As Biden returns “civilization” to Washington…Capitalism Cannot Be Reformed
https://socialistaction.org/2021/02/09/as-biden-returns-civilization-to-washingtoncapitalism-cannot-be-reformed/
February 9, 2021
By Jeff Mackler
Capitalist “civilization” returned to the nation’s capitol on Jan. 20,
Joseph Biden’s Inauguration Day. Replete with 25,000 troops forming an
iron ring around the few thousand establishment dignitaries gathered to
pay homage to the new president, with deep roots in America’s racist,
warmongering past and present, the event aimed at reassuring the world
that Trump-era unpredictability/insanity had come to an end. Aside from
the armed troops, more than the combined U.S. forces in Afghanistan,
Iraq and Syria that daily rain death and destruction on those
beleaguered nations, the streets of Washington were largely empty.
Public transportation was shut down tight; the area was enclosed in
steel fences and barriers designed to withstand a virtual army of
potential Trump invaders. No one came, either to Washington or to the
other 50 state capitols where handfuls of blustering rightwing bigots
had promised armed mobilizations to challenge the “stolen election.”
The day was conceived by the ruling class as a declaration that U.S.
capitalism would not be bullied or besieged by the likes of the Jan. 6
Trump-inspired mob of several hundred white supremacist, fascist
wannabes, small groups of self-described paramilitary neo-Nazis,
including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, some off duty police,
off duty or retired military personnel, a sprinkling of fanatic
Republican elected officials, and some 100 Proud Boy Hitlerites.
These political hucksters had combined two weeks earlier to violently
push aside a handful of Capitol Police to occupy the Capitol building,
unimpeded for several hours. More than a few noted that the violent
invaders, partially armed and explicitly organized to nullify the Nov. 3
elections results, were allowed to peacefully exit the Capitol – no
names taken or ID requested. A few heads rolled instantly at the top
echelons of the federally-funded D.C. Capitol Police and House and
Senate officials, who had made near zero security preparations.
Embarrassed officials, vulnerable to having handled this
internationally-viewed “insurrection” spectacle with kid gloves to say
the least, subsequently organized a Justice Department and FBI-led
national “manhunt” to round up some 250 Trumpers to date to face a
variety of initially lesser charges – “unlawful entry and obstructing
official proceedings.” These have now been expanded to include more
serious felony charges of conspiracy to violently storm the Capitol
building to disrupt the proceedings of Congress.
Trump’s mania
The blatant absence of Capitol Police on Jan. 6, who had been forewarned
days earlier about the mob’s Capitol take over plans, according to now
widely published reports, could only be attributed to orders from their
superiors, Trump likely included. A deranged, increasingly isolated and
desperate Trump, pumped up with psychopathic delusions of grandeur, had
already fired or excluded from his inner circle several of his closest
cabinet officials. He was also deserted by his Pentagon chiefs, top
national security advisers and the FBI/CIA hierarchy when they balked at
one or another of his schemes to negate the Nov. 3 election results. We
leave it to future historians to reveal how Trump’s desperate mob, or
Trump himself, intended to impose their will had they miraculously
succeeded in holding the Senate and House members hostage.
Regardless, the U.S. ruling class, this time acting in concert, in all
its multi-billionaire corporate manifestations, its kept media and
associated Pentagon and National Security personnel, would have none of
it, at least for now. D.C became an armed camp akin to the Green Zone in
Iraq, replete with squadrons of U.S. jets policing the skies as if
another 911 air strike was in the realm of possibility.
Trump’s 2016 inauguration
Four years earlier Donald Trump’s inauguration was celebrated by some
100,000 admirers while another million, mostly women, mobilized nearby
to protest the crudely misogynist racist bigot’s installation. Another
four million simultaneously mobilized across the country in solidarity,
making that anti-Inaugural action the largest coordinated democratic
rights/human rights protest in U.S. history. Until last summer, that is,
when Black Lives Matter mobilizations in 2000-plus cities saw some 20
million of the nation’s most vibrant working class youth and oppressed
nationalities take the streets to denounce the horror of the Minneapolis
police murder of George Floyd and U.S. society’s systemic racism.
Chris Hedges on Biden’s presidency
Pulitzer Prize journalist and former New York Times foreign
correspondent for 15 years, Chris Hedges captures today’s Biden
Democratic Party political perspectives well. Hedges’ Feb. 1 article
entitled, “Papering Over the Rot,” begins:
“The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our
governing institutions. New window dressing will not end oligarchy. The
death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It
will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by President Joe
Biden, however welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new
chief executive, be immediately revoked.
Hedges continues: The American Empire “will not be halted by removing
Donald Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists
and racists who support him, from social media. It will not be halted by
locking up the Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the
Congress on Jan. 6. and took selfies in Vice President Mike Pence’s
Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the frayed alliances
with our European allies or rejoining the World Health Organization or
the Paris Climate Agreement.”
“All of these measures,” Hedges properly concludes, “are window
dressing, masking the root cause of the demise of America — unchecked
oligarchic power and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into
the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and
whose interests he assiduously serves,” Hedges concludes, “ we are doomed.”
Hedges details how today’s “staggering concentration of wealth and the
obscene avarice of the very rich dwarfs the hedonism and excesses of the
world’s most heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past.”
His documentation is eye opening:
• In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefeller’s
net worth was $3 billion. The Shah of Iran looted an estimated $1
billion from his country. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos amassed between $5
and $10 billion. And the former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was
worth about a billion. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are each at $180
billion. (Emphasis in italics added.)
• The new wealth comes from a cartel capitalism… made possible by
Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who, in exchange for corporate
money to fund their campaigns and later Clinton’s foundation and
post-presidency opulent lifestyle, abolished the regulations that once
protected the citizenry from the worst forms of monopoly exploitation.
Bill Clinton’s “unregulated capitalism” Hedges argues, “… resulted in
financial anarchy… where everything, including human beings and the
natural world, is a commodity to exploit until exhaustion or collapse…
The new robber barons peddle the classless identity politics of the
Democratic Party to deflect attention from their stranglehold on wealth
and power, as well as their exploitation of workers, especially those
that make their products overseas.”
This “unregulated capitalism,” Hedges argues “is sold as ‘enlightened
liberalism’ as opposed to the old pro-union class politics that
[previously] saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class… It
has also pushed the human species, along with most other species, closer
and closer towards extinction.” (Emphasis in italics added.)
Here we differ significantly with Hedges’ otherwise sweeping indictment
of the unprecedented ravages of modern day capitalism, including its
system racism, endless wars, “identity politics” posturing,
environmental destruction, unprecedented concentrations of wealth, and
daily degradation of working class life.
Capitalism’s inherent contradictions
But it is not Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan or any other titular head
of U.S. capitalism, or a break from the Democratic Party’s alleged “old
pro-union class politics” that are responsible for the current and
multiple horrors facing the world’s people. These horrors are inherent
in the contradictions of the capitalist system itself.
Survival for all capitalists rests with their capacity to extract value
in the form of unpaid labor, or profit from working people. No serious
capitalist would hire a single worker without this expectation. But with
the ever-increasing substitution of machines/robots and computer
technology for human labor, the world capitalist order finds itself in
constant crisis and decline. Intense competition forces all capitalists
to introduce new technologies to survive. In time, the average amount of
human labor embodied in all commodities is reduced and with it, average
rates of profit.
Technological advances, especially those of a clean and environmentally
sustainable nature, in a rational society should pave the way for social
advances. In a socialist society, where human needs, not capitalist
profits are primary, clean and sustainable labor saving technology
portend a major increase in leisure time for all working people, time
for the fullest engagement of all in the highest levels of free
education, time for the fullest development of the human potential, time
to explore a broad range of cultural, scientific and educational
interests, time to encourage the best aspiration of humanity for freedom
and equality.
In capitalist society, technological advance, in time, portents mass
unemployment, layoffs, subjugation to the gig economy, restricted access
to education, health care and housing, not to mention endless wars for
new markets and profit.
Marx’s explanation of capitalisms horrors
Karl Marx explained this apparent contradiction in endless detail in his
three volumes of Capital. He described it as the “Law of the tendency of
the rate of profit to decline.” Sounds contradictory! How can an
economic law be a tendency at the same time? How can technological
advance portend social disaster – mass unemployment,
recession/depression, war? Marx explained this seeming contradiction in
great detail. Fully aware of the operation of this economic law in the
daily workings of all corporate enterprises, the boss class engages in
endless efforts to thwart it – to try to counter the inherent
contradiction in their system. The sum total of all their efforts on a
world scale amounts to making working people pay, to their constant
immiseration, to their repeated subjection to recession/depression
cycles that permeate capitalism’s history.
Whether it be overt union busting, obliteration of pensions and health
care benefits, workplace speed up, offshoring plants to low wage
nations, imperialist conquests to secure vital resources, cutbacks in
social services, “elimination of welfare as we know it,” tax relief of
the rich at the expense of workers and the poor, or pumping $billions
and $trillions of taxpayer money into corporate bailout schemes, the
objective is the same – to preference the corporate elite at the expense
of the vast majority – a preference driven not by any moral failings of
the super rich, but by the necessities imposed by the very operation of
the system. This has little or nothing to do with capitalist greed and
avarice, however much these are built into their psyches. Whether
capitalists are well-intentioned or evil, they must deploy one or
another or all of the above measures aimed at workers to keep their
businesses afloat in the face of the incessant competition that drives
them to survive or perish. Even when powerful monopolies act to
eliminate national competitors, U.S. capitalists face ever intensifying
competition from Europe and China.
In the long term, all capitalist efforts notwithstanding, the rate of
profit with regard to the production of the world’s commodities
inexorably declines and with it the numbers of employed workers.
Frenzied stock market speculation
Today, this has reached historic lows, hence the resort to the
financialization of capital – the increasing investment by capitalists
not in new plants or needed infrastructure repair and replacement but in
frenzied speculative trading in the stock market, hedge funds and
related securities. Today, this casino capitalism has exceeded all
previous limits whether the government is headed by Democrats or
Republicans. Both parties fuel the fires of speculation by endless
injections of near zero interest rate “loans” to failing or low profit
corporations. This virtually free money is then quickly transferred to
stock market ventures where rates of return are far higher than the
initial near zero cost of borrowing. In today’s casino capitalism, as in
the gambling casino variant in Las Vegas, the house always wins! Trump’s
skyrocketing stock market boom, and Obama’s before him, had no
reflection in the improvement of the quality of life of working people.
But the core group of the nation’s 600 odd billionaires amassed
$trillions nearly overnight, while workers suffered as never in recent
memory. Real unemployment today stands at close to 40 percent based on
the government’s official “labor participation” statistics.
Today, capitalism’s crises are multiple and worldwide. In the face of a
deadly pandemic the ruling rich, with few exceptions calculated that
sending their wage slaves back to unsafe workplaces or sending students
to unsafe schools to free their parents for work, was worth more in
profits gained than the calculated loss in human lives. Workers are
expendable; profits are not! While Trump’s “survival of the fittest”
herd immunity “theory” and his opposition to mandated mask wearing were
a crude reflection of this idea – that corporate profits trumped human
lives – the Democrats were never far behind, with all 50 state governors
at one time or another deciding to prematurely reopen businesses and
schools, knowing full well the deadly consequences.
Environmental catastrophe
Fossil fuel giants threaten the very survival of life on earth, yet they
press on, unimpeded. Biden assured his corporate backers that there will
be no serious Green New Deal under his administration. These are
impossible under capitalism, where the likes of Exxon Mobile, soon to be
merged with Chevron Corporation, plan and prepare fossil fuel extraction
long into the future, at a time when serious scientists already ponder
whether it is already too late to avoid catastrophic insults to the
world’s people.
Obama’s Democrats opened the door wider than ever to offshore and Arctic
drilling in addition to the promotion of unprecedented deadly fracking
that made the U.S. for the first time a net exporter of fossil fuel.
Imperialist wars inherent in capitalism
War is a central element in advancing the economic interests of the
ruling elite, no matter the cost and regardless of which capitalist
party is in power. The ever-promoted rationalizations regarding U.S.
“responsibility” to thwart “worldwide terrorism” – which the U.S. is the
chief instigator – or to conduct “humanitarian wars” that destroy
nation’s infrastructure to “save innocent lives” have long been exposed
as lies. But the U.S. war machine presses on with $1 trillion spent
annually to line the pockets of the largely monopolized
military-industrial complex while defending U.S. capitalism’s “right” to
rape and pillage worldwide.
Democratic Party President Lyndon Johnson presided over the genocidal
Vietnam War that slaughtered four million Vietnamese. He extended full
support and U.S. collaboration to the 1965 Indonesian military coup that
slaughtered one million alleged communists in a single year, literally
clogging that nation’s rivers with murdered innocents. Democrats and
Republicans take turns in presiding over mass slaughter for profit,
installing one after another compliant dictators to defend “our
interests.” Two world wars that cost the lives of 100 million people saw
U.S. imperialism emerge as the dominant world power. Endless wars,
U.S.-backed coups and interventions followed without interruption around
the world and to this day: Korea, Iran, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Yugoslavia, Yemen, the Middle East,
Africa and more. It mattered not whether the U.S. head of state was a
Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush or a Clinton, Obama, Trump or Biden.
Regulation or de-regulation: deficit hawks or not
The rules of the economic-political game are adjusted, bent or discarded
in accord with the needs of the ruling rich. Two decades ago in 2001 the
1890 Sherman Anti-trust Act, supposedly protecting citizens against
monopolies, was interpreted by the Supreme Court to allow Microsoft’s
monopoly to continue when the nation’s top courts essentially ruled that
its monopoly was needed to defend U.S. corporations against foreign
competition. Apple’s offshoring billions to avoid taxes was essentially
ignored as with its near slave labor million member Chinese work force.
Pfizer’ and hundreds of other U.S. corporate entities that offshored
their headquarters to avoid taxes did so with impunity, minus or plus an
occasional slap on the wrist. Republican “deficit hawks” disappeared
under Trump when $trillions in bailouts were gifted to the elite. None
winced when the Treasury Department combined with the Federal Reserve,
to literally gift them back some $6 trillion in bailouts for their first
quarter 2020 losses. This was a bi-partisan affair as was Trump $1.9
trillion tax cut for the rich only.
Here we conclude with the simple proposition that capitalism cannot be
reformed regardless of which combination of corporate behemoths hold the
presidency or one or another houses of Congress. Biden’s pledge to seek
bi-partisan unity affirms once again that this unity resides in the
common exploitation of working people in the U.S. and worldwide. His
reign will see no challenge from his party to America’s systemic racism,
sexism and LGBTQI discrimination. The deepening degradation of the
environment and capitalism’s endless wars for profit and plunder will
continue as will its guarantee of yet another round of deadly pandemics
that originate in capitalism’s failure to establish a rational
ecological balance between nature and human society.
Today, the capitalist beast has inadvertently set into motion a new
generation of radicalizing youth intent on challenging ruling class
prerogatives on multiple fronts. Their success in charting a new and
independent course aimed at challenging and abolishing capitalist rule
will prove decisive in the years ahead. Central to their success is the
construction of a mass revolutionary socialist party deeply rooted in
all the struggles to come. Join us!
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Emmett F. Fields “ Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do
not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is
an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively,
fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
” ― Emmett F. Fields