To justify these imperial ambitions he has said on several occasions, most recently on Christmas day, that expansion at Denmark's and Panama's expense is essential for "national security". China, apparently, has too much of a presence at the strategically vital waterway into the Pacific and, according to Trump, US shipping has to pay an unfair premium to travel through its gates. A demonstrably false assertion. On Greenland, Trump has shown an interest since someone, in 2019, showed him a world map and he couldn't work out why it wasn't part of the United States already. And there's the small matter of extensive mineral resources US mining interests wouldn't mind getting their hands on.
For such an overweening ego, Trump's rambling "interventions" owe something to an incontinent id. To suggest Trump has ulterior motives apart from whatever spark has lit the dim corners of his limited mind affords him too much credit, but that isn't to say those around him haven't. Offering territorial expansion would play well to the base, which has recently been riled up by a dispute between Musk and MAGA over work visas and immigration. A secondary consequence might be a repeat of what we've seen domestically from other billionaires, businesses, and institutions in pre-emptively bending the knee. For example, Jeff Bezos instructing The Washington Post not to endorse anyone at the election, and Mark Zuckerberg's scrapping of "biased" fact checkers in favour of "free speech" on Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps Panama, Denmark, and Canada will pre-emptively offer concessions to sate Trump's greedy eyes.
There's further method to Trump's madness. The reason why the likes of Musk are on board the Trump train is because their politics are determined by an experiment in naked class rule. This means scrapping as many checks and balances on capital they can get away with, winding down the federal government, which includes residual social security and health entitlements, and squeezing central funding to states' budgets. Needless to say, those who mistakenly thought Trump was protecting their meagre welfare cheques are about to find out what they voted for. What's left is going to be shaken down so more federal money pours into billionaire coffers, and they'll doubly benefit from tax cuts too (though these are now another MAGA bone of contention). What Javier Milei is doing to Argentina, and what Liz Truss tried doing here is the prize, and that is a further shift in the balance between capital and labour. Though given the state of US politics, this is a move on from the dominance of capital to its unquestionable authoritarian rule. The United States economy is to become even more a billionaire's playground, with the world's largest and most advanced military there to intimidate the rest of the globe into falling in line.
This is the project, at least where Trump's elite backers are concerned. But winding the Donald up and letting him waddle into controversy is a good way of generating interference, of continually creating spectacles while the real business of looting the state and securing an even more subservient class settlement proceeds relatively unnoticed.
It's impossible to say whether this project will be successful. Everyone has a breaking point, and not even Trump can rub the faces of his mass support in it indefinitely. The MAGA row over immigration might preface far more serious disputes to come if the incoming government and, especially, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency throws millions of federal employees out of work and ratchets up the difficulties for poorer Americans and those just getting by. That's the problem with projects aiming to implement naked class rule. Existing forms of political consent break down and the truth of a society becomes apparent to everyone. And history shows those situations tend not to end well for those who've brought them into being.
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8 comments:
Naked class rule is the project of the petty-bourgeoisie that forms Trump's base, not the bourgeois ruling class. Its why that petty-bourgeois base is not going to worry about the removal of remaining welfare benefits etc. But, as Marx and Engels set out, more than 150 years ago, the bourgeois ruling class long since grew out of that nonsense, and requires the increasing role of the state in planning and regulation.
In the 1920's in Italy, 1930's in Germany, Spain and elsewhere, the bourgeois ruling class did resort to fascism, which is itself a manifestation of the politics of the petty-bourgeoisie, but look at the conditions. In Italy, a mass workers movement was occupying factories and establishing workers councils and widespread workers control. In the 1920's, the German ruling class did not resort to fascism, but slapped it down. Only in the 1930's, as a last resort did it do so, as in Spain.
In Britain, although there were people like Mosely, the world's leading ruling class, at that time, did not resort to fascism, nor did that in the US, despite the support for it from powerful individuals such as Henry Ford. Why? It didn't need to, and as Lenin set out in State and Revolution, the bourgeoisie does not give up its preferred method of political regime, the parliamentary republic lightly. Where it did, it was because a revolutionary working class threatened its rule, and did so in conditions where that working class had already squeezed its profits.
The 1980's were a similar condition to the 1930's, but the ruling class did not feel the need to resort to fascism. Again, its profits were squeezed following the long rise in wage share of the 1960's, and 70's. That is not the case today, even. Relative profits are high. Labour shortages mean that wages are rising as they did in the 1960's, but not yet squeezing profits. The main problem caused by that is not for the bourgeoisie, but for the petty-bourgeoisie which as self-employed traders already with miserable living standards, they cannot raise their revenues, and as small scale employers of labour themselves, they find they can't get workers, or else have to pay those higher wages, and so get smaller profits.
In the 1930's, fascism solved a problem, but it can't solve the problem that the ruling class faces today, which is not the need to slap down powerful labour movements squeezing their profits, but is the fact that the mirage of wealth from rising asset prices it has relied on for the last 40 years has been shattered, as economic growth causes interest rates to rise, and those asset prices to crash. No fascism, no experiment in naked class rule can resolve that problem for them. On the contrary, the solution within a continuation of capitalism could only come from a return to the kind of progressive social-democratic regimes of the 1950's and 60's.
I think you're right not to take Trump's sabre-rattling too seriously, I doubt he takes it that seriously, at least not at face value. But it does have a serious purpose in that he wants both allies and enemies to be wary of him; the old saying is that you don't mess with the pub nutter. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and other Imperialists (who may be exempted from Imperialist label because ) get away with a lot of stuff because they know the liberal Western powers don't intervene as directly into proxy conflicts as they do. Yes, the West gives Ukraine and Israel etc... weapons and support, but they're not as directly involved on the ground as the "Eastern" Imperialists are in Syria, Yemen, Gaza etc...). But Trump sails a bit closer to their style of unstable strong man schtick (which I think is partly true and partly an act) and he has a bigger stick than they do, meaning they're a little more wary than with a more orthodox Western leader. In the West; NATO members have to be a bit more wary about freeriding on US security.
So for all his grotesqueness I think Trump will be a far more moderating influence on the other Imperialists than Kamala Harris would have been.
Isn't this just Trump's standard method of negotiation? i.e. begin by making maximal demands, and then moderate down.
So why isn't there any coherent support from the bourgeois ruling class for a return to those policies?
It's clear that they would benefit. If they had moved that way a decade ago, then the current apocalyptic partisan tensions - and the support base for fascism - wouldn't now exist.
But instead, they have been throwing most of their resources behind fighting against the return of progressive social democracy, at the expense of conceding more and more ground to fascism. They made a spectacle of being prepared to do absolutely anything to stop the rise of Sanders and Corbyn, but have repeatedly appeared unwilling to go an extra metre (never mind a mile) to resist Trump and Farage. When Walz was added to the Harris ticket, it was the first sign that they were even seriously aware of the danger: and it was too little, too late.
So what gives?
One possible explanation is that they really are so decadent and complacent now, that they've forgotten what their predecessors in the 20th century knew about how to keep their heads during a systemic crisis of capitalism.
Another is that they never knew how to respond to these conditions in the first place - never accepted the correctness of Marx and Engels - and only allowed progressive social reforms in the 20th century because they were terrified of the Soviet Union. The problem with this explanation is that predatory capitalists do have a tendency to admit (off the record) that Marx is their bible for exploiting the working class. I've heard from people who have heard that first hand.
A third option is that they know what they're doing... Or at least thought that they did, until very recently. Whereas the advent of the Soviet Union pressured their behaviour in the 20th century, now their behaviour is influenced by another huge shadow - the historically unprecedented possibility of autonomous robot soldiers. A force multiplier like that has never existed; one person could in theory wield the ENTIRE power of an industrial nation, with no checks on their behaviour whatsoever (other than some kind of rebellion from the robots!). Whoever gets hold of those first can dictate terms at will to anyone that doesn't have them. A prize that big (and utterly final) has never before existed, which means that the stakes in politics are also in uncharted territory.
Your question is a reasonable one. The answer, however, is simple, as I have set out many times before.
The bourgeois ruling-class, today, is not that of the early to mid 19th century. As Marx and Engels set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and in Anti-Duhring, it is not a class of owners of private industrial capital, whose revenues come from profits. It is a rentier class, a class of owners of fictitious capital, whose revenues come from interest/dividends. As M&E call them a class of coupon clippers. The actual owners of large-scale industrial capital as M&E note, are today, the workers, though they do not have control over that property.
In the post-war period, the ruling-class had rising revenues from interest and dividends, as the global economy expanded. In the 50's real wages also grew, but not relative wages, i.e. wage share did not grow. It created a golden era for social-democratic ideology. The ruling class did not provide welfarism for fear of workers, no the alternative offered to workers of the prison camp of Stalinism in the East. It did so, because it was consistent with the needs of large-scale industrial capital, to plan and regulate the economy, including labour supply.
But, from the 1980's, that ruling class, saw interest rates/yields drop as industrial profits massively exceeded the demand for capital. Conversely, it caused asset prices to soar. The ruling class became addicted to this rise in their paper wealth from soaring asset prices. However, once the long wave cycle turned again after 1999 to one of expansion, interest rates were set to rise, and the consequence of that is falling asset prices. The ruling class have used their state to try to restrain that global globe, and so the rise in interest rates, so as to avoid a crash in asset prices. Hence QE, and hence their reluctance to support the only thing that can actually save them, which is a return to progressive s-d, greater panning and regulation of the economy, economic growth, and capital accumulation, which is the basis of greater profits. Its why they crave QE, and why, as today, the news of more jobs in the US economy, which caused bond yields to rise, also caused a big sell off in the stock market.
The only other thing that can help them is globalisation, scrapping borders and so on, which is why the policies of Trump, Brexit, Blue Labour are anathema to to them, as much as to workers.
Your answer is either not simple, or not coherently presented, or both. I think you're trying to say that the suicidal lack of support for a return to progressive social democracy among the outgoing ruling establishment results from their never actually having dealt with these conditions before, and being therefore unable to recognise where their bread is buttered.
I was only saying that the answer to your question was simple, not the answer for the ruling class to their problems. Your summary, however, is pretty good. In the financial crises of 1847 and 1857, detailed by Marx, speculative stock market bubbles ended in big crashes, but no lasting damage to the real economy. It continued on a long wave expansion that ran from 1843 to around 1865-70. The credit crunch during those financial crises was removed, but was not used to inflate share prices. 1929 was different, as it came at the end of a period of long wave expansion. Stock market levels did not get back to pre-1929 levels, in real terms, until the 1950's. Unlike, today, the 1930's were a period of stagnation, and rising rates of profit from low levels. In the post-war period, there was no condition of existing inflated asset prices, as the new expansion got underway. Profits went into real capital accumulation - including state spending on infrastructure/welfare, and that expanded capital base meant expanding profits to also finance increased dividends and interest.
2008 was more or less identical to 1847 and 57, except that the ruling class had had 30 years of such gambling and reliance on asset price inflation and capital gains. Every time bubbles burst such as in 1987, 1990, 1994, 2000, central banks intervened to buy up assets and reflate their prices. Central bank policy rates, and yields on assets had sunk to near zero, so any, even the smallest absolute rise in rates was a huge proportional rise, with a similar huge effect on asset prices via capitalisation. The ruling class has become like a junkie dependent on that fix of liquidity to keep asset prices high, even at the cost of not eating to keep its body healthy. It needs to go Cold Turkey, and start eating, to use profits for real capital accumulation, but can't do it, voluntarily.
In the post-war period, still reasonably strong, and strengthening labour movements also provided the backing for mildly progressive social-democratic parties, which implemented the policies that real large-scale capital required, such as nationalising and recapitalising core industries, such as coal, steal, energy and transport, as well as socialising welfare. We do not currently have such labour movements, nor social democratic parties.
That is not to say they provide the solution either, as the 1970's showed. They simply provide a more cogent solution, within capitalism, in the present conjuncture, and also a basis within which socialists can operate to present the real solution, which is the demand for control over that large-scale capital by the workers that own it, and removal of the control exercised by shareholders. Its notable that in the 1970's, Wilson's Government commissioned the Report on Industrial Democracy, and the EU introduced such a Draft law. In Germany Co-Determination has existed for more than a century. Its a fraud in all these cases because worker directors are always left in a minority, but it opens the door a crack to the real solution.
@Kamo suggests that the real imperialists are Russia, China, Iran and 'others'. By others I assume he means the USA - the biggest Imperialist power of all since 1945. Just look at how many bases they have all across the globe. There to ensure not so much the pax americana, as the primacy of the dollar and corporate contract law.
They control the international system through the IMF and World Bank and WTO, which allows them to discipline most countries without needing to use military force. This doesn't work on China or Russia, which, not coincidentally, is why they are labelled as enemies. America can't attack them directly, but can encourage disorder and disruption. And vice versa.
When the US sees the need to intervene directly, they do with gusto. In the Middle east they maintain a level of chaos and conflict that forces the various local powers to pick a side. Most choose to be allies. It's cheaper than war, and more effective.
Trump is unlikely to deviate from the script too much. He likes to sound off but he is more interested in wealth than war. He's a plutocrat, and the only thing that matters to them is money.
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