dissatisfaction and anger growing, with confrontation intensifying, and with more and more institutions and authority discredited, the need for effective responses grows. Over a hundred years ago, Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is To Be Done? cleared much of the ideological underbrush, discarded most of the false roads and missteps foiling a movement for socialism.

Today, these false roads, missteps, and ideological thickets again block the road to twenty-first-century socialism.

What Is To Be Done? demonstrates the need for a political organization of ardent, committed revolutionaries, united with a program to overthrow capitalism. Since the retreat of Communism, Leninism has unfortunately been discarded by many on the left. But the wisdom of Lenin’s pamphlet is needed now more than ever.

Greg Godels 
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Blood and Oil

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Reuters report that their sources have revealed the CIA is concluding (with its surely-by-now suspect “high confidence”) that the highest echelon of the Saudi Arabian government, including the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi embassy has occupied US headlines for the last six weeks. While it appears to be a particularly gruesome and brazen act, one cannot but recoil from the callous selectivity of the US media, a media that heretofore ignored or minimized the horrors inflicted upon tens of thousands of Yemeni people by the same Saudi government and its coalition allies.

As though choreographed for the moment, a study suddenly appeared last week proclaiming Saudi savagery (Aid Group Says 85,000 Children May Have Died of Hunger in Yemen) and capturing the attention of The New York Times, Washington Post,Time,The Independent, Voice of America, etc. Overnight, the US media discovered atrocities already well documented over the last three years by the UN and foreign and alternative media. Suspiciously, the aid group releasing the study was thrown out of Pakistan in 2015 charged with covering a bogus CIA vaccination program.
 
One might be led to believe that the violently imposed social, cultural, and political backwardness of the Saudi family regime and its bloody actions was unknown until the Khoshoggi affair. However, it is only politically expedient to recognize it now with a rift in the ruling class.

But what is one to make of this leak from anonymous CIA sources to the media?

Like so much of the unattributed information and misinformation driving the US entertainment-oriented media, the leaks stir the political pot without adding certainty or clarity.

Apart from information tantalizingly dangled by Turkish authorities, the CIA leakers additionally claim a phone intercept between the Crown Prince’s brother in Washington, DC and Khashoggi, assuring his safety for a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA sources assert that the call was made at the behest of the Crown Prince. Therefore, they conclude that bin Salman’s motive for the call was to set up the Khashoggi murder.

The corporate media have taken the matter as proven despite no official confirmation from top CIA officials or other government agencies. For the entertainment-industrial complex, the Khashoggi affair is just another opportunity to bait President Trump-- a firm supporter of the newly installed Crown Prince--  into another episode of prevarication, bluster, and outrageousness. And the simultaneous “discovery” of Saudi Arabia's bloody massacre of Yemen only adds to the case against Trump.

In the meantime, President Trump squirms before the broad national and international revulsion over the killing.

Is the revulsion over the Khashoggi killing sufficient for the US and the NATO allies to kick Saudi Arabia to the curb? Will they jettison their long reliable “policeman” over the Islamic world and their intermediary in imperial domination?

Soaked with self-righteousness, US and European leaders act as if they had forgotten the dirty work that the Arabian head choppers did for them, for example, in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, in supporting Israel, in Libya, and, of course, in Syria.

Like the US media, Erdogan’s Turkey stoked the assassination into a major crisis. They willingly exposed their illegal wiretap in order to discredit Saudi Arabia and drive a wedge between the Saudis and the US. They have also sided with Qatar in its defiance of the other Arabian monarchies.

Qatar, in turn, has conveniently befriended Iran with whom it shares an enormous natural gas field. Iran, like Turkey, has engaged in an off-again, on-again friendship with Russia. In the case of Turkey, Erdogan plays the US against Russia over arms sales. Round one went to Russia with its sale of its sophisticated ground-to-air defense system, annoying the US to no end. Though the US cancelled its offer of the defense industry’s crown jewel, the F-35, the Turkish leaders know that the US desperately needs to sell the fighter to rationalize the development costs. Erdogan would like to trade closer relations with the US (and not Russia), arms sales, and a muting of the Khashoggi affair to get their hands on Fethullah Gülen, the alleged coup plotter living in the US.

Alongside the gore of assassination and weapons sales haunting the Middle East, there is, as there always is, the specter of oil (energy). Saudi Arabia has sought to reset its role in the energy nexus. New leadership hopes to shed its image of unreconstructed tribalism, it attempts to diversify its vast wealth, and it looks to jump-start its capitalist normalization by making ARAMCO, the Saudi energy firm, a publicly traded corporation.

But the emergence of its long-time energy partner, the US, as an energy rival has deflected those goals. First, the Saudis tried to discipline the US energy industry by driving prices below cost of production, bullying the revived US fracking industry and taming its growth. With billions of investor funds propping up the US industry, the plan failed.

Saddled with enormous and growing expenses from the Yemeni war, the Saudis reverted to their traditional role as ‘CEO’ of OPEC, guiding the oil producers toward a stable mix of sustainable and profitable prices.

But their close friends in the Trump Administration overturned that effort. Taking the Trump sanctions against Iran at face value, the Saudis and the other oil producers ramped up production to fill the void. However, the Administration negotiated large exceptions to the sanctions, turning the increase into an overproduction glut and collapsing prices.

Sensing a betrayal of the alliance, the Saudis are embarking on an independent policy of drastically reducing production and urging others to do so as well. The oil wars are escalating.

With the Saudi-US alliance frayed, Putin has made nice to the Saudis in recent months.

If the Middle East seems a cauldron of chaos, drama, and frictions, it is only one of several centers of growing tension and conflict. Southeast Asia is becoming the scene of US-PRC rivalry, with different countries taking different sides, with influence peddling through loans and projects, and with threats and counter-threats.

Further, the European Union continues to barely hang together, wracked by ever more powerful centrifugal political forces. And South America continues to suffer sharp political and economic instability.

To those still viewing the world through the prism of the Cold War or the brief period of global US hegemony, today’s world appears as a great mystery-- a moment of intense drama and inexplicable chaos. The Cold War-- for all of its dangers-- operated under a fairly strict set of unspoken rules, even when reckless leaders like Ronald Reagan were in power. During the post-Soviet, short-lived US global regnum, all but a few countries accepted some US governance.

But today, states are in intense competition for economic advantage as Lenin's Imperialism foresaw. Capitalist countries are replaying the intense competition typical of human interactions under capitalism, but on the regional and international level. Alliances are formed and broken; contradictory new ones are formed in the blink of an eye. International rules and regulations are under siege as countries seek to gain an economic edge. Cooperation, always a tenuous global achievement, has dissolved to reveal a feral pursuit of national self-interest. A ruthless zero-sum logic replaces the heralded “win-win” attitude of global players during more stable economic times.  

The more powerful economies are attempting to construct hegemonic blocs to bring rivals to bay. Lesser powers are seeking regional hegemony or the most advantageous place in a larger constellation. The anarchy of unrestrained market competition has finally and decisively penetrated international relations. And there is no going back to a non-existent “golden era.”

But we have seen this before.

Today’s aggressive rivalries resemble only too well those smoldering before World War One. Like the pre-WWI period, big and small powers vie for economic advantage, taking every opportunity to expand the exploitative tentacles of their capitalist enterprises. As Lenin foresaw over a hundred years ago, the voracious hunger for new markets, for new sources of exploitation, and new resources inevitably leads to war.
That is where the toxic combination of economic decline and intensifying inter-state rivalries is taking us. As the danger of a spark igniting a disastrous regional or global war grows, too many good people are engaged in the machinations and maneuvers of bourgeois politics to now recognize the looming catastrophe.

Now, more than ever, we need a powerful movement for peace. Nothing could be more urgent.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Where is the Economy Headed?

Headlines such as “World Stocks Fall to Two-Year Low” that appears in today’s (October 30) Wall Street Journal have many wondering if the tepid recovery from the 2007-2008 crash is finished. Since mid-Summer, the Shenzhen Composite, FTSE 100, Stoxx Europe 600, and other benchmark exchanges have steadily declined, with the US Standard and Poor’s joining them over the last few weeks. As author Akane Otani notes: “After a punishing October, major indices in Europe, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Argentina, and Canada are languishing in correction territory-- a drop of at least 10% from a recent high. The US is teetering on the edge of joining its peers…”

The Stock Market Fetish

Like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Unemployment rate, composite equity performance is a limited measuring stick of the economy’s health, though it is favored by popular mainstream pundits and celebrity economists. As such, all three become the grist for the bourgeois political mill. Invariably, they soon obscure more than they enlighten.

So what do the markets tell us?

In some parts of the world, they signal that stimulus programs have failed to revive stagnant economies (e.g. EU, Japan). Additionally, measures of manufacturing growth have declined for nearly every segment of the global market since the beginning of the year (emerging markets, EU, Japan, etc., excepting the US).

Last week’s EU quarterly GDP figures confirm the European Union’s persistent stagnation: the aggregate growth for the European Union’s 19 members was a mere 0.6%, the lowest in 5 years.

For the US stock market, on the other hand, highs and lows are more intertwined with policy decisions, financial manipulation, and speculation. Thus, the market euphoria of the last few years did not reflect real economic fundamentals, and the current volatility does not foretell an imminent collapse. Instead, US stock exchanges have thrived on nearly free money and a Federal Reserve that removed all of the “asset” flotsam and jetsam lingering in the wake of the 2007-2008 collapse. But the usual shakeout of less profitable, damaged firms was incomplete, thanks to the availability of money at interest rates suppressed by the central bank, the Federal Reserve. The low interest-rate environment was especially favorable to high-tech firms (slow to show sufficient revenue growth), emerging markets (hungry for low interest foreign loans), and small capitalization enterprises that should have sunk into oblivion because of investment unworthiness after the meltdown.

For the behemoths of monopoly capital, low interest rates in the wake of the crisis allowed for an orgy of mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks that electrified equity markets without creating any socially useful results. In others words, the era of interest-free money buoyed up a leaking capitalist ship that predictably converted the gift into market “value” and profit.

Wiser heads in the Federal Reserve understood that if it continued to be a wet nurse for mature capitalist enterprises, asset inflation would continue unabated. Investors would wake up and see that there was no ‘there’ there and punch a hole in the market bubble.

Consequently, the Fed began a program of gradual interest-rate increases to slow the promiscuous borrowing that was fueling asset inflation. Industries like Technology, Finance, and Communication were particularly vulnerable to this program since their earnings growth stood well beyond their more modest growth of revenue.

Nothing shows the weakness of the overheated market more than the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)-- the first stock offerings of newly public companies. So far in 2018, fully 83% of IPOs have been conducted for companies that have lost money in the last 12 months, a figure greater than that leading to the dot-com crisis year of 2000.

It is no wonder that the Federal Reserve, fearing an asset bubble, has put the brakes on. And it is no wonder that capitalists are caught between the responsibility of managing capitalism as a system and the ecstasy of operating with free money, the contradiction between systemic discipline and unrestrained accumulation.

Leading Indicators?

But if the stock market is a not-so-reliable guide to the health of the US economy, what are more reliable markers?

On the surface, the US economy is uniquely healthy in the midst of global stagnation or decline. The television hawkers of economic news herald the GDP growth rate in the second (4.2%) and third (3.5%) quarters of this year, numbers well above the post-crash averages. Similarly, the pundits are in awe of the officially reported low unemployment level. And they point to the less impressive, but welcome growth of wages in recent months as further evidence of a vibrant economy. They are less forthcoming-- embarrassed, perhaps-- about the explosion of already robust earnings (profits) in 2018.

Likely, this photo-shopped picture of the US economy will benefit Trump and his candidates in the elections. The warm and fuzzy picture is conveyed by the so-called leading indicators. But if we open the hood and look more closely at the capitalist economic engine, we get a somewhat different picture.

Behind the 2018 GDP growth are several contingent factors, including the Trump tax cut. But unacknowledged by many is the increase of government spending, largely military. Nearly half of the year-to-year growth-rate increase through April was accounted for by government spending alone, two-thirds of which was directly for the military. The bipartisan endorsement of an obscene military budget pumps up Trump-era growth as it has for many previous Presidents (remember Reagan?).

Fully 1.22 points were added to the 4.2% 2nd-quarter growth solely from global trade, the overseas purchase of US products like soybeans before the onset of the Chinese retaliatory tariffs.

And third-quarter GDP growth was equally a result of consumer spending (highest growth since 2014) and the aforementioned growth in government spending.

Despite the hollow celebration of rising wages, the aggregate numbers mask an important reality: Labor Department figures show that the greatest growth in weekly earnings accrue to the bottom 10% of earners (+5%) and the top 10% (+3+%), while 80% of US workers now see their incomes grow at a level only marginally above their cost of living.

While growth in income for the bottom 10% is welcome, it results only from the tight labor market in low-paying jobs, the largest source of job growth since the crash. The pressure on that segment underscores the hollowness of the employment recovery.

The US capitalist “recovery” has relied on the availability of low-wage labor. The collapse of 2007-8 generated a veritable ‘reserve army of unemployed’ willing to accept low-paying jobs, absent union militancy. Consequently, the capitalists have felt no need to invest in productivity-enhancing equipment-- it is cheaper to hire minimum-wage workers than invest in new machinery. Therefore, the last decade has experienced tepid growth in labor productivity demonstrated by 32 straight quarters (8 years!) of sub-2% productivity growth, but strong profitability, unprecedented in the post-World War II era.

Most of the growth in consumer spending is fueled, not by workers’ pay, but by additional borrowing and more people working more hours. US household debt hit a new high in the 2nd quarter; debt continues to rise faster than income for the average US citizen.

Fundamentals

Contrary to the promises of the Trump Administration, the deep cut in corporate taxes along with the 21% increase in profits in the 3rd quarter have produced little increase in business investment. Growth in business investment was a mere .1% in both August and September.

A key measure of core industrial production—durable-goods orders excluding military orders-- declined 0.6% in September.

Retail spending-- a core element of consumer spending-- rose by only 0.1% in both August and September.

Two other critical components of consumer spending-- auto sales and home sales-- are flashing danger. Auto sales declined steeply by 6% in September, after a mostly sluggish year.

And home sales, a huge element in the US economy has tanked. New-home sales declined in September by 5.5%, the slowest rate in 2 years, and the latest month of a four-month slide.

Existing-home sales, a far bigger part of the housing market, declined by 3.4% in September, the latest month of a seven-month slide!

What to Expect

While it is true that Trump has been somewhat corralled into being a conventional right-wing Republican, but with his own uniquely vulgar and infantile stamp on the Presidency, he retains unconventional elements of populist nationalism-- the tacit confession that the empire is in trouble and the need to “Make America Great Again.” Both stances play into Trump’s economic policy in unusual and contradictory ways.

Like archetypical right-wing President Reagan, tax-cutting and deregulation drives a Corporation Über Alles approach. 

Like Reagan, the current Administration uses defense spending as the central stimulus for the economy. Since such a policy needs powerful enemies, the two parties have collaborated to concoct Russia and China as the countries to play the role of bitter enemies. The threat of war against China and/or Russia justifies far more spending and weapons sales than a war against Islamists in sandals or weak countries with ancient Soviet equipment.

Trump’s nationalism rejects alliances, pacts, and submission to international constraints, regulation, or authority. Instead, it embraces the economics of sanctions and tariffs; it substitutes the blatant behavior of a bully for the formerly fostered notion of global cooperation. If other countries deny US hegemony, the US will demonstrate it forcefully.

To the chagrin of the Democrats, the popular perception of the booming US economy has calmed corporate fears of Trump’s recklessness and emboldened Trump’s advisors and supporters.

But behind the appearance of economic exuberance is an economic engine running out of gas: key fundamental markers for consumption and investment are slackening, profits are threatened, and major political stumbling blocks lie ahead.

Despite record-breaking profits, compensation costs for capitalist enterprises are eating into those profits. The low unemployment rate has spurred an intense competition for workers. With fewer unemployed available, firms are offering higher wages, salaries, and benefits to wrest employees from other firms.

Further, the rising interest-rate environment is tacking on additional borrowing costs to overall costs, cutting into corporate margins.

And the relatively slow corporate-revenue growth, especially in Technology and Communication, is squeezing profits as well.

The explosive growth of Federal debt further challenges the Trump economy, though only for those wedded to conventional economic dogma. Because of the tax cuts, the deficit expanded by 17% in the fiscal year ending in September to the highest level in 6 years. With rising interest rates, deficit growth will only accelerate. The debt scolds in both parties will be screaming in chorus for budget cuts and spending limits (as they did so often during the Obama Administration). Of course they will argue for the cuts to come from programs and institutions that serve the people. The scourge of austerity will descend again over the economy, producing the readily predictable result of dampened growth.

The Trump Administration is battling the Federal Reserve over the issue of interest rates. The Fed is attempting to raise interest rates to take the oxygen out of the economy and evade speculative bubbles. Trump, on the other hand, wants low rates to pump oxygen into the economy to secure the continued growth that he has promised. Neither approach will save the economy from the turmoil ahead.

Next year will bring stagnation, if not economic decline, for the global as well as the US economy. Inevitably, capitalism will attempt to place the burden of the system’s failure onto the backs of working people. It will sell austerity as the palliative for that failure, another sign of the bankruptcy of the system.

Some will fight to fix the capitalist system, to reform it. Others will struggle to replace it. The goals should not be confused. They are different projects. Only one can promise a humane, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com