I'm confused. Here we are two weeks into the Presidency of our first reality show leader who has rapidly been overturning and flouting laws - and whom many think is on a fast track to a fascist coup – and my friend and long time activist calls me up to announce that she thinks we’re on the way to the revolution. There is definitely a strong grassroots movement, beginning with millions of women coming out into the streets the day after Trump’s inauguration, and a more fierce, and angry outcry of millions worldwide protesting the Muslim ban that Trump imposed to exclude Muslims from the United States, but what kind of revolution are we talking about?
For those of us who identify as socialist, we see revolution in terms of a radical restructuring of society through class struggle, replacing Capitalism which is based on production and exchange of privately owned goods and services for profit, with a system where private property and the inequality of wealth is eliminated and the means of production and distribution of goods is publicly owned by the state and distributed equally among its citizens.
As a Marxist, I always felt I understood the different sides of the class struggle, On one side stood the wage workers, who worked for the big businesses that exploited us in pursuit of profit. In this model, many people who thought of themselves as socialists (Bernie Sanders) tended to vote for and work with the Democratic party which supported a program where the workers could gain some control over the capitalist owners by organizing in unions to demand higher wages and better work conditions and if the capitalists did not meet their demands, they could withdraw their labor (i.e., strike).Without the workers the capitalists lost money so they usually negotiated.
Republicans (Donald Trump) supported a program that clearly was on the side of business interests and was anti-union, anti-public schools and public works (Medicare, Social Security, libraries and public parks and National Parks) so they were on the side of the Capitalists. I frequently voted democratic as the lesser of two evils but proudly proclaimed that I would never vote for or sleep with a Republican.
At the same time, since I grew up in a socialist household. I would usually vote for a true socialist (e.g., Jill Stein of the Green party, Socialist Alternative) who saw both the Republicans and the Democrats as parties of the wealthy corporate class (who could deny it looking at their wealthy corporate campaign donors?). Finally, having lived through the 60’s and 70’s and the ideologies of the New Left, the Civil Right Movement, The Women’s Movement, the Migrant workers movement,etc, which to some degree successfully tried to integrate groups excluded from the unions and the labor market (what Mao called secondary contradictions), I did have a soft spot for “identity” politics.
But the recent transition from an Industrial economy to a digital economy has added new contradictions. Inside of Left (Liberal/Socialist/Democratic/Public Sector) vs. Right (Free Enterprise/Conservative/Republican) the world is transitioning into a conflict between Nationalist vs. Global neoliberals. Both Donald Trump (Capitalist) and Bernie Sanders (Socialist/Social Democrat) supported a Nationalist agenda which, in an effort to support the American economy over the economies of other countries, included a ban on the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement since the TPP encouraged the ever widening export trade and outsourcing of jobs at the expense of American workers. And both Trump and Sanders were strong supporters of the forgotten working class voters (mostly white male) who had lost their union jobs in the transition from an industrial manufacturing economy to a digital/service economy. Meanwhile the Obama administration strongly supported the Trans Pacific Partnership, NAFTA and other trade agreements opening the United States to global markets as did Hillary Clinton before she reluctantly withdrew her support, and even after, did support increases in opening the US markets to export trade – just not this specific bill).
In general, Clinton supported a globalist, multicultural approach of inclusion of exclude groups (blacks, women, immigrants) into the US system through a policy of equal opportunity including a comprehensive immigration bill which included a path to citizenship and the creation of jobs through an assimilationist program of upward mobility. Sanders supported immigrant rights and the inclusion of excluded groups such as blacks and women, but stressed the important of putting class inequality first (all boats rise together) and voted against the immigration bill because it included a guest worker program that would impact jobs for Americans.
Trump clearly held a xenophobic view which would exclude all immigrants by building his now infamous wall between Mexico and the USA. Add to this that both Trump and Sanders ran populist campaigns against the monied elite of Wall Street (even though Trump is a purported billionaire) and successfully tarred Clinton (though not Obama) with the Goldman Sachs brush of collusion though over half of Obama’s campaign contributions came from Goldman Sachs and, as we have seen, now that Trump is elected, his entire cabinet is filled with billionaires, most of whom are from Goldman Sachs.
Add to that the impact of groups such as the Libertarians and the Greens, both of which have substantial constituencies. The Greens have somewhat less since, as a socialist group, they competed with Bernie’s socialist agenda but the Libertarians seem to have an increasing base among young people, which gets a little more complicated (they are for free markets and the hegemony of private property - definitely the domain of The Capitalist ruling class, but they also support individual freedoms - to smoke pot, have an abortion, express your individual opinions even if racist or sexist, etc). In England they would be called classic liberals. So my normal categories of one group exploiting or oppressing another economically is getting stretched by the added dimension of National vs. Global interests, in the case of the libertarians, the opposing groups seem to be the individual vs the community or State (this brings up anarchist related issues).
Other frequently related categories (some new, some not) that seem to be cropping up are equality vs equal opportunity, totalitarian vs democratic (or even more weirdly, making tossed salad out of economic and political categories -- democratic versus socialist and free market states vs Totalitarian/Authoritarian states). And this is just the beginning: there is the whole identity politics issue: there are the excluded (racial minorities, women) vs. the included (Patriarchial White Supremacists — or as it is more crudely but most frequently put — white men), and this even breaks down into rather weird subgroups where Women is used to refer to white women (feminist movement is assumed to be mainly “bourgie white women), black women and men are subsumed into the category of racial minorities and the civil rights movement, and the working class is perceived as white male workers). Let’s not forget Main Street vs. Wall Street (industrial capital vs. finance capital), illegal aliens vs. undocumented workers, immigrants and refugees and people vs $$ power. Add to that war vs. antiwar, neoliberal vs neoconservative vs new imperialism (updated from liberal vs conservative and plain old Imperialism), etc etc etc. What is a poor voter or nonvoting activist to do?
I am not concerned with Trump’s shenanigans, or even whether he legitimately won the election at this point. I am more concerned with how we build a movement that can stop his take over of the government. And, with the Bernie Sanders movement as viable and vibrant as it was in reintroducing the issues of class struggle into the discussion, I fully expected the leading issue that would bring the grassroots out in “revolutionary” numbers would be class inequality.
Although the socialist block clearly left their imprint on the movement through their organizing and inclusion of a variety of economic issues as well as the slogan of “Resistance” (which I am assuming was based on the idea of the Resistance of the French under Nazi occupied France), the “grassroots” when they did come out, did not come out on the issues of class inequality (a single payer healthcare system, draining the swamp of billionaires in the government) but on the issue of the exclusion of particular groups from the economic structure –- women, immigrants, people of color, minority religious groups –- in other words the identity politics which were promoted by the Obama/Clinton coalition as part of their neoliberal globalist multicultural agenda. While you could say — of course — because these are the issues Trump most aggressively promoted and/or are a reaction to his own clear white supremist identity politics. But the first thing he signed was the order to dismantle any form of collective healthcare and appointed a cabinet of Goldman Sachs Execs and military generals. You could also say that the movements are just “AstroTurf “created by the democrats –- but we all know that isn’t true. Granted, they are clearly organized and supported by the left-leaning democratic party elements, but the Women’s march was started by a woman on facebook and though the more experienced left-leaning groups in the country came out to support the march and make sure it was all inclusive and led by women of color, millions of young women showed up who had clearly not been involved in politics before, but felt the need to speak up for themselves. There was no way not to feel the innate energy of these women.
Although Hillary Clinton was notably not a part of the march, this is one place where I think we can give her credit -– by taking the slings and arrows of misogyny directed at women throughout the campaign from all political sides (both left and right) many young women (granted they were white and middle-class, but isn’t most of the left movement in the States?) saw, for the first time their own oppression and responded.
The subsequent uprising against the Muslim ban again channeled the energy of the most basic of American democratic cries to support the individual liberties of all, in the best American tradition; but more than that, the unity of all citizens globally. I don’t think we (or at least I) can come up with the answers today, but I do think we have to clear away some of fog and confusion in where we are headed to find out what the current dynamics means by defining some of the terms and interacting contradictions.
These seem to fall into two main groups:
1) those that relate to material economic concerns (the rich/poor, developed/underdeveloped, haves/have nots, Bourgeoise/working class).
2) those that relate to the ability of how a society organizes itself in relation to it's decision making over societal wealth, through individuals or the collective community or some combination of the two.
The difference between socialism, Capitalism and a Mixed Economy:
A Socialist economy is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or cooperative government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods; a system of society or group living in which there is no private property and the goods are ideally distributed fairly equally among the citizens.
A Capitalism Economy is an economic and political system in which goods and services are produced and exchanged by private owners in order to make a profit through capitalist competition in private or free markets (i.e., not regulated by any government or public entity). In a capitalist economy, large corporations can accumulate capital (money) by hiring workers to produce the goods, then selling the goods at a higher price than it cost to produce them. Capitalist accumulation is used to develop new means of production and move the economy forward as well as allowing the enrichment of individual accumulation of wealth. In its early stages, Marx saw capitalism as good as it created a means for developing technologies which could move the society forward. However, as some capitalist corporations grew and drove its smaller competitors out of the market, the decrease in competition allowed the bigger capitalists to treat workers badly as there was no other jobs for the workers to take, causing impoverishment of the working class and an increasing number of unemployed workers,
Mixed Economy: A society which uses a mixture of nationalized or publicly controlled corporations and industries and private sector companies which sell their goods and services in the market for a profit. Mixed economic systems do not block the private sector from profit seeking, but do monitor profit levels and may nationalize companies that are deemed impediments to the public good. The United States is mostly a free market economy but does incorporate elements such as protection of agriculture and manufacturing through trade restrictions and subsidies and also through the provision of public recreation areas and public schools. Many European and Latin American countries provide a clearer example of a mixed economy by nationalizing major industries and services such as oil and gas, healthcare, airlines.
Marx’s Theories of Dialectical Materialism and Modes of Production;
According to Marx’s theory of dialectic materialism, every society is made up of a form of economy by which we produce the things we need to survive (our technology). This is objective and determined by our material surroundings (we cannot use oil for energy if it is not available in our surroundings). But social, cultural and political institutions and values we create in that environment are subjective (we choose them) i.e., we have lots of water and wood, we worship a water goddess and use water as electricity for energy or we take the wood, build boats, travel to our neighbors who do have oil and conquer them to use their oil as a source of energy. Each type of production creates development that forces a change leading to a new mode of production and new social relations of work within the community.
This basic change in productive technology produces new economic conditions which alter the social (political, cultural) institutions and (although Marx makes the technological changes primary) to some degree how the social relations alter the mode of production. The first group is generally considered the economic and the second the political. Often analyses are thrown out in the mainstream that don't differentiate between the two or put them in a historical context.
Social relations of production do not necessarily explicitly deal with the relationship of the workers to the ownership of the means of production. Many suggest that they are necessary but not sufficient. If one truly wants to radically alter the current capitalist system, one must end the individual ownership of the means of production as private property. While unions can gain some benefits for workers; to radically alter the current capitalist system, it is private property that provides the mechanism for capitalist exploitation of workers as well as the surplus capital for the capitalist form of economic development and competitive growth. If a society only considers the distribution and exchange of goods (the consumer sector) when fighting for social justice, hard fought for gains can easily be taken away should the capitalist owners of the means of production choose to pull their support. We can see this through the austerity programs currently being implemented by governments throughout the world, following the crisis of financial capital in the 2008 economic crisis, as they shred the social safety nets of the people in those countries.
Traditional Marxist argue that you can’t just “grow” another economic form within capitalism through reforms in the political sphere. If a social welfare state did start to overtake the capitalist mode of production by nationalizing industry, the capitalist owning class would bring all its political, military and cultural might to crush such a movement to retain its control over the working class. According to the Marxist critique, before a new more egalitarian system can be implemented, workers will have to expropriate from the capitalist owners their collective political control of the state, through a revolutionary dismantling of the state either electorally or militarily.
In the past, Marxists saw the wage workers in the large industrial plants as the core which would form the revolutionary proletariat that would appropriate the means of production and reorganize it into a socialist state. However, the technological development during the Industrial revolution made possible the discovery of digital technology which has revolutionized our world yet again.
With globalization and the new digital technology, the workforce is fragmented where, through new, more immediate communications technology the world has more instantaneous mobility and employers can pick up and disappear at the drop of a hat. Or workers are spread out in small decentralized subcontracted shops. Where there are few or no employers at all, the traditional model of trade union organizing is no longer viable since there are no longer large centralized industries with large numbers of workers withdrawing their labor at once, causing the downfall of the enterprise. Moreover, technology can increase efficiency and reduce the number of jobs in total that are needed for the capitalist to make a profit.
This forces us to look for new ways to organize workers. One such strategy is to transition from a competitive society that focuses on capitalist profit and an antagonistic class struggle to a cooperative one that focuses on human needs. Just how the political sector creates this new cooperative approach given the objective conditions of the productive technology in the digital age remains to be seen. The Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain, is an excellent example of one such effort and provides an interesting example of how they interact and struggle within the current global economy.
Modern or Social Liberalism in America
Traditionally, the word liberal in a political sense means to be open to change and new ideas and options. Conservative means to keep and preserve the old ways. When we look at it the difference between the Democrats, Republicans, the Tea Party, the Democratic Socialists such as Bernie Sanders , the Green Party and the Libertarians, we tend to put the Republicans and Tea Party on the conservative side and the other three on the "Progressive" or liberal side.
There is an important difference between liberal politics and liberal economics. But this distinction is usually not articulated in the mainstream. As summarized here by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia:
“Liberalism” can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In general it refers to policies which are open and encourage change. As a political philosophy or worldview, it is founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the importance of equality. In the U.S. social liberalism has been most closely associated with FDR's New Deal which established a strong public socialist leaning State sector to provide a social safety net for poor and working class people and a way for them to develop a decent lifestyle (www.corpwatch.org/...).
It is also important to note that the social dimensions of the FDR program were specifically introduced as an alternative to a real socialist program as socialism had become very popular during the 30’s depression and was also competing with socialist/communist ideologies abroad, FDR introduced them to prevent a full socialization of the society. So while he introduced many social welfare programs, he refused to enter into a full scale nationalization of private industry (much like the Obama government temporarily took over the auto industry but quickly returned it to private capitalist control). It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Right wing.
Economic liberalism is different.
Economic liberalism (including neoliberalism)is the exact opposite. In this case, it means liberating the economy from any socializing constraints resulting in what is called the "Free" market which is based on individual private transactions without any community or social regulation and has been the economic philosophy of the conservative and right wing groups. In other words, it is unfettered capitalism which enables the wealthy or bourgeoise to exploit the working class domestically,(or in the case of global economics, the imperialist countries to exploit the developing countries).
The Conservative politicians who say they hate “liberals” — meaning the political type — have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism.
Economic Neoliberalism compared to Economic Neoconservatism
The Neoconservatives, however, do take a more nationalist view in that they support the right of their Nation State to intervene politically on behalf of the capitalist class, the ensuring markets give them preference by using tariffs, and, most importantly, military intervention to protect them for other aggressively capitalist nation states and for their physical security (i.e., Trump’s America First). It is based on the understanding that the Nation-State model is for international governance and imagines its state as the superpower.
Neoliberals, on the other hand, are even more to the right in that they advocate for less state intervention and more privatization of the markets globally with no one Nation-State or Super Power running the world. It is a product of globalization where the Financial Institutions and Banks, no longer are tied to one economic Nation-State.
They also believe in some intervention of both international institutions and nation-states for the social good, particularly in the domestic sphere but in general believe in increasing privatization of wealth and leave the manipulation of power in the interests of the free market capitalists to the broader global banking financiers through currency manipulation instead of a single super power Nation State. In reality, the Neoliberal model has been equally successful in manipulating currencies so that some countries prevail economically over others so that imperialism is still alive and well and overall inequality between the have and have nots has only increased -- only it is now not necessarily based on the exploitation of the individual worker under the individual boss in nation state, but more generally on the dynamics of imperialism where small impoverished sweatshops (even coops) are at the demand of larger international corporations.
The Third Way
The third way –- introduced under Bill Clinton and carried on by the Obama administration (and philosophically Hillary Clinton) tries to take a more centrist path — something different and distinct from liberal capitalism with its unswerving belief in the merits of the free market and democratic socialism with its demand management and obsession with the state. The Third Way is in favour of growth, entrepreneurship, enterprise and wealth creation based on extending private property, but it is also is in favour of greater social justice and it sees the state playing a major role in bringing this about. In reality, however, the implementation of social justice goals, especially in the international or global arena, are limited to the individual social justice goals (e.g., assimilation of girls into education and the workforce) that can be achieved under a paradigm of capitalism as equality of opportunity, not real economic equality — and the accumulation of private property and increased inequality continues unabated.
So in the words of Anthony Giddens of the LSE the Third Way rejects top down socialism as it rejects traditional neoliberalism. Moreover, as we look at the actual implementation of the third way, under Clinton, the Clinton administration is always lauded for its successful economic progress, but much of the wealth that created the new economy was due to restructuring the tax base in the United States by increasing the taxes on the rich and lowering them on the poor. While this state intervention was strictly within the neoliberal concept of social control through the private markets (it was not a big new public government run welfare plan)it did stimulate the economy and provide some economic relief. However, the wealth had come from that made by the rich on imperialist endeavors abroad. This resembles the mercantilism that has its roots in the Middle and Dark Ages of Europe, many hundreds of years earlier and also parallels various methods used by empires throughout history (including today) to control their peripheries and appropriate wealth accordingly. As J.W. Smith argues, even though it is claimed to be Adam Smith free trade, neoliberalism was and is mercantilism dressed up with more friendly rhetoric, while the reality remains the same as the mercantilist processes over the last several hundred years
— Report from the BBC, 1999, [17]
As political establishments adopt either enthusiastically or reluctantly the prevailing economic orthodoxy — the neoliberal strain of capitalism — the Left-Right division between mainstream parties becomes increasingly blurred. Instead, party differences tend to be more about identity issues. The word “proletariat” (used widely by Marx to designate workers) initially designated a Roman citizen whose only wealth was his children (proles). Exceedingly poor, the proletariat constituted the least respected class in Roman society, having only its labor power—and those of its children—as potential source of income. So it is worth underscoring that “proletariat” was not a synonym for “wage-earning worker” but for something like “dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market.” In sum, “you don’t need a job to be a worker. The proletarian is a function of the economic organization of capitalism and includes all persons who cannot provide their livelihood on their own as well as workers exploited under a variety of systems of production in order to survive.
The second type of identity is more prescriptive, based on the immediate form (which is obvious) that the proletariat inhabits in the real economic process, and much less general. Here, one might well distinguish the wage-earner from the poor, the poor from the unemployed, the unemployed from the undocumented, and indeed the “white” worker from “black.”The deployment of these categories and their political efficacy — both derived from the workings of global capital —tend to emphasize the identity dimension of inequality rather than its more impersonal dimension: i.e., the accumulation of capital and the subsequent, or parallel, creation of the reserve army of labor. In this version of identity politics, there is no a structural difference within capitalism. They are instead a function of the forms of domination to which these differences are subject(ed), and which in turn fashion the sorts of identities that workers may adopt in the social structure (e.g., unemployed, worker, employee, part-timer/temp, undocumented, immigrant, racialized, etc.). In either case, it obscures the relationship of how these identities relate to the underlying ownership of the means of production as part of the Marxist class analysis.
All in all, we can detect in this sort of approach as a variation on the liberal themes of diversity and multiculturalism, the end result of which is the transformation of Marxist class analysis to social analysis under, in our case, western capitalism. Some say the new “class” division will be between the included remaining union members and the industrial capitalists and the excluded. The dominant white patriarchal capitalist culture including those more recently excluded (whether unemployed industrial workers or unemployed young people from middle class homes) are in the Trump and Bernie movements focused on the class struggle within the nation-state. The neoliberal global “multicultural” and open market model is that of the Clintons and Obama administrations.
Opposition to Planned State Economies
In general, most liberals oppose socialism when socialism is understood to mean an alternative to capitalism based on state ownership of the means of production. American liberals doubt that bases for political opposition and freedom can survive when all power is vested in the state, as it was under state-socialist regimes. We would like to note although this is not generally expressed by liberals, that the problem also exists under authoritarian nationalist capitalist regimes and the historical evolution of some socialist regimes in societies that tended toward authoritarian and/or totalitarian governments may not in itself be sufficient to rule out a more democratic form of socialism that still manages to produce goods in a collective way and still eliminates private property.
In line with the general pragmatic, empirical basis of liberalism, American liberal philosophy embraces the idea that if substantial abundance and equality of opportunity can be achieved through a system of mixed ownership, then there is no need for a rigid and oppressive bureaucracy.[25] Some liberal public intellectuals have, since the 1950s, moved further toward the general position that free markets, when appropriately regulated, can provide better solutions than top-down economic planning. Economist Paul Krugman argues that in hitherto-state-dominated functions such as nation-scale energy distribution and telecommunications, marketizations can improve efficiency dramatically. The question, however, remains -– efficiency for whom –- the capitalist owners or the 99% of us soon to be superfluous workers who live in these economies?
There is a fundamental split among liberals as to the role of the state. Historian H. W. Brands notes while "the growth of the state is, by perhaps the most common definition, the essence of modern American liberalism, while Paul Starr, notes that it is the "Liberal constitutions [that] impose constraints on the power of any single public official or branch of government as well as the state as a whole." Numerous states have filed legal briefs to overturn the Muslim ban as a violation of the first amendment on religious grounds. At the moment, the ban is suspended pending further action. Trump, true to his nature, is appealing. His is simultaneously trying to appoint a new conservative Supreme Court judge. In a few weeks, I guess we will know whether the rule of law under a liberal government can, in fact stop a Fascist Capitalist takeover.
(Sorry for the lack of sources. I’m a teacher and I’m used to plagerizing. Will add sources in the next couple of days. Super busy resisting Trump.)