Joe Biden, who for weeks looked a no-hoper to win the selection for the Democrats' Presidential candidate, has now become the favourite to take that position. Biden, a “centrist”, for which read right of centre, conservative social-democrat, is weighed down with half a century of political baggage, in which he has repeatedly been on the wrong side of the fence. He is renowned for his gaffes, which seem to have increased more recently, and have been suggested to be related to his age. He is also an easy target for the Republicans, given their existing attacks on him related to his son's $50,000 a month “job” with a Ukrainian company that was subject to corruption inquiries. There is no suggestion, other than from Republicans, that Biden or his son were involved in any such corruption, but nor is there much doubt, either, that Hunter Biden would not have obtained such a lucrative position were it not for the fact of being the son of the then US Vice President. There is little chance that Biden's Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, would be open to such obvious and open attacks from the Republicans. However, as in 2016, the Democrat establishment have rallied to try to prevent Sanders winning the nomination. If they succeed, they will again be handing the Presidency to Trump on a platter. But, even if, by some accident, Biden were to become President, it would only open the door to something even worse than Trump, in four years time.
The response to COVID19 illustrates the issues clearly, as I suggested yesterday. The mortality rate from coronavirus depends on a number of factors. As with all matters relating to health, it depends on the level of economic development of the country. Precapitalist economies have lower standards of living than capitalist economies, and less developed capitalist economies have lower standards of living than more developed capitalist economies. That means that people, on average, in the latter have better diets, better living conditions, better environments, sanitary conditions, and better healthcare provision than people, on average, in the former. That is the message that comes out of Lenin's analysis of the effects of the development of capitalism in Russia that I have been setting out in recent posts.
However, as Lenin also describes, in those writings, averages can hide a multitude of sins. Whilst, the healthcare of even the poorest person in Britain today is better than that of the richest person in Britain 200 years ago, when you might have been treated with leeches, and had a high risk of death from infections, the recent report on the effects of austerity, showed that the improvements in life expectancy that have been going on for a century, have come to a halt, and the existing discrepancies in life expectancy, between those in affluent compared to deprived areas of the country, have widened notably. Its not surprising if people are more likely to become sick if they depend on food from food banks, live in substandard housing, or even have to sleep on the streets! Nor is it surprising if people are more likely to become sick, or die unnecessarily, if they live in a deprived area, where its impossible to get a doctor's appointment, so that early diagnosis is not made. In Britain, all those things have been made worse by Tory austerity, and will be made worse still as a result of Brexit.
But, at least, in Britain, as in the rest of Western Europe, there is socialised healthcare, free at the point of use, so that everyone is able to seek attention, free of the worry of whether they can pay for it, or whether their insurance will cover it. In the US that is not the case. Obama had the chance to deal with that after 2008, but failed the challenge, instead plumping for a typical half-way compromise, in the form of Obamacare. It was an easy target for the Republicans. On the one hand, they branded it as Socialism, and Obama as a communist. It was, of course, nothing of the kind, and Obama was certainly no socialist let alone communist. Obama, like Biden, was a right of centre, conservative social-democrat. In British terms, he was the equivalent of a David Cameron, and, indeed, in 2015, when the left of centre, conservative social democrat, Ed Miliband stood against Cameron, in the General Election, Obama sent one of his advisors, Jim Messina, to assist Cameron and the Tories, with the message to stop “that socialist Miliband”.
As a bureaucratic, half-way house that maintained, and even enhanced, the role of private health insurance companies, in the US, Obamacare was never going to be a solution for US workers, as I wrote at the time. Even as a social-democratic measure, it was totally inadequate. It was rolled out poorly, giving the Republicans open goals to attack. Many US workers in larger businesses, where unions had negotiated good company health insurance cover, felt that they were being offered a poorer level of cover. Millions still were not covered by it, and millions more found that insurers increased premiums. In Europe, social-democracy, long ago, introduced socialised healthcare, as part of their welfare states, precisely because it is fundamental to the interests of the large-scale socialised capital on which social-democracy rests. Even conservative social democrats in Europe recognise that, restricting themselves not to attacking the principle of social insurance for all, and care free at the point of need, but to the means by which the healthcare itself is provided. The US Democrats are also such a social-democratic party, that rests on that same socialised industrial capital, yet they have been unable to rise to the challenge of consistently pursuing its interests. Yet, as I wrote at the time, even conservative US writers, have pointed out the need for such a socialised healthcare system in the US.
“WHAT DO GENERAL MOTORS' WOES, the Medicare prescription-drug law, the state and local health-care time bomb described in the previous story, and Congress's recent refusal to trim soaring state Medicaid subsidies have in common? They're all stones on the path toward the nationalization of health-care spending--an idea that's so easy to slam politically yet so sensible for business that only Republicans can sell it! Before everyone screams, please note that I said health-care spending, not delivery. There's a difference. GM's recent profit warning proves its business is reeling; one reason is the $5 billion--plus a year it spends on health care, or $1,500 a car. Automakers in countries where governments fund all health spending don't lug around that ball and chain. But the auto sector is just an extreme example of the stresses facing all U.S. employers after years of double-digit health-cost increases, with no end in sight.
To call GM's "answer" a Band-Aid, however, is an insult to half-measures everywhere. GM is begging the UAW to reopen its contract and end generous coverage that features virtually no premiums or deductibles. Yes, it's doubtless time for those in gold-plated plans to have some skin in the game. And yes, it may save GM $500 million a year. But let's be clear: GM simply wants to shift costs to workers. That does nothing to lower the trajectory of health costs over time. Still, there's a potential common agenda lurking beneath today's health-cost angst. Think of it as a two-step: First, we'd move a chunk of private-sector health costs to government, something business and labour could embrace as a competitiveness booster. Then we'd find ways to guarantee coverage for all while reengineering health-care delivery to lower costs in the long term (without the price controls that stall innovation abroad)...
The bigger hurdle may be stereotypes. Business's sensible drive to get Uncle Sam to take on more of the health burden will run into the nihilistic (but potent) "big government" rhetoric of the GOP--plus the party's delusion that we can keep federal taxes at 17% to 18% of GDP as the boomers retire. If Republican pols want to help Republican CEOs solve their biggest problems, this caricature of a political philosophy will have to give way to something more grown-up. Just as the Nixon-to-China theory of history says it will ultimately take a Democratic President to fix Social Security, it may take a Republican President to bless the socialization of health spending we need.”
Yet, here we are, years later, and Biden cannot break from the timid and ineffective solution that his friend Obama put in place. As the US faces the spread of COVID19 across the country, even setting aside the moronic response of Trump, its clear that the limitations of Obamacare will mean that those millions in the US who still do not have health insurance will feel unable to seek medical treatment. In the world's richest country, thousands may die, either from coronavirus or from other conditions, if the economy seizes up, simply because of the gross inequality that exists in the US, and, in particular, the inequality in access to even basic healthcare. Yet faced with that crisis, Biden continues to propose simply further bureaucratic tinkering with Obamacare, rather than the obvious and straightforward answer of a single payer socialised healthcare system, such as proposed by Sanders, in the form of Medicare For All. As I wrote at the time, and as I have written in relation to the NHS, as a Marxist, its not my preferred solution. I would prefer that workers create their own single payer system, under their ownership and control. But, as Marx pointed out in his essay on Political Indifferentism, we are not in favour of making the perfect the enemy of the good. If social-democracy creates such a system, we are not going to tell workers not to use it. Even such a social-democratic solution is better than what has gone before it. Single payer social insurance schemes are shown to be far more cost effective than a multitude of private health insurance schemes, which is why Obamacare is a dud.
But, healthcare is simply a totem for the inadequacy of centrist, i.e. conservative social-democratic solutions in general. Those solutions under Clinton, led to Bush, and yet, in 2000, the contradictions had not yet fully matured. The supporters of Blairism point to the fact that he won four elections, but the reality is that, in 1997, any Labour leader could have won a stonking majority, such was the opposition to the Tories, after 18 years of austerity, and decay of society, and the truth is, also, that in each of those elections after 1997, active support for Labour continued to decline. But, the contradictions represented by that conservative social-democracy, resting upon a massive expansion of credit, the ballooning of asset price bubbles, as the other side of the coin to the inflation of those debt bubbles, came to a head in the US and UK, with the 2008 financial crisis. It opened the door to Cameron, but his solutions remained in the same mould, and simply opened the door to reaction in the form of Brexit, and the rise of Johnson, and others to his right. The same happened in France, where Hollande talked left, but acted right in office, leading to the destruction of the Socialist Party, facilitating the rise of Le Pen, only headed off by Macron.
Obama's solution to 2008 was better than that of Cameron, because the US economy could sustain it, given the role of the Dollar. But Obama's solution, the conservative social-democratic solution, was to double down on all of the policies that had led to the 2008 crisis to begin with. Obama, like Brown/Darling in Britain, first responded instinctively to stabilise the system, via Keynesian intervention, but, equally as instinctively, they acted to protect the paper wealth of the top 0.01%. In Britain the government pumped £2 trillion into bailing out the very banks that had caused the crisis, and thereby to bailing out the shareholders and bondholders in those banks and other financial institutions that had brought it about. In the US the initial $750 billion of TARP money was dwarfed by other guarantees and lending limits. By March 2009, the Federal Government had committed $7.77 trillion to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. And, on top of that, we have had year after year of the Federal Reserve, as well as other central banks, destroying currencies by money printing, in order to buy up the worthless financial and property assets of speculators so as to prevent the destruction of the paper wealth of that same 0.01%.
It meant that Tea Party Republicans could brand Obama's bail-out of the super rich as “Socialism for the Rich”. In essence, they were not wrong, and the same policies have been pursued by conservative social-democrats across the globe, once again blowing up asset price bubbles to even greater levels, and thereby creating the conditions for an even greater bursting of those bubbles, whilst at the same time, the associated policy of austerity, to restrain economic growth, and thereby hold down interest rates, has meant that large sections of the population saw their living standards fall. There was only one consequence. The solution to this problem could be found – short of a socialist political revolution – only by the implementation of progressive social democratic policies, or else by the victory of reaction. So, far, reaction has been winning. First we had Brexit, then Trump. In France, we see the potential future for the US.
Macron won, as a lesser evil to Le Pen, but with huge levels of abstention. Having taken office, he was confronted with the contradiction described above. As a conservative social-democratic, he chose to bail-out the speculators, the owners of fictitious capital, and to impose further austerity, by attacks on workers living standards, reductions in pensions, rises in the retirement age, lengthening of the working-week and so on. The consequence was inevitable. First, it gave fuel to the reactionaries, not just of Le Pen and the National Front, but of their foot soldiers, in the Gilets Jaunes, who took to the streets week after week. This is typical of the kind of process described by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, by which the political agenda is bit by bit ratcheted to the right. Its the same process, fuelled by the same social forces of the small capitalist class, and their associated layers that brought Trump to office, and that pushed through Brexit. Macron's continued attack on French workers, at the same time, means that he has cut off any potential of a united front against those forces of reaction.
To Macron's left, the Socialist Party still has not recovered from the damage that Hollande's own conservative social democratic agenda inflicted on it. And, then there is Melonchon, whose own economic nationalism is hardly distinguishable from that of Le Pen. Something similar can be seen in the US, where the limitation of Sanders own agenda is his support for measures of economic nationalism in relation to NAFTA/MCA, and so on. Macron's conservative social-democratic agenda cannot provide an answer, and in trying to do so by attacking French workers, he is opening the door to Le Pen, come the next election. If the Democrats choose Biden, as against Sanders, they will simply, at best, send the US down the same dead end.
More likely, as in 2016, all of those sections of workers that the Democrats need to mobilise to come out and vote, many for the first time, after years of having no real choice, will simply sit on their hands. Having provided no real choice, some, as with Brexit in Britain, will fall for the appeal of simplistic, reactionary populist messages from Trump, as they did in 2016, despite Trump's manifest failures over the last 4 years, and his daily illustration that he is a moron who believes he is a genius. Its true that, in 2016, Clinton actually beat Trump, by around 4 million votes, but the fact also remains that Trump won the vote on the basis of the Electoral College. The Democrats have reason to believe he can't do that again, but given the appalling nature of Trump himself, and his manifest failure, it should not even be in doubt.
The Democrats, led by their establishment, are again heading towards disaster that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. But even if they secure victory at the hands of Biden, it will be entirely Pyrrhic in nature.
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