Thursday, November 7, 2024

ESSAYS ON THE RISE OF TRUMPISM: ECONOMICS, POLITICS, RACISM

 Harry Targ


 

1.The Trump Phenomena: How Does It Apply to 2024

The comments below have been adapted and edited from an earlier assessment of the constellation of political forces that led to the surprise victory and support for Donald Trump, first in 2016 and now.

Trump’s core constituency all along has been sectors of finance capital, insurance, real estate, the military/industrial complex, and drug companies whose profits have come from domestic investments or sales and speculation overseas. It also includes portions of small and medium-sized businesses whose viabilities have been threatened, not by big government, but by the further monopolization of the economy.

In addition, some workers displaced by the underside of neoliberalism, including capital flight, automation, and trade, have supported Trump because they saw no positive economic future in a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 or a Kamala Harris presidency in 2024. Finally, the Trump constituency has included a percentage of voters who are ideological legatees of white supremacy.  

Therefore, the Trump coalition from 2016 to today has consisted of fractions of capital who gain from a more muscular and economically nationalist policy agenda, marginalized portions of the so-called “middle class,” sectors of the working class, and portions of all of these whose political learning has centered on the history and consciousness of white supremacy (“make America great again”).

Trump’s major adversaries have come from a core sector of the ruling class that has dominated the policy process at least since the 1980s, the neoliberal globalists. In response to the squeeze on profits of the 1970s, the capitalist elites began to promote a dramatic shift in the character of the economy in the direction of “neoliberalism.” Drawing upon an economic ideology with a long history from Adam Smith, to Milton Friedman, to mainstream neoclassical economists of the late twentieth century, every administration from Carter to Trump has engaged in deregulation of economic life, reduced or modified government programs that help the poor and working classes, weakened  rights of workers and their unions, and  the privatization of  public institutions. The Republicans have advocated the privatization of Social Security and the postal service. Note these policies have been tepidly opposed by sectors of the Democratic Party at the national level but have been fiercely institutionalized in many of the 50 states, mostly red states.

The neoliberals in both Democratic and Republican administrations “went global;” developing a network of economic ties via trade agreements, the globalization of production, and integrating corporate boards. Capitalist elites from every continent began to develop common approaches to national policy via such informal organizations as the Trilateral Commission, meetings of the G7 countries, and the annual World Economic Forum.

Debt poor countries were the first to be forced to embrace neoliberal policies, followed by the former Socialist Bloc countries, then the Western European social democracies, and finally the United States. A significant portion of this qualitative change in the way capitalism works has involved increased financial speculation (as a proportion of the total gross domestic product), dramatic increases in global inequality in wealth and income, and increasing economic marginalization of workers, particularly women, people of color and immigrants.

Candidate Donald Trump in 2016 orchestrated a campaign against the neoliberal globalists who dominated the political process in the United States since the 1980s. While he epitomizes finance capital, albeit domestic as well as foreign, and represents the less than one percent who rule the world, he presented himself as a spokesperson for the economically marginalized. He attacked some of the capitalist class of which he is a member. In addition, he blamed the marginalization of the vast majority on some of their own; people of color, women, and immigrants. Of course, this was the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, drawing on the history of White Supremacy and American Exceptionalism embedded in US history.

Resistance to Trump, 2017 to 2020

Since the November 2016 election, masses of people mobilized in a variety of ways against the agenda of the newly elected president. The women’s marches and rallies of January 21, 2017 and International Women’s Day on March 8 were historic in size and global reach. During the rest of Trump’s first term, there were huge mobilizations to reduce the use of fossil fuels and prevent climate disaster, to support immigrant rights, to provide basic health care, and around police killings.

A multiplicity of groups formed or increased in size since January, 2017: former Bernie Sanders supporters; anti-racists mobilizations particularly against police violence; those calling for sanctuary cities and defending the human rights of immigrants; progressive Democratic organizations; climate change activists, and women’s organizations.

Traditional left organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, benefiting from the Sanders campaign, tripled in size between 2016 and 2020. And organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood  reported large increases in financial contributions. Since the 2016 election the mobilization of millions of people  bolstered the spirits of progressives everywhere. They felt that at this point in history a new progressivism was about to be born. But the story has been made complicated by the nature of the opposition to Trumpism.

Oppositions to Trumpism: Neoliberal and Progressive

Paradoxically, while 1996-2020 was “a teachable moment” as well as a movement building moment, progressive forces continued to struggle to be organized. In and around the Democratic Party there were conflicts over the vision and the politics it ought to embrace at that time and in the coming period. The Sanders supporters, inside and outside the Democratic Party, and progressive Congress persons such as the “Squad” marshalled much support for a progressive agenda: single-payer health care, a green jobs agenda, protecting the environment, tax reform, building not destroying immigrant rights, defending women’s rights, and cutting military spending. With the brutal policies advocated and already instituted by the Trump administration, progressive democrats and their allies on the left worked mightily to articulate a program, and create some organizational unity to challenge Trumpism. And that struggle remained relevant after the 2020 election of Joe Biden, who supported some of these policies. But candidate Trump in 2020 received in excess of 70 million votes for reelection and exceeded that number in 2024.

The dilemma for progressives is that opposition to Trumpism and all it stands for has been and must be a key component of reigniting a progressive majority in the coming decade. But if it does not address the fundamental failures of the neoliberal agenda, including challenging neoliberal globalization, including support for war, convert interventions, and militarism, the current phase of capitalism, Trump’s grassroots support will continue as he occupies the White House in 2025. Working people who ordinarily would vote for more liberal candidates for public office need to believe that future candidates from the local to the national level are prepared to address the issues, often economic, that concern them.

Therefore, the fundamental project for progressives today, 2024, includes mobilizing against Trumpism while articulating an alternative political and economic analysis of the current state of capitalist development. In concrete terms, this approach means challenging the legitimacy of the legacy of the Trump administration and its allies in Congress while articulating the perspective that mainstream Democrats, the neoliberal globalists, are part of the problem, not the solution.

This alternative analysis requires a bold challenge inside the electoral arena and in the streets that calls for progressive reforms: single-payer health care; cutting the military-budget; creating government programs to put people to work on living wage jobs in infrastructure, social services, and public education; addressing climate change: and fiscal and regulatory policies that reduce the grotesque inequality of wealth and income which has increased since the 1980s. It might boldly include discussions of a guaranteed income for all and/or the right to a job for every member of the society.

The tasks are challenging but another world is still possible.

 

2.Transforming Politics and Elections


Writers have identified the onset of capitalism with slavery, land grabs, brutal violence, and globalization. Out of this came an industrial revolution that over two hundred years rearranged the processes of extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, the global distribution of goods and services, and the accumulation of incredible wealth by small global ruling classes and the expansion of human misery for the vast majority. In the twentieth century, banks assumed great power and control of national economies and political systems.

Changes in the global political economy gave rise to revolutionary ferment, socialist systems, and massive campaigns demanding economic justice including the right to form trade unions. In the twentieth century governments were forced to adjust the capital accumulation process to accommodate some worker demands. A small number of socialist states struggled to create new economic and political systems. From the 1930s to the 1970s the United States responded to massive social movements by carrying out modest political and economic reforms which combined substantial growth and ruling class wealth with policies to redistribute some of it to meet the needs of workers.

By the 1970s, because of declining profit rates, over-production and under-consumption, a state fiscal crisis, rising oil prices, and expanding worker power, the “golden age” of the welfare capitalist state was dismantled. Of particular significance was the shift from a manufacturing- based economy to financial speculation. To accommodate finance capital President Ronald Reagan in 1980 embraced a series of economic policies which transformed the system of welfare state capitalism, initiated in the period of the New Deal in the 1930s to a new economic program referred to as neoliberalism. 

Reagan gutted government programs, reduced taxes for the rich, launched a frontal assault on trade unions, and increased military budgets. The official rationale for the new public policies was that “government was not the solution; government was the problem.” Inspired by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England, and promoted by Western-dominated economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the so-called “Washington consensus” was imposed on the world: forcing virtually every country to cut government spending, privatize public institutions, and to produce for global rather than local markets.  U.S. capital outsourced manufacturing to countries with cheap labor and expanded its direct foreign investment.

In the United States political arena, pockets of resistance to neoliberalism, or austerity, grew.  The national Democratic Party, for the most part, embraced the Reagan Revolution but vibrant presidential campaigns of Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 challenged the direction of change in the United States. Jackson launched a movement, the Rainbow Coalition, which was designed to mobilize workers, people of color, women, and youth to reverse the panoply of Reagan policies. Despite enormous popularity, the Jackson campaign could not break through the wall of collaboration of the Democratic Party.

On the Republican side, right-wing populist Pat Buchanan challenged the Reagan consensus, particularly on so-called free trade in 1992. Others, such as Ross Perot, ran for president primarily on the basis of opposition to the yet to be approved North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Both efforts were motivated by sectors of capital that were domestic in character, in contradistinction to the growing primacy of globalized financial capital. 1992 Democratic candidate Bill Clinton remained cautious on NAFTA as he promised American workers that he would represent their interests.

Upon election, Clinton proceeded to cajole recalcitrant Democrats in Congress to vote “yes” on NAFTA. Over the next twenty years NAFTA led to the loss of at least a million jobs in the United States and created a downward pressure on workers’ wages. Meanwhile the Mexican economy declined, relying on growing food imports and massive migration. Clinton continued the Reagan era programs by cutting modest but critical welfare programs, supporting efforts to increase the incarceration of masses of people of color who lost economic opportunity because of the neoliberal policy agenda, and worked to expand the so-called neoliberal-framed trade agenda by helping to create the World Trade Organization. While there was high tech job growth during the Clinton years (1992-2000), real wages for most workers continued their steady decline, manufacturing jobs continued to go overseas, and due to aggressive United States interventions economic migration from Latin American and Asia increased.

Reflecting on this historical overview from a political perspective several conclusions seem clear. First, the economic and political characteristics of the “golden age” of the United States, that is the growth and distribution of wealth benefiting workers between the late 1930s and the late 1960s, were anomalies.

Second, as a result of the economic crises of the 1970s, politics shifted from support of government programs for the many to austerity and wealth for the few. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s constituted a qualitative shift from welfare to growth and from providing some benefits to the working class to extracting more from them to increase profits. The Reagan Revolution expanded the economic shift to financialization.  Ideologically, pluralities of Americans were convinced that the economic problems they faced were because of too much government.

By the 1990s, the pluralities drawn to Reaganomics increased to majorities as a result of the support given to it by the Clinton Administration. NAFTA, mass incarceration, and welfare reform supported by “third wave” Democrats like Clinton legitimized the Reagan Revolution.

Based on this extrapolation from economic and political history, the 2016 presidential election campaign on the Democratic Party side was critical. Candidate Hillary Clinton spoke for the interests of financial speculation, trade regimes, privatization of public institutions, and accommodations with Reagan descendants in the United States Congress. 

Candidate Bernie Sanders, however, represented a fundamentally different public policy agenda; one that began with the most marginalized rather than the economic elite. It presumed that by bolstering the economic opportunities of workers, the poor, people of color, women, and youth, a buoyant economic recovery could occur that “trickles up” from the base. His program endorsed some redistribution of wealth and the provision of health care, education, a job, and adequate housing as basic human rights. His vision also was and is of a “moral economy,” one in which every person is provided with the opportunity to achieve all of her or his human potential that is possible in the twenty-first century.

Questions remain about whether a “political” and “moral” revolution is fully achievable without fundamental structural change in the U.S. and the global political economy, but there is no question that the Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 represented an effort to reverse the policies established by Presidents Reagan and Bill Clinton during the late twentieth century.

 

3.Some of the Material Reasons for the Current Crisis and Alternatives


Introduction

The twenty-first century economic reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the other.  More and more of those in the latter have become  political activists, particularly among the young,  women, and people of color episodically in the twenty-first century.  

This new class society in the United States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have arisen everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to Chile, from Syriza and Podemos, to Minneapolis,  to the Sanders campaigns, the cry for change, often a demand for socialism, has spread. The outcome of this new activism remains unclear  after November 4, 2024, but the prospects for positive social and political change remain possible despite the 2024 election.

The New Class Society

In 1999, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions of a perceptive sociological analysis that identified what the authors identified as “the new class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian analysis of class that combined workers’ relationships to the means of production with their organizational position.

Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that the popular portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”

In the new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class” composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and “professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed, and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80 percent of the population.

In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.

Peter Temin, an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE), representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;” clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and profits for the top twenty percent.

In summary, both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

The Precariat

Guy Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation increasingly are experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials as well as the traditional working class.

Standing argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.” These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.

Accumulation by Dispossession

David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.”  Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.

Harvey then argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century. Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession, while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the few.

Growing Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification

Virtually every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union, have occurred while inequalities within these countries have widened. In the United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.

The patterns of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,”  demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies. Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.

On the other hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict and violence spread across communities.

Also in the new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become prohibitively expensive. For those who accumulate massive student debt the experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest. Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.

Racism

Manning Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South. Unemployment  increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.

Marable suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly devastating impacts on educational institutions.

With declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework, which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter disenfranchisement.

Neoliberalism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism

The so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about 2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and services.

In terms of international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.

At home a United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium, television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).

However, by the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments had been increasing services such as education, health care, and transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added to emerging economic stagnation.

By the 1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending, privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in the world market.

Thus, the new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of the many for the benefit of the few.

Neoliberal globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.

A Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century  

As history has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive results.

History shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a vision of a better society.

The analyses above highlight the changing character of the global political economy, emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male; gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation in work places, the political system, and the community.  

References

Robert A. Perrucci and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 (the first of four editions).

Peter Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, MIT Press, 2017.

Victor Tan Chen, “The Dual Economy,” Working Class Perspectives, 
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-dual-economy/

Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,  Oxford University Press, 2015.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2017.

Harry Targ, Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and Militarism, Lulu.com, 2006.

Manning Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” ZNET, zcom.org, March 2, 2009.

Various articles on political economy, social movements, peace and justice in Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com


 

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CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

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