Rai 01-03
The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution (Part 1) Mark Wain on March 28, 2016 Part 1 In the article, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist.html#permid=17995337 Michael Kazin quoted the Populists’ 1892 platform “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few,” those fruits have grown over the past several hundred years by unpaid surplus labor of hundreds of millions of hard-working people to such a gigantic scale or the overwhelming material abundance that, if not being stolen or otherwise they had completely recovered the stolen goods, would have so enriched everyone of this country as to enable all become multi-millionaires. The root cause for the undemocratic status quo is capital and not its political representatives or the populists. Whenever a remedy is to be sought, one should focus on capital as a social relation that controls and abuses its privilege on the entire society.
The number of manufacturing job in the U.S. has kept falling since the late 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan’s infamous anti-labor neo-liberal “revolution.” In their 1992 book: “America: What Went Wrong?” Donald Barlett and James Steele wrote: “During the 1950s, 33 percent of all workers were employed in manufacturing. The figure edged down to 30 percent in the 1960s, and plunged to 20 percent in the 1980s. It is now 17 percent-and falling.” In 1999, it further plunged to 10.3%, thanks to the “invisible hand” of the market as the determining force of outcomes. While one third of the plunge is attributed to manufacturing strength decline due to flat investment and trade deficit, two thirds of the plunge of manufacturing job number is due to increased labor productivity because of automated production. (See,for an example, http://www.industryweek.com/workforce/why-americas-manufacturing-job-loss-greater-other-industrialized-countries?page=3 ) In fact, increased labor productivity by means of increased fixed capital investment (or organic composition of capital assuming variable capital - wage level - is either unchanged or lowered for given rate of exploitation [ratio of surplus value extracted from labor or profit to wage]) causes decreased rate of profit, which, in turn, bolsters capital to cut investment. Underinvestment initiates not only crises but also unemployment and underemployment – low-wage and/or part-time jobs in the service sector where constant or fixed capital investment is much less than in manufacturing. De-industrialization is a feasible way for raising profitability and even for counteracting its otherwise insurmountable decline.
The flat investment and trade deficit factors imply trade-led job loss and stagnant and eventually race-to-the-bottom wage level. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both rebuke the manufacturing industry for shipping jobs to Mexico and overseas and win over working people’s general approval, and as a result the number of their combined electorate must exceed the sum of other candidates including Hillary Clinton. To be sure, a deeper understanding of the problem should be found elsewhere. Ever-increasing forces of production are indispensable to the existence and development of capitalism. When such a stage of increase has arrived that labor productivity reaches its highest possible level, the system tends to go through with its general average rate of profit ebbing away from its more common phenomena of ebb and flow. Hasn’t such a stage arrived yet?
For a discussion refer to https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/recessionsdepressions-and-recoveries-0712151.pdf ; https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/the-global-gdp-story/#respond , and other papers and books.
The fact that capitalism has reached its late stage of declining rate of profit seems to agree on some common-sense observations, such as flat investment, unfree and unwanted investment outlet - plenty of investment objects, e.g., infrastructure, renewable energy sources, health-care facility, public education, etc. exist but they remain unattractive to capital; disposable capital to the tune of about $1 trillion to 2 trillion; insolvent debt; unemployment and underemployment rates remain far too high for the economy to recover; record-low interest rates (some going negative) do not seem to spur new investment interests except on the stock market and in financial casinos, yet investment and not consumption drives a capitalist economy; manufacturing remains under pressure, for an example, durable goods orders in the U.S. drop 2.8% in February 2016; world market has run up to its expansion top, economies of the BRICS countries either barely grow, are slowing down or in deep slumps and money is flowing out of emerging markets - so far close to $1 trillion has fled China alone. Capital looks forward for immediate return more than long-term investments as its horizon has been dimmed by the falling driving force of capitalist production, namely, the rate of profit. To gain immediate higher return, capital resorts to increased labor productivity by means of full-speed automation in production.
The price to pay for this endeavor is the increased surplus population or unemployment and underemployment of labor. Therefore, the (unpaid) surplus value or profit created by higher labor productivity has increased, while the value embedded in commodity has decreased together with its price to such an extent that price deflation becomes a reality. Capital, over-accumulated and over-idled at the same time, is about to be suffocated by its own success in making monopoly private profits.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the two patriotic vanguards, certainly want to save the system, it is a pity that they may stall for time but most definitely fail to succeed unless they venture their lives for sublation or Aufheben des Werdens of the rotten line of anarchism in the capitalist production.
The much scolded and condemned hideous Donald Trump has touched off strong repercussions not only from the far left but also from the far right, especially the establishment. Is Trump a fascist who will be bound to set up a Trumpist dictatorship? Capital has monopolized the political landscape in a dictatorial manner for more than a hundred years, what could a Trumpist dictatorship gain his ends of the democratic freedoms rigged by capital? As it has bogged down in the quagmire of its own making, further digging through its life-saving democracy of sheer formality means nothing but suicide.
The current situation would call for a political revolution deeper and more radical than what Bernie Sanders has done. The hegemony, to which capital has laid claim for hundreds of years on the premises that whatever it does, it would never let the system go down the drain, is both questionable and broken. A few years ago, no one would think capital’s hegemony could ever be off the hinges, now capital faces petrified challenges that it can no longer bluff its way through business as usual, its existing authority is undermined. A true democratic revolution under the sovereignty of the people, not only in this country but also over the world, will likely break out as a successor to the American and French democratic revolutions of the late 18th century. Their enemies are no longer old monarchies, aristocrats and the clergy, the new kings are the capitalist ruling class under its dictatorship in various countries, the new aristocrats are the establishment, its apologist three-branch governing class, and the new “clergy” consists of the corporate media, mainstream think tanks, elite at colleges and universities, lobbyists and Super Pac’s.
Donald Trump already warned the establishment of riot as he is ahead of his time. Revolution against the dictatorship of capital certainly will involve not only riots but also uprisings by militant social movements against the establishment which refuse to make any change for the better of people’s interests. Its early stage – democratic revolution – will confine its scope to only repeal bad laws, force bad legislative-executive-judicial members to resign, transform the political system into a pro-people and multiparty one and save the dying system. Its later stage – socialist revolution – will expand its scope to destroy the system and replace it anew. It’s an irony that to achieve the latter goal, the former one must be taken as a dress rehearsal for the full-scale revolution; to destroy it, one has to save it.
The system’s major stumbling block to progress is capital’s absolute monopoly of production. To save the system from demise, when capital has failed miserably to solve the problems of economic as well as political crises, of living conditions of vital importance and enhance people’s political economy, all means of production will have to be nationalized either through confiscations or buy-outs. The means of subsistence will remain largely in private hands but allow of community-owned enterprises during the democratic revolution stage. The second stumbling block is capital’s monopoly on the political system of no change for the betterment of people’s immediate and long-term well-beings. Instead of a representative democracy already fatefully damaged by capital dictatorship, a direct democracy must be established and subject to changes as needed. People should not only vote for representatives but also line items in their federal and state budgets and policies by either yes or no vote or by percentage allocation of their tax return despite of the representative’s own votes by their veto power. Only after people wield political power, the system then can be saved from ruin that the undemocratic hegemony of capital brings on.
Any revolution will cause a crisis spawned by the anger of anti-revolution together with the indifference of looking-on neutral forces. But then, without revolution, people would have no future at all. April 8, 2016 From: "Mark Wain" https://groups.google.com/a/mail.csuchico.edu/forum/#!topic/pen-l/KHC4NfzMK6g
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