Introduction—Financial Collapse and War

us global dollar suzerainty is in retreat, as world trade is undergoing “de-dollarization”; the bloc of classes underpinning Trump’s presidency permits him to fully engage in the one area of policy formulation where restrictions on presidential behavior are severely constrained, that is allows him a free hand in pursuing an array of tariffs, effectively constituting a trade war; while by no means an inexorable trajectory, trade wars lead to shooting wars, similarly “de-dollarization,” as the changing class structure in America portends a major class confrontation which will decide whether a shooting war, if its likely development unfolds, devolves into renewed imperialist world war.

Part I

It is not necessary to once again recount the litany of manufacturing industries that have disappeared and the corresponding loss of good paying, benefited jobs that have similarly vanished as a consequence of us industrial decline. For purposes of this account, we’ll begin in medias res with a discussion of the causation of this decline.

Industrial Decline and its Causation

We know Fordism now forms an era in the past history of capitalism: The mass production industries in the older regions of capitalist development and with them the big factory landscapes are gone.

Three explanations can be elicited, all causative moments of industrial decline and collapse in the older centers of capitalism (those dating back to the long nineteenth century). Consider all three, each in turn.

First, beginning in the late 1940s and extending into the early 1960s, larger us industrial capitals geographically diversified their operations. They both expanded operations and moved existing plant from the centers of union power in the Northeast and Midwest to the open shop, old Southern and southwestern states. This was done not just with the aim of seeking cheaper, unorganized labor, but with the intent of shifting the balance of power at the point of production in daily work and in struggles that broke out therein away from workers and their organizations (the major unions, uaw, umw, usw, Teamsters, uew, etc.) This regional movement was accelerated by, and a novel movement of capital abroad first appeared (though not systematically) in response to, the upsurge of wildcats in the last international cycle of class struggle (1964–1978) in the old centers of capitalism.2

Second, industrial decline in the United States is directly related to real domination, not so much by how we define it (the epochal moment in the history of capitalism at which production begins to undergo continuous transformation through machine inputs and, or, reorganization of the labor processes) but by what sustains it. The crucial feature permitting real domination to hold sway in global production (and as an epoch in the history of capitalism) is systematic, ongoing scientific and technological inputs to that production. Itself driven by competition between capitals, technical innovation generates more advanced (efficient, productive) labor processes. Competition may originate domestically or from abroad (or both), it makes no difference (though in the case of the United States foreign capitalists played the more important role in key sectors). Technical innovation on the basis of the modern science of nature, and its allied technologies, markedly increases per worker productivity leading to a corresponding decrease in the number of workers individual capitals require to generate the levels of surplus value necessary to valorize themselves as much larger individual capitals. Take the example of steel production, since it so forcefully instantiates the significance of technical innovation for worker employment. In 1900, it took slightly in excess of roughly a day of labor (14 man-hours) to produce a ton of galvanized steel. Production was carried out in, new then, the oldest form of open-hearth furnace. By 1950, improvements in this furnace had reduced production of the same ton to 8 man-hours, and by 1965, the most efficient open-hearth furnace allowed workers to form that steel in 6 man-hours of labor. By the end of the war in Indochina (1975), Japanese and Korean workers utilizing oxygen-burning furnaces could produce the same galvanized ton of steel in 4.5 man-hours.3 In the next twenty years, production times deploying the latest, most efficient oxygen burning furnaces had reduced this time to 2 man hours of labor. In 1988, an electric furnace-based form of steel production called the mini-mill first appeared in North Carolina. It melted existing scrap sourced from, for instance, local auto junk yards (that is it was not dependent upon raw ore, thus did not require a location astride a major waterway to transport the ores mined elsewhere). Relative to mills employing, say, oxygen-burning furnaces, it is vastly cheaper to construct a mini-mill, and abstract labor utilizing this technological achievement can produce a ton of galvanized steel in 3/4 man hours. Witness the outcome: In 1970, the steel industries in the United States employed about 600,000 workers, today they employ 75,000—80,000. Third, there is a more remote, theoretically paramount, mediate causation of industrial decline, the falling rate of profit. Modulated, and from 1965 down to the mid-seventies accelerated, by class struggle at the point of production, the rate of profit among large capitals was falling. In a strictly theoretical sense, expressed very crudely this can be set down to the increase in fixed capital (as a component of constant capital) relative to the decline in labor deployed in production, to the declining quantities of socially necessary labor time required in the production of commodities as they are averaged across whole industries, and thus to technical innovation. It means the technological innovation created by capitalist competition tendentially renders too much labor-power superfluous, makes it impossible for capitalists to valorize adequate amounts of abstract labor to sustain production at existing levels of development of productive forces.

The bourgeoisie, of course, recognized this profitability decline. It is from this moment, and this recognition, that we can date a shift away from investment in basic industry (production of the means of production, production of their inputs, production of consumer durables) toward the finance, entertainment and real estate sectors, which phenomenally at least appeared vastly more profitable.4 We might say the reorientation of investment was in the objective, historical sense capital’s response to the wildcat and the cycle of class struggle it largely defined: It inaugurated the entire historical process of the disintegration of domestically-centered mass production industries, beginning with initial stopgaps such as creation of nonunion subsidiaries, proceeding through deployment of subcontractors and the use of temporary workers. By 1984, the mass production international capitals in auto and related industries, joining hand with Sunbelt firms (in aerospace, agribusiness and oil, major elements of neo-Right power) had simply abandoned their “liberalism.” That is, these large capitalist concerns no longer accepted the social wage and supported the social welfare state. Instead, for starters they supported low-waged or worker-participation labor-capital relations with state subsidies and protectionist state support on the Japanese model. At that moment, the old liberal wing of the ruling class became largely nonexistent in a political sense as the neo-liberal program initially took shape. And it was from this situation that the primacy of speculative financial investment in the us economy, and the ensuing rentierization, arose.

So at this point (1984) in the history of capitalism, it was technical innovation (which extends into all spheres of activity including, today, increasingly the so-called “service sector” which has been built around cheap wages and precarious work from the start) that pushed de-industrialization forward: Mediated by the technological apparatus it sets in motion, it has been the gigantic growth in the productivity of abstract labor that had made de-industrialization a reality, makes a return to Fordism impossible and creates for capital its phenomenally decisive problematic, enormous excess capacity worldwide unmistakably evident and identifiable in the uninterrupted production of fallal, baubles and rubbish to alleviate some of that overcapacity. The upshot, though, may not be clear: Worldwide, both relative to global population today, and absolutely with respect to the total number of workers in manufacture, the industrial proletariat is smaller today than it was in 1965. It will continue to decrease numerically both relatively and absolutely.5

Part II—Contemporary Significant Classes

While retaining an analytic focus the following discussion, especially that of the second section, will be distinctively more polemical. We make no apologies.

Formation and Structure of a neo-Right, neo-Fascist Oppositional Culture at its Origins (1976–1984)

In 1974, Henry Kissinger engineered what would become known as the petro-dollar deal with the Saudis (military protection for pricing oil in dollars with some kickbacks from the Saudis to us weapons manufacturers for armaments purchases). The immense spike in the price of oil that followed not only exacerbated declining profit rates among great international capitals (other than the oil firms themselves), but the ensuing economic contraction narrowed the opportunities for waged work, put a permanent stop among organized workers to easily negotiated wage increases, and forced new considerations on all those in the social movements of the left who been able to preserve their radicalism: In the broadest terms, the oil shock brought everyone “to their senses” compelling recognition among far too many that all strategies had to be aligned to really existing capitalism.

At this moment, the street-oriented, explicitly political cadre as the dynamic element among the bloc of classes hegemonized by the great bourgeoisie launched a new series of initiatives: They included a property tax revolt in California led by Howard Jarvis, mobilizations to block the passage of the Equal Rights Amendments in state legislatures, and the first appearance of anti-abortion bigots and fascists in the streets. Aimed at capturing, these initiatives reached out to those middling groups who, constantly buffeted by the cyclical development of capitalism, had sought refuge in fundamentalist religion, going beyond and deepening its roots in Southern society and property through militancy around “single issue” rightist “social issues” struggles. Domestically, the core of the neo-liberal program had already begun to appear. It consisted in rolling back (with the aim of ultimately abolishing) New Deal reforms (minimum wage, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, social security; agricultural price supports; separation of investment from deposit banking; later additions to social security constituting a dimension of the social safety net such as food subsidies and aid to dependent children; a retirement medical program), and (another later development) public sector unions as well as liquidation of legislated and accrued business and environment regulations, elimination of progressive tax rates in favor of a flat tax, riddance of public funded education, and removal of the wall separating church and state through funding private schools and religious institutions. This was the neo-Right program at its origins, circa 1976.

Central to the dynamics of capitalist development over the past two hundred years has been increasing concentration of capital and centralization of ownership of the means of production. Previously economically independent strata have largely disappeared as a result of this development. Underpinned by growing financially speculative investment, and rentierization, the two periods of expansion (1983–1987, 1993–1997) following upon the end of the last cycle of workers struggle saw, to the contrary, layers of the middle stratum thicken as us-based, massive debt-supported consumption fueling global expansion has formed the other side of the abandonment of domestic industry (and, with it, domestic industrial employment) for sites abroad (primarily in East Asia), a development that characterizes industrial Europe as well, while, dialectically, overall global industrial employment has shrunk as productivity increased enormously. In and through this process, the us economy has undergone transformation from the world’s industrial dynamo to a rentier formation (based, most importantly, on financial services, insurance, real estate, and entertainment) for which middle strata consumption has been, at least up to the financial crisis (2008–2009), decisive.

In the vortex of these changes, a neo-Right oppositional culture germinated and grew. Consider its structure at its origins, much of which (though vastly expanded) survives to this day: At it origins and as it took shape it was as a multi-centered, decentralized mass political party of the right, neo-Right because it had abandoned the old right, isolationist, Midwest small-and medium-sized business based, pro-German and non-militarist Republican party which had opposed entry into the last imperialist world war. It has been characterized by overlapping, partially integrated organizations each at the core of one of those multiple centers. Each of these centers pursues a distinctive agenda, organizations and agendas overlapping in specific areas of activity, objectivity effecting a division of labor. If today Trump’s presence provides leadership, at its origins the institutions of this neo-Right oppositional culture lacked an overarching direction and formal connections.

Over forty years later almost all of these early institutions survive. In fact, there is a hierarchy of institutions, at the summit of which are corporate donors, fabulously wealthy individual contributors and private foundations. All largely operate through Washington DC-based think tanks and research institutes (the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute among the oldest), who are staffed by a well-paid, captive intelligentsia of free marketeers and rightwing libertarians, and which aim at shaping the policies of the federal executive, the Congress, the national network news programs, the large metropolitan newspapers, and increasingly the Internet. The think tanks and research institutes, then, constitute a subordinate ideological apparatus publishing the entire array of materials, periodicals, journals, newsletters, working papers and studies of specific problems which recurringly vex the bourgeoisie. These publications are intended for the consumption of Congressional members and particularly their staffs, those groups of individuals who by and large research and write legislation. That array of materials, moreover, includes a veritable flood of press releases and news stories so-called (many more of which than might be imagined end up reported and in print verbatim), as well as op-ed pieces, all of which are daily disseminated to the major us television, radio and newspapers, and, today, online. The purpose, it is dual, in all this is obvious but nonetheless requires and deserves stating. First, this entire ideological apparatus is oriented toward preempting and structuring the terms and contents of discourse on broad social, political, economic and cultural issues as well as specific events. This pursuit is primarily achieved in the provisions made for the major media (and through public contacts such as organized, scholarly and public conferences, and through the lecture circuit on college campuses and with community and business groups). Second, there is explicit intent to executively and legislatively (today more emphasis on the former) to shape, assure and maintain the legal and organizational principles of the capitalist system, returning it to its fabled “free market” foundations. This entails a push for deregulation of business activity and environmental safeguards, privatization of state services right down to the municipal level, the dismantling of affirmative action and the introduction of market principles in public education at all levels. These are, we note, policy orientations which in the past 30 years have been almost entirely successful in implementation. It is the ubiquitous character of the first activity which allows the terms in which the second is couched to appear reasonable, coherent and practically viable.

These institutions, the think tanks, are financially supported by foundations of the neo-Right as well as by large corporate grants. (By 1988, the corporate community provided a full 45 percent of its funding.) The major foundations include Adolph Coors Foundation, Fred C. Koch Foundation (energy, real estate), Samuel Nobel Foundation (oil and drilling), John M. Olin Foundation (agricultural chemicals), and Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation (Gulf Oil). Their mention makes clear who they are: Neo-Right foundations rest on trusts set up by wealthy Sunbelt capitalists. In this light, think tanks appear, then, as privately funded “research” communities pursuing a reactionary social and economic agenda with the support of individual members of an authoritarian, military-expenditures dependent ruling class social group.

A third center of power among the institutions forming the neo-Right oppositional culture is “political action groups.” The largest, most visible group is, of course, the institutional Republican Party membership in the Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives. Unlike other such neo-Right groups, however, this bloc is riddled with typically social class-interest group compromises which characterizes representative politics.

In and outside the Republican Party, explicitly political groups range from reactionary street cadre to those “respectable” groups operating on the terrain of formal bourgeois politics (such as the National Conservative Political Action Committee) and small legislative groups (such the “Freedom” Caucus in the House whose reverence for the Constitution is counterrevolutionary, the legal basis for its racism, and who is the historical analogue to the ultra-nationalist militarists, monarchists and fascists acting outside European parliaments in the immediate postwar period).6 So it is that at the top, neo-Right power rejoins nativists, fascists and neo-Nazis on the ground.

Today increasingly made up of those nativists, fascists and neo-Nazis, fighters among the reactionary cadre founding neo-Right power operate in the streets. By and away their largest component is middle strata refuse, i.e., economically precarious, behaviorally unstable elements. They are mostly white males. Precarity and instability has been generated by the absence of regular, well-waged and benefited work, thus loss of a work-based role that would permit of a “manly” identity, a loss which is the other side of the massive entry of women into the workforce, and a loss which that finds them fiercely resenting and fearing autonomous, working women. The same character defining emotions suffuse the consciousness of women who as non-working housewives are personally threatened by feminism. The connection tissue between this reactionary minority operating in the streets and the more stable bourgeois groups (e.g., middle stratum intellectuals) is obviously ideological. Of course, their respective behaviors are different: Street action involves undisguised fascist-terrorist intimidation and aggressive baiting, with reference to the early Munich-based nsdap what Martin Broszat called “provocative brutalities,”7 with the intent, for example, of shutting down abortion clinics; today, of bullying, frightening and demoralizing the soft left milieu such as Black Lives Matter; always, with the intent of using the media spectacle to build their own bases through rallies (celebrating antebellum monuments and the Confederate flag, affirming “free speech” for thugs and murderers); and, with the intent of occasional murder (Dr. Peter Gunn, Heather Heyer), though the latter hardly rivals the sheer numbers of cop executions which occur annually.

The evangelical Christian churches, the attached television ministries and organizations that have devolved from them (such as the Moral Majority now defunct) form the last center of neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist power. There are literally thousands of small parishes (especially in the South) operating out of old houses, abandoned buildings, ancient church buildings, and even strip mall storefronts, connected only to the larger oppositional culture by ideological appetite; the larger fundamentalist churches, however, are highly organized and tied through personnel and activities to the other centers of power. The intent here is different (from that of the street scum). It is threefold. With no attempt to prioritize, they are, first, provision of a biblically grounded construction of all contemporary events, relations between social groups and states. This construction establishes an operative conceptual framework from with which the meaning and significance of national and world developments are to be understood. That framework, second, also ensures fidelity to and fortifies evangelical concerns, a modern version of patriarchy in family life together with visceral opposition to feminism, and individualism (which interprets socially mediated or determined “failure” in terms of personal shortcoming and justifies a commitment to bootstrap capitalism). Third, efforts are made to shape local affairs (and here among the small parishes a further connection is made to the other centers of power, for guidelines drawn up by the later are often utilized in) petitioning school board and state legislatures to permit school prayer, enact abortion prohibitions, de-secularize textbooks and teach creationism. As a whole, the evangelical Christian churches give direction to primarily middle stratum, especially its lumpen layers, mediating their aspirations, politics and existential concerns, activity entirely congruent and advancing the multiple agendas of the institutions of a neo-Right, neo-fascist culture.

Unlike traditional, denominational American churches the evangelical ministries elicits far greater religious commitment. They, for example, often provide the really hardcore among the single-issue fascists engaged in the kinds of actions described above. Their relations to other organizations and centers of power within the neo-Right milieu are much more distant since they function quite autonomously with respect to these other organizations. The same cannot be said of other organizations and centers of power in relation to one another: Organizations and generations of leadership interlock; strategies are often jointly planned; and the same politically authoritarian, militaristic and nationalist, patriarchal and unfettered capitalist vision animates their views of American society.

The entire direction of de-industrializing us development, and beyond it the financial crisis and its depressionary aftermath, has not only created a vast precarious proletarian mass, but simultaneously a dense lumpenized middle stratum layer that includes, above all, small owners (many Internet based) and “independent contractors” highly visible in residential construction (where they were once upon a time, “handy men”), in transportation (e.g., FedEx where drivers are forced to buy “their own” delivery trucks, Uber, etc.), in telecommunications among non-organized employees, and elsewhere.

The nuclear elements of the neo-Right oppositional culture present in the middle strata taxpayer and homeowner revolts of the latter half of the 1970s as well as fears of “white” working class layers about emerging feminism and black entry into high-paid wage-labor jobs were tapped into by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 Presidential campaign. These activities and sentiments were crucial to the formation of an alliance of classes that created the conditions for a dramatic rightward shift in the political culture of American society during the 1980s, and that with the electoral triumph of Donald Trump continues, deepening, to this day. The political culture that emerged in the ‘80s is what we have here characterized as “neo-Right,” nascently neo-liberal and, today, more or less openly neo-fascist. Opposed to the reformist, welfare-statist perspectives characterizing high capitalism in its Fordist phase and embodied in the historically liberal wing of the Democratic party, the neo-Right practices of the Reagan-Bush era objectively constituted recognition of the inability of declining mass production industries to form the foundations of renewed us capital accumulation, of the decline of mass consumption norms among the vast overwhelming majority of the wage-earning population (and increasingly now of numerous layers of the salaried middle stratum as layer upon layer is either proletarianized or lumpenized), and the centrality of a political mediation of the changing American economy and class relations, what we otherwise call the increasingly totalitarian, police despotic naked dictatorship of capital over society.

Class Struggle and Politics in the Age of Accelerating, Abrupt Climate Change

“Race” came into being as a historically formed, varying and changing ensemble (i.e., a logical, ordered complex) of culturally specific meanings that constitute an imaginary social relationship. The contents of these meanings (this imaginary social relation) form a socially constructed psychic topography of arcane fears, anxieties, fantasies, and sham facts and insights projected onto the libidinous body and otherwise unfathomable soul of a degraded Other. These meanings are, …the imaginary social relationship is, called into being by and serve Power. They at once structure Objective Spirit (e.g., law) and are embodied as the tacit purpose of any number of institutions. Hence, they are materialized and to this extent “real.” Accordingly, this imaginary social relation, a projection sedimented in the structure of personal identity, bestows petty privilege upon those whose daily social practice reproduces these institutions as congealed social relations of domination (and reproduces them in opposition to those who struggle against subordination and marginalization).8

What is effectively required is that the need and affect structures of the persons, groups, and class strata who would be bearers of free communities already be implicit in the old society, so that this community is already tacitly and pre-figuratively constituted as an actually possible alternative to existing social relations. The full emergence of these human beings remains on the horizon of the future.9

There is a storm on the horizon. Its character is social, political and productive. It portends the very real possibility of large-scale conflict and a major confrontation. In the Hegelian sense it is actual (i.e., immanent to the existing configuration of social relations), prefiguring gigantic class struggle.

Since classes only exist in relation to one another, to this moment the foregoing has for analytic purposes been abstract: Only one side in this confrontation has been identified, the classes and strata (small owners, independent contractors, the lumpen middle stratum and older, precarious and self-consciously “white” workers) that constitute a neo-fascist oppositional bloc.10

So who forms the other side of this contradictory social relation that encompasses the whole of society? It too constitutes a bloc of classes and strata, but its social reality is only possible (socially, not logically, possible). It consists in the large layers of Spanish speaking and black workers and much smaller ethnic-national layers as well, a stratum of white workers, and a vast number of youth, significant numbers of whom are and who will be proletarianized, engaging in precarious labor. Of paramount import here, there has not been a proletarian core among the working classes in the old capitalist zones for over a quarter century, as four decades of outsourcing, restructurings and downsizing destroyed the traditional industrial center; and with the appearance of these youthful strata, especially proletarians, that core is re-forming.11

How is this core to be identified? Let the other side speak to the issue. Steve Bannon tells us this core consists in “millennials,” for they are “socialists,” and he decries the increasing secularism among this demographical group, stating, “the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising generation.”12 There are several points we are required to address here. First, Bannon is a nativist, “white” and an economic nationalist, an ideologue who mediates a neo-fascist oppositional culture to the reactionary bloc of classes; in fact, since it is this bloc which supports (politically renders possible and sustains) right-wing power in the state, above all the Trump presidency, and since Trump is patently the leader, an idiotic spokesman, of this bloc, it also of import that, in the same way Trotsky was Stalin’s theorist, Bannon is Trump’s theorist.13 Second, in identifying “millennials” as the class enemy, far more savvy than Trump Bannon, like a few other Trump officials such as David Malpass, understands the nature of the struggle and its potential culmination in civil war and has said as much.14 Third, by “millennials,” Bannon is not simply designating a chronologically determined age coterie.15 And by “socialist” he surely does not mean “revolutionary.” Instead, he means and intends the demand for student loan forgiveness, support for universal, free health care funded from general revenues as well as public sector job creation, for legislation and action aimed at ameliorating climate change, and the further demand for far more rigorous nationally legislated gun control, in other words, he means all those youths who support (and existentially require) a vast expansion of federal expenditures largely of the existing tattered, minimalist social safety net. He means those who in the full (Weimar German) sense of the term might be called “social democrats.” Bannon’s determination of who constitutes the enemy in the ongoing and coming struggle, then, refers us in the strict sense to the contents of consciousness.

One may scoff. If so, the problematic nature of “consciousness” does not rise to the level of explicit awareness. Instead, it is blocked by the false conviction that it “the material basis of whiteness” which, having largely disappeared, underlines white working class racism.16 This problematic can only be transcended if it is recognized that the formation of a social subject is not just “materially” but, of greater significance, institutionally and pre-cognitively shaped.

Approach this somewhat obliquely.

Consider the woman recently (July 2018) harassed (gone viral) by some self-consciously white male who kept badgering her, alleging she did not have citizen status, all the while another (self-consciously) white cop stood by ignoring her pleas for assistance. (She is a resident of Puerto Rico which, whatever you think of this, is territorially part of the United States, i.e., she is a citizen and a national.) You don’t explain this behavior by reference to “whiteness” if by that all you mean is petty (”material”) privilege. Rather, what is at issue here is that “imaginary social relation,” that “socially constructed psychic topography of arcane fears, anxieties, fantasies, and sham facts and insights” and embedded in it, the one social fact, which “material” privileges (from waivers of tax payments and parish levies while participating in the slave patrol down in historical time to higher wages along with exemption from really difficult, backbreaking work) have been designed to affirm and which de-industrialization has largely destroyed, namely an experientially based three class model of society (the rich above “us,” “us” in the middle, and “them” permanently below us, a barbarous common sense elaboration of immediate experience), providing “us” with moral worth and human dignity by proving that “we,” “whites,” are better than “them,” “blacks,” or more generally people of color.

So what is at issue is not material privileges so-called, but the institutions which create a perverse, malformed identity on the foundations of a socially constructed psychic topography for which bigotry, racism and racialized awareness affirm moral worth and human dignity.

This brings us back to Bannon’s “socialist” “millennials.”

Whatever we make of institutions which shape the sensibilities of Bannon’s “millennials,” those sensibilities are not racialized. First, let’s understand the historical foundations governing institutions that impart a non-racialized, precognitive affective existence. These are multiple but the following elements are crucial:17 By the early 1970s a socially generalized opposition to the war in Indochina (recall that even those who voted for Richard Nixon were promised by the sitting president that he had a secret plan for withdrawing from Vietnam) and, in conjunction with this, opposition both popular and emanating from states themselves among the bourgeois democracies of the West compelled the us ruling class to seriously pursue efforts to recoup its authority. (It was after all experiencing a crisis of legitimacy): The requirement was reconnecting capitalism, American capitalism, to bourgeois democracy. It should also be kept in mind that backgrounding, if you will, the entire societal crisis, was the ever-present issue of capital’s outward problematic, overcapacity, overproduction and a surfeit of commodities. In this context, the public, spectacular sanctification of the murdered Martin King was pressing: the Achilles heel of American bourgeois democracy as formally democratic has always been the institutionally racist burdening of blacks. For instance, it was the one criticism that the state capitalist bloc, societies of the Soviet type, offered, and to which those engaged in the ideological defense of the political form of American capitalism could not forcefully respond. From the mid-1970s on, it was imperative to develop, then put in place, a program which, while consciously failing to touch key socially reproductive institutions (the family, the workplace), might offer a self-image to Americans and an image to the bourgeois world of America as a color blind society. A safe place to institutionalize that problem, so it was believed, was the school system. Core curriculum was transformed, textbooks rewritten, new faces, dark-skinned Americans speaking, playing and working with naturalized, “white” Americans appeared in elementary school workbooks, literature was carefully chosen (and in works in which bigotry was present and the teaching of which could not be avoided, educators went to great lengths to point out the vast gulf that separated the present-day from Jim Crow, Redeemed and Antebellum America). Policy makers at all level of the state down to its lowest, the school districts, municipalities and townships may have been cynically posturing, but educators, the teachers themselves, by and large took it all very seriously. Film capitals cooperated. More black actors appeared, and in good guy and gal roles; and, of course, in its own crucial way there was Sesame Street. De-industrialization with its falling wage rates and collapsing benefit structure was forcing women in droves into the workplace, thereby drastically restricting the role of the family in socialization of the very young. At the same time, the capitalist daycare center as a social phenomenon emerged as an alternative venue of socialization, but animated by same principles increasingly operative in institutions of education. With respect to the latter, what was taught? Equality, tolerance, and sensitivity to feeling and sentiment. Tolerance of difference, national, ethnic, racial and gender inclusivity, was not only taught but cultivated, not as intellectual content (though this was present) but as pre-reflective attitude, as practice and behavior. Ironically, implementation of the entire socializing project began as Ronald Reagan took office as the American state’s chief executive. And, indeed, in large measure it has been successfully carried out, primarily because since the time of Reagan the function of schooling had dramatically changed. Instilling a discipline commensurate with factory work, the underlying pre-cognitive aim of education until that moment was transformed into cultivation of a subjectivity which realizes itself in and through the consumption of commodities, commensurate with capital’s phenomenal problematic of overproduction and commodity excess.

To be sure, not all youth develop de-racialized sensitivities. But, then, not all school districts have systematically pursued this socializing project: Over the past four decades, it has been the large metropolitan school districts, with at least some financial resources, and at least a modicum of racial integration where the project has been successful. Thus, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (housing 8,000 students) in Parkland, Florida. Even if undertaken, it has decidedly not come to fruition in the small, rural and pervasively white school districts.

Evidence? Witness young people who gather at popular venues of mass consumption, note their inter-ethnic, inter-racial composition. Make a list (it would be exceedingly long) of the cop executions of black males in very recent years, and examine the media accounts (visual bytes in the network news media, newspaper photographs, online videos especially at YouTube) of the protests, spontaneous and otherwise, in response to these murders. Inter-ethnically, inter-racially constituted youth are best represented. In fact, you’ll find lots and lots of “white” faces. How do you account for this?

It may be retorted that this is not class analysis, which means: “Youth” is an amorphous, non-class category, while by and away the largest number of Bannon’s “millennials” are “white,” their concerns do not address pressing issues of immigration and cop brutality and murder.

Consider, however, that propelled by competition among capitals, the dynamic of technological innovation at the dead, mechanical heart of capitalism will insure vast numbers of these “millennials,” education and expectations notwithstanding, will be proletarianized and precarious, and deeply, very deeply in debt: (The whole situation itself has and will increasingly become a formula for lived and experienced immiseration.) Casualization is a universal, ubiquitous datum of proletarian life today here in the United States and in the whole capitalist world (the entire world) and will be, more so, into the foreseeable future. Consciousness in both its pre-cognitive and explicit aspects is, at any rate, constitutive of class.

The view put forth here is that, among proletarians struggling with the issue of power, an awareness that is non-racialized, and whose sensibilities embrace tolerance and equality will be far more disposed toward a just and equitable treatment of immigrants, and will, moreover, be capable of addressing the really thorny irredentist and revanchist questions that, dating to 1846, may still linger in popular awareness; such proletarians will also far more likely be ecologically sensitive; and, prior even to the assumption of power, in the conflicts to come replete with cop brutality, such awareness, notwithstanding bourgeois democratic and electoral illusions, will come to recognize (if only intuitively) the role and function of cops as the front line of ruling class power on the ground. From the high school student walkouts (22–25 February 2011) in eastern Wisconsin which initiated the mass strike culminating on the Sunday (27 February 2011) 100,000 person plus rally in Madison to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas led demonstrations and rallies of Florida high schoolers that compelled a right-wing legislature to enact, and a NRA sycophantic, atavistic governor to sign, restrictive gun legislative, this youthful proletariat in the making exhibits a capacity for acting in concert (in the tens of thousands) in a way in which workers in the us have not done since the 1970s. This is worth noting. Actually it is of utmost importance.

There is a final subterranean issue here, a question of whether the emerging proletarian core is too “white.” Millennials alone at 75.4 million individuals form the largest demographical group in us history. It may be believed they are largely “white” (where the term is not naturalized but refers to outward appearance, phenotype in genetic sense where it is taken as immediately given, i.e., observationally accessible, yet in a lengthy historical process formed by the human organism’s structures and functions), but in point of fact a full 42 percent in 2012 and 46 percent in 2018 of “millennials” are non-”white.”18 But more to the point, for non-racialized awareness the issues of “white,” “race” and “color” simply do not weigh heavily.

As we shall attempt to show in our conclusion, the whole trajectory of contemporary development tends toward a general crisis of capitalism: When seen in its broader context described below, this crisis, set down within planetary ecological and climatic transformation, portends a gigantic class confrontation that, though not fated, is most likely to transpire. Within this setting, there will be opportunity, undoubtedly fleeting, for revolutionaries to exhibit political weight without any relation to their tiny numbers.

So what are the requirements here? “Whiteness” cannot and will not be abandoned by those who are its bearers. Its impact, however, will lessen (not societally, but as an internal relation of the working class with itself) over time, but not as dramatically as we might wish, but lessen nonetheless; that is as large numbers of self-consciously “white” workers will “age up” and no longer be significant for the class relation. Perhaps not, but an eminently defensive sound position, and a rational hope.19 The requirement here is to fully comprehend the situation and its dynamic.

Part III—Problems of Revolutionary Communists

There are two very large blank spots in the thinking of revolutionary communists. They devolve on the crisis of society set down in local nature itself undergoing rapid deterioration and unraveling. The consequences of the failure to come to grips with this blindness are large-scale, even disqualifying.

Planetary Climate Change

We’ll forgo discussion of ongoing ecological collapse and mass species extinction and instead direct ourselves exclusively to planetary climate transformations.20

Examine three experientially manifest forms of changing climate, torrential rainfalls and flooding, heat waves, and wildfires. All these are very recent events, a snapshot of changes that are ongoing, occurring with more and more frequency with greater and greater intensity.

In the first week of April, flooding in North Yorkshire due to heavy rain occurred producing crop failure from waterlogged fields and the death of livestock (10 percent of all lambs) due to drowning; at the same time, there was flooding in Kauai, Hawaii where, after 24 inches of rain in 24 hours fell, mass evacuations by air were required; in mid-April, in Jammu and Kashmir heavy snows and rainfalls closed highways and caused avalanches and landslides; and, again in mid-April, along Red Sea coast Arabia (south of Mecca) storms produced hail so dense that in the aftermath nearly a foot of icy snow remained. All of these events were unprecedented, “weird” by historical standards.

On 5 July, the same day Denver reached 105 °F (40.5 °C) and central Pakistan 122.4 °F (50.2 °C), both all-time recorded high temperatures, the following cities across the northern hemisphere hit record daily highs: 98 °F (36.6 °C) in Montreal, 86 °F (30 °C) in Castlederg (Ireland) and 85 °F (29.5 °C) in Belfast, 89.4 °F (32 °C) in Glasgow and 92 °F (33 °C) in Motherwell (also Scotland), 107.6 °F (42 °C) in Yerevan (Armenia), and 108.7 °F (42.6 °C) in Quriya (Oman).

As we write, on 18 July, while 60 major wildfires are blazing in the western United States, 11 large wildfire rage inside the Arctic Circle in Greenland, Siberia, Alaska and Canada with the worst in Sweden. Those in Canada, still burning, reach down into southernmost British Columbia, thus creating a line of wildfires visible from space along the length of the North American Pacific coast. In Europe, Ukraine has been hit especially hard by wildfires.

All this represents the proverbial tip of the metaphoric iceberg.

Torrential downpours and flooding are regionally, not globally, connected; but the wildfires and the heat (and dryness) driving them are globally synchronized. That’s an indication of the trajectory of planetary change. Generated, exacerbated and accelerated by capitalist development, these changes now respond to a dynamic of their own: Shut down all power plant and industrial emissions, eliminate exhaust from vehicles of all sorts, stop all airline flights, and above all shut down emissions from military operations (perhaps the greatest carbon producer on Earth), put an end to all of it tomorrow, and atmospheric CO₂ levels will continue to rise for the next quarter century, and the heat, drought, wildfires, downpours and flooding will continue to increase in lockstep while appearing in qualitatively novel ways. Does the technological means to alter this situation exit? No. Might it be created? Perhaps, but it is vastly more likely that the new Earth the formation of which the movement of capital has initiated will last several million years, a reality that in a practical way is beyond human comprehension.

Even without a runaway warming, the terminus of this ongoing transformation—the end of the interglacial and with it the onset of oppressively hot climates, reduction of built environments to a level well below that which existed 8,000–9,000 years ago and, above all, a resources famine in nature—renders genuinely communist designs emphasizing the suppression of work, opposition to a “transition,” and the effort to put abundance on a new non-commodified basis beyond technologies of capital no longer germane or meaningful.

Marxists have continued to celebrate nature mastery long after it passed over into resource plunder and ecological destruction, affirming that communism as a free human community rested solidly on the foundations of the “material achievements” of capitalism. Since circa 1998 and in particular beginning from the financial crisis, revolutionary communists have miserably failed to link climate change, mass species extinction and ongoing ecological collapse to capitalist dynamics, while the entire neo-Right, neo-fascist culture has tied their defense of capitalism to climate change denial. So here we are without a clue (much less programmatic direction) as to how to cope with these transformations.

Ask yourself as a revolutionary ensconced in a novel, proletarian organizational form holding power, call it a council or quasi-state, two decades from now what will you and your comrades, those here and abroad, do when the glacier melts are exhausted and winter snowfalls are so sparse that the flows of many of the major rivers feeding great cities of the world slow to a trickle or dry up? When the surrounding countryside of those cities is subject to intense heat and unrelenting drought, the cities dying for lack of water and food? When the Rockies and Sierra Nevada fall to this fate, and the thirst of Los Angeles, Vegas and Phoenix cannot be satisfied, or the heat is so intense that the same Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson and El Paso and cities like these are simply abandoned? As the first 5–6 foot rise in sea levels generates salination which kills all coastal crops worldwide, and an eighth of the world population (nearly a billion people) begins a forced migration into continental interiors that will not end until that rise exceeds 260 feet and roughly half the world population has migrated? (Salination has made rice farming impossible in Bangladesh as much as 60 kilometers inland from the Bay of Bengal; and it has forced a million peasant farmers to abandon rice cultivation and leave their homes in the Mekong Delta.) How do you anticipate dealing with the same as mass migrations move inland from the coastal eastern United States and the Gulf region? How will you deal with the collapse of infrastructure, ports and docks that fall under sea level rise, storm sewers backed up and overflowing in streams, lakes and rivers, highways, rail lines and runways that buckle under overwhelming heat, bridges and roads battered and destroyed by relentless storms, the overload and shutdowns of electrical power stations due to intense heat-based demand, and, accordingly, with the collapse of local, regional and global distribution systems? How will you cope with wet bulb temperatures of 35 °C and above, as people in the tens, nay hundreds of thousands incessantly undergo heat prostration, physiological shutdown and death?21

Crisis of State Legitimacy and Revolutionary Communists

The long aftermath of the financial crisis (2008–2009) includes the Occupy Movement, the February 2011 mass strike and following state house occupation in Madison, the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and, as events shifted rightward, Trump’s election in 2016. Taken together, these events reveal a certain loss of naive faith in the state. Not merely diversionary, Trump’s conflicts with and the popular support he has marshaled against the FBI, the neo-con Congress, network news and the major national newspapers of record exhibit profound cynicism, albeit most of it coming from the right, toward the dominant ruling class faction. This speaks to increasing disenchantment. Yet specifiable convictions, beliefs and illusions put a break on just how deep this disenchantment can go.

The case in point is the events inside the United States on 11 September 2011.

In New York, highjackers with no commercial piloting experience carried out maneuvers experienced pilots would have had extreme difficulty accomplishing; airline crashes are said to have ignited and melted a complex of steel girders with a maximal intensity of heat that made such melting impossible; the collapse and free fall of the North and South Towers was consistent with controlled demolition; in Washington, the size of the hole, the extent of the damage inflicted on the Pentagon and absence of airline debris were all consistent with a hit by a guided missile; in New York and Washington, the failure of the entire NORAD based air defense gird was inexplicably unprecedented; near Shanksville, the debris pattern of the downed plane was also consistent, and only consistent with destruction by a missile (not to mention the impossibility of lengthy, coherent cellphone calls from above 8,000 feet in 2001). And on and on and on.

The official report of the 9/11 Commission is a sham with zero explanatory value. It is an absurd conspiracy theorization writ large. Yet it functions as a summation of a widely held, rationally unacceptable belief.

Now there is good reason why revolutionary communist websites and discussions forums do not take these events up (but, there is no good reason why the same often parrot the official line): Open up a site or forum to discussion of such events and there’ll be arguments whether the Queen of England and, or, the Vatican in pursuit of Satanic rituals control the world of great capitalist finance.

But there are two far more important aspects to whatever value discussions of this specific “conspiracy” possess.

First, among those workers who do not define themselves in terms of their “whiteness,” and additionally probably offer little or no support to Trump, and among the emerging non-racialized, youthful proletarian core, there is electoral allegiance if not to the Democratic Party, then to the state and, particularly, the country and “nation.” Belief in the official version of the events of 911 September 2001 not only paradigmatically exhibits a heart-felt chauvinism, it is the myth of our time binding the working class to “its” “nation” (i.e., to the ruling class, to its projects, and to capitalism). No revolutionary transformation is possible without breaking the back of this (among other) myth(s).

Second, even cursory consideration of the events of that day suggests (while serious examination of evidence compels) the conclusion that a rogue network of operatives housed inside the intelligence agencies, the military command structure and the Executive-based permanent bureaucracies purposively carried out these actions. The significance of this is that there is something very much like a “deep state” functioning within the structure of the bourgeois polity. Yet with the single exception of Wildcat, no forum of revolutionary communists pays attention to the reality and import of the “deep state.” Its importance is this: In the coming struggle, regardless of how widespread support for revolutionary change in the red hot heat of class confrontation, the presence of “deep state” operatives in support of a fascist oppositional bloc guarantee civil war and civil war which is long, bloody and, as with all civil wars, vicious.

Conclusion—Tariffs, Trade Wars and Shooting Wars

The Drift toward Renewed Imperialist World Becomes the Tendential Direction of Capitalist Development

There are currently two roads to renewed imperialist world war, de-dollarization and tariff wars. We’ll examine each in turn.

De-dollarization is the longer, slower road, but perhaps the more certain. Since the moment Kissinger engineered a deal with the Saudis as the world’s then largest oil producer and undisputed leader of OPEC, the petro-dollar has underlay the global system of trade.

For forty-four years, every central bank in the world has had to possess large dollar reserves (in the form of us Treasuries) or forfeit purchase of that fundamental commodity lubricating the world economy, oil. Furthermore, the us trade deficit, and thus the debt-based standard of living in the United States (without respect to stratum or class whether various layers of the property owning business classes, well-to-do adjuncts to capital and professionals of all sorts, or different strata within the proletariat), is financed by the petro-dollar: For the most part stemming from overseas, and largely from East Asia, the vast purchases of the various great and small retailers are paid for by presenting us Treasuries for imported goods arriving by container ship. The us Treasury Department prints dollars in order to cover both the trade deficit (which will exceed $600 billion in fiscal 2018), and the interest on the loans (this time the receipts from the sale of Treasury bonds) that finance the federal deficit. This printing is done without reference to American productivity in the full knowledge Treasuries backstop world trade (i.e., are sitting in the vaults of central banks across the world to meet the dollar purchases, most importantly oil, of their national capitals): This printing is inflationary, vastly so, and the inflation is exported abroad through central banks’ Treasury bond purchases. Taken, together, this is the basic meaning of dollar suzerainty.

Dollar hegemony, however, is troubled. De-dollarization proceeds on two “fronts” if you will.

First, a good portion (perhaps as much 40 percent) of world trade is now, and soon the largest part (perhaps 60 percent) will be taking place, outside the dollar zone. A simple enumeration is in order here.

China’s Xi’s signature project, revival of the Silk Road (the Belt and Road Initiative, which is far more than a highway stretching across central and western Asia), is reputed to have the dollar equivalent of 6 trillion in pending contracts, almost all in infrastructural development.

Since 2005, planned efforts have been ongoing in several areas of infrastructural construction that underlay and accelerate trade in east, southeast and east Asia. The Chinese state and a number of financial institutions (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS Development Bank, and the Chinese InterBank Payment System) have been and are funding these developmental projects. Across Eurasia the Russians have been similarly active.

Those projects include railways, highways, natural gas and oil pipelines, and ports.

The Kunming–Singapore Railway refers to a network of railways, under planning and construction, that would connect China, Singapore and all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia.22 In January 2015, the Beijing city government announced Russia and China will build a 7,000-kilometer (4,350-mile) high-speed rail link from Beijing to Moscow, a ten year partnership at a cost of 1.5 trillion yuan ($242 billion). The rail-link will bring travel time between Beijing and Moscow down from 5 days to 30 hours.

Revival of the old wwii Stilwell Road, a highway connecting China to India (Assam), is well developed. In 2005, Indian and Chinese survey teams began mapping out plans to rebuild the road. So far China has done all the reconstruction work, paving dozens of miles at a time with granite stones packed into dirt. When the monsoons end, the surface is watered, rolled and baked hard in the sun, making it almost as flat as asphalt.

A decision to construct a transcontinental highway was made back in 2007, a memorandum signed between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. The aim of the project is the construction of a motorway with a length of up to 8,500 kilometers from St. Petersburg to Western China through Kazakhstan, where it would connect with a network of Chinese roads. In the near future Chinese and Kazakh sections of the roads will be finished and the Russian part will be finished in 2020.

Natural gas and oil pipelines are under construction in Central Asia and China, as part of one unitary project. Thread by thread the pipeline project has been gathering all of the available gas resources of Central Asia. Now a fourth branch is being built, called Strength of Siberia which constitutes in two lines combined into one which will deliver gas from Eastern Siberia and the Far East to China: The East-West oil pipeline carries oil from fields in Kazakhstan to China. The Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean and Western Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipelines supply oil to China and further on to the Asia-Pacific region with oil from fields in Russian Siberia and Far Eastern fields.

China is also considering building a rail line to parallel a 1,100 kilometer pipeline connecting Kunming and the western Burmese deep-sea port under construction at Kyaukpyu.

Bilateral trade agreements (2014.05.21) between China and Russia in investment and finance have been formalized, with local currency settlement, and with the Chinese investing in development in housing, infrastructure, natural resources such as coal, iron ore and copper. The agreement includes a deal on the purchase of Russian natural gas for Chinese renminbi. In October 2014, China and Russia signed a 150 billion yuan currency swap deal. This underpins accords on energy, banking and technology that include the east gas pipeline route, a double-tax treaty, satellite navigation, high-speed rail and Rosneft-CNPX cooperation, with China indicating a readiness to export agricultural products and oil and gas equipment to Russia.

All these infrastructural projects and the trade pacts are conducted in local currency, thus accelerating the de-dollarization of commercial relations.23

The second “front” amounts to a direct assault on the petro-dollar. It involves non-dollar agreements made with respect to petroleum purchases. Qatar accepts Chinese renminbi for the purchase of oil, as do the Iranians and Russians. Nigeria, Venezuela, and yes Saudi Arabia sell thicker crudes to the Russians who refine it and market it, while the sellers thereby avoid us sanctions. These pacts are of very recent vintage, without any in place before 2017.

To facilitate developments on both these fronts, linked to the Chinese Interbank Payment system in early June (2018) the Chinese state began issuance of a gold trade note, a certificate that permits exporters who receive payment in renminbi for goods sold to or in China to exchange the rmb for the gold trade note. The note can be held by central banks, or redeemed for bullion at any time.

These developments, all of them and all ongoing, undermine global dollar suzerainty. Without the most unlikely of events, a vast reduction in the us trade deficit, sooner or later, likely later (in a five year time frame as a rough estimate), the refusal, especially by shipments coming out of East Asia, to accept Treasuries in exchange for container cargo at us ports will grow qualitatively, snowball, and precipitate massive shortages and runaway inflation inside the United States…

A tariff war sets us down another road to renewed imperialist world war, though this is less certain, filled, as this road is, with exits that fall short of what in the end we think is where the various dynamics operative in capitalism tend toward.

There is no way to avoid this: It starts with Trump.

On exhibit in his 2016 campaign rallies, Trump is a thug on the model of Mussolini. His plutocratic appetites make him a political leader on the model of Peron. Though his diminished and diminishing vocabulary suggest an early form of dementia, though clarity is largely absent and though he publicly contradicts himself with a regularity that is amazing, a singular consistency in behavior is apparent. It is nativist, xenophobic and racist. At the level of policy, these behaviors translate into an economic nationalist motif governing its formulation. Trump’s shorthand for this is the phase “America First,” ideologically expressed in the popularized slogan, “Make America Great Again.” It took Trump a frustrating year in office to learn that his kingly expectations and predilections could not be realized in domestic policy. Foreign policy offers a freer hand, and, currently, tariffs can be decreed on his authority alone.

Tariffs are important.

First, pursued doggedly by a powerful enough capitalist state for a long enough period of time, they can reconfigure the existing structure of capitalist social relations globally.

Second, they can accelerate a trajectory of development that is immanent to those social relations as they form the entire world system.

Trump’s supporters among workers (such as those at Harley-Davidson), a support which has grown dramatically since his 2016 election, and among the business classes (such as soybean farmers) believe, that is they fervently hope, the tariffs imposed on European and Chinese raw materials and finished goods constitute a negotiating tactic and they are temporary. It is further believed that within six months (by the beginning of next year, 2019), they will have achieved the goal of leveling the playing field (i.e., reconstructing the advantages in exchange which the United States with Bretton Woods enjoyed in the long aftermath of the last imperialist world war) and, accordingly, will be dropped. There is, however, evidence to the contrary. And, crucially, it concerns China with which there is much likely less chance (than with the eu) of some sort of accommodation.

Robert Lighthizer, a trade lawyer for larger steel capitals, is the us trade representative, the man (actually he has a group of subordinates) who is (are) drawing up the list of goods and materials against which the next $200 billion of tariffs against the Chinese are to be imposed. He has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal (2018.07.05) as stating that he does not think the tariffs will force China’s red capitalists to fall into line, which means that entire dollar amount of the Chinese surplus in exchange vis-a-vis the United States ($375 billion), actually the figure that is floated by his Administration and Trump himself is $505 billion, will be subject to tariffs. Like the Europeans (eu), the Chinese have and will continue to retaliate, though it will take a different form after the next $100 billion in reciprocal tariffs since Chinese purchases from the us do not exceed $130 billion. One form that retaliation will take is harassment of us capitals operating in China (slowing down requests for waivers on internal exchange regulations, on environmental restrictions, etc.), another is and will continue to be the slow, steady devaluation of the rmb and, still open to the Chinese, there is the really big “trump” card, dumping hundreds of billions of dollars in us Treasury bonds on world markets, taking gold or whatever currency they prefer in exchange. Tariffs, then, beget retaliation which, in turn beget further retaliation, and shifts in the form the latter take. It can lead to a vast contraction in world trade. After Smoot-Hawley (June 1930), retaliation was forthcoming from Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and India, and all the developed European nations.24 Generating a trade war, tariff retaliation was inadequate; it was followed by still higher duties on specific products or product categories, differential evaluations, exchange restrictions, and preferential treatment for domestic products. This led to capital controls, blocked accounts and currency devaluations. Bilateral trade was shortly the order of the day, but, it too was inadequate and was soon (by 1932) surpassed by trade blocs (uk Commonwealth “preferential treatment,” a customs union that included Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands).25 Among the more aggressive imperialist great powers, Germany and Japan, bilateral trade and trading blocs in basic ways were unable to support acquisition of necessary raw materials on suitable terms. Trade war led to shooting wars, starting with territorial aggrandizement. The German “Drang nach Osten” began with annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and by way of Hungarian absorption aimed at a Grosswirtschaftsraum (Greater German Economy) that encompassed Romania, Bulgaria and Greece (and reduced the former two nations in particular to an agricultural hinterland with the Nazis dictating what crops were grown, their prices and what purchases could be made).26 The Japanese started from the military occupation of Manchuria in September 1931, which was industrialized on the basis of enslaved Chinese labor, and culminated in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (proclaimed in September 1940), which was a euphemism for military conquest (China, Singapore, Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina and Burma) and organized plunder and pillage.27 Military conquest and shooting wars led to world war.

So there’s the pattern, and while history does not rescript itself by repeating event for event, past history and contemporaneity at this early stage are structurally similar: Tariffs, tariff retaliation, higher levies on specific products and categories of goods, preferential treatment (including subsidies) for domestic products, currency devaluations and capital controls have all appeared, though what the Trump Administration likes to say it aims at is bilateral trade. We’ll return to this.

Lighthizer has more to say on the matter of tariffs. He has also been quoted, pity Trump supporters, as saying tariffs could last for “several years.” (Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary, steel magnate and beneficiary of the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on the eu, the Chinese, S. Koreans, Mexicans and Canadians, is on record as stating that tariffs should be imposed indefinitely.) In fact, Lighthizer and Ross, and the Koch brothers too, together with Trump embody the (domestic steel and oil) nationalist and protectionist and rentier interests of factions within the us ruling class who have been less successful in valorizing their capitals in an era of American de-industrialization. It is these capitals which have “lost the battle for modernization” in the face of global competition especially as conditions of their reproduction as capitals has worsened since the financial crisis.28 Yet they alone constitute a minor summit within that class: Whatever political conflicts, or circus as the case may be, rage in the media spectacle, Trump can pursue his tariff policy because he has garnered, retained and enjoys far more significant support in armament manufacturers, great bankers and large oil capitals: Adjusted for inflation, military spending today rivals that of 35 years ago under Reagan, Dodd-Frank has been legislatively repealed, and the world price of oil has doubled since Trump entered the White House. Thus, temporarily he also enjoys the support of Exxon-Mobil, BP and Shell, Rosneft and Aramco, i.e., international oil capitals, the Russians and Saudis (though conjunctural considerations rarely shape long-term geopolitical strategy and planning).

Infrastructural renewal has been abandoned as Trump Administration policy, and the windfalls reaped from a massive tax cut have been plowed back into stock buybacks, not into capital investments in plant and equipment so that re-industrialization policy has also miscarried. Actually accelerating continuing economic decline, these failures leave trade policy (together with racist and xenophobic demagoguery) as the only current means of maintaining faltering us hegemony in world capitalism. But the objectives of Trump and his Administration go far beyond bilateral trade, and will be pursued even if tariffs are followed by negotiations and agreements benefiting the us: Trump, and hemmed in by negotiated international rules and regulations, the ruling class domestic factions whose interests his presidency promotes are intent on dismantling global agreements and the centralized institutions of capitalist power that operate worldwide, without regard to whether they are financial (World Bank, imf, central banks including the Federal Reserve), exchange-oriented (gatt, wto, tpp, eu, nafta) or political (un, the Climate Change Accord).29 Make no mistake, the aim is not fair and equitable trade relations or a “level playing field” (whatever either might mean), but, patently, terms and conditions heavily weighted against us trade partners: Trump seeks one-on-one deals because us financial, economic and military power loom far larger in such negotiations. As long-term us decline deepens, as the case of Canada demonstrates the objective is to “stay atop” by using that power to push everyone else down (like a drowning man who keeps afloat by flaying his way on top, likely drowning, his swimming partner), using that power to extract the most onerous terms, and this without regard to long-term viability of the project or consequences.30 At some point in the near future it is a sure formula for a transforming a trade war into a shooting war.

But whether “trade wars are good” or bad (it is an evaluation made within capitalism, certainly without a view to its transcendence), they are not “easy to win.” No one but Trump and a couple of economists domiciled in the White House believe otherwise. They will not enhance world trade, and they will not overcome the structurally grounded economic weaknesses of the United States, most important of which are the absence of an industrial base (beyond the narrow capacity for production of armaments of all kinds), a burgeoning trade deficit, and a dollar suzerainty which not-so-slowly and inexorably is disappearing. To the contrary, even short of a shooting war a global trade war will inevitably lead to a dramatic contraction in that trade, to vast dislocations, economic collapse in large parts of the world, a global recession in the short term (within fifteen months), and, if pursued long enough (two-three years) it will result in renewed financial crisis and, likely also, global depression.

Rooted in de-industrialization, American global political and financial hegemony is in decline. Trump recognizes this. Rendering the neo-con policy wonks, media and politicians apoplectic, his effort to seek betterment of relations with Putin and the Russians is designed to remove the greatest military threat to the United States as the struggle for global hegemony grows, at the same time that he ratchets up tensions with the Europeans over their commitments to their Union, to the World Trade Organization and multilateral trade.

Understood as just that, as a fight for global financial and political dominance, that struggle, as Bannon has pointed out at in numerous forums and most recently in a bbc interview, is against China, a “mercantilist power” to which “the United States is a tributary state.”31 However, it is China which, as we suggested above, is actually positioned to win a trade war with the United States, accelerating its (China’s) global ascendancy.32

Trump, though, believes this war can be won because he believes that a return to post world war, American productive dominance, effectively a return to a us hegemonized Fordist regime of accumulation, is still possible; that against the technologically innovative dynamic governing capitalist development, the creation of 25 million new jobs is possible (well, maybe he only says this). Likewise, his supporters in the WVA coalfields believe that employment will return with $63.00/hour wages. Trump believes all this because he believes that the us economy has hidden autarkic strengths that will permit it to weather a trade war and its consequences. These beliefs are entirely congruent with the assault on environmental legislation and climate change regulations, and the effort to subsidize coal and nuclear in the name of “national security” (and through a general, national tax on popular consumption no less).

Ironically a grand beneficiary of the following developments, Trump understands nothing of the financialization and rentierization of the us economy, nothing of the fictitious accumulation of multitudinous and unsatisfiable paper claims to real wealth, and he understands nothing of the global supply chains which thickened throughout the 1990s and whose networks grew astronomically after 2000, that is after the Chinese joined the wto. That is crucial. He cannot grasp the blowback from tariffs: Any number of Ford sedans sport an engine of German manufacture, interior components (say airbags) made in Japan, electronic components manufactured in both Japan and China, and Canadian and Mexican steel, with assembly carried out in Mexico City. A single electronic component may contain a rare metal mined in China which has been transported to Malaysia where it become an element in a semi-conductor that is shipped back to China for final component construction whereafter it ends up in the German manufactured engine of an American sedan.

The potential for a prolonged trade war is real. Forcefully pursued, it will unravel existing levels of world capitalist integration. It will destroy crucial global supply chains. It will generate dislocations, disruptions, supply shortages and (already transpiring) accelerate domestic inflation. If this much comes to pass, the two roads to renewed imperialist world war will intersect: The precariousness of us dollar suzerainty will become apparent. Exporters will refuse to accept us Treasuries as payment from the Walmarts and Targets as container ships pile up at us ports of entry. And at this point, domestic inflation will skyrocket. Simultaneously in lessening global tensions, on the Korean Peninsula, in the effort at accommodation with the Russians (while exchanging them for others, above all with the Chinese), Trump brings class struggle back home. And though class struggle in the United States has a long history in which it has been canalized into racial conflict, and while said channeling will get much worse, the mystification, illusion and diversion will increasingly come to an end. Confronting this, it will be difficult for Trump, or whoever sits atop the us Executive at this moment, not to pursue war both to canalize growing domestic conflict and to seize raw materials, resources and goods that are no longer available in us markets. The outcome of the mammoth class struggle (below) will decide whether military confrontation of this sort devolves into renewed imperialist world war.

If we come this far, this will be the moment at which the work of the Steve Bannon’s comes to fruition or falters, exciting racist bigotry, xenophobia and jingoism, ratcheted up as nativists, fascists and neo-Nazis clamor for blood in the face of dislocations, disruptions and shortages that portend domestic collapse, with fascism as a highly possible outcomes.33 In the face of massive social crisis, large swathes of the population in the United States (the bulk of the business classes, middling adjuncts to capital, disguised proletariat layers in particular so-called independent contractors, and still other smaller layers), anti-proletarian, extremely nationalist, racist and illiberal (i.e., bearers of the neo-Right, neo-fascist oppositional culture), will accept the “leadership” of these, the most rabid elements. The struggle for the social totality will then sharpen: Ruling class social groups will tacitly, in some instances openly, support this counterrevolutionary bloc, the rest of the business classes will fall in line (and those in the middle stratum with politically liberal consciences and plenty of money will flee the country), the state will exhibit its essentially historical character as armed force as cops across the country mobilize to protect fascists and nativists in the streets, and the National Guard will be called up and the military brought home to impose de facto martial law where the cops are ineffective. The same unfolding events will push in the direction of consolidation of a counter-posed class bloc, youth with its proletarianized, precarious core, large layers of Spanish speaking labor, thin layers of other ethnic-national workers and a thick multi-class stratum of blacks. At this point it will, as a matter of life or death, be necessary to split the National Guard, and the enlisted soldiery from the military leadership and those in their midst who are special forces, while making this consolidation of our forces real.

It will be at this moment, and those leading up to it, that a withering critique of the primacy of profitability over need, of ruling class imperatives and bureaucratic administrators over the development of community-mediated individual competencies, of direct democracy over all form of representation above all over capital’s police despotic dictatorship, and of the inanity and deleterious character of capital’s media spectacle will increasingly receive a hearing. Reaching all the way back to abstract labor and the value-form, such a critique will become increasingly meaningful, concrete and real. On this basis, it will be at this moment, and those leading up to it, that, even as all the dauntingly intractable problems of an accelerating climatic transformation remain, masses of men and women can and perhaps will, however messy and even chaotic, find a practical alternative to capitalism. If from perspective of history itself, this moment, and those leading up to it, are fleeting, they will nonetheless be our opportunity.

15 September 2018

1. A version of this article will shortly appear as the afterword to the collection Climate Change, Social Revolution and their Imaginary Representations in Late Capitalist Popular Culture.↩

2. The decisive sector in which wildcats broke out was in autos, the core of capitalism in the Fordist era. Take the United States. In Detroit, wildcats occurred at Dodge Main (1968), Chrysler Sterling (1969) and Dodge’s Eldon (1969–1970), at GM in Lordstown (1972), in Detroit at Jefferson Assembly, Chrysler Forge and Mack stamping (1973). The other major wildcat strike was nationwide by postal workers (1970). The flight of capital offshore, of course, has never been limited to the United States. Before China ever entered the field, offshoring had become a global phenomenon, perhaps occurring at a later moment but nonetheless occurring: Since the early nineties, German auto manufacturing is conducted as much in the German East and the Czech Republic as in Bavaria, while Japanese electronic components are produced in Malaysia and Thailand in as great a quantity as in Honshu.↩

3. The war in Indochina bore directly, even if not obviously, on steel manufacture. Based on the antiquated open-hearth furnace, us steel capitals could not keep pace with us military demands for those steels used in construction of the machinery of war (munitions especially automatic weapons and their ammunition, artillery shells, bombs of all sorts; helicopters, jet fighters and strategic bombers; utility vehicles and convoy trucks; smaller watercraft such as PT boats). As a result, the Pentagon undertook purchases of steel in sheets and bars from Japan and Korean plants (operating with modernized, integrated oxygen furnaces). By 1969, steel sourced from East Asia amounted to a full 10 percent of the American market. This was the point of entry of Japanese goods, followed by a whole array of commercial (non-military) products (most notably autos) into the us market, and an entry which would shortly become a floodgate, a movement in which, as we are relating, technical innovation within global capitalism virtually destroyed the us steel industry during the 1970s.↩

4. Business Week (17 October 1977) noted that between 1966 and 1976, a “stunning decline” occurred as “the return on investment for US industry… shrank to 9.2 percent from 13.4 percent” (cited by Milton Fisk, “The Roots of the Stagnant Economy,” Cleveland, 1978: 17.) Fisk produces two tables, “Ibid,” 34–35, one detailing a year by year (1964–1976) summary of the declining rate of profit of us industry as a whole, the other for the same period quantitatively relating an increasing fixed capital (and inventory) to a declining rate of worker exploitation and an increasing organic composition of capital for us industry as a whole.

   In the boardrooms, the very upper layers of management running the great industrial firms were acutely aware of falling profitability. The shift from industry to finance, real estate and entertainment begin in earnest in about 1980 and really took off in 1983. See Steve Massey, “Who Killed Westinghouse” (1998), chapters 2 and 3. This piece can be found online searching for it by title.↩

5. There is actually a further thread intertwined with this account of de-industrialization. It is important to be sure, but will be only acknowledged here. It concerns the globally shifting class structure of capitalism manifested in the establishment of industrial work in East Asia. Relative to global capitalist development today, it is in East (and South) Asia where an industrial proletariat is housed and concentrated. This includes not just China, but S. Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam (Saigon), Malaysia and Thailand (Bangkok). According to the World Bank (World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World. New York, 1995: 170), eighty percent (80 percent) of industrial workers in the world were found in East Asia by 1995. That concentration may be far greater today.↩

6. That is, they recognize only the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, considering the 13th, 14th and 15th (not to mention the 19th) amendments as usurpations. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments legally embodied, codifying in fundamental law, the only revolution in American history, the overthrow of planter property in slaves.↩

7. Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany. New York, 1987 (Munich, 1984): 4.↩

8. Will Barnes, Civil War and Revolution in America. St. Paul, 1999: Preface, Part IV, “The Meaning of ‘Race’ and its Relation to Class."↩

9. Will Barnes, Community and Capital. St. Paul, 2001: §240.↩

10. Forming the largest part of a surplus population thrown off by the movement of capital, there are still other social layers which, as decline deepens, far more or far less tend to be swept up into this bloc: They consist in the strictly lumpenized elements who live from theft, swindling, scamming, etc. (far less); pensioners entirely dependent upon a shrinking social wage institutionalized in Social Security (far more); structurally unemployed living from family and relatives (far more); a still thin but growing layer of addicted (opioids primarily) in certain enclaves (e.g., rural West Virginia) whose forms and means of socially reproducing themselves vary and overlap to some extent with lumpenized and structurally unemployed (far less); and a vast prison population (far less, many of whom may line up with our side).↩

11. The Spanish speaking proletariat is clearly Central American and Mexican centered, but just as obviously includes Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans (now with little fanfare being deported by the Trump Administration). Then, as indicated, there are other ethnically-national components depending on locale. Thus, for instance, in the coastal West cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle), this proletariat includes Filipino and Vietnamese workers; and, in Minneapolis-St. Paul (actually on the edge of Shakopee, Minnesota – a small town, not a suburb, just southwest of Minneapolis) where Amazon built its Twin Cities metropolitan area distribution center, twenty percent (20 percent) of the employees, over one thousand workers, are Somali, the majority of them young women).

    According to the investigative Internet journalist, J.P. Sottile, among other reasons (a largely successfully implemented agenda for dismantling environmental and workplace restraints on capital), Trump’s big financial backers, Robert Mercer (see fn. 14, below) and the Koch brothers (protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), see in Trump a barrier raised against a hysterically feared “brown flood” that will flow north from the tropics as climate change refugees in the coming decades. See the discussion for 22 August 2018 on the “The Ochelli Effect" (audio).↩

12. Remarks made before the 2014 International Conference on Human Dignity, organized by the rightwing, Catholic Dignitatis Humanae Institute (video).↩

13. "Trotsky was Stalin’s theorist. This lasted as long as Stalin had yet to come to grips with the deteriorating situation in the countryside and until the time at which he had fully assimilated the Left’s program and, on the basis of his 1928 experience, elaborated a course of action the would indicate the way forward, i.e., the manner of overcoming the crisis. A single example will suffice. Lewin recalls that in summer 1928 Trotsky, in internal exile in Alma Alta, wrote an analysis of the situation inside the Soviet Union for the VIth Comintern Congress held in Moscow in July. Entitled ‘What Now?’ the piece was, of course, suppressed, but ‘Stalin, naturally, read every word. … [He] was in agreement with Trotsky’s reading of the situation’ [Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. Aylesburg (Eng), 1968: 254, 255]. This assessment is in the strict sense objective, i.e., can be made repeatedly by anyone who compares Trotsky’s analysis with the course of action Stalin, as head of the party.” Will Barnes, Bolshevism and Stalinism (Ur-Geschichte). St. Paul, 2014 (posthumous): Part II, “Primitive Accumulation.” His departure notwithstanding, Breitbart serves up a form of political garbage dear to Bannon: One only need to cursorily examine the swill and pap printed there to get a distinct sense that is written at a level that even Trump fully grasps (and even if its contents are only summarized for him). Between Fox News and Breitbart Trump gets the politico-ideological guidance he requires.↩

14. Similarly, the truly rabid Trump mega-donors, the Mercer bigots, father and daughter, Robert (billionaire hedge fund financier) and Rebakah (whose fingerprints one finds all over Breitbart). For Malpass’s awareness much like Bannon’s, see the former’s “Upheaval to Reinvent us Politics,” Forbes, 10 May 2016.↩

15. Namely, those born between 1980 and 2004. Gordon Long, Macro Analytics, “Millennials: A Menacing Metamorphosis,” 2017.04.17 (video). In such a schema, those born from 2005 to the present are termed the “Homeland” generation ("Ibid"), and to the extent those among them, now just entering high school, have been publicly educated for up to eight years, they too will tend to fall under Bannon’s designation. See the textual discussion which follows for a more precise determination.↩

16. Noel Ignatiev, writing in the Comments section of Insurgent Notes, 2017.08.03. Ignatiev is responding to remarks by Amiri Barksdale.↩

17. Here we are relying on Will Barnes, Race, History, Production, “A Sea Change May Be Occurring, But If It Is, It’s Passing Us By” (2008). We, however, do not accept his, albeit tacit, appraisal of these individuals whose awareness and behavior has been shaped by this, their historical formation: They are not simply passive objects, consumers of commodities.↩

18. Long, “Ibid"; “The Ochelli Effect,” “Ibid” (discussion with Michael Swanson, a historian and market analyst, during first half of the program). According to Long, in 2012 that 42 percent was broken down into 21 percent Spanish speaking ("Hispanics"), 14 percent black, 6 percent Asian and Pacific Islanders, and 1 percent “others."↩

19. This is difficult terrain. As a rule, it should not be discussed quantitatively. Put differently, numbers are only a point of departure, so here are the numbers that underline our textual assessment.

    As we indicated, so-called millennials marginally form the largest demographical group in us. Those born from the end of the large imperialist world war until the onset of the last international cycle of class struggle (1946–1964) numbered 74.9 million in 2015; those born at the moment bearers of neo-liberalism first assumed state power until the long period of global working defeats devolving into dormancy finally came to a close (1980–2004) numbered 75.4 million in the same year (2015). [The period closed as an explosion of working class strike activity along the “Asian industrial arc” brought it to an end in spring 2005 with huge strike movements in India, then Vietnam and in the following year Bangladesh.] By way of contrast, the generationally based demographical group in-between totals roughly 59 million (Gordon Long, “Ibid"). Empirically, Long also agrees with Bannon’s ideological characterization of “millennials” as “socialist.” More importantly, Long ("Ibid") also indicates that this demographical group, today 36 percent of the workforce (waged and salaried), will form a full 75 percent of those employed in 2026.

    Finally with respect to numbers, basing himself on a survey conduct in January 2018 Anthony DiMaggio ("Fascist Nation: The ‘Alt-Right’ Menace Persists, Despite Setbacks,") states that it is “the 30–45 age group [which admittedly contain millennials at the bottom of the age bracket], not the 18–29 group,” which we identified as generationally-based demographical group in-between, “who are disproportionately more likely to support the [alt-right] movement."↩

20. As in so much of the rest of the world, there are no streams, rivers, ponds or lakes in the United States containing water which is drinkable without extensive treatment. Pollutants include pesticide, herbicide and insecticide runoff; gas and oil spills from ships, and leakage from boat and other marine motor craft; toxic chemicals used in manufacturer as well as in other applications; runoff of nitrogen and phosphorous used as agricultural and lawn fertilizers; excess antibiotics drained from the blood of humans and livestock leaving the body in urine and flushed away; and unreported daily radioactive emissions from nuclear power plants and radioactive particles with longer half-lives released in above ground weapons tests. Some chemical components of pesticides, some chemicals (e.g., MTBE), antibiotics and radioactive elements are not filtered by treatment plants.↩

21. Internal heat is a byproduct of human metabolism, about 100 watts for a resting human body at any given moment. To maintain an internal equilibrium against outside temperature fluctuations, core body temperature in humans averages, given or take a coupe tens of a degree, 37 °C (98.6 °F). So that the internal heat generated by metabolism, not to mention that generated by dramatic local atmospheric warming, must be carried away by conduction and evaporative cooling (perspiration). When temperature hits 35 °C/100 percent humidity and above, internal body heat can no longer be carried away (and one can no longer perspire), for with outside heat exceeding interior warmth that internal heat has nowhere to go. Without radiative cooling (cooling outside air as in air conditioning), or retreating to underground or cave life conditions, at rest in the shade an otherwise healthy individual (we are not speaking of the very young, the elderly or the infirmed of whom all are much more vulnerable) dies of heat exhaustion in about 6 hours.↩

22. The proposed network, parts of which are under construction, consists of three main routes from Kunming, China to Bangkok, Thailand: The Eastern Route via Vietnam and Cambodia; the Central Route via Laos, and the Western Route via Myanmar. The southern half of network from Bangkok to Singapore has long been operational, though a high-speed line has been proposed.↩

23. Currently under construction, NordStream2 is a underwater pipeline traversing the Baltic that connects Russian natural gas fields to Germany near Rostock. Its completion, too, will not see Germany paying for Russian natural gas in dollars. Further, there will be growing internal pressures to base exchanges following upon the trade agreement signed by Japanese and eu political leaders 17 July 2018 on yen and euros, not dollars.↩

24. Two important works here, the latter of particular importance for Germany, are Joseph M. Jones, Jr., Tariff Retaliation. Repercussions of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. Philadelphia, 1934, and Antonin Basch, The Danube Basin and the German Economic Sphere. London, 1944.↩

25. John A. Garraty, The Great Depression. San Diego, 1986: 15, 24; Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939. Berkeley, 1986: 123–124.↩

26. Basch, Ibid, 165–184.↩

27. Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931–1945. New York, 1978 (Tokyo, 1968): 57–75, 130–131, 153–180; also Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashito’s Gold. London, 2002.↩

28. A correspondent relates this can be seen in a number of Koch facilities. She points to, for instance, the large complex in Rosemount, Minnesota which refines oil for the entire Upper Midwest retail gasoline market. Even though expanding its activity to accommodate (North Dakota) shale and (Alberta) tar sands, most of which has been accomplished with new chemical inputs, it has not fundamentally modernized for the past twenty-two years. It can also be grasped quantitatively in a critical examination of the information put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: From 1995 until 2003, years of the social generalization of the information technology “revolution,” productivity gains averaged 3.2 percent annually; while in years following to the present (through 2017), the annual increase with marginally in excess of 1.4 percent. See the various alternative indices at John Williams’ website, Shadow Statistics.↩

29. Its members firmly entrenched in the State Department for decades, the leading body of the old, internationalist wing of the us ruling class, The Council on Foreign Relations, fears and is convinced that this is just what Trump aims at. See the in-house journal article by Adam Posen, “Post-American World Economy; Globalization in the Trump Era,” Foreign Affairs, Mar-Apr 2018.↩

30. "us President Donald Trump took office demanding renegotiation of” nafta, “but rather than making deals, he has just made threats. Canada is supposed to ‘cave to a series of hardline us demands’ or get hit with 25 percent tariffs on autos ‘that could plunge much of the country into recession.’ …the negotiations are manifestly in bad faith. In an off-the-record comment to a reporter, which was leaked last week, Trump admitted that he had no intention of compromising on anything with Ottawa but that he couldn’t say so, because, in his words, ‘it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.’” Summary (with internal quotes) of Barrie McKenna writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, cited in The Week, 14 September 2018: 15.↩

31. "We send them, you know, natural gas and soybeans and hogs and beef… We send virtually no high-end value-added manufacturing. That can’t continue.” (From a bbc News interview reproduced on YouTube.) In other words, the historical role of metropolis to periphery has been reversed. The interview is recent, probably recorded in late May of this year. Accessed on online through a search under the heading “Steve Bannon interviews."↩

32. This struggle is not just being played out in a tariff war but linked to this struggle for global hegemony also in geopolitical conflicts over the role of militarily, regionally and demographically significant third party countries, a case in point being Pakistan. With Pakistan, it is a question of to what extent this southwest Asian state’s military and intelligence services are funded by the us especially with respect to their contradictorily role in relation to American operations in Afghanistan. Starting with the Obama Administration, military funding has been cut. Under Trump, funding it been dramatically scaled back. What is at issue is not just, and not primarily, Pakistani covert support to the Taliban but Chinese inroads in West Asia in the form of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a large component of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative. See the insightful article, “The us-China Cold War is Now Playing Out in Pakistan,” 3 September 2018.↩

33. Here, fascism is best grasped in its active aspect as a social movement, one aimed at obliterating the concentrated power of workers, which historically appears in the context of an unfolding, enormous social crisis at the center of which is an impasse in capital accumulation (phenomenally, impairment of profitability portending ruin), and programmatic paralysis at the level of the national state. That assault objectively constitutes an effort to unblock the impasse, and resolve the crisis, by destroying that concentration (we said concentrated, not organized or union, power), atomizing workers, vastly reducing historically achieved standards of living, and seizing full control of the state apparatus for purposes of a massive campaign of murder of the militant proletarian minority, where upon a policy of “liquidation” of political, ethnic and, or, national groups as objects of fascistic bigotry is pursued.↩

I will make five sets of remarks. Impinging on content, three are substantive in the full sense. Two are merely formal (one of which is stylistic) and barely touch on substantive issues.

1.

I would like to begin with the concept of real domination and the reality it refers us back to.

Historically, real domination entails a transformation in the work processes as the capitalist interposes himself in them and directly takes control of them. Either he (and we can legitimately speak of “he” here) introduces new machinery or undertakes to reorganize the work processes (see Marx’s Economic Manuscripts, 1861–1863). Actually, these two forms are more often than not intertwined. In history, this intervention transforms the merchant who has legal title to means of production and who employs waged labor and who does not intervene in the work processes, into an industrialist who does. In the former case, the merchant is, we might say, the bearer of formal domination since his role in the work processes is merely formal.

It is important to expressly note these two aspects of real domination, since it easy to abstract the latter from historical context and to see only the technically innovative side, especially since systematic modern scientific and technological inputs make real domination “permanent”; that is, make it irreversible and give it the appearance of an automatic process, a motor or driver or dynamic of capitalist development.

Recall some well-known instances.

The croppers’ (and weavers’ and frame-knitters’) struggles in the English Midlands against the gig-mill and the shearing frame in the early nineteenth century was part of a broader fight involving other groups of workers against the factory-system, which threatened to declass them as small masters, abolish customary work relations and disrupt a settled way of life.

As a foreman and supervisor at Bethlehem Steel at the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor argued with, browbeat and disciplined skilled workers. All unsuccessful. We also know it was Henry Ford who, in introducing the assembly line in Highland Park in 1914, made serious inroads against the personally (as opposed to machine) embodied knowledge and the prerogatives of the skilled layer. But it took imperialist world war, the mobilization of labor and the cooperation of unions and workers, mediated by chauvinist commitments, and finally the demand for rapid production of military vehicles and armaments of all kinds to introduce continuous flow production across multiple sectors of industrial economies. Lest we forget, the respective antiwar activities of the British shop stewards and the German Obleute (both skilled metalworking proletariats) started from a struggle against the dilution of the proletariat; while the same skilled layers constituted the overwhelming majority of the 250,000 workers who made up the Bolshevik Party in October 1917.

Culminating in the open class struggle (Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and Stanley) in the Decatur, Illinois “war zone,” 1992–1996, the 1980–1990s struggles against worker-participation labor-capital schemes and management-controlled production teams were struggles against lean production with its just-in-time inventories, which for the most part involved reorganizing work processes without technical innovation.

Albeit lengthy, there is a point here well worth making. Technical innovation is not just rooted in competition among antagonistic capitals, which, because the latter is a central feature of the system of social relations, gives rise to an automatic dynamic. Rather, the initial efforts to introduce technological inputs or to reorganize work processes as a rule are met with worker resistance. If the inputs or reorganization (or both) are large-scale and are met with open class struggle, it is only worker defeat which leads to the successful deployment of inputs or implementation of reorganization. In the wake of such historical defeats, the most frequent result is their generalization across economic sectors and working class recomposition.

Casualization and precarity are contemporary forms of recomposition, consequences of the major historical defeat of the 1980–1990s. If one of Floris’ sources, the bourgeois and empirical theorist Gordon Long (together with Charles Hugh Smith), is correct, the so-called retail sector is about to undergo automation by way of robotics. This will further deepen the immiseration of his precarious, youthful proletariat. Amazon’s use of drone delivery and Anheuser-Busch’s recent purchase of self-driving tractor trailers portend a similar development in transportation.

2.

The very term “de-industrialization” is suspect. There are three aspects to this.

First, the term does not adequately integrate its actual dynamic with its theoretical explanation (the three moments of historical causation Floris proposes). Its core dynamic is simultaneously real history: Class struggle, a string of worker losses (patco, Greyhound, Eastern Airlines, Dodge-Phelps, Hormel, Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone, Stanley) amounting to historical defeat, class recomposition.

Second, though I do not have figures to hand, industrial output in the United States (in inflation-adjusted dollar terms) is no less today than it was forty years ago. Industrial production today merely is carried out from a vastly smaller base.

Third, for those who associate American industrialization with a desired us global hegemony, de-industrialization is a disaster and its remediation, re-industrialization, amounts to a reactionary undertaking. Rebuilding an oil-coal-steel economy is not only a project of national capitals which chauvinistically links workers to their “nation” (i.e., the ruling class), it can only further unravel an already massively simplified, thus grievously damaged global ecology.

Floris avoids the problematic in its second aspect because he deploys Marx’s value analysis and, in a complexly mediated way tied to this analysis, because on its tail end he grasps ongoing class recomposition. He is fully aware of and directly confronts the problematic in both moments of its third aspect.

Return to that second aspect. A Fordist regime of accumulation cannot be resurrected (Trump’s fantasy). If a global supply chain is an interconnected series of sites of production spread across continents, and if Floris thinks wreaking havoc with those supply chains is the reason why Fordism cannot be reconstructed, he is mistaken. Or, it is one reason, but not even the primary one. Knowledge as subjective skill and objectively embodied skill (machinery, machine complexes) as basic “inputs” to production as well as the forms of association of labor and the types of labor (work) themselves have all been radically transformed. The upshot is that production itself has been radically transformed. It, and those inputs and forms, have been transformed by the class struggle mediated, competition-driven dynamic of capitalism, and thus by the continuously reduced socially necessary labor time required by that production. Carried out in one national sector of global capitalism, re-industrialization in the intended sense will not only put that sector at an enormous competitive disadvantage, but relegate it to a peripheral adjunct to the dynamic centers of global production (with, as Floris recognizes, all the intendant consequences such as a collapse in existing living standards). But the issue goes beyond this: the productive forces of global capitalism have developed in such an all-inclusive, qualitative manner that a return to an earlier moment in the history of capitalism is not possible.

3.

I have known Floris for some two decades. We were brought together by the late Will Barnes as part of a small correspondence circle. Will, you might say, was our leading light. At the time I was aware that Floris was refining his English language skills in the discussions of that circle. It was only later that I realized he was also doing so by exploring the conceptual universe developed by Will. Like most theorizations of society and history, Barnes’s has gaps or weak spots but it is plenty sophisticated. So on the face of it, such effort is commendable. Yet it appears to me Floris’s exploration has had at least one lasting negative result. He not only assimilated much of that conceptual universe as his own, he also assimilated the convoluted writing style of someone who never got over reading much of Hegel and Marx in the original German, especially the manuscripts that were not published during the respective authors’ lifetimes.

This is a stylistic criticism, but it spills over into substance. The essay exhibits a nearly adequate grasp of historical causation. It is unabashed in pointing out the limitations of contemporary communist theorizing. It lays out an incisive analysis of where race and class intersect. It unites careful class analysis and the dynamics of capitalist development. And, thus, it permits a statement of the tendential direction of that development. Yet lengthy, sometimes Byzantine sentences each occasionally forming an entire paragraph, lots and lots of commas, and a host of parenthetical remarks all tend to really inhibit comprehension.

4.

What does it mean to say, “There are two very large blank spots in the thinking of revolutionary communists… The consequences of the failure to come to grips with this blindness are large-scale, even disqualifying”?

In a second case, the consequences of failure to examine the significance of “something very much like a ‘deep state’ functioning… in the bourgeois polity” are explicitly stated. According to Floris, it signifies the bourgeoisie possesses not just a hidden statist infrastructure, but the core of an unswervingly loyal armed reserve beyond cops in the streets and various branches of the institutional military. It signifies, then, that even in the event of a vastly popular uprising, the collapse of the formal institutions of bourgeois power, and formation of a historically novel, non-statist proletarian power, the bourgeoisie has a reservoir of armed force with which to pursue civil war. I will not contest this assessment.

What about the first case—that of an accelerating, abrupt climate change?

Here Floris pursues a rhetorical strategy. Having assisted in generating that novel power, he asks if communists are prepared to deal with hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing inundated regions or parts of the Earth no longer habitable due to intense heat? Or with salination and a precipitous drop in agricultural food production worldwide? Or with massive infrastructural damage due to storms, sea level rise and the same intense heat? And so on.

In replying I would query, is he expecting a response? Something programmatic? I don’t think so. I think he is being coy. He understands that anyone who by now does not grasp the transformation that climate change has just begun to provoke is hopelessly lost and incurably blind. But I think he wishes to say more than this, and that is what I mean by being coy. I believe his position has these contours:

Once established on its own foundations (production for production’s sake, self-valorizing value), it is the entropic logic and movement of capital itself which has created the crisis in nature. That crisis is threefold. It entails a mass species extinction, the recreation of planetary nature as a raw materials basin and a global garbage dump, and abrupt climate change.

It is systematic scientific and technological inputs which sustain that logic and movement, making it irreversible short of a thoroughgoing revolutionary transformation.

The bourgeoisie has no answer to climate change, except the pious hope that more scientific and technological inputs can ameliorate it. There is only very limited, partial evidence as to what the outcomes of those inputs (pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to deflect solar insolation, seeding the oceans to mitigate acidification, etc.) might be. At best, that evidence is not encouraging. What is highly likely is that undertaking such efforts may well worsen the situation, and if they do not they will be permanent since halting them merely returns us to that situation we confronted before deploying them; furthermore, even slight failures to sustain the efforts will expose the life forms of Earth to rapid temperature rise. Yet to the extent these “remedies” are effective enough to make life tolerable, not merely doomed, they reinforce the regimentation and repression required to implement them. (What Floris calls the “increasingly totalitarian, police despotic naked dictatorship of capital over society.”)

Communists too have no answer to climate change. Most operate with the same faith in the efficacy of the modern science of nature as does the bourgeoisie. This constitutes a commitment to the civilization of capital. It is this commitment which is “disqualifying.” For communists’ “remedies” will not differ from those of the bourgeoisie.

The model here is the Bolsheviks. Their perspectives were productivist and holding state power at any costs to workers was, citing Trotsky, their “historical birthright.” Confronted with the destruction wrought by world war and civil war, they assumed bourgeois tasks and undertook reconstruction of productive forces along state capitalist lines. Today, communists’ perspectives are mediated by the bourgeoisie’s theory of nature, modern science. Confronting civil war within the context of a radically unique total crisis in nature that has already begun to destroy the built environment, starting from bourgeois theory they will be compelled to impose the same regimentation and repression along hyper-statist lines.

If this is what Floris thinks, then he should simply say so.

5.

Since the financial crisis, much of the theorizing about another qualitative break with capital’s movement has been devoted to the movement of money within the sphere of circulation (the bank bailouts, various phases of endless printing of money known as quantitative easing, real negative interest rates, a 700 trillion derivatives hangover an order of magnitude larger than the total annual output of the global capitalist economy, more recently the slow motion crumbling of Deutschebank and the Italian banking crisis). Over and again, one hears “this cannot go on forever.” All this is in the interests of assessing the trajectory of capitalist development, usually with provision of a timeline for the onset of another, far worse financial crisis. I have been guilty of something along these lines myself.

Floris’s parenthetical indications of when we might anticipate the onset of a global recession and, beyond this, a renewal of an open crisis of capital is a residue of this kind of thinking. It is not required. It distracts and detracts from his overall analysis which at the same time goes beyond thinking of this kind.

I will end with some affirmative comments.

Permit me to return to that small correspondence circle. We spend a lot of time mulling over the fate of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the party of Stalin. As a group we were decidedly not Bolshevik, perhaps councilists of sorts but not left communists. Yet if there were one thing we all took away from those discussions, it was in some sense the prewar (Great War) Bolshevik and left claims that inter-imperialist antagonisms necessarily lead to world war and open capitalist crisis were correct.

Floris operates with a notion of the historical present as latent with possibilities amongst which the tendential direction of capitalist development is primary. In a period in which so much revolutionary thinking is infected by politically disorienting post-modernist notions of the radical contingency of history, Floris has restored a sense of the historical necessity of crisis and, without effective proletarian action, world war. He does so by dispensing with the false autonomy of the sphere of circulation, shifting analysis to global trade. His sense of trade is not narrow, but involves conflict among competing imperialist powers. This conflict itself is governed by the impasse capital’s own movement runs up against, namely, overcapacity, overproduction and commodity surfeit. But based on the class struggle mediated technical dynamic at the core of capitalism, these in turn are the phenomenal faces of the inability of capitalists to valorize adequate amounts of abstract labor to sustain production at existing levels of development of productive forces. Admittedly dense, in sum he integrates looming major class confrontation with geopolitical, great power jockeying illuminating both with Marx’s theoretically powerful analysis.

It is analyses of this kind which provide revolutionary communists with a perspective on the historical present and an orientation toward the immediate future, in other words, a rationally grounded perspective of hope. For that, I applaud him.

This is a useful and interesting piece. I agree with some aspects and disagree (strongly at points) with others. I will be concentrating on some areas of difference, notwithstanding some substantial agreements with the analysis of working class composition and the changing nature of the capitalist work process. I also should say that I’m far from certain that I adequately understand all of the author’s arguments. Hopefully this will not significantly undermine my criticisms.

The general theme of the essay is that a range of secular processes, largely, but not completely, internal, are driving us capitalism towards toward a fundamental crisis. This crisis will be politically defined by the emergence of an unstable nationalistic authoritarianism—Trumpism—that is presented as a modern neo-fascism which will dramatically increase the likelihood of global war and accelerate the development of environmental catastrophe. The revolutionary anti-capitalist left is pictured as essentially impotent and clueless in this scenario with only a faint hope raised in the final passage that: “…at this moment (the ‘moment’ of social collapse and essential civil war) …a withering critique of the primacy of profitability over need…will increasingly receive a hearing” (p. 24).

Much of the current us left shares some aspects of this perspective and I do as well; however there are many problems with the analyses and assumptions on which this version depends. These problems are magnified by the tendency of the author to present eminently debatable hypotheses as accepted fact. Let me start with a quick example of the problem from the very first paragraph: “…the bloc of classes underpinning Trump’s presidency permits him to fully engage in the one area of policy formulation where restrictions on presidential behavior are severely constrained…allowing him a free hand in pursuing…a trade war…” (apologies for the ellipses which will continue through these criticisms).

In the first place, the proposition that there is a distinctive bloc of classes that supports Trump must be argued for to justify its function in the essay. Here it is presented as a self-evident fact. In my opinion the class fragments that constitute Trump’s political base of the moment constitute an extremely unstable asymmetric coalition of various class fractions that don’t merit being termed a “bloc of classes.” It is a fragile political base lacking common short—or longer-term economic interests, and there is no apparent process through which such interests might develop. This base is riddled with contradictions and conflicts that don’t provide Trump a free hand on trade policy or any other issue. For evidence, consider the disorganized responses of his agricultural supporters to the impact of Chinese tariffs and his industrial supporters to restrictions on steel and aluminum imports.

The palpable contradictions within Trump’s political support raise serious questions whether it constitutes a “bloc of classes”, but that is only part of the difficulties with this remarkably casual argument. Trump trade policies will be “severely constrained” by a broad range of factors beyond the characteristics of his political base—notwithstanding any megalomaniacal rhetoric on the subject. These factors effectively deny him any “free hand” to pursue tariff wars or similar policies. Consider the effective political impact on his policy from the instability provoked in the commodities and equities markets from trade conflicts with China (even when the conflicts are still mainly at the stage of rumors and potentials).

Perhaps we should discount this point as an introductory polemical overstatement that is not representative of the major argument. However, the tendency to draw strong conclusions from weak facts while ignoring contradictory evidence and alternative hypotheses runs through the piece and I will be raising additional examples in the course of some criticisms.

Before getting to some of these specific issues, I would like to raise a more general problem. I think the essay lacks a clear delineation between two topics that should be kept distinct despite their many interconnections. On the one hand it analyses the circumstances and trajectory of the us capitalist social formation. On the other hand it implies an analysis of transnational capitalism in which the us is an important component. By not properly distinguishing between these issues, the argument tends to treat us capitalism as a simple proxy for the transnational capitalist system. This elevates historical factors unique to this country (sometimes factors that embody a questionable history) into essential drivers of the transnational capitalist system while giving negligible attention to how that global system impacts and interacts with politics in this country.

At what I regard as its better points, the analysis deals with processes that are features of the global system: “us-based, massive debt-supported consumption (that is) fueling global expansion has formed the other side of the abandonment of domestic industry and with it domestic industrial employment for sites abroad (primarily in East Asia), a development that characterizes industrial Europe as well…overall global industrial employment has shrunk as productivity increased enormously. In and through this process, the us economy has undergone transformation from the world’s industrial dynamo to a rentier formation…” (p. 3).

While I have questions about the assertion that “global industrial employment has shrunk” (perhaps we are working with different definitions of industrial employment), this is a reasonable description of some significant global economic processes that the essay elaborates at a number of later points. However the author combines this line of argument with questionable assertions about us historical development to support a conception of a specific political alignment that he appears to think will dominate the global conjuncture. These posit the development of: “…a multi-centered, decentralized mass political party of the right…” (p. 3) and the eclipse of, “…the old liberal wing of the ruling class…in a political sense…” (p. 4). In the process of spelling out these points, major features of the global dynamics of struggles within the framework of capital and against that framework get lost in the narrative of an inexorable march towards fascism and social collapse—towards: “… the increasingly totalitarian, police despotic naked dictatorship of capital over society” (p. 8).

This argument is the main content of the first section of the piece. At a later point issues are raised that tend to undermine it, I think, although the author probably doesn’t see it that way. Here are a few of them:

“(Trump and his capitalist supporters) …embody the protectionist and rentier interests of factions within the us ruling class who have been less successful in valorizing their capitals in an era of American de-industrialization. It is these capitals which have ‘lost the battle for modernization’ in the face of global competition…” (p. 21).

“…the ruling class domestic factions whose interests his presidency promotes are intent on dismantling global agreements and the centralized institutions of capitalist power that operate worldwide without regard to whether they are financial…exchange oriented… or political” (p. 21).

“Trump understands nothing of the financialization and rentierization of the us economy, nothing of the fictitious accumulation of multitudinous and unsatisfiable paper claims to real wealth and he understands nothing of the global supply chains which thickened throughout the 1990s and whose networks grew astronomically after 2000” (p. 23).

The question these points raise for me concerns how a sector of the ruling class that has “lost the battle of modernization” will manage to “eclipse the old liberal ruling class” and dominate the political trajectory of capitalist power in the us and globally, culminating in “… the increasingly totalitarian, police despotic naked dictatorship of capital over society” (p. 8). I will spend much of the rest of my response on this general topic.

I previously mentioned the essay’s argument that the capitalist ruling class had been structurally transformed as neo-liberalism supplanted ‘Fordism.’ Here is a more complete version of the argument: “At that moment, the old liberal wing of the ruling class became largely nonexistent in a political sense as the neo-liberal program initially took shape. And it was from this situation that the primacy of speculative financial investment in the us economy, and the ensuing renterization, arose” (p. 4, author’s emphasis).

I agree that that the transition from the Fordist model was associated with a range of changes in ruling class organization and ideology which, as the essay reasonably claims, “…objectively constituted recognition of the inability of declining mass production industries to form the foundations of renewed us capital accumulation…” (p. 8). However, I don’t agree that the main political substance of these changes is that, beginning from the mid-seventies, the hegemonic political tendency in the us ruling class increasing becomes a “neo-right, neo-Fascist Oppositional culture” (p. 4).

The essay makes the argument as follows: “The political culture that emerged in the 80s is what we have here characterized as ‘neo-right,’ nascently neo-liberal and today, more or less openly neo-fascist. Opposed to the reformist, welfare-statist perspectives characterizing high capitalism in its Fordist phase and embodied in the historically liberal wing of the Democratic Party…” (p. 8).

I would argue to the contrary that the changes in the ruling class that developed from this period are better understood as the emergence of ruling capitalist elites that are increasingly motivated by the transnational interests of capitalism, interests which are increasingly in tension with the stability and domestic tranquility of particular national capitalisms—including us national capitalism. The resulting conflicts certainly develop around questions of profitability, but they are particularly acute around issues of hegemony and political consent.

It is revealing that the author speaks of the “… neo-Right practices of the Reagan-Bush era” (p. 8) that have become hegemonic in the time of Trump. In fact developing neo-liberalism exhibits an essential continuity of political practice between the Reagan-Bush era and the subsequent Clinton–Bush Jr.–Obama period. This continuity of practice extends beyond this country and includes virtually all governing ruling class segments in the global system and most of those that make up the loyal opposition—notably incorporating parliamentary social democracy. In short, as a transnational capitalist system emerged, the array of capitalist political elites that identify with it have coalesced and dominate the levers of state power throughout the system—frequently to the detriment of capitalist nation states.

Neoliberal ideologies and political practice featuring the privatization of public assets, the dominance of markets, ‘free’ trade, control of information and communication systems, and the end to ‘welfare as we know it’ have been the major factors in the efforts of the capitalist ruling class to maintain profit and power in the late capitalist ‘New World Order.’ Contrary to the essay, this system of power is not equivalent to “… the increasingly totalitarian, police despotic, naked dictatorship of capital over society” (p. 8). It has not normally involved the overt reliance on the police power—even if it does include increasingly effective limitations on political democracy. The ruling elites continue to be concerned with their hegemony as well as their profits. They still have concerns with maintaining some elements of ‘consent’ among those that are ruled and the essential class ‘dictatorship’ still remains a good distance from being ‘naked.’ However capital’s potential to gain political consent from systems of differential material benefits such as Fordism—or from mirages of Fordism—is dramatically curtailed. Capitalist hegemony must be organized and developed via other factors.

As the contradictions within the global capitalist system intensify, the dominant sector of capital comes into sporadic conflict with a ‘losing’ minority of capitalist interests that often combine with a disaffected mass right wing constituencies in nativist populist movements, parties and regimes. Overwhelmingly the transnational capitalist elites see these developments as major destabilizing threats, and not, as the essay suggests, as a welcome facilitation of a path towards a fascist future.

Despite the growing problems facing the ruling elites and their difficulties maintaining a coherent and consistent politics, they continue to dominate most of the levers of state power globally and with some notable exceptions they are using this power to successfully oppose nativist populisms—including the disruptive elements of the Trump phenomenon. For the most part the global capitalist elites have been able to contain and dilute populism where they haven’t managed to defeat it.

The essay misses entirely the process by which the reactionary populist opposition to current capitalist power is being used by the currently dominant sectors of capital to develop a renovated approach to their hegemony. This involves a partially constructed and partially genuine popular fear of fascism being used to provide a basis for a cross-class social bloc that is not dependant on the substantive material and political concessions involved in the Fordist model. I have written at length elsewhere on these points and won’t go into them further here.

Instead, I’d like to indicate some significant gaps and errors in the historical treatment of what the essay terms the, “multi-centered, decentralized mass political party of the (neo) right.” (p. 3) This is a central concept in the conception of the development of ‘neoliberal fascism’ in the us (I think this neoliberal fascism concept initiated with Henry Giroux although it’s popping up in many places.) Athough this right wing political formation is described as hostile to the transnationalist capitalist order and as involving the sectors of capital that have “…‘lost the battle for modernization’ in the face of global competition…” (p. 21); it is paradoxically, in my opinion presented as the political vehicle which will lead to the “naked dictatorship of capital over society” (p. 8)?

There is little evident effort to describe this vehicle anywhere in the global capitalist system outside of this country. Perhaps this could be done, but it would certainly require more and different evidence and the elaboration of a different historical arguments than the ones that the essay uses for the United States. This makes a critical look at the historical arguments that are presented for this country more relevant.

The essay supports its picture of the development of the mass right wing movement in the us with some substantially manicured history. It requires a harsh hand with known facts to sustain the conclusion that, “… at the top that neo-Right power rejoins nativists, fascists and neo-Nazis on the ground” (p. 6). Most popular sectors of the mass right tendency, and certainly the elements that are closest to fascism, have historically been in opposition to notions of the “New World Order,” that is the essential feature of the “Reagan-Bush” neo-Right neoliberalism that this argument places as a major launching point for the neofascist political trajectory. No evidence is presented as to how this contradiction has been, or will be, transcended.

Consider the extended treatment of right wing ‘Think tanks’ on page five: they are presented as a major center of power in the “neo-right, neo-fascist Oppositional Culture” (p. 4). In reality, the great bulk of these groupings provide the ideological bulwark for ‘New World Order’ politics and are committed to a ‘never-Trumpism’ that is in explicit opposition to any insurgent populism or mass-based proto-fascism. Where does this fit with an emergent “neo-right, neo-fascist Oppositional Culture”?

Consider the following comment: “… the entire neo-right, neo-fascist culture has tied their defense of capitalism to climate change denial” (p. 14). This is factually dubious on many levels. There have been numerous manifestations of right-wing environmentalism, including some that are essentially eco-fascists; and there are significant fascist tendencies that use environmentalist arguments as a basis for an anti-capitalist politics. Both tendencies are evident in nativist opposition to immigration. On the other side a number of very pro-capitalist elements in those rightwing think tanks are not into climate change denial, while many nativist right-wingers oppose transnational capitalism in part because of its ecological destructiveness in what they see as ‘their’ territory.

Perhaps the most striking problem with the essay’s perspective on the emergence of fascist tendencies in us politics emerges in the section on the ‘Crisis of State Legitimacy’ (p. 15–16). This is the 9/11 Truther section, but that notorious dead-end for left analysis is not at the heart of the matter. The author uses it in an unexceptionable way to highlight how the denial of ‘conspiracy theories’ in general and alternative explanations of 9/11 in specific function as “…the myth of our time binding the working class to ‘its nation’ (i.e., to the ruling class, to its projects, and to capitalism)” (p. 16). I agree that one function of the attack on ‘conspiracy theories’ is to tie the population to ruling class narratives and obscure the effective power of the ‘deep state.’

Personally I’m quite open to conspiracy theories and averse to official explanations for a whole range of historical phenomena; the problematic lone assassins; various convenient coups and interventions, wars of questionable origins; and the multitude of extravagant corruptions. I also think there is significant substance to notions of the ‘Borg’ and/or ‘deep state.’ So I’m not at all put off by the author’s assertion that, “…there is something very much like a ‘deep state’ functioning within the structure of the bourgeois polity…” (p. 16).

However, what I find to be significant in most examples of potential ‘deep state’ intervention that come to mind is that they are carried out in the interests of the ruling sectors of capital—although sometimes these interests are misconceived. They are focused on maintaining the existing structures of power in the centers of capital, not on toppling it. I see the evidence of ‘deep state’ involvement in the startling emergence of Macron in France and, particularly, in the efforts of the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ to reverse the outcomes of the 2016 election. In the second of these examples, the organized role of the “…network of operatives housed inside the intelligence agencies, the military command structure and the Executive-based permanent bureaucracies…” (p. 16) is far more evident and their motives and goals are much easier to understand than can be said about any alternative explanations of 9/11.

That’s why the general approach of the essay to the topic seems so off-target: “… in the red hot heat of class confrontation, the presence of ‘deep state’ operatives in support of a fascist oppositional bloc guarantee civil war…” (p. 16). In my opinion, the ‘deep state’ and the other tools of capitalist state power will probably be aligned against any potential “fascist oppositional bloc”, and not incorporated as the author implies in what he sees as “… the Tendential direction of Capitalist Development” (towards fascism).

I intended to spend some more time on these criticisms although they are already self-indulgently long. However, I’ve encountered major computer problems and will cut it off here and hope my comments have some use.

Floris D’Aalst’s essay “Whither America? Class and Politics in the Era of American Decline” covers a lot of ground. I appreciate that his overview of the unfolding crisis of us capitalism highlights the role of right-wing political and cultural forces, and that he surveys not only how these forces have developed, but also how this development has been bound up with changes in the structure of us capitalism. I’m not going to offer a comprehensive response to his paper as a whole, but will concentrate my comments on certain issues related to the us political right.

D’Aalst traces the development of “a neo-Right, neo-fascist oppositional culture” in the United States. He is certainly correct that right-wing political forces have greatly increased in size and influence since the mid 1970s. But D’Aalst drastically exaggerates the unity of these forces, glossing over major divergences and conflicts between them, and thereby distorting and oversimplifying the political situation. He compounds this problem with a misguided discussion of race that ignores the systemic nature of racial oppression, and a seriously disturbing foray into 9/11 conspiracism.

In D’Aalst’s account, what he calls the neo-Right encompasses “a hierarchy of institutions” ranging from corporate donors, wealthy individuals, and private foundations at the top, through think tanks, evangelical churches, and “ ‘respectable’ groups operating on the terrain of formal bourgeois politics,” down to “nativists, fascists and neo-Nazis on the ground.” With the exception of evangelical ministries (which he acknowledges “function quite autonomously”), D’Aalst argues that all of these forces operate in concert: “Organizations and generations of leadership interlock; strategies are often jointly planned; and the same politically authoritarian, militaristic and nationalist, patriarchal and unfettered capitalist vision animates their views of American society.” D’Aalst describes the neo-Right bloc variously as either just neo-fascist or as tending increasingly toward neo-fascism.

I think it’s a mistake both analytically and strategically to treat fascism as simply a wing or incremental endpoint of a broad rightist coalition, and better to reserve the term fascism for political forces that advocate a radical break with the existing political system.1 But even if we set that aside, there’s no hint in D’Aalst’s account of the fierce disagreements that have riven the us right for decades, regarding such major issues as the politics of race, wars, trade, immigration, and the role of the state. The New Right coalition that elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980 never included the neonazi movement (much of which the Reagan administration actively suppressed) and the coalition itself largely broke apart with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unity that anticommunism had provided. The late 1980s and the 1990s, for example, saw sharp clashes between neoconservatives and self-described paleo-conservatives, who opposed mass immigration, free trade, and most us military interventionism abroad. Paleo-con Pat Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns in the Republican presidential primaries attracted significant support, and his attacks on “globalism” resonated with the Patriot movement’s first upsurge during the same period.2 Many paleo-conservative themes have reappeared in the “America First” politics of Donald Trump, whose 2016 campaign attracted enthusiastic support from alt-right white nationalists not only because of his racism and nativism, but also because he ridiculed and vilified establishment conservatives.3

I have argued elsewhere that since the 1990s, the us far right has supported some elements of neoliberalism but has also developed largely in reaction against it:

For example, Christian Reconstructionists have generally applauded the privatization of public services, while Patriot activists have called for rolling back environmental regulations and have embraced the ethos of individual property rights as a cornerstone of freedom, just as neonazis and other racists have endorsed the rollback of social programs identified with people of color. [On the other hand,] non-European immigration and multinational free trade agreements are cornerstones of the neoliberal system and prime targets of far right rage. Far rightists have also denounced the us economy’s trend toward runaway financial speculation (an organic consequence of the deregulatory policies of the past three decades), persistent military interventionism overseas, and even—when it targets white people—militarization of the police. This ambivalence about neoliberalism, as much as anything else, expresses the far right’s contradictory relationship with established systems of power.4

Similarly, in claiming that Donald Trump “provides leadership” to the neo-Right, D’Aalst obscures Trump’s own conflicted relationship with neoliberalism. Much as the Nixon administration in the early 1970s included both defenders and enemies of the weakening New Deal system, Trump put together an administration by jamming together neoliberals and America Firsters. His team has furthered the neoliberal agenda by pushing to dismantle industrial and environmental regulations, open up public lands to greater exploitation by business, and make the tax system even more regressive than it was before. But on immigration, trade, and foreign and military policy, Trump has repeatedly, if somewhat erratically, challenged and undermined neoliberal positions.5 Yet D’Aalst glosses over the conflict between neoliberals and America Firsters, claiming for example that the Koch brothers support Trump’s protectionist and anti-immigrant politics when the opposite is true.6

D’Aalst’s paper also includes a very problematic discussion of race. Although this is separate from the section on the neo-Right, I want to address it here because race is central to rightist politics in the United States. D’Aalst describes race as an “imaginary social relation” that is shaped by “institutions” but is essentially a form of false consciousness without material foundations. He argues that since the 1970s policymakers have successfully used public schools and popular culture to instill “de-racialized sensitivities” in many millennials. For these young people, he argues, “the issues of ‘white,’ ‘race’ and ‘color’ simply do not weigh heavily.” The implication, although not clearly stated, seems to be that those with “de-racialized sensitivities” can operate outside of racial categories altogether.

The element of this that I agree with is that over the past half century color-blindness (“not seeing color”) has largely replaced explicit racial bigotry in the consciousness of many white Americans. But as Lorraine Hansberry commented in her anti-colonial play Les Blancs, “it is pointless to pretend that [race] doesn’t exist—merely because it is a lie.” 7 Nowhere does D’Aalst acknowledge that racial oppression is a systemic reality in us society, deeply rooted in a whole network of institutions, practices, and social relations. In this context, color-blindness functions as an ideology that masks, and thereby protects, the continuing reality of racial oppression. And color-blindness isn’t limited to millennials or left-leaning people. Many sections of the us far right have embraced it as well, including Patriot groups such as Oath Keepers, most Christian rightists, and even the Lyndon LaRouche fascist cult network.8 This is crucial for understanding how rightist politics continues to evolve and adapt.

D’Aalst himself seems to back away from his own conclusion about “de-racialization,” as indicated by the extraordinary ambivalence in the following passage:

“Whiteness” cannot and will not be abandoned by those who are its bearers. Its impact, however, will lessen (not societally, but as an internal relation of the working class with itself) over time, but not as dramatically as we might wish, but lessen nonetheless; that is as large numbers of self-consciously “white” workers will “age up” and no longer be significant for the class relation. Perhaps not, but an eminently defensive sound position, and a rational hope.

The last issue I want to address is D’Aalst’s discussion of the 9/11 attacks. D’Aalst asserts, without providing any documentation or evidence, that al-Qaeda hijackers could not have carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or even the plane that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and that these attacks not only may have but must have been carried out by “a rogue network of operatives housed inside the intelligence agencies, the military command structure and the Executive-based permanent bureaucracies.” He declares further that “belief in the official version of the events of 911 [sic] September 2001…is the myth of our time binding the working class to ‘its’ ‘nation’ [and] no revolutionary transformation is possible without breaking the back of this (among other) myth(s).”

I strongly disagree with all of these claims. I won’t rehash the many arguments that have been advanced to refute the “inside job” theory of 9/11, except one: the sheer implausibility that all of the supposed conspirators—not only the spies and soldiers and bureaucrats who supposedly engineered the attacks but everyone involved in all of the official investigations—have kept utterly silent about their roles for seventeen years.9 D’Aalst himself acknowledges that revolutionary communists have “good reason” not to engage with the so-called 9/11 truth movement: namely, the likelihood they will encounter “arguments whether the Queen of England [or] the Vatican in pursuit of Satanic rituals control[s] the world of great capitalist finance.” Another factor that D’Aalst doesn’t mention is that 9/11 “truth” has become a major tool for right-wing antisemites such as Kevin Barrett and Christopher Bollyn to repackage their ideology for left-leaning audiences.10 In this context, the burden of proof is on D’Aalst to explain why his version of 9/11 conspiracy theories is any different or any better. But he doesn’t back up his claims in any way. Not only does this undermine his argument on this point, it calls into question his overall judgment and credibility.

1. Matthew N. Lyons, “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism,” Socialism and Democracy 47 (vol. 22, no. 2; July 2008): 121–156; Don Hamerquist, “New Stuff From an Old Guy—Part 2,” Three Way Fight (blog), 28 October 2018.↩

2. On the Reagan administration’s anti-nazi crackdown, see Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009), 145–147; on the fracturing of the New Right coalition, see Matthew N. Lyons, “Business Conflict and Right-Wing movements,” in Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics, edited by Amy E. Ansell (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 93–97.↩

3. Matthew N. Lyons, “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right,” Political Research Associates, 20 January 2017.↩

4. Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The us Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Oakland, CA: PM Press and Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2018), xv.↩

5. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, 200–205; see also Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, “Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Working Paper No. 66, January 2018, Institute for New Economic Thinking. Ferguson et al. argue (p. 48) that the coalition of business interests backing Trump’s administration is “extremely unstable” and is “made up of several layers of investor blocs with little in common other than their intense dislike of existing forms of American government.”↩

6. John Verhovek, “Koch network takes aim at ‘protectionism,’ slams Trump administration as ‘divisive,’” ABC News, 29 July 2018; Maggie Severns, “Koch network raps Trump, won’t support House immigration bills,” Politico, 19 June 2018.↩

7. Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 92.↩

8. Matthew N. Lyons, “Ammon Bundy, the refugee caravan, and Patriot movement race politics,” Three Way Fight, 20 December 2018; Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, 87.↩

9. On the “9/11 Truth movement,” see Dave Thomas, “The 9/11 Truth Movement: The Top Conspiracy Theory, a Decade Later,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2011; Jeremy Stahl, “The Theory vs. the Facts: 9/11 conspiracy theorists responded to refutations by alleging more cover-ups,” Slate, 7 September 2011.↩

10. Cloee Cooper, “Kevin Barrett: Repackaging Antisemitism,” Political Research Associates, 23 October 2017; Jacob Siegel, “Jew-Hater Christopher Bollyn Brings 9/11 False Flag Act to the Brooklyn Commons,” The Daily Beast, 10 September 2016.

    ↩

Floris D’Aalst has taken on an ambitious task as he attempts to explain the political/economic situation in which we, in the United States, find ourselves. Among the many topics he attempts to link together are:

1. an explanation of the deindustrialization of the 1980s and ’90s in the United States;
2. the basis of what he calls “neo right and neo fascist oppositional culture”;
3. the potential role of millennials in the emerging class struggles;
4. the evolving role of “race” in American society,
5. a critique of “revolutionary communists” that includes their failure to take seriously the various conspiracy theories involving a “deep state” in the United States as well as their failure to see the relationship between capitalism and climate change;
6. a discussion of how Trump-initiated trade wars may well lead to hot war.

My critique here will focus on his argument about the causes and consequences of industrial (manufacturing) decline, especially what he terms “us dollar suzerainty” and “global de-dollarization.”

The author argues that it is the decline in us “dollar suzerainty” or what he calls a “de-dollarization” in world trade that has brought on trade wars that are likely to end up with hot shooting wars.

D’Aalst correctly emphasizes the importance of the dollar’s status as a “global reserve currency” in his discussion. But his explanation of the extent to which this status has been declining, why it’s declining and why it’s important needs further discussion.

If a nation or an individual wants to buy stuff, say a car, from another nation, they have to pay for the car in that nation’s currency or use a currency that can easily be converted to that nation’s currency.

For that reason, nations try to hold foreign exchange reserves in currencies that can be used in trade, or to make investments in other nations. Central banks of large economies hold a reserve of different currencies that have “global reserve status” (meaning that they can be easily converted to a number of other currencies). However, they select one currency, based on their assessment of the size and stability of the economy it represents and hold most of their “foreign exchange reserves” in that currency. In the case of the us dollar, foreign holdings are not just in dollar bills but in dollar denominated assets like government short-term notes or longer-term government bonds. The U.S sells its debt in the form of bonds and notes in global markets where governments and private investors purchase them, essentially lending the us money.

Worldwide the us dollar dominates the foreign exchange reserves. As of November 2018, 64 percent of such reserves were in dollars. The Euro was second at 20 percent. Further, about 65 percent of all cash dollars ($580 billion) circulate outside of the us, mostly in the nations of the former Soviet Union.

So the us dollar, both in the form of dollar denominated assets and cash, continues to be dominant in the world. And that economic power enables the people and businesses in the us and the us government to spend more than we take in and trade freely with other nations. But the dominance of the dollar has slipped since it achieved global reserve currency status in 1944. Why it has slipped is important to D’Aalst’s argument.

At the end of World War II, the us was the only industrial nation left in tact. Bombing and fighting had devastated Europe, and the us used its advantage to dictate the terms of global commerce. The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 created three institutions that governed global finance and trade. They were the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt). The us had a voting majority in the boards of all three of these institutions. In addition, Bretton Woods made the dollar the one and only global reserve currency. Its value relative to all other currencies was fixed and backed by gold that the us Federal Reserve Bank kept in its vaults. Other nations could use their currency locally and its value was backed by us dollars. Each dollar, in turn, was backed by us gold reserves. This powerful status of the dollar was initially opposed by some other nations as the Bretton Woods Agreement was being negotiated because it gave us capital total hegemony in the global economy.

As Europe recovered from the war and began rebuilding, us capital’s power began to be challenged both by industrial workers in the us and other national blocs of capital. Global capital accumulation was generated at the time by a system of large-scale mass production known as “Fordism.” And us hegemony was grounded in its domestic industrial might. The use of the dollar for trade along with the productivity and purchasing power of us workers made the us a vital trading partner of the nations of the world. The challenge came initially from industrial workers who demanded a greater share of us capital’s fortunes. It also came from the us civil rights movements that demanded among other things equality in wages, benefits and job opportunities. In addition, other industrial nations began to diversify their foreign exchange reserves. And some nations began to cash in some of their dollars for gold.

In 1971, President Nixon announced that he was removing the gold standard. The us would no longer allow the sale of gold for dollars. Even in the aftermath of this unilateral action, the dollar remained dominant at 85 percent of global reserves. Then in 1973 Nixon announced that the exchange rates between the dollar and other currencies would no longer be fixed, creating a global market for currencies. And then, as D’Aalst points out, in 1974 there was the petro dollar deal with Saudi Arabia to trade oil in dollars. The us effort to protect the global status of the dollar by cancelling the Bretton Woods Agreement and insuring that oil would be traded in dollars was initially unsuccessful. By 1995 the percentage of total foreign reserves held in us dollars fell to 58 percent. But then it began to rise again and reached 71 percent by 2000. Another decline followed, but presently it seems to be stable at 60–65 percent.

So what was behind this movement? I don’t agree with D’Aalst’s emphasis on single events like the “petro dollar deal” or technological advances like the rise of automation. They were factors, but the decline in the dollar’s dominance in global trade is more systemic than he presents. Historically there have been times when the global capital system is unable to reproduce itself and the people who live within its strictures. More demands are placed on the value produced by working people than the system is able to generate. And the crisis is inherent in capitalism itself. A new crisis appeared in the 1960s. The mode of accumulation that had been institutionalized by the Bretton Woods Agreement was no longer viable which generated further challenges from workers generally but also took the form of civil rights movements, war and a vibrant anti war movement. This is the broader context of Nixon’s monetary initiatives that unilaterally cancelled the Bretton Woods system.

There were many more developments from a variety of sectors of the ruling class over the next 25 years that caused a decline in the dominance of us Capital. These included technologies that enabled manufacturing to get out of the bind of “Fordist” mass production, allowing cost effective production of a single product by manufacturing parts all over the world. A completely revamped logistics industry gradually came into being. It included new networks of automated ports, massive warehousing, product containers, trucking, rail, air and ship innovations to facilitate the movement of goods and services around the world. The Bretton Woods institutions were repurposed to enable capital and goods to flow around the world as needed and to undermine workers’ rights, environmental standards, health and safety rules that had been gained through struggles of the Fordist/Bretton Woods era. Ultimately Fordist mass production and the Bretton Woods system were replaced with a new mode of accumulation that many call “neo liberalism.”

Most importantly, money in the broadest sense of the word, took on a new role in this system. The world shortage of value was offset by globally traded debt. Debt was created and then traded like any other commodity all over the world. And nations could now hold debt as part of foreign exchange reserves. Dollar denominated debt like us Government bonds is “as good as gold.” So dollar reserves today take on a different meaning than they did in the Bretton Woods period.

The us and its corporations were major players in the creation of neo liberalism but on more of an even footing than was the case in 1944. And the us government and us corporations no longer have global hegemony. Even the national identity of global corporations is murky.

Today, classic capitalist crisis where claims on total value are greater than the system is capable of producing is reappearing. Debt, which is essentially a promise to produce value in the future, is phantom capital. It cannot indefinitely enable the global capitalist system to reproduce itself and the people who live within it. Trade wars and hot wars are part of the chaos and the “churning and flailing,” that historically comes with classic capitalist crisis. Once again efforts are under way by the capitalist class to save the system. But this time us capital is not the dominant player as it was in 1944 or even in the1960s.

Trade wars, hot wars, massive human dislocation, a growing population of people who are not needed by the system, increasing environmental degradation, revolutionary challenge from both right and left are all in play. A period like today’s churning and flailing is both a time of great peril and a time of great opportunity. D’Aalst has laid out a number of the perils ahead. And he singles out a possible role for millenials in shaping what comes next. The opportunity now as it has been in past crisis periods is to rid ourselves of capitalism. This could make global de-dollarization irrelevant if a new system includes abolishing wage labor and money itself as we create a totally new society in which the full and free development of everyone is the point of society.

TPTG/Ta Padia Tis Galerias

Floris’s text, notwithstanding certain disagreements from our part, has the merit of covering a wide range of issues, with each one of these requiring a separate analysis in order to be dealt with properly. Therefore, we deliberately left out of our commentary certain aspects of us reality, not because we regard them as unimportant but because we focused on what constitutes our basic line of argumentation in relation to the points of divergence with Floris’s text.

We largely agree with his theoretical explanations on the industrial decline in the United States, however, we consider it to be only a part of a broader historical process that we call a crisis of reproduction of capitalist social relations dating from the late 60s—early 70s.

This period witnessed the beginning of the decomposition of capital-labour relations in the West, as they were consolidated after the war, with Keynesianism, as a model of domination and disciplining-integrating class antagonisms, reaching its limits because of wildcat strikes, urban riots, sabotage, absenteeism, high turnover, the subjective (at times even individualist) revolt against social privileges and state regulations of all kinds, in short a revolt against inflexible models of work in factories and offices and oppressive reproductive models in society at large.

Equally important with what the text says about the falling rate of profit, because of the rise in the organic composition of capital, were the wage rises as a result of labour insubordination, because of which the extraction of surplus value became more expensive.

Apart from the rise of the direct cost of exploitation, what was new in this period, historically speaking, was the rise of the indirect cost of exploitation, the expenses of the welfare state. Since the capitalist state, as a welfare state, incorporated more and more aspects of everyday life, the alienated social organization, society as a factory, generated movements against state control and around education, housing, health, transportation, consumption models etc. It was the period when the struggles of wageless housewives, ethnic minorities, the so-called “surplus population,” for more benefits and less control came to the fore. It was through these struggles that the contradictory relation between the working-class and the welfare state became obvious: the increase in benefits presupposes subordination to the alienating form of the capitalist state, but it was the state itself that had become a terrain of class antagonism and its control was crushed from within.

The struggles in the factory to disconnect wages from productivity and for control over the labour process and the struggles of proletarian subjects such as blacks, women and the unemployed for increases in social benefits, for income without work, were the two sides of the same coin, of the same revolt.

The welfare state came under a crisis, being blamed for causing the crisis itself. The focal points of the new strategy of capital’s counterattack were the restructuring of state expenses and the production sphere, the strengthening of the police functions of the state and the deepening of divisions within the working class. The crisis of the welfare state or else the “fiscal crisis of the state” was the outcome of the social and class struggles over state expenses.

We had to dwell on that because we think that Floris’s argument that “large capitalist concerns no longer accepted the social wage and supported the social welfare state” (p.3), is insufficient in order to describe the crisis of the capitalist state itself when its basic but contradictory functions, capitalist accumulation and the legitimization of capitalist relations, came to an acute crisis.1 We think that his text underestimates the role of the capitalist welfare state as the most powerful agent of capitalist activity and at the same time the mediator of class struggles and it fails to present it as the irreversible historical result of the post-war class compromise on western democracies until nowadays.2

It’s also misleading, in the sense that instead of presenting neoliberalism as a capitalist strategy of both political forms of capital in us politics (Republicans/Democrats, right-wing/liberal), as political forms of capital faced with the crisis, in the text it is only the “Neo-Right” that it is identified with the neoliberal program.

Actually, in the first period of the capitalist counterattack, in the late 70s, Keynesianism was replaced by a monetarist, deflationary politics. It was Jimmy Carter, of the Democratic Party, and Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve, who were the ones who applied monetaristic, deflationary politics through the restriction of money supply to curb inflation (an underlying reason of which was, among other factors, the power of the working class to increase the direct and indirect wage). Starting with the bank and municipal attack against the New York City working class in the mid 70s, it was the Democratic Party that inaugurated neoliberalism with a series of anti-Keynesian policies aiming at the destruction of the local and federal states’ old redistributive function. The first major cutbacks in federal social spending were imposed through the Carter administration’s budget for 1980 “which called for “austerity” and “restraint” in the provision of government services. While defense spending, social security, and health-care payments were increased (the latter two because the benefits are tied by law to the rate of inflation), other programs were level-funded or cut. The 1981 budget continued these trends, with increases for defense spending and austerity for domestic programs; the Reagan administration’s economic program only accelerated these shifts in the public sector.”3

So, although it’s true that capital’s counter-attack was escalated by the Reagan administration, it had already started earlier during the 70s: the new conservatives of both the Republican and the Democratic parties launched an ideology and a practice that combined individualism and economic “rationalization,” reaching to social inequality as a supposedly natural human condition, thus disciplining the working-class by deepening the divisions within it. Instrumental for this was an “attack” on the Big State, “particularly the distant, unresponsive bureaucracies of the federal government, … a crucial element in eroding support for the regulatory and social-wage elements of the state, and for building support for the pro-growth and military-spending elements.”4

But if neither the content of neoliberalism can be attributed exclusively to the Neo-Right’s program, as the text claims, nor its origin dates back in Reagan era, then a disproportionately long analysis of the New Right is hardly necessary, if not confusing. On the contrary, what is missing from a revolutionary perspective is what the limits of the social and class struggles were then and how both political forms of capital helped consolidate the neoliberal policies and ideology.

For example, was the “tax revolt” just a “ ‘single issue’ rightist ‘social issues’ struggle”? More generally, didn’t the 1978 changes in the federal income and payroll taxes further accelerate the inequality of the tax structure with capital gains taxed more lightly under the personal income act, while rates were increased on wages and salaries below certain maximums? Wasn’t the property tax a very regressive tax, favoring mostly the wealthy? The more well-to-do segments of the working class (whether right-wing or liberal) got involved in the interclass movement for tax cuts and it would be very interesting to show how “the Right used it as a wedge to cut business taxes and taxes for the wealthy, as well as social services,”5 that is how parts of the bourgeoisie used the anger and insecurity of an increasingly threatened working class to create a movement that favored them and how they promoted cuts in expenditures that attacked first the weakest parts of the class and in the long term even those parts of the class that were involved in the “tax revolt.”

Furthermore, would it be possible for the conservative anti-proletarian, “populist” and individualistic propaganda to gain ground, if the power of the organized working-class had not been already undermined by the liberals on the city and state levels and if the ability of the working class to fight on its own terrain (i.e. the practical critique of the wage relation in all its dimensions) had not been undermined by the left liberal citizen-action, public-interest groups and the practice of citizenism in general?6

The long history of neoliberalism from the 1970s up till now had its ups and downs. It was not an even historical process culminating in Trump, as Floris suggests.

Reagan was successful in attacking labour legislation favorable to workers and through tax cuts made it easier for capital to relocate from the unionized “rust belt” to the non-unionized southern or western regions of the country (even abroad to Mexico and Southeastern Asia) or reorganize itself in other areas of the economy or new companies free of unions and collective bargaining—a process which continued during the Bush and Clinton’s administration. But as Harry Cleaver had noted:

“Although, once again, as in the 1970s there were successes in cutting social programs, especially in the first year of the first Reagan Administration, there were also failures. The defensive counter-mobilization of a wide variety of targeted groups, from those defending food stamps for the poor to those defending social security for the middle class, succeeded in preventing much of what had been slated for elimination under Reagan’s supply-side program. Given the successful resistance to such cuts, the Reagan program of reduced taxes but not-adequately-reduced expenditures produced a skyrocketing budget deficit which could only be funded by massive foreign borrowing from Europe and Japan. The result was that when business discontent over the depression and over federal crowding-out in money markets combined with the threat of Mexico to default in the debt crisis, Volcker was forced to ease up on monetary policy and lower interest rates in the Fall of 1982. When he did so, his explicit emphasis was on stimulating consumption, not investment. The long slow recovery that followed had something of a Keynesian flavor to it, much to the distaste of monetarists and supply-siders. The fact that the pattern of unemployment, income tax cuts and financial deregulation had had the effect of shifting money income from waged workers to salaried workers and managers—financing the yuppy generation—meant that this “consumption-led” recovery was based on a new class composition, but it was not the investment-led growth envisaged by the supply-side policy makers”.7

Despite the growing importance of productive investments in the reorganization of information flows, science and technology, vast amounts of money were re-deployed in the direction of paper and speculative (stock market and real estate market) investments. This move by industrial concerns had the merit of restoring profit rates and atomizing workers through credit but could not strengthen the link between money and extraction of surplus value, with the result of continuous financial bubbles since 1987.

Clinton’s presidency was the era of extreme financialization and neoliberal populism; workfare was introduced and the pension system was largely privatized. The Clinton years witnessed a continuation of neo-liberal policies by signing up to NAFTA, slashing welfare (with the welfare reform bill that dismantled the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)) and abandoning federal assistance to the old industrial “heartland” in favour of the computer and information industries in the South and West. On the other hand, the median household income increase in African-American households (by 25 percent, twice as fast as it did for all households nationwide) during that time, together with African-American unemployment rate fall (from 14.1 percent to 8.2 percent) simply meant that class divisions within black population deepened. With the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world when Clinton left office in 2001 (because of the 1994 crime bill, with its three-strikes provision and increased number of capital crimes) and African-Americans constituting 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men, including those behind bars, was 42 percent as government statistics on poverty and unemployment rates did not include incarcerated people. Clinton’s period best exemplifies the expansion of the penal side of the welfare state if we take into account that funding for public housing got slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent); this transformation, according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, “effectively makes the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”8

Direct wages (both minimum wage and salaries) were increased during the second Clinton Administration, but thanks to the expulsion of 6 million people from welfare, the slashing of housing benefits and the everyday practice of dismissing those workers who were involved in the organization of trade unions and workers’ groups (10,000 every year), the only beneficiaries of this increase were salaried workers and the managerial strata of the working class, who were also considered to be credit-worthy.

After the bubble of the so-called “New Economy” burst in 2000, there followed a period which could be described as a form of “military Keynesianism” i.e., the use of government funds directed to the military to stimulate economic activity in a period of decreasing private investment and profitability.9 This mixture of neoliberalism (privatization) and Keynesian deficit spending to get and keep us capital out of a crisis and at the same time, the promise of non-union jobs in a hugely expanded and privatized “national security” sector to some citizen workers while further driving immigrant workers into illegality, or else the “Bush Deal,” had as key parts the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. They were components of a strategy of increased expenditure combined with the guarantee of not strengthening the working class through a massive use of non-union private contractors. In essence, the “war on terrorism” was a strategy of a dramatic transformation of class relations and the temporary reversal of the profitability crisis. It was also a means to reaffirm the monopoly of us dollar as the main reserve currency.10 Therefore, it is in this framework that we put the importance of the 9/11 events and not in an abstract critique of “national mythology.”11

The reduction in interest rates and the loosening of credit was even greater after the collapse of the “New Economy” in 2001 and this kind of “privatized Keynesianism” was extended to more and more people who were encouraged to borrow to sustain demand. Gradually, the disciplining/divisive role of the debt expansion was seriously undermined in the years before the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis as speculative investments in the derivative markets connected with consumer and mortgage debt got autonomized, thus leading to a total relaxation of the rules and criteria for providing credit: even unemployed black families were able to get mortgage loans.12

Consequently, the bursting of these new bubbles in the beginning of 2008 brought the global banking system to the verge of total collapse and the global economy into deep recession. The us government under Obama chose to deal with this situation through the even greater burgeoning of the “sovereign debt” with the provision of astronomical sums of money to bail out banks and boost capitalist growth. The use of trillions of dollars of government funds to take control of the banking sector and the demand of a specific restructuring of the auto industry were urgently undertaken among “a wide spectrum of actions that appear[ed] ‘collectivist,’ ‘socialist’ and ‘commonist’ to a doctrinaire neoliberal”,13 since Obama’s administration also saw as its duty to help reverse the legitimacy crisis of the capitalist state brought about by the meltdown in 2008 while bringing the economy back to its pre-crisis state. Neoliberal trends continued as usual and “the number of us families living under the World Bank’s global poverty line (2 dollars per person, per day) more than doubled since the mid-1990s, reaching 1.5 million households in 2011.”14 Unsurprisingly, therefore, in the supposedly “post-racial” era under an African-American president, the deportation of undocumented immigrants was more than 2.5 million and police murders of predominantly black proletarians increased.

Trump enters the picture when the previous administrations’ failure to reverse capitalist profitability crisis for certain capitalist fractions and mitigate the consequences of neoliberal policies for large swathes of the working class reached a point that could seriously endanger the reproduction of capitalist relations.

Therefore, it is important to repeat what several comrades have stressed so far, that it was primarily a defeat of Clinton rather than a victory of Trump, relativizing his supposed electoral “triumph” as a contingent response to Obama’s neo-liberal political economy. Consequently, we view Trump more as an expression of the predicament capital finds itself in and of working-class frustration than as the “deepening” or the “culmination” of a “neo-Right political culture, nascently neo-liberal and, today, more or less openly neo-fascist,” as Floris says. The “anti-establishment” stance he tried to take during his campaign (mobilizing the electoral base of the Republicans to a large extent against the party apparatus) and his populist narrative indicate a deep crisis within the political forms of mediation in the United States politics (in both the Republican and the Democrat Party) rather than a homogeneous strengthened neo-Right, as Floris asserts.

While we do not underestimate Trump’s effort to normalize white supremacy, sexism and militarism, we find it more productive to question the material basis of the racist deal that he seemed to offer to the (“white”) working-class before his election. It is there, however, that we note that instead of keeping the long list of promises he gave (as a candidate) to a deeply disillusioned working-class (raising of taxes on the rich; tax changes that would not benefit the rich; breaking up of the largest us banks by reinstating old Glass-Steagall regulations; price controls on prescription drugs; a $1 trillion infrastructure package etc), what Trump and his cabinet have so far accomplished is that a whole program of regular right-wing demands, stalled for decades, has been turned into actual policy within a very short time (the tax bill, that has dramatically reduced the corporate tax rate; environmental deregulation, increase in the military budget, charter school proliferation, defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, etc).

This standard boiler-plate from the right-wing agenda since the New Deal will hardly satisfy the less well-to-do segments of what, according to Floris, constitutes a “neo-fascist oppositional bloc” and we could also risk suggesting that its working-class segment will feel very alienated if not betrayed at the end of Trump’s presidency. Couldn’t one also predict that these standard neo-liberal “accomplishments” will make Trump’s cabinet “redundant”?

For all these reasons we concur with dissenting voices in the American Left, like Phil Neel, who wrote that:

“… the majority party in the United States is the party of non-voters. This is particularly true among the poor. And this shouldn’t be a great mystery, either. People aren’t really that dumb, and it’s not terribly hard to see that neither major party offers anything to anyone other than the rich and those within its patronage network. Talking to people from these places [the “far” hinterland, which is “a sort of abandoned zone, dominated by informal work and black markets”] you definitely see support for Trump—often almost exclusively out of spite for spineless liberals—but for every Trump supporter you’ll find two people who say fuck both parties, they don’t have our interests in mind. And remember that rural America is nowhere near exclusively white, either… As a “material force,” Trump is not particularly important. He obviously cannot offer any sort of true economic revival, because he’s not able to put through the type of severe tariffs and massive public projects that would be necessary to do so (albeit temporarily). The trade policy he’s pursued has been haphazard at best. In the social sphere, there’s a lot of talk about how he “enables” these far-right mass movements, but the evidence is actually quite mixed. Generally, far-right mass movements tend to grow fastest and strongest under center-left Democratic regimes, because they thrive off these confrontations with an unpopular federal government… And here is the real meat of the issue: when you actually compare the data, you see that Democratic regimes were obviously not much better, and there’s no reason to assume that the Democratic alternative would have been any different”.15

Even more certain is that there can be no historical analogy with fascism. We have major disagreements with Floris on what historical fascism was and even more so on its resemblance with the modern capitalist regime, however, as a proper analysis would be too long for this text, we will just confine ourselves to some short comments. There are no “structural similarities” between the neo-liberal us state and the Nazi state. The Nazi regime was a state capitalist economy, a “closed commercial state,” characterized by protectionist tariffs, full employment and a state-subsidized domestic industrial and agricultural production. The Nazi government had tried to keep peasants tied to their land and there were also regulations against working class mobility between industries. What is more, German society under Nazis was a racist Volksgemeinschaft, totally different from the individualist American society which is characterized, as Floris rightly observes, by inter-racial educational institutions that develop “de-racialized sensitivities” and institutions like affirmative action. Moreover, in German society under the Nazis there were only hidden forms of working class resistance because there was no freedom of press and collective action. Finally, the German national capital tried to solve its lingering overaccumulation crisis, by violently exporting it to other countries, leading to the massive devalorization of constant and variable capital alike during the World War II massacre.

However, since then the capitalist accumulation, seen as a whole, has evolved into incorporating globalized networks of surplus value extraction, supply/consumption and financing. In that sense, the de-industrialization of the West and the rapid massive accumulation of fixed capital in Eastern Asia are connected, both reflecting the new division of labour exploitation on the global scale that emerged as a temporary spatio-temporal fix to the crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations in the West. The current dynamics of valorization/devalorization strongly depend on the cooperation of the capitalist class to set up such fixes, interconnecting local regimes of accumulation to an ever-greater degree. It is this very material basis of labour exploitation under capitalist relations that prevent us from seeing a direct linkage between current “tariff or trade wars,” to the extent that these are actual inter-capitalist “wars” and a “renewed imperialist world war.”

So-called “tariff wars” should also be examined under the perspective of simultaneous intra-capitalist competition and cooperation. Trump’s tariff-based policy, focusing on bilateral agreements that would largely favour the United States, seem to have been halted by temporary agreements with EU and Canada while, and this is equally important, such protectionist policies may be beneficial to all trading sides, to a certain degree at least. For instance, the Chinese government has long been pursuing a more balanced accumulation model (both investment and internal consumption-driven), in response to the rising production costs in China due to working class unrest and as a tactical shift to partially disengage local production from (currently largely) unstable global demand.

Finally, we can’t see what’s the use of the dystopian science fiction, apocalyptic totalitarian scenario that Floris presents at the end of his text. If it is true that the far-right organises localist self-reliance initiatives in areas faced with declining government services, thus bypassing the central issue of exploitation, then the only solution still remains the autonomous multiracial, multi-gendered organization of the working class around the central issue of work and wages. What are the possibilities of strengthening such universalist organizations both in workplaces and the sphere of reproduction? What are, for example, the prospects and the dynamics of the multi-racial, multi-gendered Fight for $15 movement? Is it an independent working class movement or a public relations movement under the patronage of the Democrats and DSA? From a revolutionary point of view, such, among others, would be for us a more productive and grounded attitude towards the real movement of our times, instead of highly questionable, apocalyptic hypothetical series of events on which, moreover, proletarian organization seems to have no influence whatsoever.

A theoretical postscript

Our modest analysis in the form of the above short and incomplete comments has been informed by the theoretical assumption that currency issues and trade-currency wars are mystified forms of appearance of problems that arise within the relations of production, i.e. within the relations of exploitation. Money is neither a simple means of trading and profit accumulation, nor is it a simple mechanism for regulating production. Money is the most abstract, capitalist form of social wealth; it is the contradictory, mystifying social power through which social reproduction is subject to capitalist reproduction. Behind the United States effort to support the dollar and make money out of money lies the inability of capital to increase work productivity in a way other than reducing the cost through redundancies. Trump’s decisions, like those of his predecessors, show the inability to create a new model of exploitation of labour and integration of the whole working class without at the same time encouraging its demands; in other words, they show the failure to impose a productive and profitable disciplining of the working class. On the other hand, competition among different forms of capital or between companies or even national capitals is not the essence of capitalism; it is one of the ways of sharing the total socially produced surplus value (another way is the co-operation of the individual capitals). Because labour is forced to produce surplus value under the dictate of capital as a whole, the strongest capitals—national or supra-national ones-do not only aim at increasing their individual profits, but, most importantly, they try to achieve this by promoting their own overall solution to the problems of global surveillance, exploitation and reproduction of the planetary labour power. Thus, although true that the overall strategy of capital emerges through competition, the obsession of anti-imperialists (whether left or liberal) with inter-capitalist conflict conceals the real content of this conflict: the joint domination of many capitals over the undisciplined labour powers.

1. As far as we know, the first major contribution to such a class analysis of the capitalist state and state expenses was O’ Connor’s The Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973).↩

2. As the late Chris Harman had recognized in 2008, “There have been repeated attempts by governments to cut back on social expenditures over the past three decades. Indeed in Britain struggles against cutbacks began much earlier than that. I remember reading about the first cuts in old copies of left wing publications from the early 1950s. Yet the expenditures have gone on rising. How is that to be explained? Part of the explanation has to do with struggles against the cutbacks… But that is not the end of the story. There are features built into capitalism that compel it to pay out a social wage even though it resents doing so. Capitalist ruling classes can only prosper by exploiting people’s capacity to work (their “labour power”). That capacity is damaged by illness, accidents and malnutrition. So capitalists have to worry about keeping a fit and able body of workers (ie “reproducing labour power”). That requires healthcare for workers, and benefits to enable workers to survive through periods of unemployment so that they can be fit for exploitation when the economy revives…The capitalist wants contented workers to exploit in the same way that a farmer wants contented cows.” The question for all social classes is “who pays for the welfare state?” We think that “white power” ideology and middle class tax revolts cannot be understood outside this context. Nor can the increasing financialization of the pension and social security funds be explained, let alone connected to the expanding globalized flows of fictitious/speculative capital, also channeled to feed “national debt.” For example, almost half of the staggering us debt, which is used as a means to stimulate capitalist accumulation globally, is held by such (both state-owned and private) funds, much more so than foreign governments, say China or Japan.↩

3. Crisis in the public sector, a Reader by the Economics Education Project of the Union for Radical Political Economics, Monthly Review Press, p. 14.↩

4. Ibid., p. 313.↩

5. Ibid., p. 74.↩

6. Let’s give some examples: the left-liberal groups against corporate power (citizen-action groups and liberal public sector unions associated with labour bureaucracies and the Democratic Party) tended to accept the need for welfare cuts and tax reduction on business as long as their own funding was not threatened or middle-class residential properties were taxed at a lower rate than business properties. In many cases, class collaboration, as in New York City, where public unions co-operated in implementing the austerity measures proposed by the city’s municipal and financial authorities in the end worked to the disadvantage of their own members. The grassroots movement used similar militant liberal reformist tactics and electoral strategies, e.g. the Detroit Alliance for a Rational [sic] Economy (DARE). As a result, most of the anti-corporate groups (whether liberal interest-groups or non-professional community-based groups) of the late ’70s – early ’80s remained trapped in the bourgeois public sphere and had only limited successes in their campaigns. All the examples are taken from the aforementioned Reader. The situation does not seem to be very different today.↩

7. The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis, in Bonefeld/Holloway, Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, p. 162–163.↩

8. Cited in Michelle Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” The Nation.↩

9. According to George Caffentzis in “Is Truth Enough? The Bush Administration’s Lies and the Anti-War Movement’s Truths,” 2004.↩

10. The forthcoming de-dollarization of global economy has indeed been announced several times over the past years, especially after the slacking us growth rates of the 2000s and the inauguration of the euro. Official data, however, do not confirm such projections, as reserves held in USD in September corresponded to $6.63 tr or 61.9 percent of all allocated reserves (from $6.56 tr and 62.4 percent in June 2018). Though all central banks keep on further diversifying their reserves, claims held in euros are still only 20.5 percent, followed by those held in yen (almost 5 percent). Furthermore, almost 40 percent of the global debt is issued in dollars, while most global contracts (i.e. for oil) are still denominated in USD. Keeping the United States dollar “strong,” that is more expensive than the corresponding national currencies, is of key importance for such central banks as those of Japan and China so as to subsidize their export-oriented local industrial production. This is why they keep on purchasing us debt, thus simultaneously financing us-based consumption and Japanese/Chinese exports.↩

11. On the other hand, we do not share Floris’ view that the significance of this event is that “there is something very much like a ‘deep state’ functioning within the structure of the bourgeois polity,” especially since he associates it with a “fascist oppositional bloc.” Bourgeois democracy does not exclude temporary or long-drawn “states of exception” or “states of emergency,” as the violent transformation of class relations in Greece in recent years has proved. The democratic community of capital is capable of transfiguring bourgeois law and of introducing its (partial) revocation, when needed, without necessarily having recourse to dictatorship. In the case of 9/11, what the “deep state” did was in no way incongruent with the Bush Administration’s operations, i.e. with the policy of a democratically elected president.↩

12. TPTG, Burdened with debt.↩

13. George Caffentzis, “The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?,” 2010.↩

14. Cited in Phil Neel, Hinterland, Reaktion Books, p. 16↩

15. Phil Neel, “The Center Has Fallen and There’s No Going Back,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 4th, 2018.↩

Floris D’Aalst’s “Whither America?” provides plenty of food for thought. Split into three sections, it first examines reasons for us industrial decline before moving on to dissect the class composition of the contemporary American political scene. Once this has been accomplished, it outlines tasks for revolutionaries. As the author himself openly admits, the second section is the most controversial. The majority of my remarks will thus concentrate there, but we may proceed roughly in order.

D’Aalst begins by sketching the country’s postwar economic development, with a focus on deindustrialization. He pinpoints its cause in three main factors:

1. geographic diversification of the workforce, both within the United States and offshore;
2. the real subsumption of labor by capital, with technological innovations granting specific firms a short-term advantage before becoming generalized; and
3. the falling rate of profit.

Without question, this is the strongest section of the paper. It might even be reproduced elsewhere as a condensed introduction to the topic. Especially vivid here is D’Aalst’s example of steel production, the gradual reduction in man-hours necessary to galvanize and process the metal, illustrating perfectly the dynamics of unemployment that follow.

More contentious is the second section, which is further divided into two subsections on the rise of a new conservatism following the 1974 oil crisis and possibilities for renewed class struggle amidst accelerated climate change. Both present problems. Let us deal with them one at a time, then, starting with the former. Although D’Aalst contextualizes the origins of today’s rightwing oppositional culture quite well, he fails to highlight important fissures within the so-called “neo-Right, neo-fascist” bloc (which is treated as more or less unitary). For instance, its institutional apparatus and sources of funding are laid bare, but no effort is made to parse the distinct — indeed, often contradictory — elements that comprise the Trump coalition. To do so requires a bit more finesse.

Of the various theorists who have analyzed the nascent “alt-Right” ideological formation, Matthew Lyons is by far the most insightful. Itself a fairly complex phenomenon, as he points out, it nevertheless sits in uneasy tension with the neoliberal and neoconservative factions that have dominated the Republican Party since the seventies. Protectionist tariffs chafe against the free trade policies of Reagan, while the isolationist drift of alt-Right ideologues brings it closer to the paleo-conservativism of Pat Buchanan than the hawkish neo-conservatism that held sway under Bush II.1 Even D’Aalst seems dimly aware of this fact, noting in passim the way Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin and words of praise for Kim Jong-Un “[render] the neocon policy wonks and media apoplectic.”

Notwithstanding the tax cuts Trump managed to pass, his bloated budgetary allowances send the congressional “Freedom Caucus” into fits. Steve Bannon’s immortal line about House Speaker Paul Ryan, reportedly calling him “a limp-dick motherfucker born in a petri dish outside the Heritage Foundation” in 2016,2 comes to mind. To be sure, one should be careful not to overstate the incompatibility of these elements. John Bolton, a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative, was later brought on as Trump’s National Security Advisor — having first been rejected on account of his mustache.3

All the same, D’Aalst is onto something with his diagnosis of “a dense lumpenized middle stratum” at the forefront of Trumpian discontent. Under this category he groups a number of down-on-their-luck petty proprietors, whose diminished job prospects fuel their xenophobia and nativism. Furthermore, the second subsection gets off to an auspicious start with lengthy quotes from the late Will Barnes, an independent scholar whose writings seem very relevant today.4 However, I do not share any of D’Aalst’s optimism regarding the younger generation of “socialist millennials,” whom he believes to possess “a non-racialized awareness” thanks to changes in school curricula during the 1980s. D’Aalst insists that this is a “rational hope,” but I am compelled to disagree.

Education alone is not enough to do away with systemic issues such as racism or sexism, which reproduce themselves ideologically along preexisting lines: namely, those laid down by the division of labor and its segmentation across different portions of the population. What is perhaps even worse, moreover, is the fact that liberalism’s proposed solutions to these problems only exacerbate them further. On college campuses, ostentatious gestures of disavowal are encouraged, urging students to check their privilege or other well-intentioned but superficial palliatives. Needless to say, none of these do anything to touch the underlying causes of racism, sexism, etc.5
This in no way excuses reactionary politics founded upon the specter of “political correctness gone mad,” of course, but it does not hurt to at least acknowledge that such gestures are ineffectual.

It therefore strikes me as extremely naïve to hope, as D’Aalst does, that “self-consciously ‘white’ workers will ‘age up’ and no longer be significant for the class relation.” Similar hopes were held by Democratic Party pollsters and statisticians just a few years ago, believing demographic shifts (a less “white” population, thanks to immigration) would shore up their electoral base and undermine the GOP. Unfortunately for them, politics does not work in so straightforward a fashion. Voters who considered themselves white in their countries of origin would soon feel the same way here.

The third section raises several key questions for revolutionary communists, which we will have to weigh carefully in the years to come. Apart from an inexplicable aside on 9/11 midway through, which reads more as a private hobbyhorse than anything deserving public refutation,6 this is a strong segment. Particularly pressing is the scenario D’Aalst envisions where state power has been seized by the proletariat, but zones of habitation continue to be threatened by runaway climate change. How will revolutionaries manage society’s metabolism with nature? Loren Goldner already includes in his “first hundred days” program “measures to deal with the atmosphere, [rapidly] phasing out fossil fuel use.”7 But maybe a more drastic course of action is called for today.

Concluding his essay, D’Aalst reflects on the potential geopolitical implications of a trade war. Whether trade wars inevitably lead to shooting wars is hard to say, though he might be proved right in the years to come. Military conflicts can be set off by any number of unforeseen incidents and eventualities, as seen recently with the sudden escalation in Ukraine. In any case, turbulent waters lie ahead.

• 1Lyons identifies American paleo-conservatism as one of the major “ideological forerunners” to the contemporary alt-Right, the other being the European Nouvelle Droite. See Matthew Lyons. “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right.” Political Research. (January 20, 2017).
• 2Quoted in Joshua Green. Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising. (Penguin Books. New York, NY: 2018). Pg. 188.
• 3“Bolton’s mustache is a big problem… Trump does not think he looks the part.” Steve Bannon, quoted in Michael Wolff. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. (Henry Holt & Co. New York, NY: 2018).
• 4See the editors’ “Note on Will Barnes.” Insurgent Notes. (April 10, 2015).
• 5N— Ch—. “Social Justice: Noble, but Doomed to Fail.” Intransigence. (№ 3: November 2018). Pgs. 9-13.
• 6D’Aalst recognizes this, writing: “Now there is good reason why revolutionary communist websites and discussions forums do not take events like 9/11 up (but there is no good reason why the same often parrot the official line): Open a site or forum to discussion of such events and there’ll be arguments whether the Queen of England and, or, the Vatican in pursuit of Satanic rituals control the world of great capitalist finance.” Knowing this, it is strange that he chooses to give vent to baseless conspiracy theories about jet fuel not being able to melt steel beams, or speculations about “controlled detonations,” in the preceding paragraph. I doubt, moreover, that “September 11 is still the myth of our time binding the working class to ‘its’ nation,” or that “no revolutionary transformation is possible without breaking the back of this myth.”
• 7Loren Goldner. “Fictitious Capital and the Transition Out of Capitalism.” Libcom. (November 17, 2005).

Floris D’Aalst has, if nothing else, written a provocative essay. He challenges us to make connections that we might not have thought of and to think differently about some very important matters. His analysis provides some very important starting points for discussion, debate and further investigation. Furthermore, it’s clear that his fundamental goal is to sketch out a scenario that anticipates where the unrelenting misery of the great majority of people’ lives and the profoundly unproductive turmoil of current political confusion, in both mainstream politics and the admittedly marginalized revolutionary left, might be resolved. His imagined resolution is one of great danger but that does not mean that it should not be directly engaged with.

Let us begin with a mention of the most valuable analyses that D’Aalst incorporates into his essay:

• a concise but perceptive analysis of the form and content of “deindustrialization”;
• an intriguing analysis of the formation of what we would term a “millennial sensibility” among a not insignificant group of younger people in the United States population;
• the significance of the unexpected expansion of the middle stratum between capitalists and workers (such as independent contractors in construction or technology) for the establishment of a social base for a resurgent right-wing politics—neither fish nor fowl, these individuals are likely faithful listeners to talk radio in the middle of the afternoon;
• the ways and means by which a powerful right-wing block was methodically developed over the last fifty years—a block consisting of foundations, think tanks, voter mobilizations, issue-driven organizations (such as pro-life ones). Republican party caucuses and evangelical churches;
• an anatomy of Trump’s economic policies as a way of thinking about the method to his madness; the goal is to gain advantage—“America First” is really “America Over All.”

At the same time, however, D’Aalst advances other analyses that we believe are more or less flawed. Let us enumerate what we consider to be the shortcomings in his argument:

1. a lack of clarity and precision in the meanings of terms that appear to be quite central to his thinking;
2. a lack of convincing evidence to back up claims regarding matters such as the social composition of various right-wing currents;
3. a confused rendering of the relationships between and among various strands of right-wing movements;
4. a profoundly idealist explanation of class consciousness;
5. a confused analysis of the shaping of racial consciousness;
6. an insistence that the 9/11 attacks were part of a “deep-state” conspiracy to cow and indoctrinate the American people;
7. an all-but-doomsday analysis of climate change which can only result in a conviction that it’s all too late and that not even a revolution can stop the worst scenarios from occurring [we do want to acknowledge that D’Aalst’s knowledge about these matters far exceeds our own—that is a reason for him to at least outline a programmatic alternative];
8. an overly critical assessment of Marxist commitments to exhausting nature;
9. an almost fantastic portrayal of the emergence of a new constellation of revolutionary forces.

Other contributors to this discussion have written about most of these criticisms and we’ll try not to repeat what’s already been said. We’ll focus on a few matters: the confusions about race; the idealism regarding consciousness; the over-drawn criticism of Marxist attitudes towards nature; the profound non-realism of the anticipation of revolutionary forces ready for battle.

Race

D’Aalst argues that race is an “imaginary social relation” and a “socially constructed social-topography of arcane fears, anxieties, and sham facts and insights.” We confess that we’re not sure what he means.

Further, he argues that the one social fact supporting that imaginary social relation was an “experientially based three class model of society” (the rich above, us in the middle and them permanently below). He describes it as “a barbarous form of common sense” that was destroyed by deindustrialization. For D’Aalst, what is at issue are not material privileges but “the institutions which create a malformed identity on the basis of a socially constructed psychic topography.” Quite a mouthful! He says nothing about which institutions he has in mind, how they are constructed or how they are maintained. He does not consider that institutions have material bases.

We’ll be specific about the institutions that maintain a racial order, albeit one that is no longer as monolithic as the pre-Civil Rights segregationist era or slavery. The police, the courts, the prisons, the schools and colleges, the public housing authorities, the real estate markets within cities and metropolitan areas, and the informal labor markets are all interwoven to produce systemic disadvantage for blacks and advantage for “whites.” As a result, they provide a substantial material base for the adoption and preservation of a white identity. Admittedly, the grounds are not as absolute as they once were but they’re more than good enough in many instances—see, for example, “No More Missouri Compromises” by John Garvey, an article about the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in Insurgent Notes # 11. The workings of those institutions also continue to provide for the incorporation of those once considered “non-white” into the non-black, or “white,” social group, at the moment especially individuals from Asian backgrounds.

It is true that formal work categories and wage differentials are no longer central to the maintenance of privilege. However, the immiseration of white workers does not necessarily or automatically affect the other dimensions of lived experience. The challenge remains—how can the institutions be destroyed.

Class Consciousness

Surprisingly, D’Aalst puts forward a decidedly non-Marxist theory of consciousness. He writes as straightforwardly as possible that: “Consciousness is constitutive of class.” We suspect that, at heart, D’Aalst is more Hegelian than Marxist. Paradoxically, this idealist orientation leads him to an uncritically mechanical understanding of the effects of immiseration on consciousness. He believes, as they used to say, the worse things get the better. In that regard, he displays no awareness of the autonomous character of fascist movements—that those movements too can arise in response to immiseration and they too can be prepared to challenge the state and capital.

Marxism and Nature

Marxists have continued to celebrate nature mastery long after it passed over into resource plunder and ecological destruction, affirming that communism as a free human community rested solidly on the foundations of the “material achievements” of capitalism.

Marx’s writings contain numerous analyses of the human-nature relationship that reflect a deep appreciation of its importance. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx had written:

Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.

But Marx had a complex understanding of nature:

With the exception of the extractive industries, such as mining, hunting, fishing (and agriculture, but only in so far as it starts by breaking up virgin soil), where the material for labour is provided directly by nature, all branches of industry deal with raw material, i.e., an object of labour which has already been filtered through labour, which is itself already a product of labour. An example is seed in agriculture. Animals and plants which are accustomed to consider as products of nature, may be, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour but the result of a gradual transformation continued through many generations under human control, and through the agency of human labour (Volume I, 287–288).

Thus, while society is in nature, nature is also in society.

Finally, Marx was, among other things, genuinely attentive to the need to preserve what had been passed down:

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household] (Volume III, 911).

We are acutely aware of the fact those aspects of Marx’s views were not commonly held by what might be considered traditional Marxism. The simple fact, however, is that most of Marx’s views were also not held by traditional Marxism. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Fantasy about Revolutionary Coalescence

D’Aalst provides an almost magical incantation of the coalescence of an emancipatory revolutionary block in three paragraphs of a twenty seven-page essay. Again, he has an over-confidence in the potential of material deprivation creating grounds for a new breakthrough. He has an exaggerated sense of how millenials will progressively develop adequate understandings of immigration, murder and policing:

The view put forth here is that, among proletarians struggling with the issue of power, an awareness that is non-racialized, and whose sensibilities embrace tolerance and equality will be far more disposed toward a just and equitable treatment of immigrants, and will, moreover, be capable of addressing the really thorny irredentist and revanchist questions that, dating to 1846, may still linger in popular awareness; such proletarians will also far more likely be ecologically sensitive; and, prior even to the assumption of power, in the conflicts to come replete with cop brutality, such awareness, notwithstanding bourgeois democratic and electoral illusions, will come to recognize (if only intuitively) the role and function of cops as the front line of ruling class power on the ground. “

As we wrote above, we think that D’Aalst is on to something important about the millenials—they share a conviction that racial discrimination is wrong, that respect is for others is essential, that people should not be subject to unnecessary hardship, and that social benefits should be made universal (for example, Medicare for All). As a result, they form a powerful constituency for “social democracy”—as perhaps evidenced by the extent of support for the Sanders campaign in 2016, the explosive growth of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the current remarkable popularity of Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez. But how can we turn that social democratic sensibility into a different one? It will not happen by itself. It will require sustained engagement with the ideas popular in those circles—not to trash them but to challenge them respectfully. See, by way of example, “What is Socialism” by John Garvey in Insurgent Notes # 18.

D’Aalst doesn’t address the matter of the self-consciousness of the other components of his imaginary revolutionary block; he assumes that they will be there—ready for civil war: “The same unfolding events will push in the direction of consolidation of a counter-posed class bloc, youth with its proletarianized, precarious core, large layers of Spanish speaking labor, thin layers of other ethnic-national workers and a thick multi-class stratum of blacks.” We believe that this is a problematic assumption based on little to no empirical evidence. The individuals in those groups are self-thinking and self-acting and we should not assume very much at all of what they might do. They may act well or they may act badly. If we assume only the prior and don’t anticipate the possibility of the latter, we will suffer terribly.

For D’Aalst, all that is needed beforehand is a “withering critique of profitablility.” Profitability is a curious word choice. It’s one that the social democrats that D’Alast is justifiably critical of would not object to. Why not a withering critique of the “profit system” or “wage labor” or “surplus value” or the subordination of human life time to “dead labor”? Or any of the many other classic formulations of the profound life and death struggle between those who work and capital?

What might have helped D’Aalst’s arguments would have been an expression of tentativeness about the certainty with which he advanced them. To be fair, D’Aalst was the one who suggested that Insurgent Notes sponsor a discussion and it may well be that in itself reveals that he is open to reconsidering and reformulating his ideas. We shall see.

In closing, we’d offer just a few thoughts on the building of a revolutionary block. We agree with what we think is D’Aalst’s assumption—that there is little of great promise available at the moment. We have the traditional sects; some new sects; some new journals with more or less distinctive points of view—including Insurgent Notes’ own initial emphasis on program. We do also have the resurgence of DSA. All in all, not much to build on!

Nonetheless, we would argue that it’s necessary to make the effort. Not surprisingly, we’d advocate a new appropriation of revolutionary Marxism. We have a few touchstones for how such an appropriation might occur—Marx’s own writings (un-mangled by Leninist-Stalinist-post-modernist distortions); the organization and activities of the First International, and Rosa Luxemburg’s embrace of the mass strike as the decisive proletarian revolutionary action. We’d also look to the history of abolitionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The lessons include: the powerful model of insistent politics provided by the abolitionists; the heroic defiance of John Brown in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry; the exemplary solidarity of the English textile workers who refused to work with Southern cotton; the outstanding role played by the International Workingmen’s Association in rallying support for the cause of emancipation of the slaves; the general strike of the slaves which turned the Civil War into a revolutionary war and led to the Northern victory; and the establishment of the Reconstruction governments across the defeated Confederacy—governments that were so unlike other governments that W.E.B. DuBois considered the Reconstruction government of South Carolina to be an instance of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

I wish to thank the IN editors for posting Whither America?, and all the participants in this discussion for the consideration afforded me in both reading and commenting on the article.

I have grouped my responses to the questions and problems raised by the participations by issue with the exception of the TPTG comrades and the IN editors. I have offered both a separate response.

Capitalist Dynamics

I welcome David Ranney’s elaboration concerning foreign currency reserves and the historical account of the postwar development with which it was intertwined. In criticizing my allegedly narrow focus on the petro-dollar deal and technological dynamism in ongoing loss of dollar suzerainty, I would merely ask him to reflect on the “many more developments” which “included technologies” he cites… At this moment were not autos a leading, if not the leading, sector in the world economy and were not just-in-time inventories, just-in-sequence deliveries, “lean production,” etc., all permitting the dispersal of manufacturing worldwide and thus the formation of global supply chains, instantiations of that technological dynamic? And, as a condition of those supply chains, the developments that made Rotterdam a completely automated port, that permit containers to be offloaded from ships at Long Beach and placed on railroad flatbeds that carry them tens of miles inland (before being broken down for tractor trail transport eastward) without human (i.e., worker) intervention also an expression of the same technological dynamic?

I accept David’s remarks on debt, specifically the role of derivatives he alludes to without ever using the term. I do believe I stated a perspective on the importance of paper claims to real wealth (i.e., “Trump understands nothing of the financialization and rentierization of the United States economy, nothing of the fictitious accumulation of multitudinous and unsatisfiable paper claims to real wealth.”) I also did remark that, “The bourgeoisie, of course, recognized this profitability decline. It is from this moment, and this recognition, that we can date a shift away from investment in basic industry (production of the means of production, production of their inputs, production of consumer durables) toward the finance, entertainment and real estate sectors, which phenomenally at least appeared vastly more profitable.” However, if I did not make it clear that I think the generation of those fictitious claims (vastly expanded by at least three central bank rounds of “quantitative easing” and not just in the United States, but in Japan and Europe also) are ways of coping with the inability to valorize capital, largely on an industrial basis (and ways which in the end will simply deepen crisis), then I regret not having done so.

I shall return to capitalist dynamics below.

Reactionary Class Bloc

I wish to thank Don Hamerquist for the seriousness with which he examines the essay in question, his acute analysis and his criticisms, some of which I accept. I would like to consider just two issues he raises since taken together they underpin his analyses of my manifold alleged inconsistencies. The first is the question of a “bloc,” and what I think is at issue here. The second is his reference to, and partial elaboration of, what he calls “transnational capitalism,” something on which I cannot bring myself to see eye to eye with him. Again, I shall return that discussion later.

Don writes, “the class fragments that constitute Trump’s political base of the moment constitute an extremely unstable asymmetric coalition of various class fractions that don’t merit being termed a ‘bloc of classes.’ ” I’ll accept the criticism, that is I accept this bloc consists of “class fragments,” what I have already referred to as layers and, more stably, (class) strata. A “bloc” of classes, “class fragments,” call it what you will. Substantively I concede nothing for the characterization does not impinge socially on who these groups are and politically what they represent. I’ll grant that the political base of the current Executive is an unstable and asymmetric coalition. I would simply note I am neither concerned with Trump nor that coalition with a view to whatever part he and it plays in bourgeois politics. (While the penultimate paragraph concluding Part II and the subtitle of my Conclusion, “The Drift toward Renewed Imperialist World War Becomes the Tendential Direction of Capitalist Development,” and its content as well should have made my concerns transparent, they in fact may not have. In reviewing the entire set of responses, with hindsight I can safely say it would have been better had I stated this concern even more forcefully and on more than one occasion.) Further, Hamerquist states, “This base is riddled with contradictions and conflicts that don’t provide Trump a free hand on trade policy or any other issue.” Quite frankly, this is nonsense. The support that base provides, or at least its core evangelical Christian and precarious middling layers provide, is more than enough to grant that free hand for it transpires within the context of the American presidential system, which, because that system grants the Executive vast powers in this regard (say, as opposed to those of a premier in a parliamentary system), permits this president, and in principle any president, to pursuit those tariffs with little or no regard to domestic opposition. The only real opposition the United States Executive meets is abroad, e.g., the Europeans, the Chinese, whereas smaller powers, the Mexicans and Canadians cave, as indeed they have. Finally, in regard to tariffs, Hamerquist recalls large capitalist farmers who have been paraded out in the bourgeois media, and their responses, some of which have (I’ll go Hamerquist better here) openly opposed the tariffs. I merely ask Don if this opposition has had any effect on lifting those tariffs. To answer the question is the recognize Hamerquist is simply mistaken. If the reader requires evidence, I suggest Reuters and Bloomberg both of which have printed a number of pieces since mid-November 2018 describing capitalist farmer responses and, tacitly, their negligible impact. Still, as I indicated in the essay, tariffs may not last; and, as I also stated, de-dollarization is the more important determinant. If Don is so troubled by my framework of analysis of the United States trajectory within the world system of social relations, he might have challenged the significance I assign to de-dollarization. He did not. I suspect any attempt to do would collapse on itself.

Hamerquist examines the so-called bloc in its more or less formal aspects; others, Matthew Lyons and Ross Wolfe [and the IN editors], evince concern about its ideological coherency.

I have no problems with Matthew’s analysis of the so-called alt-right, particularly since he presents valuable insight into rightwing behavior. Moreover, I would not deny the obvious, the reality, as Matthew concisely states, of “fierce disagreements that have riven the United States right for decades” (which is one, among others, of the reasons I make no effort to suggest what the specific ideological color this neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist “bloc” will assume in a major class confrontation, other than objectively effective opposition to any coalescing proletarian forces, I don’t pretend to know.) I do, however, think that he, like Ross Wolfe [and the IN editors], draws illicit conclusions. Those conclusions rest on an assumption. To paraphrase and formalize an old Trotskyist position, the crisis of (proletarian) humanity is a crisis of leadership. [Knowingly or unknowingly, this assumption appears operative in the thinking of the IN editors and their New York periphery.] It is very mistaken and, if pursued practically, dangerous.

There has an enormous cultural shift which has been ongoing since the late 1970s. Layer upon layer of the popular masses, entire strata, have been left behind in the wake of an immense rationalization of capitalism, as the weight of its global structure, vastly enhanced, is increasingly and dramatically felt at each and every site of production and consumption across the world. It has been felt particularly in all the oldest centers of capitalist development, in Britain and the Netherlands, France and Italy, Germany and Austria, Denmark and Sweden as well as in the United States. The neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist “bloc” in the United States is one significant consequence of this shift. It is this “bloc” that has pushed Donald Trump onto center stage. And, whether it is Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Mario Matarella or someone else, it remains the “bloc” itself, and in relation to the emerging proletarian core the shape it tends toward, that is at issue and not, for instance, “elements that comprise the Trump coalition” as they figure in the differences between Republican and Democratic parties in the United States and their role and function within the bourgeois polity. (The difference here is between Hegel and Marx and scientific empiricism. A full statement of what I intend is presented in the final paragraph of the section on TPTG.)

So, what then is problematic with position of Matthew, Ross, [the IN editors] and even Hamerquist’s more formalized one? In respect to the foregoing, a sole concern with a very small, actually tiny, rabid minority and their internal disputes misses the entire framework in which these disputes transpire. It is a question of overlooking the proverbial forest with its dense undergrowth spreading out in every direction for miles and miles, missing it for a few old, large trees. That entire mass is illiberal, fanatically intolerant and authoritarian, xenophobic and ultra-nationalistic, and rabidly anti-proletarian. As I suggested to John Garvey last summer, Matthew’s analysis is “hung in the air” (it’s a military metaphor), that is it’s ungrounded, detached from the primary social formation; in singling out a mere moment from this total social class context, fixing on it in isolation, one pursue abstractions: The assertion that a more “refined” analysis (Ross Wolfe’s characterization) demonstrates serious division within the alt-right camp is a formula for passivity. It fails to apprehend what is at issue and what is at stake. At the crisis deepens, and the pressures emanating from its central dynamics bear down on that “bloc of classes” or “class fragments,” it will increasingly expand and take the shape of a reactionary, fanatically godly chauvinist mass, and you can be certain without an adequate response these same masses, increasingly desperate, will push forward individuals with ideas and prescriptions far more dangerous than those of Trump.

There is one more point here. Matthew Lyons indicates that I conflate “neo-liberalism” with “neo-Right.” In fact, I do hold that neo-liberal and neo-Right programs largely did coincide at their origins, with both originating in roughly the same time frame. Differences develop later. But the manifest sense of the entire present is not oriented to whether nationalism is counterposed to neo-liberal “globalism” (of course it is); but more to my point, the layers and class strata who bear these seemingly opposed ideological positions are not capable of transforming the logic of capital, only accelerating realization of its tendential direction. (Just so there’s no further misunderstanding, they are seemingly, and thus falsely, opposed from a revolutionary communist perspective.)

“Whiteness”

In a glaringly arrant reading of the text, Ross Wolfe states that I am “extremely naive” with a view to my expectations of “white” workers. Pray tell, where did I say what he is suggesting? The “self-consciously ‘whites’ who will ‘age up’ and,” in so doing, “no longer be significant for the class relation” are precisely those who currently are in their fifties and sixties. Is this not clear? Or did I not say in the sentence immediately preceding this one that, “’Whiteness’ cannot and will not be abandoned by those who are its bearers”? Did I not expressly cite Gordon Long stating that proletarianized millennials, half of them people of color, will form seventy-five percent of the workforce by 2026? And though Long, corrected identified by Gui Destiche, is a bourgeois empirical analysis and statistician, I have not read any response that questions his assessment. So the issue is not the “white” working class as it is currently constituted; rather it is, at least with Wolfe, millennials. He cites no evidence which casts doubt on my position, and none which supports his own, i.e., he, and Matthew Lyons, merely restates an evidentially unmediated theory, in other words, both merely state a prejudice. There are three strands of evidence I can educe; first, that which was referenced in the article itself, namely, that visually provided by the media spectacle; second, my own experience which, obviously is limited, but I would immediately add transpires in a region which is a hotbed of rabid xenophobic fear of (of course it’s a ferociously racist reaction to) immigration, especially Spanish speakers. My experience is that millennials so-called, particularly those who are important for this discussion—those already proletarianized, are, as I indicated in the article, simply not subject to racialized determination; and third, the bulk of analysis, some of it polling, dealing with this issue I believe supports my view. One, very recent, is quite revealing in this respect since it addresses precisely the issues raised here.

Matthew Lyons also contests my account of “whiteness.” He states, “D’Aalst describes race as an ‘imaginary social relation’ that is shaped by ‘institutions’ but is essentially a form of false consciousness without material foundations.” Where exactly did I say without “material foundations”? (The term functions as an ideological sledgehammer to divert serious discussion. Tell me, Ross and Matthew what is “materiality”?) And I never said it is a form of “false consciousness” since precognitive affects function at a much deeper level. So what constitutes those “material foundations”? The “higher wages along with exemption from really difficult, backbreaking work” which “de-industrialization has largely destroyed”? (I am quoting myself.) Again I’ll repeat the citation from a recent IN discussion, “If I understand you, you are saying that the material basis of whiteness has largely disappeared (I assume you are speaking tendentially, not absolutely), leaving working-class whites like amputees, scratching at the place where the limb used to be.” Matthew, think this through. You’re not addressing the crucial issue: If the formation of white layers of the United States working class are no longer (and never simply have been) strictly shaped “materially,” what else is in play here? And, for that matter, how do institutional determinations differ from “material” ones? Though I suspect you will not find this very satisfying, it was my mistake to counterpose “material” determinants to institutional ones: In point of fact for capitalism, institutional determinations subsume “material” ones at least in a formal sense, that is with respect to those activities in and through which society is basically organized. Though historically considered primary, work (waged labor) is an institution, just as are education, family, religion, the military, the home and rental markets, today perhaps certain venues of consumption, and above all those “material adjuncts” (Engels) of coercion and repression (policing, taken together the judiciary and the courts and the prosecutorial system, prisons); formed in the repeated daily practice of men and women, all are complexes of congealed social relations that, dialectically, form those individuals even as they, as their bearers, sustain them. Some institutions shape consciousness generally, that is we all (or almost all) participate in, directly and immediately living through, them. Thus, the family, education, work. Some shape consciousness specifically, that is we do not all directly participate in them, their impacts vary from class to class and within, relationally speaking, classes from stratum to stratum. Thus, the military, the housing market in relation to banks (I’ve in mind “redlining”), those material adjuncts of coercion and repression. These institutions in particular are animated by racial animosity, thereby truncating the life trajectories and life chances of large social strata (blacks, people of color generally), while that animus is naturalized, thus invisible, to other strata (particularly those in the population without regard to class who identify themselves as “white”)…

I’m the one who is “confused,” yet no one has offered a statement of precisely what “race” is. (No one but myself. Distilling Will Barnes’ analysis, I have characterized it as an “imaginary social relation.”) To say the least, it strikes me as odd that no one appears to be able to say what it is. Why? Who’s “confused”? I suspect that in stating what it is, whoever does so will find it much more difficult to consistently contest my characterization. I am looking for a taker to prove me wrong. Until someone coherently offer an alternative, in this discussion at least, race as an imaginary social relation stands.1

Return to the question of material privilege.

If work, as a complex of congealed social relations (as an institution), does not carry the same weight it may have in the past (which is what Barksdale says, or Barksdale and Ignatiev are saying), then how is practical consciousness (i.e., behavior) formed? Or, as you might prefer, if white racism simply cannot be accounted for solely in terms of that (vaulted yet undefined) “material basis,” how does one account for its persistence?

There are two points I am making here.

I am arguing that as work as determinant of practical consciousness weakens, we get a glimpse of another array of determinations; they don’t supplant work but are operative also (and have been all along). And the more the significance of work as a determination declines in our accounts of white racism (as de-industrialization destroys the advantages white workers enjoy relative to black workers and other workers of color), other institutions (shaping us as our very activity sustains them) come to the form, amongst them, e.g., education (or its absence), religion, which have been particularly significant for consciousness in its precognitive dimensions (the crucial dimension of what Dubois called the “psychological wage”), precisely those affective, arcane fears, anxieties, fantasies and sham facts that you disparate, come increasingly to the fore.

I am also arguing that in this context reference to “material foundations” is indefensible dogmatism: Materiality detached from its institutional form has no explanatory value; split materiality off from its institutional form and the human activity which sustains it and your explanation references an untenable metaphysical construct (which is the significance of Marx’s critical remarks on Feuerbach). This may not be intuitively obvious; if so, then I will on request offer a more detailed, discursive explanation.

Consciousness of Class

This section has been drafted specifically in response to the IN editors, which came to me very late, long after everyone else had responded. (Thus, throughout this text, I have simply bracketed “IN editors” where, in my response to criticisms, including them appears appropriate.) The editors’ response has, very subtly, a philosophically theoretical flavor, something which in everything else here I have written I’ve attempted to avoid. In this section, however, an adequate response requires in part I engage in just such remarks. I add the IN editors’ criticism strikes me as coherent and challenging, and at the same time often exhibits polemical decontextualizations and disparaging misconstructions. I relish the opportunity to respond…

Hegel, indeed! But a Hegel read “materialistically” starting from Grunlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§182–208. Below (i.e., the last paragraph of the following section entitled TPTG) you will discover just how far I am willing to push this reading.

The IN editors appear intent on a defense of Marx. I really do not think that anyone can make a reasonable argument that the significance of Whither America? revolves around Marx. And I do not see myself as an anti-Marx, unorthodox certainly; but okay I’ll play, we can do a little Marx:

Of course, “Consciousness is constitutive of class.” What makes the IN editors think determination is singular? Class is invariably, or so it seems, complexly mediated. In a passage concerning the conservative French peasantry Marx (Der achtzehnte Brumaire) specifies a mode of living and a community of interest that opposes one class to others, and within that community interaction, political organization and a national bond (which in the epoch of real domination I would forgo as a determinant). In the very next paragraph, however, he also refers to assimilated historical tradition, belief and hope borne by the same peasantry vis-a-vis Louis Napoleon; and he speaks about these precognitive aspects of consciousness as determinants of the peasants as a class (just as they also are determinants of race), obviously though not as a revolutionary class. Could this be any clearer? “Idealism,” no doubt about it.

The IN editors’ response in respect to consciousness of class is contradictory; to one side, I stand accused of “idealism,” of an idealistic construction of consciousness; and, to the other, the editors, as I already have, do enumerate a series of institutions, which makes the “materialism” significantly broader than, for instance, Matthew Lyons’ or least his in his response to the article in question. The editors state, “The police, the courts, the prisons, the schools and colleges, the public housing authorities, the real estate markets within cities and metropolitan areas, and the informal labor markets are all interwoven to produce systemic disadvantage for blacks and advantage for ‘whites.’ ” Good, but not good enough. Since I’m being charges with offenses in the litany of crimes against Marxism (specifically, “idealism,” then without due homage to Marx’s concept of nature in the Manuskripte), it is this that saves you, but only in part, from reaching back (like Lyons and Wolfe) to 18th century materialism, bourgeois materialism. But only in part:

Your concept of institution lacks “foundations,” i.e., it is not mediated by activity, and the experience that is lived through in such doings, and thus you would be hard pressed to account for the consciousness (actually you could not do so coherently, which means, to put it bluntly, you could not even account for this exchange), and those institutions, that rise from that activity. Nowhere do you do so, or even suggest the necessity of so doing. If it looks and smells metaphysical… I’ve read enough of both authors to understand that each knows better than to coquette with bourgeois materialism. This is curious.

But there is more… in the way of bad polemic. If Hamerquist is disingenuous in conveniently finding significant fascist tendencies among insignificant groups when he denies they exist among his fabled “class fragments” (This remark refers to a later section. I apologize for a reference which pertains to something not yet stated. I can only plea this section has been written last because the IN editors response came to me seventeen days after all others), the IN editors criticism, “He says nothing about which institutions he has in mind, how they are constructed or how they are maintained,” reads like an attempt to out-Hamerquist Hamerquist, i.e., it is twice disingenuous.

First, in the article itself I specified four institutions, three of which are part of our historical present, work (waged work), the family and education, and one which belongs to the historical past, slave labor. In fact, I have much to say about how one of these is constructed (education), and negatively, something other another (work). What I say is that its impact in shaping awareness has diminished, which is not different from what the author(s), Barksdale (and Ignatiev) state (which, given the institutional enumeration and what is later stated, is not at issue between the IN editors and myself).

Second, I re-cite the IN editors, “He says nothing about which institutions he has in mind…” As we’ve seen, not so, but more to the point. This is over the top: Having enumerated specific institutions (not just the ones the IN editors have in mind), they demand a more detailed, worked-out explanation. What, comrades, would have me do, write and submit a book?

There are other criticisms which I consider not merely unwarranted, but based on intentional, decontextualized misreading. (Another word would be obfuscation.) I’ll cite just one more. The IN editors find, “Profitability is a curious word choice,” and then go on to assimilate the statement to a social-democratic perspective. I suppose, perhaps wrongly (but what other intent could be operative?), to discredit the entire standpoint of which these remarks form a part as a “fantasy” and “magical incantation.” This is linked, at least logically (though the linkage is not at all clear in the IN editors’ response), to an “uncritically mechanical understanding of the effects of immiseration on consciousness.”

No, my apprehension of the deleterious effects of immiseration on awareness is neither uncritical nor “mechanical” (another term in the lexicon of polemically obtuse Marxism): I specify an interrelated array of determinations, existentially frustrated expectation, proletarianization and precarity, and very deep debt which form the contours of a “whole situation” that “itself has and will increasingly become a formula for lived and experienced immiseration” … Find me a better, more concise formulation of the concept of immiseration… and then I situate this lived and experienced immiseration with the context of a crisis, the domestic repercussions of climactic de-dollarization (rapid rampant inflation, shortages as global supply chains break down). It is in this context that awareness is flooded with insights, constituting a transformation in which “bourgeois democratic and electoral illusions” fall away and novel, mass organizations form issuing in an open challenge to capital. Mediated by looming renewal of interimperialist world war and the existential threat of an accelerating abruptly changing climate, confronting a coalescing neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist bloc it is the unrelenting, increasing pressure of crisis which forces a revolutionary reorganization of awareness, and it those sensibilities (which embrace “tolerance and equality” and exhibit “ecological sensitivity”) that compel it to move in the direction of revolutionary opposition. (There was a time when one of the authors spoke quite differently of developments such as these, in part because they provided a context for his own reflections on the dynamic of party and class vanguards, “magical incantation” which took him less than less than three paragraphs to elaborate, a “fantasy” set down in far, far more than 27 pages.)

Constituted in a revolutionary situation, I consider this an abbreviated statement of the dialectic of freedom and necessity in the best traditions of Marx and Hegel. (For more, see the remarks addressing Bruno Astarian’s criticism in the section, “Capitalist Dynamics, Again,” below.) It may all be fantasy to you, the IN editors; for me, the real possibility of revolutionary breakthrough is grounded in the tendential direction of capitalist development. There is a lengthy elaboration in the same section, just referred. But come back to the issue of profitability.

It is clear, to me at least, that a critique of the absolute primacy of profitability over need fully transcends social democratic pretensions and intent. Why? Because in its prescriptions such critique does not permit the exploitation of wage labor in the provision of needs to be smuggled in through some back door. However, that was not what I had foremost in mind when I penned the passage. What I actually refer to is, “withering critique of the primacy of profitability over need, of ruling class imperatives and bureaucratic administrators over the development of community-mediated individual competencies, of direct democracy over all form of representation above all over capital’s police despotic dictatorship, and of the inanity and deleterious character of capital’s media spectacle will increasingly receive a hearing.” I.e., I start from what is immediately apparent in a revolutionary situation, what is given, and from the standpoint of the concrete and totalizing critique of capital what is phenomenal, and I state, this is a point of departure for critique which is essential (yes, in the Hegelian sense), for “such a critique will become increasingly meaningful, concrete and real” as it, or if it, reaches “all the way back to abstract labor and the value-form.” So, John and Loren, does that strike you as social-democratic? If so, how so?

In this context, on the face of it there is manifestly a valid criticism, namely, I do not consider the other “components” of a revolutionary bloc. This is not, and was not, the task undertaken in the essay. My warrant was to identify an emerging revolutionary core. I did so. But, yes, I fully agree, “The individuals in those groups are self-thinking and self-acting and we should not assume very much at all of what they might do.” However, the assumption is not “problematic” in the manner the IN editors suggest. That is, it is not a question of a bunch of white kids reaching out to blacks and Spanish speaking workers from whom they are walled off. Besides the obvious fact that the largest numbers of them will no long be “kids,” nearly half of this potential revolutionary core itself will be made of blacks, Spanish speaking workers, and other ethnicities. I am not arguing for passivity here, but linkages between the emerging revolutionary core and the broader ethnic communities, above all their working class layers, are already present.

The immediately foregoing neatly dovetails with the fact that the IN editors appear particularly disturbed by what they take to be a cocksure attitude animating the essay. Thus, we have, “What might have helped D’Aalst’s arguments would have been an expression of tentativeness about the certainty with which he advanced them” (in other words, a little humility comrade), followed by, “We shall see.” Is this voice of wisdom? No, I don’t think so… It is, I suggest, the source of the rather brisk (I’m being polite) manner in which they carve up the text in, what I above referred to as, disparaging misconstructions. For the record, I expressly state my underlying attitude in my response to Guillaume Destiche in the section, “Problems of Revolutionary Communists,” below. That attitude is not tepid, but then again it is also not cavalier.

There is one other point, though. It refers to my role as a demonic anti-Marx.

I doubt very, very much that one can make a case that Marx’s 1844 manuscripts provide a basis for considerations of nature in its otherness, autonomy, and self-organizing cohesiveness, either nature as atemporal becoming and unlimited being (natura naturans) or earthly nature (naturata naturans) as a limited expression of nature as that totality. These writings strike me as romantic in both the prosaic and precise historical sense. They express an attitude, little more. They certainly do not rise to the level of the systematic reflections of the young Schelling (Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1797). To once more make a contentless accusation of “idealism” would entirely miss the significance of this work in relation to our understanding of and practice in nature.

There is indications of the IN editor’s intent to cite a passage from Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, though it is missing in the response text forwarded to me. That’s probably for the better: For every passage you, the editors, can so cite, I will find one that bears all the marks of what I’ve suggested. For the better? I have no intent of getting in to a war of citations, for, as I said, the essay in question is not about Marx.

Finally, I think one can pursue this effort (considerations of nature) for more effectively starting from a rigorously critical appropriation of contemporary sciences of climate change, ending by integrating that appropriation into a historical, materialist and dialectical concept of nature, and by this I do not intend Marcuse or Bloch.

TPTG

While I thank the TPTG comrades for their contribution, and while their past work displays analytic insight and genuinely principled criticism (above all, their confrontation with Aufheben over the relation of revolutionaries to cops and the state generally), I regret to say their response does not rise to the level of that past work.

Having asked John Garvey to issue them an invitation (both as a potential check against the possibility my discussion was too US-centered and to query whether these comrades thought I over dramatize both potential conflict and its political resolution), I nonetheless appreciate their participation.

TPTG engages in a well-documented and tightly argued, detailed social and historical account of a period in recent US history defined by, for lack of a better term, de-industrialization. The parameters of the period are, in turn, themselves defined by the struggle of classes and the balance of class forces thereby achieved. It is strictly on this foundation from which their criticisms of Whither America? rise. Permit me to examine those criticisms.

First, TPTG writes, “Floris’s argument that ‘large capitalist concerns no longer accepted the social wage and supported the social welfare state’ is insufficient in order to describe the crisis of the capitalist state itself” and since it was never intended to function as an exclusive explanation, I fully accept this.

Two conclusions follow according to TPTG, (a) the “text underestimates the role of the capitalist welfare state as the most powerful agent of capitalist activity and at the same time the mediator of class struggles and it fails to present it as the irreversible historical result of the post-war class compromise on western democracies until nowadays”; and (b) “instead of presenting neoliberalism as a capitalist strategy of both political forms of capital in US politics (Republicans/Democrats, right-wing/liberal), as political forms of capital faced with the crisis, in the text it is only the ‘Neo-Right’ that it is identified with the neoliberal program.” In the case of (b), the text does allow this conclusion, and I consider that a grievous shortcoming for it is not my position; that is, I agree that neo-liberalism is a strategy pursued by both political parties of capital. In the case of (a), however, I disagree: To assert the welfare state is the “most powerful agent of capitalist activity” is to take a very narrow view of class struggle; at least in the thirty-five years prior to neo-liberal ascendancy in the state (with Reagan’s capture of the position of Executive), and in my view, down to the defeat of Stanley workers in 1996 and perhaps beyond, it the official labor movement, the unions led by the AFL-CIO which were effectively that “most powerful agent.” There are two points here worth making. First, the United States at least, the “postwar compromise” arises far earlier than the welfare state. It begins, as TPTG correctly notes, from Keynesianism. But I understand it differently, in terms of the incorporation of the wage into capitalist dynamics as the bourgeoisie understood them, so to speak as the “motor” of capitalist development, in other words, in terms of an attempt to integrate workers into a consumerist project driving demand.2 So, developed through official union leadership efforts to purge themselves of socialists and “reds” in the war’s immediate aftermath, the historical compromise in the United States consisted in a trade-off of organized forms of shopfloor power at the point of production for the wages and benefits necessary to sustain that project. In the first case, that compromise entailed continuous efforts by the union leadership to suppress worker struggle as became undeniably manifest in the explosive cycle of struggles, 1964–1978. The second point is this: A massive expansion of the social wage in the programmatic sense was not inaugurated until the mid-sixties; it should be dated from the national legislation achieved as a product of black struggles with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and establishment of Medicare in 1965.

Second, TPTG states, “But if neither the content of neoliberalism can be attributed exclusively to the Neo-Right’s program, as the text claims, nor its origin dates back in Reagan era, then a disproportionately long analysis of the New Right is hardly necessary, if not confusing.” Again, I disagree. The validity of this assertion rests strictly on the type of analysis TPTG has undertaken. Internally consistent, it nonetheless exhibits the limitation of analyses of this kind, i.e., a period-specific, detailed socio-historical analysis centered on class struggle. That limitation consists in a failure to incorporate “structural” features of capitalism, that is it consists in a neglect of overall capitalist dynamics. (I return to this in the following section.) While analysis of the sort I pursue certainly is not incompatible with the kind TPTG engages in, in not incorporating the type of analysis I pursue the TPTG comrades are unable to apprehend the significance of that “disproportionately long analysis” of the neo-Right. Within the context of those dynamics, i.e., the increasing pressure as capitalist crisis bears down on this neo-Right, increasing neo-fascist “bloc,” that import lies in its role and function in accelerating the onset of a major class confrontation.

Third, TPTG writes, “The long history of neoliberalism from the 1970s up till now had its ups and downs. It was not an even historical process culminating in Trump, as Floris suggests,” and returns to its detailed analysis, partly in an effect to substantiate this assertion.

No one, certainly not I, would deny that the neo-liberal history has been uneven; and, prove me wrong, I did not suggest that this historical process reaches its apex in Trump; to the contrary, with some of my other critics I am far more inclined to see tension, at least on the surface, between Trump and neo-liberals housed in both parties of capital. But once again, it is not Trump who is the issue (or, he is, only if one operates on the terrain of the bourgeois polity); rather, he is, as indicated in concluding the penultimate paragraph in “Reactionary Class Bloc” above, symptomatic.

Fourth, TPTG sets forth the hypothesis that “the importance of the 9/11 events” is to be placed in the framework “of a strategy of a dramatic transformation of class relations and temporary reversal of the profitability crisis”; and in a footnote the comrades add the concept of a “deep state” is redundant, since “bourgeois democracy does not exclude temporary or long-drawn ‘states of exception’ or ‘states of emergency,’ as the violent transformation of class relations in Greece in recent years has proved.” Here TPTG veers into sociological (i.e., bourgeois) territory invoking a functionalist and reductionist analysis to justify its position. Not all phenomena in social life can be immediately explicated in terms of class struggle. Though the mediations are more complex, the so-called war on terrorism and those events TPTG refers to originated as legitimizations for a ruling class factional project of the renewal of US global dominance. (This project was borne by neo-conservatives, a term which is used interchangeably with neo-liberal with the terminological difference indicating this specific factional center of capital in question is housed in the Republican party.)

Like Ross Wolfe and Matthew Lyons, here I think TPTG is in over its head (though not for the same reasons). I would like to offer all of you the possibility of illuminating yourselves. Though there is a veritable cottage industry, two very good works, the respective authors’ politics notwithstanding, are David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror. (Matthew [and John] you want evidence, well this would form an excellent point of departure. Ross [and Loren], it would be a small victory if you would even consider the evidence.) But enough: As I indicate below in “Problems of Revolutionary Communism” (first part), I will not pursue this issue further.

There is one other point here, posed interrogatively it is, just how long does a “long-drawn” state of exception or emergency last before parliamentary or democratic forms of bourgeois rule becomes something distinctively other? In US history, the American Civil War found Lincoln deploying certain “unconstitutional” measures episodically; in April/May 1861 he garrisoned federal troops on the city of Baltimore; in May (same year), he appropriated funds without Congressional authorization; and in autumn 1861 he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, had arrests made, individuals were imprisoned without charges, trial and legal consultation all in Baltimore again; then, in two elections, November 1862 in Delaware and Tennessee, he had troops stationed at the polls, and in August 1864, he declared martial law in Kentucky where Democratic party politicians were arrested and troops were stationed at the polls; finally, in November 1864, he had the New York national guard removed from and Union troops stationed at polling places. After 1864, the course of American “democracy” was resumed. This was the most sustained use of a state of exception in US history, all localized, all episodic; on the other hand, there are competent legal scholars who argue the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act effectively supplants the United States Constitution (effectively because in bourgeois jurisprudence the supercession of fundamental law by statuary law is absurd). How long has that been, nearly eighteen years? While your respect for the illusorily bourgeois democratic character of the American social formation (”what the ‘deep state’ did was in no way incongruent with the Bush Administration’s operations, i.e. with the policy of a democratically elected president”) is touching, it is misguided and mistaken.

(Egregiously mistaken. In the representative sense, the United States Senate, and each and all of the senates in those states with bicameral legislatures, the Supreme Court and the Electoral College are not democratic institutions. While there is little to regret here, the 2000 national election was won by Bush in the Electoral College by a margin which the Florida delegation of electors provided, and this only after a Supreme Court justice stepped in to halt both a count of all absentee ballots and a recount in the state, and that only after nativists, racists and state troopers had blocked, intimidated and threatened tens of thousands of blacks, turning them away at polling sites in Broward and Miami Dade counties, and this only after the president-to-be’s brother had as Florida governor already issued an executive order disenfranchising several hundred thousand, mostly black potential voters as one-time felons, felons who had completed their sentences in the United States capitalist prison hell holes, any one of which had it not occurred would have shifted the electoral victory to Bush’s opponent).

Fifth, TPTG writes, “we view Trump more as an expression of the predicament capital finds itself in and of working-class frustration than as the ‘deepening’ or the ‘culmination’ of a neo-Right, political culture, nascently neo-liberal and, today, more or less openly neo-fascist.” In a mediated way, so do I; there is no contradiction here; that is, the neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist “bloc” which supports Trump itself has historically arisen as a social class expression of that “predicament” (a “bloc” which, by the way, my analysis shows that to this moment is anything but a “homogeneous[ly] strengthened neo-Right”). You are too quick and too anxious to criticize, comrades, for this is what your analysis also indicates, Trump’s “’anti-establishment’ stance… during his campaign… and his populist narrative indicate a deep crisis within the political forms of mediation in US politics.” This is, or should be, elementary; after all, insofar as masses of people have been involved that political mediation has been electoral, and it is that “bloc” or those “class fragments” who elected Trump. And, while “deepening” suggests a process that is not completed (unlike “culmination”), for the record I employ the term “culmination” just once in the entire text, and that deployment is expressly in reference to Bannon, Malpass and the potential of civil war, not in reference to that neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist “bloc.”

Sixth, TPTG states, “Even more certain is that there can be no historical analogy with fascism.” This is a misapprehension of intent, which obviously is forgivable, and a misleading of the text, which is not.

There are two passages here from which the issue can be raised. Early on, I parenthetically refer to “the ‘Freedom’ Caucus in the House whose reverence for the Constitution is counterrevolutionary, the legal basis for its racism, and who is the historical analogue to the ultra-nationalist militarists, monarchists and fascists outside European parliaments in the immediate postwar period” (emphasis added). Note, first, that I am referring to the postwar period, not the prewar one where analogical considerations with Nazi Germany would arise; note, second, I am not comparing fascism as a societal phenomenon, total cultural fact, whatever, I am not comparing capitalist national states but individuals and groups of individuals. What I had actually had in mind here was a contrast, in postwar Europe counterrevolutionaries were swept up into the CIA financed Operation Gladio and by and large functioned extra-parliamentarily and, on important occasions, terroristically (both of which one might expect); but in the United States counterrevolutionary forces are domiciled in the state, in its representative body no less.

The second passage occurs in the Conclusion to the essay. It concerns a historically constituted pattern of events that led from trade wars to shooting wars to a world war. In this context, I mention the formation of two large geographical blocs dominated by Japan and Germany, respectively. I do not expressly compare Nazi Germany and the contemporary United States; instead, I indicate what is at issue is a pattern of events: They involve “tariffs retaliation… still higher duties on specific products or products categories, differential evaluations, exchange restrictions, and preferential treatment of domestic products,” which “led to capital controls, blocked accounts and currency devaluations,” eventually devolving into “trade blocs” whose inadequacy from the standpoint of Germany and Japan led to “territorial aggrandizement.” It is a pattern of economic and commercial behavior of national states, policies and behavior not societal determinants, a pattern which I hold, in penning the essay and now, is at an early stage similar to our situation today; it is not a characterization of “’structural similarities’ between the neo-liberal US state and the Nazi state.”

Seventh, citing increasingly interconnected “local regimes of accumulation,” TPTG suggests that contemporarily we are witnessing inter-imperialist “simultaneous competition and cooperation.” Well, yes, if the cooperation is a function of normal cross border exchange relations, but no because trade relations today fall outside the norm established with Bretton-Woods (1944) and continuing, long after its demise, nearly down to the present day; moreover, the tendential direction in which those relations are moving indicate the emerging primacy of inter-imperialist conflict. This was one of the central points in the essay, and, thus, I once again register my disagreement with TPTG. In the regard, it is stated, Trump’s tariff policy, “focusing on bilateral agreements that would largely favor the US, seem to have been halted by temporary agreements with [the] EU and Canada, while, and this is equally important, such protectionist policies may be beneficial to all trading sides, to a certain degree at least.” It appears, to me at least, that TPTG is engaged in a fiat construction of a reality which fits its perspective. Tell it to the EU, specifically, the Germans: US tariffs on steel, aluminum and auto parts remain in place; BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen Group car sales in the United States are all off from 3 percent to 6 percent year (2018) over year (2017); the trade agreement with the Canadians, as well as the Mexicans, was bilateral. (NAFTA effectively no longer exists.) The Canadians were forced to open their dairy farming market, once internally protected, to US capitalist farmers, and they also gave up a system of regulations that shielded their pharmaceuticals. Both were done to avoid tariffs on (primarily GM) autos produced in Canada. This is hardly a matter of “protectionist policies” being “beneficial to all trading sides,” which, in my judgment, is an absurd assessment.3

Eighth, TPTG censors my “dystopian science fiction, apocalyptic totalitarian scenarios” as the text ends for two reasons; first, because it is not productive and ungrounded, i.e., it is not attuned to “the real movement of our times” (emphasis in original) and, second, because “proletarian organization seems to have no influence whatsoever” over such a “hypothetical series of events.” I do believe this answers the query (posed to John Garvey) at the outset of this section of my response, “whether these comrades (TPTG) thought I over dramatize both potential conflict and its political resolution.” Instead of considering this question separately, I think this part of my response (to the question of potential conflict and its political resolution) can just as adequately be put forth by setting it in the context of a reply to Don Hamerquist (and Bruno Astarian) in the next section. The other part of that response will come in the final section. At this moment I will simply state the following: The only “apocalyptic scenarios” I offer are firmly grounded on a critical assessment of the bourgeois science of climate. For a group that is essentially clueless with respect to theorizations of climate and prefers to stick its head in the sand, it is stupendously brazen to characterize those “scenarios” as a “hypothetical series of events,” a position that puts it in the camp of the current US Executive and those domestic and international capitals tied directly and immediately to the hydrocarbon economy.

This leaves TPTG’s Theoretical Postscript.

Begin, if you will, with the statement, “currency issues and trade-currency wars are mystified forms of appearance of problems that arise with the relations of production, i.e., within the relations of exploitation.” Yes, those problems do arise in production. But the spheres of production and circulation are necessarily linked: Existing globally, capitalism is a system of social relations, and starting from the inability of individual capitals to valorize themselves as larger individual capitals (i.e., to extract adequate surplus value necessary to augment themselves, to expand their reproduction), within this total system the locus of this problem shifts. (I’ll examine how in the next section.) The problem is not phenomenal as TPTG appears to suggest.

Permit me to approach this differently. “Competition… between companies or even national capitals is not the essence of capitalism.” Yes, but competition is essential to capitalism. The critique of capital does not begin with relations of exploitation as they form in production, it begins with the commodity in order to exhibit that concrete waged labor (workers’ affects, sensibilities, corporeality and experience) are objectified and materialized in a quantified temporal form, as value. The relations of exploitation are formed in and through this process of abstraction, that is, they are accomplished through speedups, imposition of production norms, subjugation to machine rhythms, harassment and in other ways. It is done in order that a capitalist can produce commodities at a competitive advantage by lowering the social necessary labor time embodied in those commodities to achieve a competitive advantage within an industry, within an industrial sector, within the global economy; and that is done in order that the capitalist can sell the commodities to realize that value and return it to her or him as a surplus of value in the phenomenal form of profitability. Realization is not at all times and in all places simply given, which is another way of speaking, again phenomenally, of a crisis of overproduction and, driven by crisis, the responses that capitalists pursue may devolve on to trade wars. I’ll take this up in more detail in the next section, for all I wish to stress here is the inseparability of production and exchange.

There is one further point, though.

TPTG disparagingly refer to “the obsession of anti-imperialists (whether left or liberal) with inter-capitalist conflict,” and while it does not go so far as to speak of “global capital” or “transnational capitalism,” it is, for this group, a question of “conceal[ing] the real contents of this conflict: The joint domination of many capitals over the undisciplined labor powers,” which again presupposes the unity of capitals in the face of their own internal antagonisms and contradictions. (Once more, I will return to this immediately below.) While I doubt a personal affront was intended, I would like to note the following:

In the traditions with which I am most familiar, especially in their contemporary forms… they are left communist… the term “anti-imperialist” is a nasty one. It designates those who hold Marxism is a theory of the development of productive forces, a view most frequently associated with radicalized bourgeois intellectuals of the capitalist periphery. It has its political axis in support for national liberation struggles (with their usual anti-proletarian content), groups such as Hamas or, in the now distant past, the Stalinist CPs in the same periphery prior to their assumption of power (e.g., in Vietnam). I do not think there is anything in Whither America? which permits such a judgment.

There are several issues that separate us, and I’ll simply restate the one which I think is most important:

Above, I characterized the TPTG response as period-specific, detailed socio-historical and centered on class struggle. The problem here is in an examination of the historical present this sort of analysis never gets and cannot get beyond the current conjuncture. It obliterates the difference between class potential for revolutionary transformation immanent to the current configuration of social relations and the simple givenness of those relations. Centered exclusively on the struggle between proletarians and capital, it is tidally locked in that historical present without regard for future possibilities immanent to this present, without regard to the concatenation of struggles, relations, events and processes that imply a direction in which the current situation, with all the determinants embedded in, is moving. The historical present in its facticity, even class struggle as currently constituted, is not “real movement,” rather it, that “real movement,” is the immanent potential incarnate in a social class stratum (a youthful, immiserated proletarian) for historically effective action that mounts a genuine challenge to capital; taken together those determinants, which include trade wars, climate change and whatever lies beyond them, form the contours of the tendential direction within which “real movement” occurs.

Capitalist Dynamics, Again

I’ll begin with Don Hamerquist.

He states, “Overwhelmingly the transnational capitalist elites see these developments as major destabilizing threats, and not, as the essay suggests, as a welcome facilitation of a path towards a fascist future.” This is, quite simply, a misreading. Nowhere do I state expressly or even tacitly that these developments are welcomed by various ruling class factions; to the contrary, what I state is there is a logic that operates in capitalism, and it tendentially drives development whether or not those factions embrace it.

As one who over the years has held Marxism at arm’s length, I am in all honestly stunned to suggest this, but I find myself thinking that nearly all of the participants, TPTG exemplarily, simply are not Marxist enough, i.e., for whatever reason they do not accept that a dynamic and a logic operates in capitalism that shapes its tendential direction of development; in a classical formulation, it does this as long as a proletariat does not marshal a revolutionary challenge to the system of social relations.4 (Like Gui Destiche, I too think this is for the most part a lingering, pernicious effect of post-modernist thinking.) What I am aiming at here (i.e., in this specific response) is a general statement of a position, one which flies on the face of constructs such as “transnational capitalism.” Thus, Hamerquist’s assertion that, “the essay misses entirely the process by which the reactionary populist opposition to current capitalist power is being used by the currently dominant sectors of capital to develop a renovated approach to their hegemony” is, candidly speaking, simply not germane to the considerations I have been making, and entirely underestimates the limits any ruling class cooptation and renovation run up against. I would like to fold this into a response to another question. Their connectedness will, I hope, become clear.

In his polite refusal to participate, Bruno Astarian offered, tacitly at least, a criticism of huge import to the article in question. He states, Whither America? “poses the problem of American capitals as the nucleus of a world system which no longer permits us to speak of national capitalism, probably even in the US.”

In a general way, there are two features of the world system of social relations we call capitalism I would affirm. First, it is unitary, but in a contradictory fashion. I’ll spell just how in the following. Second, whether considered logically, socially or historically that major class confrontation on the horizon in the United States will have ramifications, amplifications, and precedences elsewhere in the world. In fact, a fundamental feature of this confrontation will be global simultaneity; it won’t occur without this country, and others, convulsed by strikes, antiwar strikes, strikes for wages, actions against supervisors, for a return to democratic norms in the state, against the regime in power, some against the state itself (and if anyone thinks that this is no longer possible in the United States, well the sickouts by TSA workers and especially air traffic controllers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington putting an end to Trump’s “partial government shutdown” suggests otherwise); not only will any chance of success find us reaching out and linking up beyond international borders, without respect to what we intend or pursue, other proletarians will ensure this confrontation will spill over those borders.

There is, then, that first feature, the question of what is at issue between Astarian and myself, and all those who refuse to acknowledge a logic and dynamic in capitalism. While I am sympathetic to Astarian’s concept of communism first put forth Le communisme—Tentative de définition, this is a huge issue, and the differences between him, Hamerquist and TPTG and myself with respect to that issue are profound.

Capitalism is inseparable from its historical formation and development. You need to go back a little over a century (starting circa 1870) and pick up that thread of its development there: Historically (and logically also), competition between capitals leads inescapably to concentration and centralization of production and the means of production. In Germany, this was called cartelization; in the United States, trustification. Referring to real social and historical phenomena, these characterizations were based on, unfolding just as unavoidably, increasing technological inputs to the labor processes, and thus tremendous productivity increases. Competition, then, leads inexorably to overproduction and asset deflation. The entire last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a series of depressions in agriculture (phenomenally a consequent of global overproduction of wheat). In the United States at least, there were three depressions, 1873–1876, 1884–1886, 1892–1995. There were worker and peasant (or farmer) responses as well. Again, in the United States there were large-scale effectively national responses, a metalworking railroad proletariat strike along the Baltimore & Ohio, the working class socialist and anarchist movement which culminated in the Haymarket events, and the Pullman strike. In other words, capitalists were pushed to the wall by the growing militancy, organization and consciousness of workers, themselves driven on by the crushing brutality of absolute surplus value extraction. Yet those capitalists dominated the state at the national level.

Overcapacity, overproduction, falling profit rates, capital surfeit, worker (and peasant or farmer) militancy issuing in a political challenge to capital. Hegemonizing those states, capitalist attempted to overcome these contradictions in the domestic or national economy at the level of the world. Imperialism appeared on the world stage.

Imperialist activity is organized largely through national states. Recall the antagonistic nature of competing capitals; logically, and in real history, they require a state. It’s the political space in which inter-capitalist competition is (temporarily) resolved; it’s where their unity (hierarchical to be sure) is laboriously forged, legislatively, executively, administratively. It is within the institutional framework of the state that it is permissible to speak of “capitalist unity,” and from the standpoint of inter-imperialist rivalries as they form, this arduously forged unity effectively amounts to the construction of national capitals in order to defend them. These are capitals which each ruling class decides are necessary to maintain and advance their existence as capitals, the state which they act through, and their place and role in the global division of labor, which in other words they deem necessary to the existence and expanded reproduction of their capitals, but objectively to the order of capital itself. At the level of the world, states are stand-ins for, represent and advance the interests of, national capitals.

As imperialist activity has unfolded, it has led ruling class layers (those hegemonizing the state) to defend their most important capitalist firms and national industries in this, the global arena. In a general crisis of the system of social relations, and this is what I have been discussing, capitalism does not exhibit itself as a unitary phenomenon, as, for example, “transnational capitalism” or “global capitalism”; instead, the logic of capital compels it to fissure (liquidity increasingly freezes up, production sites are shuttered and supply chains become unreliable, trade levels plummet) along the lines of its older component parts, national states, it breaks up into antagonist capitals operating at the level of the world, into states acting as national capitals, trade blocs form and tend toward confrontation and war, without that logic even disappearing, all the while that logic operates on those components or states as national capitals.

Of course, we know that workers as migrants cross national borders; that large capitals often operate in any number of countries. And, above all, we can certainly speak legitimately of certain categories of capitalists which seem to operate independently of the state, and which seem to shape capital’s movement at the level of the world. By and large, these capitalists are situated in finance. In an abstract sense, they also seem to possess a “community of interest”; this community, however, does not rise to the level of consciousness. At best, their decisions concerning higher order abstractions (equities, bonds, currencies, their markets) which the movement of capital has given rise to are made only by men and women who in making these decisions function strictly as personifications of capital, its logic. Indeed, states come into conflict with this logic; just, as starting from competition among antagonist capitals, that logic has given rise to the bourgeois state itself.

States deploy whatever means, economic, diplomatic and military being most common, to defend those capitals. As a national executive sitting atop the state, this is what Trump is doing with his sanctions on aluminum, steel and auto parts; what Putin and Merkel are doing in signing a contractual agreement for construction of the underwater Baltic natural gas pipeline; or what Xi does not only in signing but in financially underwriting the agreement with the Pakistani leadership over creation of a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

In exerting these means (economic, diplomatic, etc.) the state has injected itself into the circuits of capital; and states have done this for a long time, in subsidizing or, alternately, setting floors on the prices of agricultural commodities or fuels, in regulating banks, in bailing out failing manufacturing firms, etc. In injecting themselves into those circuits they impart new imperatives (those of states as national capitals) to those circuits, imperatives which express socially and historical formed ruling class interest and ideology such a rabid nationalism or revanchism. These imperatives become structural moments of imperialist activity shaping it just as capital export, international loans, resources acquisition or cheap labor shape it.

This is the situation we have arrived at today; it is from a specific analysis of it that the tendential direction of capitalist development can be comprehended, a direction driven precisely by that inability to adequate exploit labor power to valorize existing capitals, a direction which tends toward global (interimperialist) conflict; a direction from which the points of leveraging the abolition of capitalism can be grasped.

Problems of Revolutionary Communists

I will note (as I did in the text) I single one, just one, “conspiracy.”

With the exception of Don Hamerquist with whom I suspect an absorbing discussion might ensue, I recognize I’m not going to win any hearts and minds here. So two remarks, and I’m simply going to let it go.

First, with regard to events in New York City a little over seventeen years ago, Ross Wolfe’s response is typical of all those (a) whose understanding does not rise to the level of the most elementary physics, (b) who refuse to pursue evidence-based analysis, and (c) who have abandoned critical examination of sources. It is also typical of those who take capital’s media spectacular discourse as sacrosanct and never get beyond it.

Second, make what you will of the position I formulate here, especially with respect to something like a “deep state.” The conclusions I draw from it, specifically with respect to civil war, play a large role in anything which, I think, can be said about the future. (And, in this respect I patently disagree with Hamerquist concerning the role of “deep state” operatives in any future civil war, though, again, this is not the place to pursue that exchange.)

Then there is Guillaume Destiche and the issue of climate change.

I accept the criticisms, formal and substantive, in points 1, 2 and 3.

Point 5. I am quite comfortable with the timelines I suggest in anticipation of global recession tending toward renewed financial crisis. Initial signs of global contraction are already present, most importantly in banking, autos, airlines and domestic appliances; and it reaches back into production, particularly the most advanced technological sectors producing for international markets, especially industrial robotics, electric motors, and semiconductors. (See “Bottom Suddenly Falls Out of Demand in China in Many Sectors” (19 January 2019). Until proven otherwise I will continue to uphold those timelines.

Point 4: Gui, je n’étais pas coquette. J’étais engagé dans une reconnaissance en force. Étais-je déçu? Non, mais en même temps oui. Indeed, I am disappointed that no one else undertook to wrestle with this question. That no one did points to a deeper malaise, as the case of TPTG illustrates. (I am curious. What did the TPTG comrades make of the wildfires that recently engulfed parts of Greece? Perhaps, instead of explaining why it is capitalism which created that situation in nature that produced the wildfires, why it is capitalism exacerbates the situation, and why only a revolution which abolishes capitalism offers the slightest chance of mitigating this situation, they as their text enjoins, ignored the wildfires because they were merely a “hypothetical series of events,” a product of fantasized “apocalyptical scenarios”? I’ll offer a date, summer 2026, at which time we can revisit all these issues and see who will be foolish enough to term them “hypothetical,” though they may well appear and be experienced as “apocalyptic.”)

Unlike other participants, Don Hamerquist does take a stand here, obliquely at least. It is regressive and backward, reinforcing capitalist domination. He asserts that, “There have been numerous manifestations of right-wing environmentalism, including some that are essentially eco-fascists; and there are significant fascist tendencies that use environmentalist arguments as a basis for an anti-capitalist politics.” This is disingenuous. While Hamerquist, like nearly every other participant in the discussion thinks I’ve overblown the danger of a neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist “bloc,” he nonetheless reveals to us the presence in society of “significant fascist tendencies” deploying “environmental arguments.” He is mistaken, badly, inverting the real situation. The most prevalent trend today is for states—the Philippines, United States and Brazil are the most rabid in unfolding it—to criminalize opposition to capital on ecological grounds as terrorist, and under the same rubric to bring all the power of the state down on climate activities and, as well, indigenous (some archaic) peoples for defense of their lands against logging capital specifically, and deforestation generally (e.g., as in planting monocultural palm plantations). Criminalization, of course, extends to extra-judicial murder.

The general lack of responses exhibit an array of tacit underlying attitudes that range from cynicism through despair to indifference. Of course, this is precisely what is disappointing; at any rate, unlike the cynics, the despairing and the indifferent, in the face of prolonged and intensifying crisis and neo-Right, increasingly neo-fascist reaction I am persuaded that, given its formation, sensibilities and awareness, the largest stratum of an emerging proletariat will be compelled to challenge capital. It is by no means a forgone conclusion that we can’t win that struggle. The only remaining question is whether the challenge comes too late in the face of exponentially accelerating change in climate. In this respect, my basic attitude is expressed in the citation with which these responses ends.

So I agree, Gui, geoengineering entails irreversible risks and improbably realizable gains, that in pursuing them, I add, will ramp up repression and regimentation; but they are what will be offered. We should understand that assuming those risks befits and benefits only those who seek to preserve capitalist civilization, not to mention existing Power. The most rabid supporters of geoengineering within the ruling class are those social groups which downplay or deny climate change, its causation and its efficacy. In contradictory contrast to their general stand, the Heartland, Hoover and Hudson Institutes all have optimistically embraced geoengineering as a practical cost-effective way of dealing with warming. How about Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and Republican Party president candidate? As far back as 2008, he said such methods present an “option to address global warming” thus advancing “scientific invention” and “American ingenuity.” This is a fantasy, the quick technofix which, it is believed, won’t impinge on capitalist development. An abysmally low level of understanding of climate means that its ongoing exponential change will leave many among us by and large dumbfounded and without an explanation, subject to enormous popular pressure, as fear, then panic sets in once the implications for the socially constructed sensuous-material substratum of daily life become increasingly clear. All those with productivists appetites, and who see in the material abundance produced by capitalism the foundations of communism will not have the stomach for what lies ahead.

Such support for geoengineering alone ought to raise suspicions of it. But there are important, sound reasons for not pursuing it, and much of it is already settled science. I’ll instantiate: The singular most important technique the deployment of which is mooted by those seeking that quick-fix pertains to deflection of incoming solar insolation (by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere). Proceed with it and failure or inability (due to cost, political upheaval) to keep the engineering project properly maintained and in good repair would expose the entire Earth with all its life forms including humans to a rapid, fatal rise in temperature; even a modicum of success would also entail ozone loss and of necessity alter or disrupt and significantly decrease rainfall patterns, most important of which would be the monsoons on which the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and East Africa all existentially depend; and any retention of sea ice or snow in the Arctic would be lost within a decade, indicating an indefinite reliance on blockage of solar insolation methods, meaning, among other things, geoengineering is a means for ruling class social groups to hold onto power, reinforcing their stranglehold over the petroleum and natural gas based global economy instead of abolishing them and it.

With a few outliers and a lot of hubbub in capital’s media spectacle notwithstanding, a consensus on geoengineering had been reached a number of years ago: It is not sound science (since there is no experimental verification methods in principle that can be deployed, or we might say, geoengineering would itself be a gigantic, global experimental), which at best will be useless and at worst will exacerbate existing problems. Above all, it is necessary to note that even with some success efforts to globally manage climate change will not return us to a prior condition of climate but introduce something new, something unintended and, given the incalculable feedbacks operating on any one aspect of the changing climate, something unwanted: The climate “doesn’t go backwards. It goes different. And we don’t even understand where that different state ends up.” (The speaker is Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, in a Washington DC press conference introducing the National Academy of Sciences study critical of geoengineering, Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth (2015). McNutt, among the authors of the study, refused to use the term “geoengineering,” preferring instead “climate intervention.” She explained, “We…felt that ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory.”) As conventional as these captive scientists are, it is with them that proposals and discussions of “highly questionable, apocalyptic hypothetical series of events” originate. I am merely stating what is most often politely left unsaid.

In this respect, Gui has adequately captured my intent: Geoengineering is a litmus test: Any communist who advocates and pushes for it has gone over to the bourgeoisie.

There are two points here worth stating, then repeating again and again.

First, on Earth there have been only two stable regimes of climate over the past 700 million years; the one dry and cold (ice age), the other hot and wet (tropical). We are headed irreversibly toward the latter, but much more intensively perhaps than any hot regime which has ever existed: Within less than fifteen years, parts of the Earth (the land masses bordering the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa, the Ganges Plain, and coast East China from Binzhous and Yantai in the north to Shanghai and Hangzhou in the south, and from here inland and west to Hefei and from there south to Nanchang) will all be subject to wet bulb temperature equivalents in excess of 35º C/100 percent humidity. And this, mind you, will occur long before a hot regime of climate fully forms.

Second, the movement of capital and the behavior of groups of humans (real estate developers, industrial loggers, commercial mechanized ocean trawlers, large agricultural capitals, etc.) who have most internalized its, capital’s, logic, are simultaneously engaged in annihilating the vast majority of species life and known genera on Earth, and engaged in an enormous simplification of intricate, complex living networks, from ecological niches to whole biomes. No matter how sophisticated the technical design of built environment, a victorious revolution, above those who are its bearers, will not survive the world we inherit, if capital is permitted to remake it in its entirety: In which fauna and flora are extinguished, in which the air slowly poisons us, the water is undrinkable, and the heat unbearable. As things stand, the Earth’s climate is already beyond worst case scenarios.

So what is at stake here? Preservation of enough microbial, plant and animal life to make habitability possible; the possibility of free, genuinely human communities; and prevention of a vast methane release-based, hydrogen sulfate extinction followed by a runaway warming that boils over the oceans. (We should be so fortunate.) Continue burning fossil fuels in any form and you will abandon these possibilities. But it goes far, far beyond this. (Indeed Ross, Loren Goldner’s “program” was already long outdated at the moment he first posted it. When? 2005? Earlier?) You say none of this is Marxist. Call it whatever you wish, I don’t care; but there is no chance in today’s world of achieving any of what’s at stake short of a revolutionary transformation that brings into being a power, not based on but, actively constructed and sustained by the proletarians everywhere, at sites and locales around the world where each group of workers is situated. Un wa yusha wo tasuku.5

• 1At the end of the long passage I cited (in Whither America?) from Barnes’ Civil War and Revolution in America, he states, “Because racial concepts are socially as well as historically inseparably tied to social control (either for purposes of rule or the extraction of petty privileges), and because as such racial concepts are originally consciously generated (whatever their extent of materialization) while class originates in social practice as a relation between exploiter and exploited, the subjective drama of individuals, groups or classes can not only come to be dominated by racial concerns, but in such case subjectivity will necessarily be mystified, i.e., the class relation will not appear “in” cognitive awareness except obscurely and tangentially. Historically, then, race has come to be central within a societal totality for which class is primary, because it, race, exists as objectively necessary illusion, at once as real determination and as mystification” (Preface, Part IV, “The Meaning of ‘Race’ and Class: ‘Race’ and Class.” Emphasis in original). By “originally consciously generated” Barnes is referring to the historical genesis of race (in America) in a Virgina colony great planter strategy, legally embodied in statutory law, to maintain control over serviles in production developed in the long aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. He calls that strategy, “drawing a color line along a fault line among the exploited” (Preface, Part V, “Racial Slavery as a Planter Strategy to Secure Rule.” Emphasis in original). The entire discussion is incisive and well worth revisiting.
• 2Keynesianism was “perfectly congruent with the reality within which workers were situated": Instead “of wages as a flexible variable that capital aims at depressing, especially during crisis, unions as interference in the otherwise self-regulatory character of the economy and the state as the immediate, direct guarantee of the system of social relations,” Keynesian policies promoted "an upward direction of wages providing the dynamic, internal demand that permits the system to expand, unions [are] welcomed as the mechanism to discipline labor within the framework of capitalist social relations and the state actively” interjects “itself into the circuits of capital to insure low levels of unemployment (high demand) through public expenditures… capital actively” seeks “to integrate workers, to ‘embourgeiosify’ them in and through consumption, through production of a mass culture of the spectacle.” Will Barnes, Community and Capital. St. Paul, 2001: §126i. Emphasis added.
• 3And, of course, there is China.

  China is the largest auto market in the world with 2018 sales of some 27.55 million vehicles, surpassing the next largest, the United States, by 40 percent. Automakers sold close to 45 million new vehicles in the two countries in 2018. In December in China those sales fell 13.9 percent, declining for the sixth straight month reversing 13 consecutive years (2005–2017) of increasing sales which began with a base figure of 4 million vehicles. ("China Auto Sales Plunge, Face First Annual Decline in 30 Years,” “Carmageddon for New Cars” and “China’s Consumers Rattle Global Automakers as Sales Plunge.” All at Wolf Street.) While autos employs nothing like the numbers of industrial workers as in the past (in 1931, Ford’s River Rouge with some 101,000 workers alone employed more workers than, taken together, all US capitals manufacturing autos in the United States do today), beyond Fordism autos remains central to global capitalist production. Those combined US/Chinese auto sales are monetarily valued at over $1.125 trillion. For GM and Volkswagen, China is their largest market in the world, and both have posted year over year sales losses there. In the case of GM that loss is the direct consequence of tariffs as Chinese retaliation has added to the cost of parts imported from the US. Globally entering a decline since July 2018, worsened by tariffs the auto sector is contracting as are other sectors in the world capitalist economy.

  Finally, there is Britain and the European Union.

  The possibility of a British departure from the EU customs union arises, all from the perspective of what future portends, from profound differences within the working class, from differences and conflicts among classes, and “across borders” (i.e., differences between classes and strata of Scotland and Northern Ireland vis-a-vis England). Politically the various differences have produced parliamentary stalemate over the so-called Brexit. If Britain leaves the EU without a negotiated settlement, the impact on trade with the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the Republic of Ireland will be enormous. A “no-deal Brexit” will push the whole of Europe into deep recession, will result in the downfall of May’s government and, whatever party or coalition of parties that follows on her, will led to a bilateral trade arrangement with the United States which, a disaster for the working classes of the Isles, will drive Britain into depression conditions.

• 4I drafted this footnote, and then thought long and hard about excluding it. Reading the TPTG response (which came in late) led me to recognize the necessity of its inclusion.

  The logic of capital is what renders society intelligible. In the epoch of capital’s real domination, that logic can be summarized as a movement which aims at production for production’s sake or, if you prefer, self-valorizing value. In the text above, this logic is manifested in the implacable compulsion to unrelentingly produce commodities embodying the least socially necessary labor time.

  This expression of that logic, i.e., the law of value, is essential and historically objective, but it is an outcome. That is to say, to really comprehend that logic we are required to refer it back to the activity in and through which it is formed. This activity is not proletarian; it is capitalist.

  For the most part, an individual capitalist rarely win for herself a monopoly in the sale of commodities. Patently, monopolies exist; yet they are not determinate for the system of social relations (capitalism): The mass of capitalists face competitive conditions when seeking to market their commodities. Setting aside conditions of product scarcity (which, at any rate is opposed to the actual tendency of capitalist development, product excess), capitalists must confront other capitalists who attempt to sell like if not altogether identical commodities. Thus, as a matter of course capitalists must match or better the price of their competitors. Fearing competitive ruin, capitalists are compelled to achieve a cost advantage in the production of their commodity. From this viewpoint, profitability is realized only if costs of production of a commodity are lower than the average in the industry in question. (Call that average socially necessary labor time embodied in a given commodity.) So capitalists are impelled by the desire to accumulate wealth in monetary form; simultaneously, they fear competitive ruin. Achieving the one and avoiding the other is contingent on lowering costs of production of their commodity below that of their competitors. But each and every capitalist as a capitalist is both motivated by the same desire and compelled by the same fear. Ineluctably the activity of capitalists as a group exercises an inescapable compulsion on each one, creating an objective necessity beyond the control of any individual capitalist. It is this objective necessity which we call the logic of capital.

  Because each and every capitalist seeks to push down production costs, the amount of socially necessary labor time embodied in each commodity over time declines as the mass of commodities produced increases. This decline too confronts each and every capitalist as an objective necessity, an event of a total societal production process simply and unavoidably beyond her control. And, yet, this decline is the objective outcome of each and every capitalist’s efforts to reduce production (particularly labor) costs. So, an objective compulsion extends further as each capitalist is compelled to produce more to compensate for declining prices. This all-around increase in production leads to an impasse, as some of the growing mass of commodities will not find buyers. Historically, the outcomes of a crisis of overproduction are depression, social unrest and war; nonetheless, from the perspective of capital’s critique the crisis of overproduction is intrinsic to, a necessary phase of, capitalist development. We recognize two general outcomes, both forms of crisis resolution: One is depression characterized by pervasive productive under-capacity and massive deflation, a tremendous devalorization of existing capital; the other is war the consequences of which are enormous destruction of capital in its various forms (including human life as labor power, industrial landscapes, circulating commodities). Replaced by others, those who bear these social relations may disappear in either event as forms of crisis resolution, but destruction of productive forces, and with them the achieved level of their development, allow the production process on the basis of which the whole system of social relations takes shape to begin again, effectively to renew itself. Synonymous with a renewal of expansion, what once more issues forth is precisely the logic of capital, the activity of competing capitalists from out of which forms that compelling objective necessity which subordinates each and every individual capitalist.

• 5It’s Japanese. Loosely translated, it means, “Fortune favors the undaunted."