A cynical farce

Setting aside culture war animosities for the moment to consider the direction of politics in the US – to the extent that doing so is psychologically and / or economically possible for dedicated culture warriors, recent revelations that the FBI and CIA were active participants in the 2016 and 2020 national elections run headlong into longer history.

While ‘American democracy’ has always been tenuous and abstract (‘representative’), the US has now returned to a pre- and inter-War melding of state with commercial interests. The American political ‘system’ now fits the Marxist-Leninist conception of the capitalist state.

How is this working for ‘the people?’ Well, which people? The US has the largest military budget in the world by a factor of ten. But it is nevertheless apparently incapable of producing usable weapons and bullets. The US spends multiples of what the rest of the rich world does per person on healthcare while it has active genocide levels of people dying who wouldn’t be in a functioning society.

The end of the agreement between capital and the state to forego predatory pricing (‘greedflation’) on food and other necessities is increasing food insecurity for vast swaths of the West. And nuclear war with Russia is once again an implied possibility.

The recent shift from the soft power of trade agreements (NAFTA, TPP) to the hard power of military imperialism ties to the economic backdrop of a (US) corporate-state that exists to grab resources and market power for ‘American’ capital. In opposition to capitalist free-trade logic, American liberals have chosen the path of economic nationalism in a low-probability effort to regain political legitimacy for the American state. As temporarily disgraced American idiot-prince George W Bush put it, ‘war is good for the economy.’ Of course, his war wasn’t good for the million Iraqis that died in it, nor for the wider Middle East that was lit on fire by it, nor for the European and Scandinavian nations that faced the ‘inexplicable’ surge in refugees that it produced. But for the titans of war, the benjamins are flowing again.

For analytical purposes – again with culture war flashpoints set to the side, current US President Joe Biden was the prominent liberal advocate for ‘conservative’ George W Bush’s resource-grab-war in Iraq. Mr Biden’s central selling point for that war, Iraqi WMDs, was a fabrication. It may have been Mr Bush’s fabrication, but Biden went beyond ordinary bipartisan warmongering to sell the American war against Iraq. This likely has bearing on FBI/CIA ‘meddling’ in US elections for the benefit of national-security-state Democrats. Biden has been a consistent proponent of American empire since he entered Congress several centuries (five decades) ago.

The binaries used in American political discourse imply a distribution of political views that are mutually exclusive. Democrats versus Republicans is one such binary. Left versus Right is another. Racist versus anti-racist is another. Fascist versus anti-fascist is another. Analytically, this is to impose theoretical divisions onto American society, not to ‘report’ them. They are assumed to describe the ideological motivations that lead ‘us’ to act. But where do these binaries leave economic motives, the limits of what ‘we’ know, and the point at which we exist in history?

To bring this down to earth, the practical distinction in the twentieth century was between political movements defined in terms of national boundaries, not individual beliefs. This left imperial competition – global resource grabs to supply burgeoning industrialization, as the source of national competition. Like now, the sense was imparted that the first nation to control global industrial inputs would control the world. Industrialization was the perceived path to global domination via military production. The logical circle – military production is needed to fuel imperialism because imperialism is needed to fuel military production, was created.

But this formulation is incomplete. Wars based on national competition end when a nation or group of nations capitulates to a foreign power. Wars based on ideological competition end only when an ideology is ended (as in never). This incongruity led to the Cold War practice in the US of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism, of using the techniques of authoritarianism to crush authoritarianism abroad, only done ‘at home.’ But of course, the use of authoritarian techniques is by definition authoritarianism. The same is true in the present when politicians use propaganda and censorship to crush views that they find politically inconvenient.

American politics has long been premised in the conceit that this class collaboration via ‘national interests’ preempts the class divisions created through capitalist exploitation. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates may have made ‘their’ fortunes via Federal contracts, labor exploitation, and legal privileges denied to others, but when the US attacked Iraq in 2003, ‘we’ were united in being American, goes the logic. Never mind Orwell’s ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Through NAFTA, the American state helped Bezos and Gates lower the wages of ‘their’ workers.

Making a few people obscenely rich – and then maintaining that wealth, has taken precedence over providing workers with a living wage for most of the history of the US. From slavery through Joe Biden suppressing a railway strike after reneging on his promise to raise the minimum wage, the American ‘perspective’ has always been the wish-list of the oligarchs. However, it is untrue that this bias has the consent of the governed. To paraphrase political writer Thomas Frank, ‘every culture war in recent history has been a stealth class war.’ If the political and oligarch classes lived in the same country that the rest of us do, they would know this. But class divisions define the ‘American’ experience. A different class means a different experience.

Public discourse in the US over recent years has been of a relatively stable political system that rests atop changing economic relations. This stability was proved in the eyes of urban liberals when Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election following the manufactured turmoil of the Trump years. Missing from this analysis to date has been the impact of changing economic relations on the stability of the political system. The shift from the New Deal to neoliberalism in the 1970s didn’t just impact economic relations. It replaced the logic of a public realm with public support for ‘private’ economic production.

This difference is fundamental. The New Deal featured programs to ameliorate capitalism’s tendency to produce too few jobs, insufficient public goods, and to create market power for connected capitalists. Its conception of the public realm was premised in social tension between state and ‘private’ interests. In this formulation, the state balanced the provision of public goods like national defense, education, and healthcare, against the rent-seeking tendencies of private interests.

In a way that is conceptually analogous to the saw that science is good for analyzing everything except what is important in life, the missing ‘public goods’ from capitalist production beg the question of the purpose of ‘the economy.’ Another way to put this is that while capitalism can occasionally produce what some people want, it is incapable of producing what all people need. Ironically, having the Federal government pay capitalists to produce ‘public’ goods makes them private goods. Their serial failures as ‘public goods’ demonstrate this point.

The neoliberal turn ended the very conception of a public realm through private provision of all goods and services. Given the economists’ fantasy that capitalist production is efficient, local productive efficiency was imagined to be superior to the public production of public goods. In other words, while the government may no longer produce national defense, education, or healthcare, the additional profits earned by private producers for producing them could in theory be applied to producing more public goods. But they never are.

If this ‘economics’ reads like a cynical farce, you may be onto something. The facts of the US in 2023 are of private military contractors setting US foreign policy, an education system set up to earn private profits for trade school type employment training, and a healthcare system that is the worst in the ‘developed’ world. Given the American capitalist practice of playing legal games like patent scamming when doing so is more profitable than producing quality goods and services, why would the architects of the US healthcare system and military production not expect the same game-playing from these?

Again, while GDP (Gross Domestic Product) measures P x Q (P = price and Q = quantity), it doesn’t measure the social costs of production, the quality of what is produced, or the social utility (or lack thereof) derived from it. In this respect, ‘the economy’ can rise while the economic circumstances of most people who exist within it decline. This has resulted in serial assertions that political dysfunction is the result of the ‘little people’ being too stupid to know how good they have it.

Excerpted: ‘Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org