This isn't from a libertarian perspective but just puts across who america just voted in as president, and it's disturbing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svoeu6RPbX4
I just hope he won't carry out precisely what he has said that he will do leading upto this election victory (Trump that is ofcourse)
Theres also this explanation of why Hilary Clinton was the wrong Democratic nominee...
In terms of a concrete number interpreting the CNN exit poll suggests 130,000 more voters from union families voted for Trump than you would have expected from the national average. Total vote in Ohio was over 5 million.
You're welcome
Can't see if it has been asked before, but where can I find the results for third party candidates calling themselves socialist? In particular Mimi Soltysik standing for the SPUSA.
Can't see if it has been asked before, but where can I find the results for third party candidates calling themselves socialist? In particular Mimi Soltysik standing for the SPUSA.
http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president
this give state by state, not national totals so far as i can see
The link in Petey's post also has county-level results. Harlan County: 85% for Trump.
I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.
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You're making one great post after another Artesian. Thanks for the analysis.
But you being uncertain must be a first 
I haven’t read the IN thread Artesian mentions. But it gets kind of irritating to hear the leftist line - after Brexit & now Trump - that it's to do with worsening of working class conditions more than racism that led to these results; it defines the relationship between the two wrongly and often seeks to downplay any possible growth of w/c racism. It’s as if the old romanticised view of the w/c as an inherently radical homogenous bloc must be defended in the face of contradictory reality; when in reality the working class is neither homogenous in that way nor solely determined by external forces and what is done to it, but also by its own creative agency in dealing with those circumstances. It’s like they see the w/c as a child that can’t be responsible for its own actions (or lack of action in reducing its actions to voting options).
All of which continues to view the social role of the w/c much as the Right does – as a constituency to be manipulated one way or other by external forces. But if one believes in any kind of self-determination of proletarian struggle one has to see the fault in the internal defeat and capitulation of the w/c - and its resolution in recognising that and the w/c dealing with it and the divisions it’s based on. Meanwhile the ideologues just carry on moaning that the w/c has been fed the wrong ideology.
The growth of racism is real and not a mere passing electoral aberration; imo it can partly be traced to a decline of w/c identity – including in its official institutional and recuperative form of the old labour movement and its industrial base – leading to desperate searches for new primary clothes and masks such as race & nationality. The claims by some that this decline of w/c identity opens up a path to a messianic ‘immediate full communism now’ ignores the other possibilities that appear at present more likely – eg, a drift towards a new fascism, as this article discusses; https://libcom.org/library/communisation-theory-question-fascism-cherry-....
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I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.
lack of ballot access activity will be part of it. the SP is headquartered here in NY yet has not been on the NY ballot in my memory. the rightwing successfully painting the likes of obama as a "communist" will be another part of it. the message of the SP - more identity politics than class politics - is a third part of it.
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Has anyone put together a leaflet yet? Thinking of doing one but if there's already something out there, no need to duplicate work.
jondwhite wrote:
I make that 2471 votes **nationwide** for Soltysik.lack of ballot access activity will be part of it. the SP is headquartered here in NY yet has not been on the NY ballot in my memory. the rightwing successfully painting the likes of obama as a "communist" will be another part of it. the message of the SP - more identity politics than class politics - is a third part of it.
Isn't that how Obama and Hillary won the most votes? Why won't it work for SPUSA?
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Anarchist perspective on Trump's victory
"No One is Coming to Save Us"
http://m1aa.org/?p=1268
Goldner and others think "intersectionality" is an expression of, or accompanied by contempt for white workers; that issue of race, color, and gender are essentially "diversions" from class struggle-- which IMO is the "left wing" version of the right wing Rush Limbaugh theses. I think that, in particular, is crap and has to be denounced, rejected as simply playing into the rhetoric of reactionaries.
I somehow skipped over this paragraph. Is Goldner really arguing this? I haven't had time to take a look but if so, that's very disappointing.
infektfm-solid effort
Do comrades have any explanation as to why a lot (relatively speaking) of Latino folks voted for Trump? (29% as opposed to 8% with blacks.) Especially given Trump's stance on immigration.
Do comrades have any explanation as to why a lot (relatively speaking) of Latino folks voted for Trump? (29% as opposed to 8% with blacks.) Especially given Trump's stance on immigration.
A couple of partial reasons at least. Firstly a lot of Latinos in Florida especially are right wing Cubans who fled Castro's revolution who always vote Republican. Secondly the 2nd most recently arrived group of migrants often dislikes the latest because they see them as competition at the bottom of the labour market.
Thanks bastarx, that makes sense. I've seen the anti-Castroist aspect discussed elsewhere. As to the second point, don't many black voters compete for the same kinds of jobs? The turnout was such that blacks and Latinos represented roughly equal parts of the electorate (12% vs. 11%), but the difference in Trump support was pretty big. Could religion play a role in this?
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Craftwork wrote:
Today's events have demonstrated the hollow commitment of many self-identifying 'revolutionaries' – I see so-called communists/anarchists on Facebook, being upset about Trump's victory; they are admitting, by implication, that deep down, they would have preferred a Clinton victory.Shame!
Of course people are upset at Trump's victory, more than they would be at Hillary's victory. Not because "Hillary is better" or Hillary is the lesser evil, but because of the forces behind Trump's victory-- that peculiar combination of racists, hedge fund managers, KKKers, old line wack-job John Birch society members, Murdoch flunkies, oil money, has parlayed a "program" of violence and assault on the most vulnerable into policy.
Doesn't mean you support Hillary, but you certainly have to be aware of the differences between Clinton and Trump. You don't have to like Obama, in fact you can oppose Obama, but you also better be able to recognize, and distinguish your opposition, from the racist opposition that was just so incensed that an African-American had the temerity to run for and win the presidency.
It's not fundamentally different than Syriza vs. Golden Dawn in Greece. No support to Syriza, but certainly defense of labor, leftists, immigrants from Golden Dawn attacks. And I oppose and have opposed from the getgo any support to Syriza, but I would be upset if Golden Dawn replaced it as the government, because of what that would mean to the prospects for revolution, and the retreat of labor from the struggle.
As for support for Obama, flipping to support for Trump-- that's not an indication that racism isn't or wasn't at work in those rural and smaller cities. The Republicans coded their appeals to racism, hiding it in the verbiage of "merit" "free markets" blahblah-- not the kind of language an appeal to stir (white) men's souls. Trump dropped the code, identifying the "other"-- the "enemy."
"Forces behind Trump" = 60,072,551 votes. Your analysis is typical of a kind of reductionist leftism which treats phenomena in isolation, rather than viewing history and its results as an all-encompassing process.
The Democratic Party cleared the way for Trump's victory by ensuring Clinton's victory in the primaries, over the left-populist Sanders, who, unlike 'crooked' Hillary with her toxic reputation, would have defeated Trump (or at least, stood a better chance of defeating him). Additionally, the Democratic Party adopted a 'Pied Piper' strategy, which aimed to help push Trump to the front of the Republican line in the Republican primaries. The Democrats did everything they could to help Trump to victory! And now, the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, and others call on Americans to respect the outcome and even offer to work with Trump!
"No support to Syriza, but certainly defense of labor, leftists, immigrants from Golden Dawn attacks" — and what about defense of workers, revolutionaries and immigrants from the much greater attacks of the SYRIZA government? Golden Dawn, and groups like it, are not significant in the grand scheme of things. These groups are the rot that festers in the wounds of society, when the working-class is under attack from the democratic bourgeoisie/capital.
Leftists (e.g. Trotskyists) pretty much offer the same analysis as you. They like to distinguish between different factions of the bourgeoisie, between, say, the 'nicer' bourgeois-democrats and the 'dangerous' fascists, or draw distinctions between the 'moderates' and nastier 'right-wing'... all this serves to reinforce ineffective opportunism, and make the prospect of cross-class alliances more palatable.
All of which continues to view the social role of the w/c much as the Right does – as a constituency to be manipulated one way or other by external forces.
I've seen people calculating what percentage of the working class are LGBT and what percentage are racist and deciding 'we' should posture as racist homophobes now... a particularly crude example of this kind of 'constituency' thinking.
The growth of racism is real and not a mere passing electoral aberration; imo it can partly be traced to a decline of w/c identity – including in its official institutional and recuperative form of the old labour movement and its industrial base – leading to desperate searches for new primary clothes and masks such as race & nationality. The claims by some that this decline of w/c identity opens up a path to a messianic ‘immediate full communism now’ ignores the other possibilities that appear at present more likely – eg, a drift towards a new fascism
This is really important. Work-based identities may have been ultimately pro-capitalism, but they were also a basis for solidarity within it. There's a 2013 book Angry White Men by a liberal sociologist who hung out with Men's Rights Activists, white supremacists and the like. He basically finds a common factor in a sort of identity crisis in American masculinity among mostly non-college educated white men (not necessarily working class in Marxist terms, but many are), who kind of feel like they should be breadwinners, but can't afford to and/or can't understand why their wife divorced them, etc.
He doesn't put it in exactly these terms, but he's basically talking about the same breakdown of the 'Fordist' work-centred identity as communisation types, and how that loss of identity has lead to a disorienting, reactionary radicalisation of some men, for whom the available work, and relative freedom of women in relationships, don't conform to an idealised breadwinner role in a nuclear family. It seems like this nexus of family-gender-labour is at least partly implicated in Trumpism, and like you say Red, workers aren't just being duped by ideologues, some do really desire Trumpism and that's what needs to be explained (obviously loads of rich (white) men and women voted Trump too, so this isn't anywhere near a complete explanation, but it seems like part of the one - perhaps in Harlan County, at a guess).
In terms of more communist theory on this, I've found Angela Mitropoulos' work really useful on this:
It is what I would call a recursion to oikonomia, in that the lines of affection, intimacy and movement it seeks to redraw are around those of a familial-racial-national entity and its apparently unique properties. So we might also take an additional step and redescribe domestic violence as a method of control that includes both gendered violence as well as the kind of racist violence that escalated around Brexit, including the horrific murder of Jo Cox. It is not clear to me why we do not draw the connections between these two kinds of violence, which after all turn on ideas of domestic property (its rightful ownership, lines of inheritance and transmission), including for instance the kind of violence that Trump incites at his rallies in the US while conducting the entire campaign as one for a family-name brand.Once again, I would say it is impossible to separate gendered and racial violence—in the case of Jo Cox’s murder, I think that women are more often cast as ‘race traitors’ because men being entitled to regard women (they read as white like them) as their property has been an important compensatory element in the history and politics of class and race. I think it is difficult to separate concepts of feminine availability (and anxiety about paternity or ownership, women’s promiscuity) from anxieties about proper, racial reproduction.
I am also still reeling a little at the realisation that Jo Cox’s murder did not lead to the widespread and outright rejection of Brexit but, instead, incited a rush to embrace some version of it in arguments for stricter migration controls, as if the mere presence of migrants rather than a racism is the problem. Which is perhaps an index of how deep, still, the emotional conflation between family, race and nation is, and why it returns as the normative idea of what a crisis is and how to solve it.
Her book's online as a pdf here too. I find this useful cos it's part of an analysis of class relations (specifically, the reproduction of labour power, and the bases of property and contracts), it helps understand dynamics where many workers act more in terms of race-nation (for example).
Also a some-time libcom poster went on an anti-Trump march and got mocked as a "redneck", so Trump isn't inventing the whole 'urban liberal elites hate small-town/rural Americans' thing, he's just tapping into that quasi-class hatred (it's more classism that class struggle I guess).
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There does certainly seem to be a backlash against liberal ideology in this somewhere. It can be seen in a few ways; both in terms of a backlash from 'privileged' people (straight white men) against perceived gains from 'minorities' (everyone else) and I certainly think sexism played a part against Hillary to some extent but it is I think more important for revolutionaries to understand the other side at work. For starters the bourgeois notion of equality needs to be more thoroughly critiqued a lot of the time. The bourgeois concept of equality at best is the equality in the market place.
I'm sure most here know that but I think that just as Fascism always is a perverted insight into capitalism so the reaction against the 'pc brigade' by the 'Alt-Right' types is on some level a perverted insight into the ideological nature of 'equality' in its current conceptions.
An example of what I mean can be seen above where it was mentioned that there is an aspect of a certain section of men who feel as if there is no role for them that there's no masculine 'ideals' today. This is on one level people reacting to losing privilege but on a much much deeper level it is an expression of alienation and the fact that modern capitalist lives are not fulfilling in general. There is no authentic role for men or women today (either as men or women or on a more general human level).
I think my overall point is that the right-wing shift we are seeing as well as being explained by all the normal explanations of Fascism is also an ideological back lash against the Liberal ideology which has become more and more dominant in recent decades. The left has become more and more ideological in that period as it has focused on identity and words above all else.
."No support to Syriza, but certainly defense of labor, leftists, immigrants from Golden Dawn attacks" — and what about defense of workers, revolutionaries and immigrants from the much greater attacks of the SYRIZA government? Golden Dawn, and groups like it, are not significant in the grand scheme of things. These groups are the rot that festers in the wounds of society, when the working-class is under attack from the democratic bourgeoisie/capital.
Leftists (e.g. Trotskyists) pretty much offer the same analysis as you. They like to distinguish between different factions of the bourgeoisie, between, say, the 'nicer' bourgeois-democrats and the 'dangerous' fascists, or draw distinctions between the 'moderates' and nastier 'right-wing'... all this serves to reinforce ineffective opportunism, and make the prospect of cross-class alliances more palatable.
Honestly Craftwork--I don't see how your analysis applies to what SA, myself, and others have been saying. Noting that Trump represents a new line of attack and being sad that this line attack uses explicit racism in a way that heretofore was unacceptable, and to find it has so much support is not even remotely contingent on an inherent support of the DNC or it's constituent components. I'm really having a hard time understanding who you're arguing against because all I've seen so far here is an explicit rejection of lesser-evilism. I've always respected your contributions, but I'm really struggling to interpret what you're saying here as anything other than fighting a Straw Man of your own creation.
Of course the Dems facilitated Trump's rise. Of course they are all now lining up to provide 'loyal opposition.' None of that is surprising at all. It is also no surprise to anyone that a lot of Leftists line up to support Dems as a lesser evil. Of course they do. That's their role as the left wing of capital. But who on this thread is doing this?
this serves to reinforce ineffective opportunism, and make the prospect of cross-class alliances more palatable.
There is nothing in the arguments presented here that make Dem support inherent to understanding that Trump is not the same as others before him. That the institutionalized racism of both parties and the state is the number one threat to vulnerable populations, there is no doubt. Putting an out and out racist in charge of that apparatus, knowing how weak the worker's movement is--if that prospect isn't depressing, I don't know what would be.
I mean Dauve said something along the lines of--of course one would prefer to live in a social democratic sweden rather than NAZI Germany. The US is neither right now of course. 'Civil bourgeois society' as it has been is always going to be a more pleasant place to live than the alternative of a white supremicist led regime. Or as another example, fighting against being imprisoned doesn't mean a person believes they are actually free in capitalist society. Not to mention, we have more space for organizing in the current formulation--understanding of course that this could change at any moment, were we to become a legitimate threat.
I've said it before in this thread but it bears repeating--our analysis for the past 30+ years that both 'sides' are the same, needs to be adjusted to reflect the new reality, the facts on the ground, as it were. Of course both Trump and Sanders ultimately serve Capital. No questions, no arguments. But Trump represents a different line of attack--while his policies serve the same master as say, HRC or Sanders, Trumpism does it in a different, more direct way. A failure to recognize this change, and instead, sticking to the same binary, invariant analysis runs the risk of alienating those who most need our support right now, and allows us to be easily dismissed as 'cranks' who cannot see the difference in Capital's strategic change of attack.
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Artesian, thanks for that insightful reply.