Understanding The US Political Crisis - Part 1

The 17th October Of Barack Obama

The political crisis that has once again broken out in the US, over the Budget, is the kind of crisis I discussed in Marx and Engels Theories of Crisis. What is a political crisis, threatens to have serious economic consequences for the US, and, therefore, for the global economy. Its anticipated that every week sections of the US government are closed down, will cost the US economy around 0.2% of GDP. The longer the crisis continues, the more that will become manifest. The crisis may become intensified if it extends to a further confrontation in two weeks time over raising the Debt Ceiling. That could see the US technically default on its debts. But, although this crisis is political, it is impossible to divorce politics from economics or vice versa. The real basis of this political crisis resides in the conflicting material, economic interests of different sections of US Capital. The same conflicting interests exist in the UK, and in Europe.

In fact, some time ago - History Repeating As Farce - examining the way those conflicting interests of sections of the capitalist class are reflected in the world of politics in Britain, I examined the way the repetition of history by Cameron's Tories compared to Thatcher's Tories, mirrored the repetition of history by Napoleon III, compared to Napoleon I, as analysed by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte . Marx's work is often cited as the best example of him putting into practice his theory of the materialist conception of history. It is also where Marx uses that method to examine classes and class factions according to that method, and to give his analysis of class meaning, as opposed to the schematic formulation of class referred to in the Communist Manifesto. His analysis of class in the Eighteenth Brumaire, which encompasses richness and complexity is virtually unrecognisable compared to the economic, determinist formulation of the Manifesto. But, for that very reason, it is the epitome of what Lenin means when he formulates the basis of the dialectic in the simple formula, “The truth is always concrete.”

At one and the same time, Marx is able to demonstrate both how the vying political parties and forces were nothing more than representatives of classes, and class fractions, and their material, ultimately economic interests, and yet, how that was far from meaning that these political parties were comprised of those elements, or even that these classes and class fractions were themselves conscious of exactly what their real interests were! False consciousness is not solely a feature of the working class. For example, Marx writes,

“Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.” 

Unfortunately, over the years, this complexity of Marx's thought and analysis has been bowdlerised by much of the Left, for whom the economic determinist definition of class used by Marx in the Manifesto – for propagandistic purposes – is a much easier concept to work with, given their own Economistic tendencies. It leads to a crude view of class, and a Philistine view, in which the Capitalist class appear as one monolithic, homogeneous bloc confronting the working class. With such a view it is impossible to understand phenomena such as the rise of UKIP in Britain, or the Tea Party in the US, let alone the divisions between Tories and Labour, Democrats and Republicans, or the various manifestations of similar divisions across Europe that lie behind the imposition of policies of austerity, even in the face for calls for those policies to be dropped by sections of big capital, and its representatives in the IMF, OECD etc.

In these posts I hope to utilise Marx's method of analysis in the Eighteenth Brumaire, to explain what lies behind the current political crisis in the US, and thereby to illustrate how that is mirrored in similar phenomena elsewhere.

Forward To Part 2