After Obama, What Next? - Part 9

Trotsky in his writings on Britain, after the betrayal of the General Strike, by the union and labour leaders, set out the approach to the United Front - “with the workers always, with the reformist leaders sometimes.” To the extent that the reformist leaders are moving forward, we can give them critical support. But, even when the reformist leaders are not moving forward that does not relieve us of the duty of “sticking with the workers” in the mass organisation, led by those reformist leaders. We cannot simply skip over the stage of the workers in these organisations breaking with the leaders and moving beyond the bourgeois social-democratic ideology.

In the US, that currently means that Marxists have to be active members of the Democrats, in order to gain the ear of the mass of workers that still look to that party as its representative. To the extent that the Democrat party leaders advocate policies of fiscal expansion, such as those set out above, or policies such as Obamacare, which represent a forward movement, Marxists can give them critical support, and oppose the efforts of conservatives to reverse them. But, our support for the workers in these organisations, be they trades unions, or social-democratic parties is not in any way conditional upon the official positions of these organisations and their leaders.

In fact, in every important respect, the official position of these organisations is irrelevant to our activity. We are not parliamentarists, who believe that it is necessary to commit organisations to particular positions, and for those parties and organisations to implement them from above. We are revolutionary socialists who believe that workers have to act themselves here and now, to change the material conditions of their existence, and in so doing to build up their own self-government. Marxists in the US, can be active in the trades unions and in the Democrats to be building worker owned and controlled organisations, providing social insurance, for example, that can provide health insurance for workers within the context of Obamacare. They can be working with workers in the healthcare industry to establish co-operative healthcare provision that can then work with these social insurance co-operatives.

In fact, building on the work being done by the International Co-operative Alliance, such co-ops could link up with similar co-ops in Canada and Mexico. They can link up with co-ops in the pharmaceutical industry, or those in biotechnology, such as have been set up by the Mondragon Co-ops, to break the hold of the big US drug companies.

Housing co-ops are common in the US, even amongst the rich. Marxists in the US, working through the political machinery provided by the Democrats, at a local level, can turn these organisations outwards into the local communities, to build further such co-operative structures, at a block and community level, thereby drawing in new worker activists.

Programmes for urban renewal, undertaken by such community co-ops, can then be drawn up and construction co-ops, employing unemployed workers, and providing skills training, can then be established to carry it out. The United Steelworkers have joined with the Mondragon Co-ops to draw up a new structure of trade union/co-op working, and to spread worker-owned co-ops across N. America. A similar link up with trade union locals, in the construction industry, could facilitate such a development.

These kinds of programmes of working-class self-activity, can be undertaken whatever the position adopted by the party leaders. Moreover, to the extent they grow, and pull in new worker activists, they provide the example of the kind of alternative co-operative society that could be built in place of capitalism. It also provides the basis for transforming the nature of the party, and taking it beyond the bourgeois limits placed on it by the current leaders.

Marxists should be adopting this approach now, as the best means of moving the Democrats forward, and establishing the basis for defeating the forces of reaction and conservatism in the coming Congressional and Presidential elections.

As things stand, the most likely outcome is for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. She is likely to stand on the same kind of social-democratic agenda as she did previously. Given the divisions in the Republican party, the continuing role of the Tea Party, and the demographic shifts in US society, the likelihood is that she will win the Presidency.

But, that cannot be guaranteed. Obama and the Democrats failure to face down the Republicans, and the consequent lacklustre growth in the US economy, has seen his popularity decline significantly. A hard core conservative and populist vote will be mobilised by the Tea Party against the Democrats. Unless they can provide a bold and confident agenda that provides workers with a sufficient reason to turn out and vote, the Democrats could lose due to apathy.

That would be bad for US workers, but it would also be bad for big US industrial capital. A Republican victory in either Congress, or for the Presidency would see the US suffer from the same insane policies of austerity that have been implemented in the UK and peripheral Europe.

It would be likely to send the US economy into an unnecessary recession, at a time when it should be recovering more strongly. It would mean a further relative deterioration of the US economy relative to China. The underlying interest of big capital is then to resist such a development. However, economic interest does not map directly on to political perspective. That is why Marxists do not rely on blind economic forces driving history in our direction, but seek to create history via the agency of the working-class, acting consciously to change our existing material conditions, and thereby the ideas that flow from it. 

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After Obama, What Next? - Part 8

The reality of this reliance of big industrial capital on social-democracy lies behind Obamacare, just as it lay behind the expansion of welfarism in the US in the 1960's, under Johnson's “Great Society” measures, and before that with Roosevelt's “New Deal”. If US big capital is to overcome its current malaise and the challenges the US faces from rising economies in Asia, and elsewhere, it will require something equally sizeable, and to ensure the election of social-democratic governments to implement them, it will need to offer adequate incentives to workers to vote for these parties to bring it about.

The outlines of what big capital in the US requires, to meet these challenges, can be seen, and as in the past, some of these requirements also offer the potential to provide the necessary incentives to workers to vote for parties proposing measures to bring them about.

For example, US capital has gained a considerable competitive advantage, in the last year or so, as a result of the development of fracking, which has made available large supplies of oil and gas, at much reduced prices, thereby reducing the cost of constant capital in many industries. This may also explain the more recent shift in US foreign policy in the gulf away from the gulf states.

But, this advantage may be short-lived. The costs of oil extraction from fracking may rise quickly, and the ultimate supplies may not be that great. The US, as with other economies, needs a revolution in energy production that will require large scale investment in research and development. That level of investment in development usually comes only from the state, until its outcome can be shown to be profitable. (The example of space technology is classic here, where it is only now 60 years after the first space programmes, that private capital is beginning to take over the development of space ports, space tourism and so on.)

The US, like most of Europe, requires considerable amounts of capital expenditure to repair and upgrade its social capital. Almost every week, there are reports, in the US, of bridge failures, for example, This is just a manifestation of the fact that during the period of long wave downturn, the policy of conservative governments was to seek to rebuild the rate of profit on the basis of low wages and high levels of private debt. The increase in public debt arose, not because of large scale borrowing to finance investment, but because of tax cuts for the rich, and to cover increased revenue spending on welfare as unemployment and poverty rose, and as low-paying small employers were subsidised out of the public purse via the extension of in-work benefits.

Global interest rates are starting to rise, as a result of the shift in the Long Wave cycle from the Spring to Summer phase. But, they are still at historically low levels, as they were after WWII. This provides an historic opportunity for governments to undertake long-term borrowing, issuing 30 year and even 50 year bonds with interest rates on them locked in to these low rates, to cover specific infrastructure investment.

In the US, that would cover a nationwide programme of rebuilding bridges, roads, and rail; the complete refurbishment of its electricity distribution, to provide a smart grid; the development of the kind of 21^st century communication network an economy like the US requires. In many ways, this is the kind of programme that Roosevelt implemented with the New Deal. But, Truman and Eisenhower were thereby also locked into this social democratic framework. In fact, that social-democracy was given its international aspect first as a result of the agreements reached at Bretton Woods, though some of the necessary basis was also laid at Potsdam and Yalta, by locking in western communist parties to a reformist function where they simply acted as a left-wing pressure groups on the main social-democratic parties.

In Britain, despite the debt to GDP ratio being at 250%, the same approach was taken, borrowing to finance the development of the welfare state, and to nationalise bankrupt staple industries, so as to provide the necessary social capital for investment and restructuring. And again the incoming Tory government in 1951, had to operate within this social-democratic framework. Leading to the term Buttskillism. Expenditure on the welfare state increased, and the majority of nationalised industries were retained in state ownership to ensure the required investment continued to be made.

In Western Europe, a similar effect was achieved by the first major example of social democracy and Keynesianism at an international level, via the Marshall Plan. So, even when conservative governments were elected, they could only be so by acting as social democrats. If social-democratic parties are able to learn the lessons of history, then in the US and Europe, they will seize the historic opportunity that current low levels of interest rates provides, to draw up big bold plans for such large scale investment. Labour should join with other EU social democrats to propose such a programme across the EU, that would reinforce its growing integration, at a material level. But, an ideological struggle by social-democracy globally is required to defeat attempts of reactionary and conservative forces to prevent further progress by their insistence on austerity and similarly backward looking solutions. This is all the more necessary as forces like the conservative parties are not the most reactionary forces that have to be addressed. More reactionary forces such as those of religious fundamentalism of all sorts, feed off the success of other conservative forces, and present an even greater threat.

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After Obama, What Next? - Part 7

Just as the bourgeoisie as a whole needed the support of workers to defeat the landed aristocracy, so the tiny numbers of the big industrial capitalists are unable to defeat the much larger number of small and medium capitalists, and those that share their outlook, without the support of workers.

The British Liberal Party reflected that compromise, and the de facto alliance between these industrial capitalists and workers, and the US Democrats reflect it also. For a time, parties like the Labour Party and European social-democratic parties appeared to represent something different, but in reality, all they represented was a greater strength of the interests of workers within that compromise. In respect of the Labour Party, its commitment to the maintenance of capitalism, as the basis of furthering the interests of workers was never in doubt, and the interests of workers were always subordinate to those of big capital.

That is now simply more manifest, in the policies and actions of European social-democratic parties in general, and this was facilitated by the split in the international labour movement, into the Second and Third Internationals. There is then no real substantive difference between these parties and the US Democrats. They are all bourgeois workers parties, in the sense that they are parties with a bourgeois ideology, specifically geared to the interests of big industrial capital, that depend upon the support and activism of workers in order to win elections.

Ultimately, big industrial capital requires the election of these social-democratic parties, or for the social-democratic wings of conservative parties to be strong enough to represent its interests, as against a reversion to more primitive forms of capital. The economic power of big capital can usually outweigh the measures undertaken by conservative governments to benefit small capital, but, at times, the measures undertaken by those governments fundamentally threaten big capital. The austerity measures undertaken in the UK and parts of Europe, and advocated by the Tea Party in the US, have weakened the economic recovery after 2008. The US bore most of the cost of undertaking the required fiscal stimulus, therefore. But, the other consequence has been to strengthen conservative forces in Europe, even more, as a result of the resulting economic weakness.

Not only has this strengthened right-wing populism, but it has strengthened nationalistic tendencies, thereby undermining progress towards a single European state, which is a fundamental requirement of big industrial capital. If it is to be achieved, big industrial capital will require social-democratic governments across the dominant states of the EU, it will require co-ordinated fiscal expansion across the EU, to boost economic activity and employment, so as to undermine the tendency towards economic nationalism, and thereby create the material conditions to swing public opinion behind the need for greater political integration and the creation of a single federal state. Either that, or as happened in the US, it will be brought about forcibly by war.

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After Obama, What Next - Part 6

On all the grounds set out in Part 5, therefore, it can be seen that what is in some ways only a superficial political division between Democrats and Republicans, is at the same time based on real underlying class interests. And it is these underlying class interests that are decisive in looking at what comes after Obama, and what position Marxists in the US should adopt.

The first question is what attitude should Marxists adopt to the Democrats? In reality, it is the same question as what attitude should Marxists adopt towards Labour in the UK, the SPD in Germany and so on. The answer is to “stick with the workers”. 

“As the experiences of the Russian Revolution teach us – remember this in England and America! – the most important thing of all is to stay in the midst of the masses of workers. You will often go wrong with them, but never leave the mass organisations of the working class, however reactionary they may be at any given moment” (emphasis added).

(Zinoviev’s closing speech at the 15th Session of the Second Congress of the Comintern) 

Close to the end of his life, Engels, writing to US socialists, Made this same point, and he related that he and Marx had joined the German Democrats, an openly bourgeois party, because it was the means of gaining the ear of the workers.

“When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it. When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects, with the exception of the Anarchists, whose sudden appearance in various countries was but the effect of the violent bourgeois reaction after the Commune and could therefore safely be left by us to die out of itself, as it did. Had we from 1864, to 1873 insisted on working together only with those who openly adopted our platform where should we be to-day? I think that all our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line they will commit a great mistake.” 

London, January 27, 1887

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky

Engels made the same point to Eleanor Marx, to ignore the various British sects such as the SDF and the ILP, and to go directly to where the workers were in the trades unions and in the Liberal Clubs.

But, of course, that did not mean fetishising those organisations. The Marxists activity within them must always be geared to developing the working-class, and thereby to developing the praxis of these organisations, so as better to reflect the needs and interests of the workers. At certain points, this very process, must involve the fracturing of these organisations. Where this happens naturally, with the British workers decisively moving beyond the limits of the Liberal Party, it would be lunacy to oppose this movement, as, for example, the Fabians did, and thereby to fetishise existing structures.

But, it is also lunacy to believe, as some do today, that groups of a few hundred, or a few thousand – usually petit-bourgeois – members of revolutionary sects, can substitute for the real movement of the working-class, and simply proclaim the establishment of a new Workers Party, even if that party is intended to be only a replica of some old workers party.

More difficult is the condition that Lenin and Trotsky found themselves in in 1914-20, when the old mass workers parties were dividing, and the possibility of developing new revolutionary mass workers' parties existed at a time when global socialist revolution appeared to be unfolding. As it turned out, that division of the working class movement, was catastrophic, and created the weakness we have today, but it would have been near impossible to have seen that at the time.

It would be much better to have a workers' party in the US that was more like the social-democratic parties in Europe, but we have to deal with the reality we have. In reality, the US Democrats are not greatly different to European social-democratic parties, which if anything are moving closer to their US counterpart, and that is because they are all built upon that same bourgeois, social-democratic ideology of a compromise between the interests of big industrial capital and the working-class.

The former is based on the more progressive forms of capital – in fact, it is based upon what Marx calls, in Capital III, one of the transitional forms of property between capitalism and socialism.

“The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.” 

It is based on a socialised form of capital, represented by the joint stock company, and its modern form, the corporation and public limited company. As Engels describes in his Critique of the Erfurt Programme, these forms of capital have not only gone beyond private capitalist production, but they have also gone beyond that “planlessness”, that characterised the early forms of capital.

“What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”” 

As Marx describes in Capital III, this form of capital necessarily comes into conflict with the less mature forms, as it “expropriates the expropriators”, i.e. the small and medium capitalists.

"The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.

There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property;...

Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products."

This is at root, the material basis of the class antagonism reflected in the division between conservative and social-democratic parties.

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After Obama, What Next? - Part 2

At the time of his election, I wrote that it was reason to celebrate the fact that a black man had won the Presidency, when not many years ago, such an event would have seemed impossible. But, I was not alone in warning against being too optimistic about what his Presidency would bring – including for black Americans.

In that respect, Obama has not failed to disappoint. The financial meltdown of 2008 blew up the financial bubble that has been repeatedly inflated since 1987, and thereby exposed the underlying weakness of the US economy, that had been created by the conservative policies of the Reagan/Bush years.

Despite a policy of Keynesian fiscal stimulus, that stands in stark contrast to the conservative, austerian policy adopted in the UK, the US economy, whilst performing better than others, has not performed outstandingly. The same kind of welfarist policies have continually extended the periods of entitlement for unemployment benefits, and brought more workers into the scope of entitlement to food stamps. But, it is hardly then a measure of success that millions continue to need extended unemployment benefits, or that 46 million people, or a fifth of the population, are in receipt of food stamps. And, of course, as before Obama became President, a disproportionate number of those unemployed, those in receipt of food stamps, and of those homeless people, who turned up to Central Park recently, to receive alms from a publicity seeking Chinese billionaire, are black.

Obama had the advantage that the policy of Keynesian intervention, to save the banks and big corporations, like Ford and GM, had been started under Bush. But, the bifurcation of the US economy, referred to earlier, was reflected in a growing bifurcation in US society, which was in turn manifest in a growing divide between its political parties.

On the one hand, the division between the Democrats and Republicans, like the split between Labour and Tories, in Britain, is only a division between two bourgeois parties. For most of the last century, certainly after WWII, both camps, in both countries, stood essentially on the same social-democratic terrain. It was only when the economic conditions, that underpinned that, collapsed, in the 1980's, that the social-democratic wing of the conservative parties lost their sway, and the electoral arithmetic swung the pendulum to the Right.

In both countries, a sizeable constituency of small capitalists, and those who share their narrow, petit-bourgeois outlook, exists to provide a bedrock of electoral support for conservative parties. In more affluent times, this constituency shrinks, but, in times such as those experienced since the 1980's, it grows and becomes more vocal. After the shock of 2008, it became more vocal again, and the failure of social-democracy, at an international level, to adequately address the aftermath of the crisis, has only added to that.

It is manifest in the growth of ultra-right, nationalist and populist forces in Europe, in UKIP and the Tory right in Britain, and with the Tea Party in the US. In the US, the Tea Party, that seemed to be on the wane until recently, showed it was still alive by unseating the Republican Senate Leader, Eric Cantor, though some of that could also be due to his failing to give sufficient attention to looking after his constituency.

What can be said is that Obama has not compromised with the Republicans in the way Clinton did. In particular, Obama pushed through with Obamacare. In part, that could be down to the fact that US big capital needed some form of general socialised healthcare, more than it had ever done – New York Times.

For more than a decade, big US companies complained that they were being made uncompetitive, because of the huge costs they incurred, providing private health insurance for their employees; a cost their European and Japanese counterparts did not face. In recent years, those costs have soared even more. Pushing through healthcare reform is then something important for big industrial capital, and the Democrats, as its social-democratic political representatives.

But, in the US, in particular, it is anathema to conservatives. For the small capitalists, on whom the conservatives are based, socialised healthcare is an extravagance, and an unnecessary cost imposed on them. Of course, the reality is that its only a cost imposed on them to the extent, that unlike big capital, they do not already provide health insurance for their largely un-unionised workforces, preferring instead to throw that cost on their workers, and on to other workers taxes, via Medicare.

For the middle class supporters of conservative parties, it is equally anathema, because their small minded approach believes that if they can provide for themselves, everyone else should do likewise. They would, of course, be the first to object at the idea then that all workers should be paid a minimum wage sufficient to make that self-reliance possible! Its not surprising then that the bifurcation of US society, and its political reflection has found its sharpest expression in the virulent opposition by the Tea Party against Obamacare.

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After Obama, What Next? - Part 1

In just a few month's time, the US political machines will start to swing into action, in earnest, to begin the process of selecting candidates for the US Presidential elections. Eight years ago, when that same process started to get underway, there was great excitement at the fact that a young senator, from Illinois, was rapidly gaining support, having come from nowhere, to challenge Hillary Clinton, who until then had been thought to be the inevitable Democrat nominee.

That senator was Barack Obama, who despite an Irish sounding surname, was also the surprise contender for the simple reason that he was the first black candidate ever to seem to have a good chance of winning. But, of course, history records that not only did he beat Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination, but he was to go on and win the Presidency itself, by a wide margin, against the challenge from right-wing Republican John McCain, backed by the even more right-wing Sarah Palin.

What perhaps made Obama's nomination more interesting was the political terrain on which he mounted his challenge. Bill Clinton had based himself, in the early 1990's, on a fairly traditional social-democratic platform, that contrasted with the conservative politics of the Reagan/Bush era that preceded him. Clinton inherited the economic conditions that period had created. Conservative governments in the US and UK had responded to the stagnation of the long wave downturn, and the process of de-industrialisation that flowed from old, low-profit manufacturing industry migrating to Asia and Eastern Europe, in search of higher profits, by themselves proffering support for the kind of backward looking, low-paying employers whose outlook they shared.

In effect, these conservative governments adopted the same kind of protectionist stance conservatives have generally adopted in more straightened economic times. The protectionism was of the worst kind; protection of these, often small, always inefficient, firms by means of releasing them from the requirement to meet some kind of minimum standards of how they treated their employees, or the environment in which they operated.

At the same time, and in conditions where the open advocacy of Keynesian fiscal stimulus was frowned upon, as contrary to the new orthodoxy, the conservatives turned to that new orthodoxy when a new big financial crisis erupted in 1987. Alan Greenspan pumped millions of dollars into the economy, the stock market crash was more than reversed within the year, property prices began a massive rise, and the stage was set, along with the Big Bang of financial deregulation, for a period of debt fuelled financial speculation, whose culmination we are on the verge of experiencing, in the shape of a Big Bang of a quite different type.

By the time Clinton came to office, in 1992, therefore, the conditions were established. At the tail-end of the long wave downturn, the US was showing all the signs of an economy in relative decline. Its old, big, heavy industries were no longer competitive with their equivalent, newly built, up to date competitors in China and elsewhere, who also employed workers paid a fraction of their US counterparts. The US had some world-beating industries in technology, media and so on, but not enough had been invested in them, in the previous period of encouraging a low-wage/high debt economy, and these new industries required relatively little in the way of inputs that would generate wider economic growth, and employed a relatively small number of very high value, highly paid workers.

This in itself was a contributory factor in creating a bifurcated economy, where large numbers of low-paid workers existed alongside this group of highly paid workers. Bill Clinton, encouraged by his wife, Hillary, had made health-care reform a centre piece of his social-democratic agenda. But, when he needed to get cross-party support to push through economic reform measures on tax, to bring a spiralling budget deficit under control, he readily dropped it.

What made Obama's stance more interesting was that Hillary Clinton, not surprisingly, stood on the same ground that Bill had been driven to. Not surprisingly because, despite all of the controversies over Whitewater, Monica Lewinski and so on, Clinton's Presidency had been seen as one of the most successful of recent generations. Not only had the budget deficit been overcome, largely as a result of reversing the dreadful Lafferite tax experiment introduced under Reagan, but the budget had gone into surplus, and the economy had started to grow.

It was Clinton who developed the “Third Way” also adopted by Blair. In reality, the “Third Way”, was nothing but the social-democracy of Anthony Crosland. The only difference was that this was social-democracy for a globalised world. The formation of a single global economy had found its manifestation, in the 1990's, after the collapse of Stalinism, in a rapid spread of globalised industrial capital. Its spearhead was the huge multinational industrial corporation.

Unlike Colonialism, which was based on the extraction industries and recreated feudalistic, rent based economies, these large industrial corporations needed and created, modern industrial societies, in which to operate and extract relative surplus value. Experience in the developed economies had shown that the best political shell to achieve that was the modern, bourgeois social-democratic state. Its not surprising then that such states also mushroomed across the globe during this period.

But, this global economy lacked a global state, to set the rules, and maintain a level playing field, as it does at a national level. Imperialism developed as a system of states, but with these huge multinational corporations increasingly footloose, and able to base themselves wherever they could obtain advantage, not only did they require some state functions to be undertaken at an international or at least intra-national level, but nation states themselves needed to come together to co-ordinate their activities, or face growing impotence and irrelevance, as economic power moved increasingly out of their influence. Existing international bodies like GATT were beefed up to become the WTO, and a string of forums were established that brought together the leading economic powers.

But, absent a global state, the role of enforcing a global rule of law fell to the US, as the hegemonic military power. Of course, just as the US uses the position of the dollar as global reserve currency, so it used its position as global policeman to further its interests. The fact that this is a system of states does not mean that there is no hierarchy within it.

The policy of Liberal intervention, that starts with Clinton and Blair, is basically the same social-democratic ideology applied at an international level. It says, if we want to have economic prosperity, there has to be compromise and negotiation in place of conflict, and that requires a set of rules that have to be obeyed. That applies both to the needs of multinational industrial capital, in being able to invest confidently across the globe, as well as the need to be able to trade and transport commodities across trade routes.

When Obama stood on a platform of opposing the war in Iraq, as a mistake, of closing down Guantanamo, pulling out the troops from Iraq, and Afghanistan, offering an open hand to Iran, and refraining from further foreign adventures, this was then a break from the ground on which Hillary Clinton was standing, and on which Bill Clinton had previously stood. Moreover, where Bill Clinton had quickly dropped healthcare reform, in favour of bi-partisan politics, and Hillary Clinton was not proposing to resurrect it, Obama made it central to his domestic policy agenda.

Forward To Part 2

Concessions Or Conveniences - Part 4

Part 4 – Political Concessions?

“The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before even it collapsed externally, on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line.

“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest-bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the readjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists — the class which now [These words belong apparently not to Bright but to his adherents. See The Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 141, p. 273.-Ed.] represented the nation. And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised. Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down – if not as yet the bringing down - of wages. England was to become the ‘workshop of the world’; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was-markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England, the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!

“The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades was tolerated. Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid People’s Charter actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. The Abolition of the Property Qualification and Vote by Ballot are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to universal suffrage, at least such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates equal electoral districts-on the whole not more unequal than those of France or Germany; payment of members, and shorter, if not actually annual Parliaments, are visibly looming in the distanceand yet there are people who say that Chartism is dead.”

(Preface To The Second German Edition of “The Condition Of The Working Class."_

Here, in fact, we see the key to understanding some current events. The increasing dominance since WWII of the giant, multi-national, capitalist has meant that an increasing division within capital itself has arisen, similar to that described above by Engels. In many ways, the interests of this big capital are best served by the traditional politics of Social Democracy, which promote those ideas of social harmony, and which, at the same time, creates the conditions, through state intervention of the kinds of working-class that this capital requires. Only at times of severe crisis does this capital turn to the more traditional bourgeois parties. Those parties, now, in fact, represent, ideologically not this big capital, but reflect the interests of those more backward elements, the small capitalists, who, as Engels describes, can only survive on the back of those penny-pinching devices, and extraction of absolute surplus value, that big capital now sees as an encumbrance. Yet, in a bourgeois democracy, the achievement of political power is determined not directly by the power of big capital, which continues to dominate the state, but by an electorate whose ideas will be determined by a whole range of influences outside the control of that big capital. Hence we have the policies of right-wing, populist governments across Europe which threaten to throw the capitalist economy into an unnecessary crisis, that is not in the interests of big capital, but which plays to the immediate concerns of the small capitalists, middle class, and backward sections of workers that make up the electoral support for those Governments.

Similarly, in the US, Obama#s healthcare policies are themselves in that social-democratic tradition, and geared to meeting the needs of US big capital, which has been crippled in international competition, as a result of the massive payments it has had to make to cover the insurance and pension costs of its employees – greater, in many cases, for its retired workforce, than the actual wage bill. Small capital in the US, for the reasons Engels sets out here, has been the main bulwark of opposition to Obama's plans, precisely because it has been able to avoid making such payments. Its smaller, less well organised workforce has been unable to negotiate the kinds of health insurance that big capital has provided for its workers. Even some large companies, such as Wal-Mart, have refused to provide workers with cover, instead happy for their workers to rely on the existing socialised healthcare provision, and in the process provoking the ire of their larger competitors. In short, Obama's healthcare proposals, particularly in their more radical earlier versions of a “Public Option”, are not at all concessions to workers, but merely a convenience for big capital.

Workers should be aware of this in order to avoid being conned into believing that such conveniences for capital, are in any sense concessions won from it.

Back To Part 3

"I Was Born By the River"

Sam Cooke once sang, "Its been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come" (see bottom). One one level the election of Obama as the first black American President does signify that change. It is an event that Sam Cooke and other Black Americans in the early 1960's could only strive for. We should remember, that in what is supposed to be the world's greatest democracy it has still taken half a century from that time before a Black man could become President.

But, as I have written in previous blogs the question is not really about the change that has occurred within American Society that allows a relatively privileged black man to become President, but what has changed in American society for the vast majority of Black men and Women, and what difference will the election of Obama make to their condition.

The answer to the first question is fairly easy to answer. Black men might not suffer the same lynchings by white supremacists that they did in the 1960's, but they still suffer State sanctionded lynchings through the far higher proportion of Black Men on Death Row compared to their white counterparts. Ordinary Black Men and Women still suffer huge discrimination in employment, in housing etc. despite the small number of Oprah's and Cosby's that have for some time provided a role model for aspiration. It seems unlikely, that after decades of such individual successes even Obama's triumphant ascent to the White House can make any greater effect in that direction. And how could it? The problem for poor Blacks is effectively the same as for any other group of working class people. It is not a lack of aspiration, no lack of desire to be affluent. It is the fundamental fact, that in a capitalist society not everyone CAN be rich, and whatever the delusion presented as the American Dream, the fact is today in the United States more than anywhere, the fact is that the best way to become rich is to be born rich. Study after study has shown that despite all of the propaganda the US has a much lower - and falling - rate of social mobility than many other countries, particularly Scandinavia, and Germany.

One of the basic reason for that is the low level of social support in the US, and in particular the poor standard of Education provided the lowest levels of society. Being black simply exacerbates that discrimination that all of the poor experiences whatever its colour, whatever its creed, whatever its gender or sexual orientation. Just look at the experiecne of Hurricane Katrina which showed that in the world's richest country a large proprtion of its people live a life similar to people in the Third World. This is a country where something like 25% of the population do not have wealth, but have negative wealth that is they live he whole of their life in serious debt. Yet, this is a country where Warren Buffett has as much personal wealth as the bottom 40% of the population combined. Bill Gates who until recently was slightly ahead of him owns a similar amount.

To get a grip on how much Marx was right about the degree to which Wealth would be concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller minority consider this. In order to come within the wealthiest 1% in the US you need a Net Worth of $3 million. Most of the people that come within this category are not really rich odd as that may seem. Certainly they are rich compared with the vast majority of US citizens, but in reality most of these people are not true Capitalists, they are really only Middle Class. Th majority are people over 50 whose wealth is tied up in their house, and their Pension Plan. For most of them - particularly given US Health and Social Care costs - this wealth will disappear in their retirement. Compare that wealth with say Warren Buffett or Bill Gates with a Net Worth of around $40 BILLION. Put another way either of them has as much wealth as 13,000 of those that just scrape into the top 1%! To Buffett's credit he favours much higher taxes on the rich like himself, and both he and Gates have transferred the vast bulk of their wealth into Gates Charitable Foundation which seeks to provide Healthcare and other humanitarian aid for the world's poorest people. But, the point is that society should not have to rely on such philanthropy, it should be ordered such that these gross maldistributions of wealth and income do not arise int he first place. That cannot be achieved by redistributive tax policies either. It can only be achieved when the system that creates such iniquities is abolished, when workers own and control the means of production for themselves.

Unfortunately, the charges of the republicans that Obama is a socialist are nothing more than slurs. If he were and attempted to introduce socialist measures the US ruling class would quickly undermine him, and replace him one way or another. They will have no need. Obama is no socialist. That doesn't mean that Obama's polcies will be totally indistinguishable from those of George Bush. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century once of the consequences of the Long Boom was that in the US and elsewhere a series of reformist measures was introduced. Under Teddy Roosevelt in the US, under the Liberals in Britain. Similarly, after a similar period of expansion in the Long Boom after WWII similar reformist measures were introduced under the Wilson Government in Britain, under DeGaulle in France and the Great Society under LBJ in the US. It will be no coincidence if such a period of reformism happens under Obama. But, the nature of that reformism has to be understood. Marx spoke of the "Civilising Mission" of Capitalism the way it is forced to raise the living standards of the working class, to expand the scale and scope of the Use Values produced and therefore consumed, the way the nature of its production leads to the need for the education and culture of the workers to be raised. On the one hand that provides part of the basis for workers to become the ruling class. On the other hand, those reforms also act to socialise and tie workers to the bourgeois regime,and to reliance on the bouregois State.

The nature of Capitalism is to break that personal tie that existed between Landlord and serf, and to replace it with the open cash nexus. The nature of the Welfarism introduced by an expanding Capitalism is to reconvert a sizeable proportion of the working class to serfdom no longer existing as free wage workers, but existing as dependent vassals on the good graces of the Capitalist State, watched, investigated, their activities restricted, their whole existence dependent upon a paternalistic State, with the consequent effect on their own dignity and conscioussness. That is the true nature under Capitalism of those kinds of reforms.

Watching, the jubilation of tens of thousands of Black Americans on the news today it is difficult not to share their joy, the joy of those like Jesse Jackson who are of the generation that saw the lynchings and all the other vile outpourings of racism and white supremacism, and the joy of those thousands of young Black Americans of a generation that only knows of that from what it has read, and seen on TV, and that looks to Obama as offering a new hope. Yet, I was moved to think about the difference between the two. I heard a comment last night that said something about in the 1960's we as young people were in the streets trying to bring about change, today the young people are in the voting booths bringing about change. As someone has pointed out the latter would not have been possible without the former. But, that difference also caused me concern. It is very well to have mobilised tens of thousands of young people - black and white - to vote for Change, but what Now. The likelihood is that they will see their job as done. The whole of bourgeois ideology is geared to the idea that you elect someone else to do the politics, because bouregois ideology says that the politics happens elsewhere in some elected forum - it does not occur on the streets, in the factories, or in the communities. But, of course for workers it is precisely in all of these latter places that politics does, and must occur if real change is to be won.

The consequence of that can be seen in advance. Disappointment, disillusion and demoralisation. Already, all of those stock bouregois phrases of One Nation Toryism are coming out of the Obama Camp, talk of bringing in Republicans to the Government, talk about how tough things are, and must be - always the introductory statements of Government intent on squeezing the workers - and a general rowing back of positions. The only answer to that is not to ask the workers, the poor and the middle class to simply look for some alternative more left-wing politician to resolve their problems. It is to tell them in advance what is going to happen, and to help them t organise themselves, to rely on themselves and not on some politician/s. It is vital that US socialists are active at the grass roots of the Democrats as these discussions on "What Now?" take place, as well as in the Unions, in the Community Organisations and so on. It is necessary to organise and orientate the workers around a program of self-activity building their own co-operative organisations for control and ownership of their housing and communties, for building other co-operative enterprises geared to meeting the immediate needs of those communities, and to tie them together preventing them from being isolated utopian, small-scale ventures, to mobilise the Unions and Labour Movement to support and be supported by such ventures, to help mobilise the necessary Capital through the Unions funds, through the workers pensions and savings, through the Mutual Societies, through the creation of Local Credit Unions, and of a Co-operative Bank under the ownership and control of the workers through their unoins and other Labour organisations.

A Change is gonna come, but it requires the working class to bring it about now through its own activity. The working class has to end its servility, and its servile dependence upon the bourgeois State, has to get up off its knees.

Sam Cooke - "A Change is Gonna Come"

US Elections

Whoever wins the US Presidential Election today it looks certain that the lawyers will once again be big winners. The Democrats claim to have 5,000 lawyers on hand in Florida alone, ready to launch legal challenges against any malpractice or funny business. And let's face it you can't have a US election without a hell of a lot of malpractice and funny business. If the goings on in US Elections happened in some Third World country the US would be the first to want to lecture them about their wayward tendencies.

This is a country where you can register as a supporter of one Party even though you actually support their opponents, simply in order to vote in that Party's Primary elections with the intention of landing them with the least electable candidate. The basic democratic principle that you should actually be a MEMBER of the Party whose candidate you are selecting is unthinkable in the US.

Although, we are told that the "American Dream" is manifest in the fact that even those from the humblest beginnings can become President, the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by the Parties to fight elections, the tens of millions that any individual candidate has to raise to have a chance of becoming the Party's nominee - Obama has raised $650 million - the fact that almost all of the US Political elite are born or married into some of the richest families in the country illustrates that its not so much a dream as a delusion.

This is a country where one of the most detested, least popular Presidents of all time, a President with his finger on the nuclear button of the world's largest nuclear arsenal, and who has taken the country into two wars, actually polled in his first election less votes than his opponent! This is a country where elections like that can be decided not by the electorate, but by top juges, who are themselves tied by a thousand golden threads into the country's richest families.

This is a country where an election like that could be thrown into doubt, because although it is the richest country and most technologically advanced country on the planet, it is incapable of even carrying out the basic administrative requirements of an election effectively. Even India with a much larger population spread over vast rural areas is more efficeint in that regard. Venezuela, which the US often refers to as a Dictatorship, has a far more democratic system than that which rules in the US.

This is a country where local political leaders play a significant part in the organisation of the electoral process, and where not surprisingly therefore, there arise accusations founded or otherwise of partiality in the election process. A country where 40 years after the Civil Rights Movement large numbers of Black people are disenfranchised by one means or another.

This is a country, where we might see in coming weeks the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate - whose popularity has fallen in proportion to the degree to which the voters have learned what she stands for - could be part of a losing ticket, yet find herself part of the Country's Legislature, if she decides to appoint herself Senator, in place of an Alaskan Senator who may be sent to gaol. In Venezuela at least the electors have the right to recall their elected representatives, and hold an election to choose someone else!

In recent weeks there have been challenges against the electronic voting machines introduced to overcome the farce of the "hanging chads" from the 2000 Election. Apparently, voters were casting their vote on the touch screen for Obama, but the machine was mysteriously showing the vote as being for McCain! The fact that the Company that makes the amchines is connected to the Republican Party is, of course, purely coincidental.

In order to assist with the election process voters have been able to vote early over the last couple of weeks. One wonders whether the same principle might apply as used to be the case in Ireland where the slogan was raised "Vote early, Vote Often". But, its perhaps, as well that such an opportunity has been given, because voters have still needed to queue for several hours in order to cast their votes. How many people who need to earn a living or look after their kids have simply given up we don't know. The whole process certainly seems geared to dissuade peoplef rom voting. Instead of spending tens of millions of dollars on Soap style adverts trying to persuade voters that their is some real difference between what is in the different packets, it might have been a good idea to actually spend some money on having sufficient polling stations to enable voters to exercise their democratic right effectively.

The greaest beneficiaries of the election will undoubtedly be the lawyers in a plethora of lawsuits over coming weeks and months arising from the quite honestly disgraceful spectacle. The other main beenficiaries have already been the advertising companies. Have you ever wondered why you don't see advertrs for Rolls Royce? The answer the car itself is advert enough. It is so different from every other car that it requires no advertising. You only need advertising when you are trying to persuade consumers that your product is different from all the other similar products available. The more competing products are the same, the more companies need to advertise to con people into beleiving there is some difference. That is why so much money is spent in US elections.

The main losers will, of course, be American workers.

Obama and Political Change

The message of the Obama political campaign has been "Change". Change is a very powerful message, but in reality a message that is totally meaningless. Why is "Change" a powerful message? Because, people not only get dissatisfied with what they have, but simply get bored with what they have. Think about the proverb, "A change is as good as a rest." The advertising industry, and the consumer society is wholly conditional on Change. People throw away perfectly good clothes, and other consumer items, for no other reason than they want to change them, they are led to believe that they are no longer fashionable, and nobody tends to want to be the odd one out. A large part of the reason for the production of new car models is not because of some improvement, but simply that by bringing out a new model, consumers can be cajoled into parting with their money. The whole of bourgeois democracy is based upon the same precept.

We have the accepted wisdom that Governments will always lose popularity mid-term. Why? Why should a Government that is doing a good job lose support part way through its term? And if you are going to change something, shouldn't you change it for something better? Yet, the fact is that for the last 100 years of bourgeois democracy workers have changed their Governments in elections not for something better, just simply for something different. They have abided by the proverb "A Change is as good as a rest." Its not that there has been a shortage of alternatives. Socialist parties have existed for all that time, but except for a short period they have failed to win over workers to a vision of a society that is different to the one we have.

To some extent, the same reasons, that cajole consumers into casting off perfectly good clothes in favour of spending money on different ones, can explain the reason for that. Bourgeois society has a huge advertising machine geared to convincing everyone that Capitalism is not only the best of all possible worlds, but, effectively, the only possible world. But, that can't be more than a minor explanation. No amount of advertising ultimately can convince consumers to buy something that is crap, or at least not to keep buying it. The reason workers continue to simply swap one brand of bourgeois politician for another, and to reject the real alternatives is because every aspect of their lives tells them that Capitalism IS the only possible world. Until they see some functioning alternative that works they will not be convinced in their vast majority, and without winning over the vast majority Socialism is not possible. A few might risk the idea of a new product, just as their are early uptakers of new products, but the majority will not be convinced until they see the proof for themselves. If those early uptakers build Co-operatives that work others might follow, but if the early uptakers are like the Leninists who simply want to impose their vision on the workers, who believe that in creating a new society from the top down the workers will automatically see the benefit of this new society, the reaction is likely at best to be suspicion, at worst hostility. Ideas do not change that quickly, and in the meantime those that believe they are the holders of "Truth" will simply turn themselves into a new set of political rulers. Workers are not daft. They have seen this happen before. So, in the meantime, they settle for simply chucking out one load of bums, and replacing them with another.

And so it will be in the US elections on Tuesday. For all the broo ha ha over this election being a historical moment in US history it is nothing of the kind. Barack Obama is a Centre-Right bourgeois politician. There are essentially no differences between him and John McCain in respect of politics. he would fit in perfectly well in the British Conservative Party. The fact, that he is Black does not change the nature of this election, anymore than the fact that Maggie Thatcher was a woman changed the nature of the 1979 General Election in Britain. In fact less so. In 1979 the choice was between an openly pro-business Conservative Party led by a group that accepted all of the extreme Right-Wing ideas of Frederick Hayek - at least whilst it suited them - and a Labour Party, which, whilst still riddled with bourgeois ideas, was at least tied to a still militant Labour Movement.

The experience of Thatcher demonstrates the point. Thatcher did not advance the cause of women - certainly not the vast majority of women who belong to the working class - if anything she set that cause back. Obama will not advance the cause of Black Americans, indeed in pursuing - as he undoubtedly will - bourgeois politics that cannot provide answers to the American workers - Black or White or any other colour - he will sow disillusion within those most oppressed sections of the US working class. The experience will give the opportunity to all of the multifarious racist and Right-Wing groups in the US to blame not Obama's bourgeois politics for what transpires, but simply his blackness.

In my opinion socialists have to be active members of the Democrats in the US for the same reason that they have to be active members of the Labour Party in Britain, or whatever party attracts the support and votes of the majority of workers anywhere. Not because to do so is to support the lesser evil, but for the reason that Marx and Engels outlined - the reason they gave for joining the openly bourgeois Democrats in Germany - because the job of Marxists is to be with the workers, to go through the experience of life and politics with them, to explain, to help organise, to educate those workers, and thereby raise their consciousness. The main reason for Marxists to be in the Democrats at the moment is not to mislead workers into believing that a vote for Obama is a step forward or even a lesser evil - though given the politics of Sarah Palin I think socialists have to do everything possible to prevent any ticket on which she appears from being elected - but is to go through that process with them at a time of heightened political activity and discussion, to demonstrate to them what is wrong and inadequate with the Democrats and bourgeois politics in general, to offer them in daily activity and discussion a real alternative, to do that in the Democrat organisations, and in the Trade Unions and other Labour organisations. It is far easier to do that from the inside, far more likely to get a hearing than simply standing on the outside pissing into the tent and thereby arousing the ire of the workers inside. But, as I said above if Marxists are to do that effectively they have to demonstrate to workers in practice an alternative. This fight cannot be won on the basis of the bosses terrain, of simply trying to win workers over to the idea of electing some "real" socialist Workers Government. At least not at this stage. They have seen that top down approach before, and were betrayed at best. It is necessary to utilise that work with the workers to convince them of the need to build that alternative here and now through their own self-activity. In place of the Capitalist Banks and Finance houses that have created the current crisis, to build through their Labour Movement and other working class organisations, Co-operative banks and insurance companies such as exists in the Co-op Bank in Britain or in the Trade Union bank Unity Trust, owned and controlled democratically by the workers, neighbourhood Credit Unions in place of the vicious loan sharks and so on. In place of the almost feudal Landlords, or the mortgage companies, that will sell your house from under you for not paying the mortgage they should never have sold you, its necessary to get back to that age old US custom of "Barn Raising", whereby neighbours would all work co-operatively to build a barn, but now in a modern setting by establishing co-operative building and construction companies, working with Co-operative financing, and Co-operative housing and community management organisations to build decent, affordable housing not for profit, but for the benefit of the people living in it.

These and many more such schemes and ideas are not Utopian, they have been accomplished by workers in the past, and could easily be accomplished today. In the US as in Britain, workers in their pension schemes have huge sums of Capital that could be mobilised to meet the workers needs, if the workers themselves had control of them. But they do not. Control rests with those same financiers that caused the current financial crisis, the workers savings go instead to provide cheap finance for those companies, and to keep the bosses of those companies in huge salaries and bonuses. A fundamental principle of bourgeois ideology is that the individual should have control over their own property. So why does bourgeois society deny workers control over their own pension funds? The transformation of society that could be brought about by such control would be startling. It would begin to create the kind of alternative society that workers need to see in order for them to believe in the idea that the whole of society could be organised this way. Then they might even be prepared to vote for the kind of Workers Government that would carry through the kind of measures necessary to prevent the bosses from undermining it.

Now that would be a "Change We Can Believe In"