Editorial: Fireworks on November 5? (2024)

Editorial from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we go to press the US presidential election is approaching its conclusion amid a febrile atmosphere of fear and mutual loathing, with each side trolling the other during a punishing schedule of rallies in the decisive swing states, and Trump-backer Elon Musk offering to pay $1m a day to petition-signers in Pennsylvania.

‘What happens on 5 November could change the world we live in,’ pants the Guardian, reflecting the breathless fascination of the world’s media for an election which may in truth have a significant bearing on tariff-versus-free-trade tensions playing out across world markets, as well as on Israel and the Middle East war, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the growing power of China, and implications for US carbon commitments. Many fear the consequences of a Trump victory. Many others fear the fireworks Trump may unleash if he rallies his fanbase to reject a defeat.

According to Pew surveys, domestic US voters are not overly concerned with geopolitical questions or foreign trade, and even less with global warming. 81 percent of those polled say their main concern is the economy, which a barrage of Republican disinformation has represented as a failed basket-case under Biden. This isn’t so, objectively speaking. The economy is in fact very healthy, at least for wealth owners, but for many workers it’s a catastrophe of low wages and high prices. Both things can be true, of course. A healthy economy of desperate workers is capitalism’s ideal operating condition.

Many US voters probably grasp, at some deep level, that they don’t matter, their views don’t count, and their needs will go unmet. The Democrats make no apology for standing primarily for the urban, college-educated, white-collar ‘middle class’, by implication writing off the rural, non-college, blue-collar majority as a rabble and a lost cause. If capitalist democracy is a rigged circus anyway, some will think, why not elect the most outrageous clown, if only to wind up the establishment and the liberal woke opposition?

From an outside perspective, this vicious race to the bottom looks frankly surreal, framed as it is partly by America’s privately owned and heavily polarised news media, with Fox touting Trump and CNN touting Harris, and partly by their peculiar libel laws, disguised as ‘free speech’, in which anyone ‘has the right’ to slander and tell lies about anyone else without the legal obligation to substantiate or retract.

Unlike the recent UK general election, there is no foregone conclusion here, with polls showing Trump and Harris neck and neck. But we can certainly predict that, whoever wins, and failing a global environmental disaster or nuclear war, American workers will not see much if any difference. Governments can’t control markets anyway, regardless of ideologies. They are like rollercoaster riders, hanging on for dear life as capitalism hurtles through its booms and slumps, powered by its own insatiable frenzy. The main effect of capitalist elections is not to bring about real change but to promote the illusion of change while the runaway acceleration of exploitation remains unaddressed and undisturbed.

So, whichever way it goes, the working class won’t win. There is no way to win, except by abolishing capitalism in favour of truly democratic global common ownership. Otherwise, all the glamour and fireworks are merely sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A plague on both their houses (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

This issue is published before the US presidential elections on 5 November so we are unable to comment on the result. But we can analyse the campaign and what is at stake.

Most elections under capitalism are simply about which band of professional politicians shall occupy executive and ministerial posts. In other words, about a change of personnel to continue with the same basic policies. This was the case in the recent UK elections. On some occasions, however, the capitalist class are split on some key economic issue and the only way this can be settled is via the ballot box.

In Britain, this was the case over whether or not the British state should remain part of the European Union. One section of the capitalist class wanted to withdraw to avoid EU regulation of their financial activities while another section, the majority, wanted to stay in.

In a capitalist political democracy the only way of settling such conflicts of interests within the capitalist class is to put the matter to the electorate to decide, an electorate overwhelmingly composed of workers. The rival sections of the capitalist class each spend millions in propaganda to try to get workers to vote for their candidates. The section that wins gets its way. The government is formed by their political representatives who have a mandate to implement that section’s policy. In Britain those in favour of leaving won a referendum and a subsequent general election, so Britain left. Had the vote gone the other way Britain would have remained in the EU.

In such elections there is something more than a mere change of personnel at stake — for the capitalist class, though not for the working class, whose interests are opposed to all sections of the capitalist class and who are not required to take sides.

The current presidential election in the United States is one such example. The basic split in the capitalist class there is the old one between those who favour free trade and those who favour protectionism, which has foreign policy implications. Harris represents that section which favours the status quo and support for existing international bodies set up to promote freer trade. Trump represents those who want to protect US manufacturing industry from outside competition by imposing a tariff on all imports. Harris wants to continue the war in Ukraine and bombing Gaza. Trump just wants to bomb Gaza.

If the election was a contest as to which candidate has the least unpleasant personality Harris would be the lesser evil. But that’s not the issue. It’s which section of the US capitalist class shall get its way, a matter of indifference to workers and of equal opposition to both by socialists.

Because it is the working class electorate that will decide, both sides have to spin their policy in a way that will dupe workers into supporting them. Thus Trump courts the Christian right and other social conservatives while Harris presents herself as a champion of liberal values. Trump’s appeal is mainly to whites, Harris’s mainly to voters of colour. Trump mainly to men. Harris mainly to women. But none of these is the real issue, even though how voters react to them will decide which section of the US capitalist class gets its way.

The US system for electing the president is peculiar. In other countries with elected presidents, the candidate who wins is the one who gets the most votes, whether in a first or second round. In the US this is not necessarily the case — it is the candidate who wins the most votes in an electoral college composed of members representing the states that make up the union, whose number broadly reflects the electorate of each state and who (except in a couple of small states) vote as a bloc. When Trump won in 2016 he got fewer votes than Hilary Clinton but more in the electoral college. This was because Clinton won easily in California and New York but this didn’t increase her representation in the Electoral College. Who wins here is decided by who wins in a number of key ‘swing’ states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia but also smaller ones like Arizona. This is not fully democratic but is the procedure that has evolved in the United States for deciding who shall chair the executive committee of its ruling class.

Under the US constitution, the president cannot get their way unless their party has a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is elected on a normal democratic basis from constituencies of roughly equal size. Only one-third of the Senate is elected every two years, a constitutional arrangement put in place by the Founding Fathers to prevent a majority for any radical proposal (such as land reform) getting its way for at least six years.

The Democratic Party leaders got Biden to withdraw as they were afraid that, if he stayed as their candidate, they risked not winning a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and so not being in a position to block what Trump might do that would be against the interest of the US capitalist class as a whole. In fact, their strategy is just as much aimed at this as at electing Harris as President so that, if she loses, they will still be able to block Trump doing something the section of the US capitalist class they represent doesn’t want, such as abandoning Ukraine or starting a world tariff war.

Trump is portrayed by some of those who support Harris as a ‘fascist’ who wants to install himself as dictator. This is an exaggeration for vote-catching purposes. A more sober assessment is given by one of Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore of the notorious right-wing think-tank The Heritage Foundation. When asked what Trump would do if elected President again, he said that ‘Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth’ (tinyurl.com/2n4ftxp3). Perhaps not so different, then, than what the new Labour government here has said is its approach.

Cooking the Books: Harris in Blunderland (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Believe me, as president, I will go after the bad actors and I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food,’ Kamala Harris declared in a speech on 16 August, adding: ‘My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules’ (tinyurl.com/7c373bda).

Price gouging is not a term employed this side of the Atlantic where the equivalent would be ‘profiteering’ or ‘rip-off’. Basically, it’s when a firm or individual selling something to the general public takes advantage of some temporary shortage to jack up the price and reap an extra profit beyond what they would get in normal times.

What Harris was promising appeared to be to bring in legislation to stop the price of food rising, a people-pleasing promise when there’s a cost-of-living crisis.

Actually, when you look at the small print, all she was promising was legislation at federal level to prevent this when a State of Emergency had been declared such as for a forest fire, a hurricane or some other disaster. It wouldn’t apply in the case of a supply chain problem or a temporary shortage arising from some other economic or industrial cause. In any event, many of the states of the US already have such legislation.

In her first interview after officially becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate, Harris went further and promised not simply to stop grocery prices rising but to actually bring them down:

‘Prices in particular for groceries are still too high. The American people know it. I know it. Which is why my agenda includes what we need to do to bring down the price of groceries’ (tinyurl.com/5eyfpf7m).

She didn’t explain how she was going to do this. A federal act to punish ‘opportunistic companies that exploit crises’ won’t do it. Nor will naming a raft of measures an ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ as the Biden administration has already done.

These days ‘inflation’ is defined as a rise in some index of the price of a basket of consumer goods, whatever the cause. This can be caused by a depreciation of the currency through over-issue (the main cause since the 1940s) or by an exceptional rise in the prices of some key products in the basket of consumer goods (which was the main cause from 2020 till this year due to supply chain problems as a result of the Covid epidemic). In neither case would price controls work to stop ‘inflation’ any more than a command by King Canute stopped the tide coming in.

‘Inflation’, then, is the difference between what the index was at one date compared with what it was at a previous date. What this measures is the rate of increase. So, ‘bringing inflation down’ is reducing the rate at which prices are rising, not bringing prices down. Doing the latter would be ‘deflation’, which is what Harris seemed to be promising.

This is theoretically possible, but it would require a change of policy on the part of America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, which currently aims to keep the rate of increase in the general price level at 2 percent a year (even if not very successfully in the past few years). In other words, that prices, including the price of groceries, should rise at this rate every year.

Since it is unlikely that the Fed will abandon this policy or that she will pressure them to do so, we can confidently predict that a President Harris will not bring down the price of groceries. Anyone who votes for her because she has pledged this will find that they have been ripped off.

Editorial: Instant recoil (2024)

Editorial from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outrage and condemnation poured forth from the forked tongues of world leaders at the ‘horrific and heinous’ assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which left him posturing bloodily but heroically unbowed, and soon plundering his spectacular PR gift for all it was worth (oh yeah, and y’know, sorry about the dead people, whatever). Biden once again failed miserably to rise to the occasion by describing the attempt as ‘not appropriate’. Smelling blood, press hacks were all too quick to drag up his embarrassing quote from only days before that it was ‘time to put Trump in a bullseye’. Things just couldn’t have got any worse for Geriatric Joe. After he’d staggered incoherently through a TV debate that left his supporters aghast and huge numbers of his own influencers publicly wanting him out, this rifle shot was the coup de grace. Biden duly quit, leaving lame-duck VP Kamala Harris with an impossible uphill battle and Trump the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. His more wild-eyed acolytes even started wearing simulated ear bandages, as Trump’s bloodied ear raised him to mythic and, it would seem, unprosecutable status. They may bury him one day, but that ear belongs in a museum.

Some of the ‘outrage’ will have been for form’s sake. A lot of people might have privately wished the attempt had succeeded. Trump is a blustering renegade who can be expected to disregard facts or reason. His comments about a possible ‘third term’, in defiance of the constitution, have sown plenty of disquiet. His implied warnings about withdrawing support from NATO could spark a budget-busting arms race across the world as individual states look to their defences in the face of real or perceived threats from Russia or China. In practice though, the administration may well rein in his worst excesses.

Nonetheless, he is an abject and repulsive metaphor for capitalism’s screw-you ideology. Perhaps that’s why so many of the rich love him, and dismiss concerns about his MAGAlomania as Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don’t seem unduly worried that he might turn the powers of the state against them, if he decides he doesn’t like them. He’s one of them, after all. Meanwhile many poor Americans have somehow convinced themselves that this fraudulent, conceited, misogynistic man-baby is their best friend. Just like turkeys welcoming Thanksgiving.

The shooter, barely out of his teens and apparently a young conservative, tragically wasted his life for another delusion. Politicians, even populist demagogic ones like Trump, can’t change how capitalism fundamentally works, so shooting him wouldn’t make any difference. That’s thinking with the heart, not the head. He would just be replaced by someone else who, if not necessarily as personally repellent, would nonetheless still carry out the repellent work of managing the system in the interest of the rich, and entirely at the expense of the poor and the planet. And besides, socialists could never condone political murder. There really is only one solution to all this. If the collective misery of the 99 percent is ever to end, capitalism itself needs putting down.

US politics: what to expect from Biden and Harris (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What can we reasonably expect from the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

An assessment of the likely policy orientation of the new administration would ideally take into account the record of the political careers of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the sources of finance for their campaign, the appointments that Biden makes to cabinet post, and – last but not least – the political and economic circumstances in which the Biden White House will have to operate.

We do not yet know about appointments. In accordance with customary practice, some key personnel will no doubt be recycled from the Obama administration. However, we do have information about campaign finance. And from the long political careers of Biden and Harris we can learn a great deal about their attitudes and their patterns of behavior. Biden has under his belt 38 years as a senator plus two terms as Obama’s vice president. Harris has had four years as a senator; before that she was District Attorney of San Francisco for seven years and Attorney General of California for six.

A useful account of Biden’s career is provided by Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for Jacobin magazine, in his book Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden (Verso and Maple Press, 2020). In the November 2020 issue of Jacobin the same writer analyses the financing of this year’s presidential election campaigns. Another exposé is that written and published by Chris Aclixia under the self-explanatory title The Biden/Harris Ticket Is The Ultimate in Plutocracy: Screw The Little Guy.

Biden the compromiser 

Two points bear special emphasis. First, Biden has always been a great believer in bipartisanship and consensus. The leitmotif of his recent victory speech, for which he received fulsome praise from the corporate media, was his commitment to national unity and ‘healing’ after the divisiveness of the Trump presidency. Unity presupposes compromise. Biden’s compromises, however, are always with the Republicans to his right. And as the latter are much less willing than he to make concessions, ‘compromise’ generally turns out to be a euphemism for surrender.

Marcetic sums up the sorry result as follows:

‘Biden has spent his career reflexively adopting his right-wing opponents’ position as his own… He has repeatedly worked with Republicans to advance [many of] their political goals, dismantling the legacy of the New Deal in the process… Biden has got swept up in every right-wing panic of the last few decades – crime, drugs, terrorism — often going even further than Republicans in his response’ (p. 6).

This brings us to the second point. Both Biden and Harris have made major contributions to the explosion over recent decades in the size of the prison population – a phenomenon that has led many observers to call the present-day United States a ‘carceral state.’ As district and state attorney in California, Harris was keen to get even non-violent petty offenders locked up and reluctant to agree to their early release, which she opposed on the grounds that they were an important source of cheap labor for the state. But when her subordinates urged her to prosecute a crooked businessman she refused. Later he made a generous donation to her campaign fund.

Who paid the piper?

Now let’s follow the money. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

Trump versus Biden was the most expensive election ever held. The combined spending of the candidates is estimated at $14 billion – over twice the amount spent in the 2016 presidential election.

Many companies gave money to both candidates. Especially firms in the military-industrial complex. They certainly had no reason to be displeased with Trump, but they wanted to hedge their bets.

Mining corporations and the fossil fuel industries (oil, gas, coal) supported Trump. The high-tech firms in Silicon Valley supported Biden.

The financial sector – ‘Wall Street’ – backed Biden, as it had backed Obama and Hillary Clinton. The medical industry gave to Biden, presumably because he has always firmly opposed national healthcare schemes like ‘Medicare for All.’ Show business supported Biden, as did lobbying and law firms.

Overall, more billionaires gave money to Biden (150) than to Trump (108). Most small business owners supported Trump.

Circumstances

In the American political system, the executive branch governs not alone but in collaboration and conflict with Congress and the judiciary. The Democrats are set to retain their control over the House of Representatives, but the Senate hangs in the balance. Which party controls the Senate always has a palpable impact on the effectiveness of a presidential administration.

Whatever happens to the Senate, the Biden administration will be burdened with a conservative Supreme Court that is likely to rule radical new legislation (if there is any) unconstitutional.

We must also take into consideration budgetary and other economic constraints – some flowing directly from the current situation, others imposed by the general requirements of the capitalist system.

Thus one change that does seem likely to occur as a result of this election is the adoption of serious measures at the federal level to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control. However, similar measures already taken in states with Democratic governors have proven costly enough to jeopardize other state-funded services. The same problem will now arise in the federal government. Even if taxes on the wealthy are restored to pre-Trump levels, it is hard to imagine a fiscal situation less conducive to maintaining – let alone expanding — social provision.

Policy implications

What are the implications of all this for the policies the Biden administration is likely to pursue?

We can expect some reforms, if only for the sake of appearance, but hardly any with real substance. For example, the United States will probably rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change, but there will be no Green New Deal (or at least nothing worthy of such a grand name). In the field of healthcare there may be an attempt to revive Obamacare – nothing more.

Those radicals who seek to ‘push Biden to the left’ under current circumstances have set themselves a truly Herculean task.

Stefan