Voice From The Back: The madness of capitalism (2010)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The madness of capitalism

Capitalism is an insane society. Millions die with easily prevented or curable diseases whilst millions of dollars, pounds, euros and yens are spent on new ways to destroy human beings with ingenious methods of military mayhem, but surely capitalism has reached the epitome of madness when some children are trying to exist on less than £1 a day and we can read of the following insanity. “It’s simple, but no less appealing for that. Celine’s classic box bag may cost a pretty penny but its sleek lines make it among the most wanted bags of the season. Price: £2,150″ (The Independent, 20 September). Yes, the equivalent of years of nourishment for a child spent by some parasite as a gift of a handbag to his latest girlfriend. Mad, mad, mad.

Pay cheque to pay cheque

The media constantly reminds us how lucky we are to live in an advanced capitalist economy. We should be grateful to our masters that we don’t live in a backward third-world economy. The United Kingdom, the USA and Canada must surely be free from the poverty of those third-world nations according to the media – but what is the reality? “The recession may be officially over, but six in 10 Canadians are still surviving from paycheque to paycheque, a national survey showed Monday. Fifty-nine per cent of Canadian workers say they would be in financial trouble if their paycheque was delayed by just a week – the same proportion as last year when the economy was still mired in a downturn, according to a poll of 2,766 people by the Canadian Payroll Association. The survey comes as the OECD today warned that record high debt levels have left many Canadians vulnerable to any future adverse shocks” (Globe and Mail, 13 September). Like our fellow workers in Canada and the USA we in the UK live from pay day to pay day. That is how capitalism operates.

Dollars and democracy

One of the illusions that supporters of capitalism like to boast of is the notion that whatever the failings of the profit system at least it is thoroughly democratic. This is a complete fabrication as by the expenditure of million of dollars, euros and yen the owning class completely distort any pretence to democracy that capitalism may possess. A recent example of this manipulation by the power of money has emerged in the USA. “It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite. But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month’s midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil. The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private company with 70,000 employees and annual revenues of $100bn (£62bn), used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of. Not any more. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement. The two, 74-year-old Charles and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the 2 November elections. One Koch subsidiary has pumped $1m into the campaign to repeal California’s global warming law, according to state records” (Guardian, 14 October). Like Bob Dylan once wrote “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Behind the rhetoric

Politicians’ stock in trade is pretending to represent the whole of society when in fact only representing the owning class. Thus we have Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats claiming that he is concerned about the poor and exploited at election time, but in power forced to declare his real aims. “Poor must accept benefit cuts: Clegg on collision course with own party by backing welfare axe. Nick Clegg has waded into the row over welfare reform by warning that benefits should not be there ‘to compensate the poor for their predicament’. On the eve of the Liberal Democrat conference, the Deputy Prime Minister backed the Coalition’s programme of welfare cuts and dramatically shifted his party’s policy on the subject” (Daily Mail, 16 September). If you represent the owning class, despite your glamour TV image, you sometimes have to tell the truth. You are poor? So what, we are not here to “compensate” you, declares this politician once in power.

Witch side are you on? (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

It’s always strange when, after conversion from one religion to another, someone says “I was born a Christian” (or Muslim, or whatever), “but I’ve converted to Hinduism/Judaism/The Celestial Flying Teapot” or whatever it is. Of course, none of us is born Christian or Muslim or anything else. We’re born with no knowledge or beliefs in any god. In fact we’re all born into a state of atheism.

If someone ‘born’ into a religion – any religion – suddenly became aware of the fact that by some freak occurrence it was the wrong god they had been born with, and they had to convert to another one, surely God only has himself to blame. These gods certainly move in mysterious ways.

There’s been a bit of juggling from one deity to another in the news lately. The strangest case by far must be that of Christine O’Donnell the ‘Tea Party’ candidate for a seat in the US Senate. After apparently being brought up as a God-fearing Christian her faith in Jesus was shaken. “I dabbled into witchcraft,” she admitted. “One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar.” Maybe she once wrote to Santa but mistakenly sent the letter to Satan. We’ll never know.

However, by the time the midterm elections were under way she had found Jesus again. After reassuring the American public that “I’m not a witch” she went on to explain to them the truth about (amongst numerous other things) Evolution, Socialism and Masturbation.

“Evolution is a myth. Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

“America is now a Socialist economy. The definition of a Socialist economy is when 50% or more of your economy is dependent on the federal government”.

And her views on masturbation were numerous and detailed. Hardly the sort of thing sensitive readers of the ‘Standard’ want to hear. Well OK then, just one  – “Masturbation is a form of adultery.” Do you think she’s been doing it wrong?

As someone once pointed out. “The trouble with political jokes is that they sometimes get elected.” This one didn’t.

Back in the UK Lauren Booth, an English language Iranian TV channel journalist, and Tony Blair’s step-sister in law, spent most of October hogging the headlines with her conversion to Islam. “Almost unnoticed to me, when praying for the last year, I had been saying ‘Dear Allah’ instead of  ‘Dear God’, she informed readers of the Guardian while complaining about the ‘screams of faux horror’ from her fellow columnists. In fact they were mostly screams of laughter at the latest antics from Blair’s extended family.

Tony himself, of course, famously recently undertook a religious conversion when he decided to become a Roman Catholic and nipped off to Rome with Cherie for an audience with the Pope. Imagine being a fly on the wall at his first confession when he was asked about his role in the Iraq war.

It must be confusing now in the Blair household. “Hide the pork pies and the communion wine, Lauren’s coming round”. Fortunately Roman Catholicism and Islam do have one thing in common. Both are dominated by old men wearing long black dresses. Maybe that’s the attraction.

NW

When Ideologies Run Out of Ideas (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “establishment” candidates Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush had money and media backing, but their bankrupt ideas doomed their campaigns.

The 2016 US presidential election revealed the splits within the Democratic and the Republican Parties. We witnessed the breakdown of the coalitions that each party had relied upon in past elections. As the political tendencies within both coalitions grew estranged from each other, the conventional ideology and slogans of each party became increasingly hollow and unconvincing. This new reality was revealed over the course of the primaries and the general election, as the ordinary tactics of the ‘establishment’ candidates proved not only ineffective and often completely counterproductive.

Identity crisis

At the outset of the presidential primaries, however, it seemed that only the Republican Party was facing a true identity crisis. The first sign of trouble was that well over a dozen Republican politicians declared their candidacy for the Party’s presidential nomination, reflecting the perceived weakness of the supposed frontrunner Jeb Bush. Moreover, some of these candidates had risen to prominence on the back of the so-called Tea Party movement, which rewarded politicians who aggressively challenged the ‘moderate’ Party leadership.

Yet, despite the breakdown in Party discipline and open criticism of Republican leaders, nearly all of those seeking the nomination imagined, on the basis of past primaries, that a viable candidate would have to pledge loyalty to the sacred principles of the Republican Party, such as Christian values, a belief in small government (i.e., welfare and tax cuts), faith in corporate deregulation and the free market, and blind support for overseas military adventures. Those core principles roughly correspond to some key factions within the Republican coalition: the pious Christian right, the small-government “libertarians” (‘free market’ capitalists), and the hawkish Neocons.

Those factions were already coming into severe conflict with each other years before the 2016 election. For instance, the obsession of the Christian right with issues like abortion or gay marriage, was alienating Republicans (particularly those in urban areas) who were less interested in serving God’s will than in rendering unto Caesar as little as humanly possible. The Libertarians and other true believers in small government were, in turn, vehemently opposed to the massive spending on the military and foreign wars, bringing them into sharp opposition with the Neocons and the foreign-policy establishment. And the Neocons themselves already had one foot planted in the Democratic Party, which had continued under the Obama administration the Bush-era policy of aggressive ‘regime change.’ 

Yet even while the Republican coalition was splitting along such lines, the Republican candidates stuck to the idea that it was necessary to come across as a Bible-thumping, corporation-loving Christian warmonger in order to win the nomination. The one candidate who ignored that outdated common sense was of course Donald Trump, himself a Tweet-wielding, corporation-running, Capitalist a-hole. 

Trump refused to genuflect at the altar of orthodoxy, it can be imagined, simply because it did not suit his brash showbiz persona. Whatever the case, his approach turned out to perfectly suit the public mood. And, with surprising eagerness, the rank-and-file abandoned supposedly cherished Republican beliefs in order to back a two-time divorcee from that ‘den of sin’ New York City who called for economic protectionism and stimulus spending (along with his tax cuts) and declared that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder.

Complacent

The willingness of Republicans to turn their backs on Party dogma in favour of the ‘straight-shooter’ Trump was a sign that the public mood was shifting dramatically. But the Democratic leadership looked on complacently, confident that the Republican primary was unfolding in a way that would benefit Clinton.

In April 2015, Democratic strategist and Clinton confidant Sydney Blumenthal suggested in an email (later released by Wikileaks) that the Clinton campaign should elevate what he called the ‘Pied Piper candidates’ (like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump) ‘so that they are “leaders of the pack and tell the press to take [them] seriously” as a way of moving “established candidates further to the right” and making the “more extreme candidates . . . actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party.’

Under normal circumstances this may have been an astute strategy. But this time around the Democratic leaders were badly misreading the situation in concluding that only a moderate from either party was a viable candidate. The Republican leaders shared that common sense,’ but fortunately for them (in the end) they lacked the tools that the Democrats had to crush an insurgent campaign.

Thanks to the Democrats’ ‘super delegates’ and frontloaded southern primaries, not to mention a Democratic National Committee crawling with Clinton operatives, the nomination of Hillary was all but a foregone conclusion more than a year before the primaries even began.

Even the participation of Bernie Sanders in the primary seemed, at first, to play right into the typical election strategy of the Democrats. His assigned role, like Dennis Kucinich and other ‘radical’ candidates in the past, was to generate just enough interest in the election among youth, trade unionists, and others on the ‘Left’ to prevent them from deserting the Democrats for a third-party candidate. Bernie himself seemed to have no greater ambition initially than to ‘push the Party to the left,’ but to his surprise, no doubt, a powerful movement began to gather around him.

Despite all the careful preparations to keep the rabble from being roused in the election, the split between rank-and-file Democrats and the Party leaders was laid bare over the course of what became a bitter primary battle between Sanders and Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the election campaign was not the cause of the split, but it did make very clear to the public the deep divisions that had been papered over during the Bush and Obama years.

In fact, the fraying of the Democratic coalition was already well underway back in the 1990s under the Bill Clinton administration. The coalition had once centred on the strength of the labor unions, who could mobilize campaign workers and funds to back Democratic candidates. The steady decline of organized labor (accelerated thanks to Clinton-era policies) altered the balance of forces within the Party. Moreover, the Democratic leadership were able to take labor-union support for granted, since organized workers were hardly likely to defect to the rabidly anti-union Republican Party. Another group whose unconditional support was assumed were African Americans, who had been almost uniformly opposed to the Republicans ever since President Nixon implemented his ‘southern strategy’ of appealing to white southern workers.

This election, the Democrats also thought the Hispanic vote was in the bag, thanks to Trump’s vilification of Mexicans and obsession with building a border wall. But Obama has deported well over two million illegal immigrants during his terms in office, breaking the record of George W. Bush, which may account for why Hillary only won just over 60 percent of the Hispanic vote.

In any case, taking the votes of so many of the rank-and-file Party members and supporters for granted was premised on the singular awfulness of the Republican Party — and for a time the strategy seemed to work well enough. But an ideology that is largely negative or defensive offering few positive principles or goal — seems doomed to failure.

And the end did come in November 2016 with the defeat of the ideologically bankrupt Clinton campaign, which had smeared supporters of Trump (and Sanders!) as misogynists and racists, and even dabbled in laughable conspiracy theories suggesting sinister links between Trump and Putin.

Nostalgia

Granted, the central ideas of the Sanders and Trump campaigns were based on a nostalgia for the good old days (that never were) — whether returning the Democratic Party to its role as the supposed party of the working class or bringing ‘greatness’ back to American somehow — but at least their slogans did challenge the status quo and create the impression of having some positive content.

It might seem that the Trump and Sanders insurgencies offer the two parties a way out of their ideological and organizational impasses. But is that the case?

Trump, certainly has taken a broad axe to the rotten planks of the old Republican platform. But his own incipient platform looks to be very shaky. For instance, how is he going to balance tax cuts with expanding the military budget and increasing spending on infrastructure as a stimulus measure? His surprising victory has brought a temporary unity (or truce) among warring factions within the Party, but no fundamental compromise is on the cards.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s supporters hope to win Party leadership from the Clintonites to implement ‘progressive’ policies. Much of their criticism of the Party establishment is on the mark, but they overlook the very basic fact that capitalism is a system of production for profit. This reality shapes policy and leaves only a limited space for the sort of reformist policies the ‘Berniecrats’ are advocating. The supporters of Sanders may be right about a strategy to win voters to the Democratic Party, but the role of the Party is not simply to win elections but to administer capitalism effectively, which is to say, ‘profitably.’ 

It is impossible to predict exactly where the Republican or Democratic Party might be headed, but if either party were to undergo a decisive split it would not be too surprising. Then again, both may very well manage to more peacefully realign themselves along different lines, in altered coalitions.

Fascinating fiasco

In any case, the 2016 election has revealed the current fault lines within those two parties and also taught us (or at least reconfirmed) a number of valuable lessons. It has become clear, for instance, that the ‘faithful’ of each party may not be as blinded by loyalty as their opponents imagine. Ultimately, each party has to gain and maintain the support of its members and of voters on the basis of ideas. Even a campaign backed by the power of money and the media can fall flat without any coherent ideology at its basis.

The obvious case example is the Clinton campaign, which enjoyed a formidable fundraising apparatus and network of media lackeys. But the mixed message of the campaign, reflecting the gap between Clinton’s words and deeds, left her vulnerable to Sanders and vanquished by Trump. The weapons the Clinton campaign wielded ended up harming her more than her opponents by exposing to the public, without much room for doubt, that she was the establishment candidate. The more money Clinton raised from her donors and the more articles published to praise her or attack her opponents, only ended up underscoring that status as the champion of the status quo.

This fascinating fiasco is highly encouraging to a socialist party. One can expect the ruling class to launch ferocious attacks against the socialist movement, starting with the media, once the movement has grown too powerful to ignore. But there is every likelihood that the effort to attack and discredit the socialist rebellion, will only contribute to its strength. It is already rather astounding that in a US presidential election, of all places, a Democratic candidate and his supporters would embrace terms like ‘socialist’ or ‘revolutionary,’ which are ordinarily used to smear a leftwing opponent. We have come a long way from the 1990s, when Democratic politicians lived in fear of being labelled ‘liberals’ by their Republican opponents.

The 2016 election campaign suggests that now is an ideal moment for socialists to boldly attack the thread-bare ideologies of bourgeois political parties and present our alternative to capitalism.

MS

Poor old capitalists (2012)

Book Review from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pity the Billionaire. By Thomas Frank. Harvill Secker. £14.99.

If you have been paying attention to the Republican primaries, you have probably been shocked by the low level of political debate in the US. Personal attacks, vacuous appeals to religion and the use of ‘liberal’ as a swearword seem to be the common ground in speeches and debates. In the book under review, Thomas Frank looks at the politics and tactics of the ‘newest Right’, as he calls them.

The banking crisis and recession have led, not to calls for more government control of the economy, but for less regulation and the introduction of a genuine ‘free market’. Despite the Reagan and Bush regimes, it is claimed by many that ‘true conservatives’ have never really been in charge and the market has never had a proper chance to impose its discipline on the economy, as there has always been some state interference.

The Tea Party movement is the most obvious manifestation of these ideas. Interestingly, Frank argues that the Tea Party is essentially based on small-business owners who see government regulation as a matter of time-wasting interference in their activities, in contrast to the checks and balances that were (to some small degree) imposed on the big banks. The smaller capitalists tended to borrow money against their homes, so the collapse of house prices left them far less able to borrow and made them look on with envy at the bank bail-outs.

Along with this is an ideology of individual responsibility, the view that those who make it succeed by their own efforts and those who fail and suffer deserve to do so. Where once communities might have rallied round to help someone whose home was being repossessed, now many people are pleased to see a person losing a home that they should never have tried to buy in the first place.

Frank shows how the Democrats have made no serious attempt to respond to these illusions. And he makes a valid point that the real role of the state is far from what the conservatives imagine: ‘neither federal nor state governments have ever mounted a campaign to intern the free-market faithful or blacklist the hardworking proletarians in the Chicago futures pits. However, they have used force over the years to break up strikes, imprison labor organizers, keep minorities from voting, round up people of Japanese descent, and disrupt antiwar movements.’

Paul Bennett

Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? (2010)

From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right-wing Tea Party movement is, according to some commentators, turning into a mass, ‘grassroots’ movement and revolutionising politics in America. Is it?

If the ‘lame-stream media’, to steal an appropriate phrase, is to be believed, then there has been a ‘massive’, indeed ‘historic’, change in the biggest economy and the most powerful country on the planet. The United States’ mid-term elections, held last month, midway between the four-yearly presidential elections, saw the biggest swing to the Republican Party for 72 years. The Republicans now hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and fell just short of control of the Senate, only four years after voters handed both chambers of the US Congress to the Democrats. A conservative revolution has swept the nation. At least, that’s the lame-stream view. But in truth, nothing much has changed.

The Republicans and the Democrats are essentially two wings of the same party – the Business Party – and there’s very little to choose between them. During election campaigns, significant policy differences are downplayed or ignored completely – largely because they don’t exist – and which wing wins depends on which has succeeded in attracting the most investment from sections of the capitalist class, spent the most money, and delivered the most effective PR/advertising campaign.

As for what voters themselves might be thinking, the election results don’t tell us all that much, as Stefan points out on our American party’s website (See here). The truth is that most voters, and a disproportionate number of Democrat voters, stayed at home, and that the success of the more ‘progressive’ Democrats was at least as noteworthy as the success of the more-right-wing Republicans – in fact, a lower proportion of Americans voted Republican in 2010 than in 2008. In any case, as a result of the way the electoral system works, the votes of just 3 percent of citizens make all the difference between a Democratic and a Republican landslide. So much for the rise of conservatism.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the election, and the campaign leading up to it, was the growth of the so-called Tea Party movement. This is a network of hundreds of supposedly ‘anti-establishment’ conservative groups across the US, which, if nothing else, energised the Republican Party and made the election campaign slightly more interesting. No one knows just how many Tea Partiers there are – it’s not a single organisation with a membership or leadership – but it has had a significant impact on American politics, if only because the lame-stream media has obligingly given it a voice and credibility.

The relatively lame performance of the Tea Partiers in the election would seem to draw into question the common claim that the Tea Party represents a significant popular force, with a mass ‘grassroots’ following. But last month more than half of Americans in a Rasmussen poll said they view the Tea Party favourably – that’s despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the Tea Party has no manifesto, no clear policies, and no clearly expressed ideas about what it would do should it win power. Instead, the party makes its stand on reducing the deficit without specifying how, cutting taxes, ‘taking back’ America from a supposedly corrupt ‘establishment’, and abolishing vast swathes of government, including such evils as environmental protection legislation, subsidised healthcare for the poor and elderly, and unemployment benefit.

To the extent that this is a grassroots movement, then, it is a movement of people organising against their economic interest. The reasons why this happens are many, not least of which is that people have been conned into it by a PR campaign funded by billionaire businessmen. But the Tea Party is also saying things – about the bankruptcy of the economy, about the rottenness of government and other institutions – that ordinary people are increasingly interested in hearing.

Why has the Tea Party risen to prominence now?
The context for the rise of the Tea Party is a profound and deep crisis – economic and ideological. Let’s take the economic aspect first. It is certainly true, as apologists for capitalism will be quick to tell you, that capitalism has continued to be very good at creating massive amounts of wealth. But whose wealth? The wealth of the nation is now concentrated in fewer hands than it has been for 80 years, says Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and former secretary of labour under Bill Clinton (See here). Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 per cent; and the top one-tenth of one per cent of Americans now rake in as much as the bottom 120 million. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is 300. That’s what they mean when they say nothing can match capitalism for creating wealth.

At the other end of the scale things are getting pretty desperate. Wages for the majority of the population have stayed flat since 1973, while work hours and insecurity have increased. And that’s for those ‘lucky’ enough to have a job. America is facing ‘the worst jobs crisis in generations’, says Andy Kroll in a report for TomDispatch.com (5 October), with the number of unemployed exploding by over 400 percent – from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million this June. As a result, 11 million borrowers – or nearly 23 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage – now find themselves ‘underwater’, that is, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. In June of this year, over 41 million Americans were relying on food stamps from the Federal government to feed themselves. That’s an 18 per cent year on year increase. Thirty cents of every dollar in personal income now comes from some form of government support.

In short, capitalism is in its biggest crisis since the Great Depression. This means that wealth is returning to its ‘rightful owners’, the capitalist class; the workers, meanwhile, must make do with austerity.

The American Dream
Meanwhile, the related ideological crisis is presenting itself as the ‘end of the American dream’, or, as Edward Luce in the Financial Times (30 July) puts it, a crisis in the consciousness of the middle class. Lame-stream media commentators often have lots to say about the ‘middle class’, but they will very rarely define what they mean by the term. This is very wise on their part, because it would quickly become obvious that the ‘middle class’ includes just about everybody, which would make people think about just what it is they’re supposed to be in the middle of. The ‘middle-class’ couple Luce interviews for his article work as a ‘warehouse receiver’ (he lugs stuff around a warehouse) and an ‘anaesthesia supply technician’ (she makes sure nurses and doctors have the stuff they need) – surely working-class jobs by any definition. Hilariously, Luce cannot even bring himself to describe the woman’s father – an uneducated miner – as working class without wrapping scare quotes around the term. ‘Working class’ is clearly a taboo term – the working class is not supposed to exist.

Still, it’s not a taboo socialists respect. As working -class people, with jobs, living in the richest country on the planet, and with a joint income about a third above the US median, Luce’s interviewees could think themselves not too badly off, relatively speaking. They lived in a house on a nice, tree-lined street, never went hungry, and turned on the air-conditioning when it got too hot. Once upon a time, says Luce, ‘this was called the American Dream’. Now, it’s a different story. Their house is under threat of repossession, their son was kicked off his mother’s health insurance and only put back on at crippling cost, and, as the couple say themselves, they are only ever ‘a pay cheque or two from the streets’. Who isn’t? We’re all middle class now, after all. This ‘economic strangulation’, as Luce puts it, began long before the recession – as we pointed out above, wages have been flat since 1973 – but is only now being really felt as the credit cards are cut up, jobs lost, and state spending on social services cut back.

But it’s not just that things are bad. Americans are also losing confidence that things will get any better: a growing majority of parents do not think their children will end up better off than they are, for example. Another important ingredient in the American Dream has gone off. It is this growing majority of disaffected working-class people, who had been convinced that they were middle class and doing pretty well, who are looking for answers. And unless they look very hard indeed, beyond the lame-stream, the only answers they’re hearing with any coherence at all are coming from the Tea Party.

The appeal of the Tea Party
It can’t be denied that Tea Party ideas have some superficial appeal. The Tea Party was described by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker as a collection of, among other things, “Atlas Shruggers”. No doubt McGrath could be confident that his American audience would understand what he meant by this. Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand and, according to an often-quoted American survey of readers, was ranked second only to the Bible as a book that had most influenced their lives. It was a tiny, unrepresentative and biased survey, but still, there’s no doubt that the book provokes strong feelings among its readers and admirers and is a best-seller in the US – no small achievement given the book’s length and the fact that it is explicitly a novel exploring abstract philosophical ideas. The strong feeling it provokes in most socialists is revulsion – it is a manifesto for unrestrained capitalism, proclaims the virtues of selfishness, and the characters we are supposed to look up to as models of human moral virtue are vile, self-serving monomaniacs and workaholics.

But it’s not hard to see the appeal of Rand’s ideas either. She is committed, at least in theory, to individual freedom, independence from all authority, and writes inspiringly of human achievement – in Rand, human life is not a pit of despair, but an exciting adventure, full of possibility. The best social and economic system for realising human potential, according to Rand, is capitalism. But not really-existing capitalism – more a utopian vision of what a free market, laissez faire future might be like if only people acted rationally and according to their own interest, and the state got off people’s backs. Rand was interesting, but wrong. Marx’s Capital shows that capitalism – even when it is operating perfectly well, without corruption or unnecessary state interference – must necessarily produce misery and exploitation; and that the state, far from standing in the way of free markets, was an absolutely essential tool for creating and maintaining them.

The truth is that, whatever the appeal of the Tea Party or Ayn Rand to working-class people, the ideas are unlikely to have the desired impact for one good reason: the business elite and the capitalists, who Rand and the Tea Party hold up as models of human virtue, don’t like them either. As Lisa Lerer and John McCormick put it in a cover story in Bloomberg Business Week (13 October), Tea Party ideas:

“… may sound like a corporate dream come true – as long as the corporation in question doesn't have international operations, rely on immigrant labour, see the value of national monetary policy, or find itself in need of a subsidy to boost exports or an emergency loan from the Fed to survive the worst recession in seven decades. Business leaders who favour education reform, immigration reform, or investment in infrastructure can likely say goodbye to those ideas for the short term as well.”

So there’s little danger of capitalists going too far in supporting “free market” or “laissez faire” capitalism – they understand their own business interests too well. The only remaining danger is that these ideas will continue to have a poisonous appeal for the working class, and to radical movements genuinely searching for answers to social problems. It’s up to socialists to provide better answers and get them out there. Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? Probably not. Socialists certainly hope not. The American Dream has always been just that – a dream. Now, though, the dream is turning into a nightmare. It’s time to wake up.

Stuart Watkins