Trump Indicted

Well, the prediction took slightly longer than suggested, but has proved correct.  Trump has been indicted by a Grand Jury, on charges relating to his payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, to keep schtum.  But, its notable that the US ruling class has chosen this as its basis to indict Trump, rather than on charges relating to his role in organising and fermenting the failed coup attempt in January 2021, or his other attempts to subvert US democracy.  Notable, but not at all surprising, giving everything else I've noted about the role and strategy of the ruling class, when it comes to confronting the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie.

That approach and strategy can be summed up, by examining the Theory of Permanent Revolution.  In essence, it comes down to this.  The bourgeois ruling class is tiny, much, much smaller, today, than it was even in Marx's day, when he set out the basic ideas of permanent revolution.  It could only achieve its political aims in alliance with other classes, originally with the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie, of independent commodity producers, out of which it grew, and a nascent working class, and later, mainly in alliance with the latter, which had grown hugely during the 19th century, whilst the petty-bourgeoisie had shrunk, and become a reactionary drag on further development.

Initially, the bourgeoisie is in alliance with these other classes, against its primary class enemy, the landed aristocracy.  But, by the end of the 19th century, the latter had been defeated and subordinate to the bourgeoisie, with which it largely, now merged.  As Engels sets out, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, the big industrial bourgeoisie found itself allied with the industrial proletariat, to achieve the conditions required - social-democracy - for its political hegemony.  It was no longer the old landed aristocracy that was its main class enemy, but the working-class, with which it had been forced to ally, in order to prevent any rolling back of bourgeois-democracy.

But, the main threat for any such rolling back, now came not from the old landed aristocracy, but from the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests were antagonistic to all of those of large-scale capital, which was destroying it at an increasing rate.  So long as the petty-bourgeoisie was shrinking, and its heterogeneous nature ensured it was weak and subordinated to other classes, the bourgeoisie could ignore it, and even, when in times of crisis, such as the 1920's, and early 30's, it needed to step on the working-class, when it challenged for power, could resort to the natural political forms of that petty-bourgeoisie - fascism - to unleash against workers' organisations, making sure, of course, that when those immediate aims were secured, it also, then, stepped on the political ambitions of that petty-bourgeoisie as well.

But, since the 1980's, when, particularly in the developed economies, the ruling class became even more divorced from real capital, i.e. large-scale, socialised industrial capital, from whose profits it sucks interest/dividends, as it became focused on simply inflating the prices of assets, so as to obtain capital gains, instead of profits going to accumulate real capital, it was sucked into the purchase of these paper assets at ever higher prices.  As large-scale capital failed to expand, and perform its historic task of destroying the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, so that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie filled the void, especially as thousands of former wage-workers joined it, as self-employed workers in a vast range of low value, low productivity, precarious activities.  Its increased social weight, was reflected in its takeover of formerly conservative social-democratic parties, such as the Tories in Britain, the Republicans in the US, and so on.

That meant that these parties, when elected, now came under pressure from that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, itself tied inextricably to associated layers of lumpen workers, themselves largely outside the organised labour movement, and infected with these same reactionary ideas, and having to accommodate them.  The index of that movement was the progress of the Tory Party, during the 1980's, and 90's, from being a conservative social-democratic party, that reflected the interests of big capital, of EU membership and so on, through the accommodation of the petty-bourgeoisie, in the mid 80's, by Thatcher, to her, growing Euroscepticism, and finally, its complete collapse in Brexitoryism, and reactionary nationalism.  But, a similar transition can be seen in the US Republicans, symbolised by first the Tea Party, and then Trump.

The ruling class needs its social allies, of the last two centuries, in the working-class, to again join with it in suppressing the threat presented to it, by the reactionary forces and ideologies of the petty-bourgeoisie.  But, the working-class is now the largest class on the planet, it is much better educated than it has ever been, it has access to instantaneous communications and so on.  Mobilising that working-class at its side, to defeat the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, presents the same problems for the ruling class it has always done, back to 1848, as set out by Marx, and later by Lenin and Trotsky.

Moreover, even if that ruling class simply wanted to mobilise workers passively, via parliamentarism, it would have to offer them something in return.  What exactly would that be that would not also simply pose a challenge to the profits of the large corporations, on which the ruling class is dependent for its interest/dividend payments, which are the basis of its capital gains.  And, it would  be doing that at a time when the normal operation of the long wave cycle has again asserted itself, after being hibernated since 2010, by austerity, lockdowns and so on, which has led to growing labour shortages, rising wages and interest rates, causing a fall in asset prices, and so to growing capital losses for the ruling class, in place of its expected capital gains.

Under those conditions, for the ruling class to launch a political war against its petty-bourgeois class enemies, would risk waking the sleeping giant of the working-class, and, thereby, threaten its own interests if not its existence.  That is why the ruling class has used its main levers of power, i.e. the capitalist state, to try to frustrate the interests of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its governments, be it over Brexit, or the idiocies of the Trump Presidency.  In doing so it simply sows the seeds of future problems, rousing the reactionaries ire even more, enabling their numbers and organisation to grow, and their methods to become even more violent, whilst doing nothing to mobilise an adequate social movement amongst workers to confront it.

Even waging an open parliamentarist war against the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie becomes problematic for the ruling class, because doing so leads to increased political discourse and activity that could provoke an independent response from a newly strengthened working-class, again finding its feet, as employment expands, and its security and solidarity grows.  So, the ruling class instead continues to utilise these bureaucratic and roundabout methods to subdue the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, indicting Trump on salacious charges about his relation with porn stars, charging Boris Johnson with the trivia about having held parties in Downing Street and so on, anything other than an open political struggle.