Harlem, NYC — As for the Republican race, it’s largely an internal affair as
it’s pretty obvious that the power elite have decided that the people
need a ‘rest’ from the Bush Gang (aka the Carter years following the
Nixon debacle) before, hopefully, getting back to ‘business as usual’.
The question however is whether there can ever be a return to business
as usual.
So on the one hand we have Obama presented as Hope and
Change to the public whilst the reality is that he is bought and sold
by the same power elite who selected Bush (just a different branch).
And on the other, Hillary Clinton, the ‘backup’ candidate, just in case.
Picking
Obama/Clinton is a win-win solution, a stroke of marketing brilliance
as there’s nothing to choose between the two candidates, so whether
it’s Obama or Clinton who ‘win’ the nomination, matters little as long
as one of them does (any other alternatives have long been removed).
The
important thing is that the populace are sold the idea that electing
one or the other of these ‘brands’ sells the idea of Change and Hope.
Thus whichever one ‘wins’ matters little, what’s important is the
illusion that by voting for either of the two candidates heralds a new
Era of Change, change from the disastrous rule of Bush and his gang of
gangsters.
So what’s going on? Why have the US ruling elite
taken such a drastic step as boosting both a black man and a woman for
the next president, an event unprecedented in US electoral history?
The
reasons for this abrupt turnaround should surely be obvious; number one
is the dire state of the economy and number two is the complete loss of
legitimacy, something all the ‘advanced’ countries are experiencing.
So, just as with the Carter years, they need the appearance of a clean
break with the past.
Furthermore, it reveals a ruling class in
disarray and divided over what to do. The Bush years, led by the
alliance of the weapons, financial and energy sectors and until
recently, a totally complicit corporate media, are caught in a paradox
of their own making.
On the one hand in order to maintain
hegemonic control of the global economy through unlimited access to
resources and markets, meant the projection and use of overwhelming
military power but in so doing it has undermined the economic basis of
the rule of Capital, eg the $9 trillion government debt, the collapse
of the credit system, itself the product of cutting social spending to
the bone and depressing wages, so that millions of working people whose
consumer spending kept the ‘wheels of industry’ turning can no longer
afford to buy the products produced, produced not in the US but in
China and other points East and South.
A closer look at the
contradictions of deindustrialising the US reveals the nature of the
paradox (ditto for its junior ‘partner’, the UK).
In order to
maintain the level of profit US capital was forced to move production
to low wage countries but in so doing they created another competitor,
China to add to Japan and the European Union.
The process has
been inexorable. For example, starting in the 1970s, local US
production (concentrated in the North and North-east) first moved to
the Southern states then to Mexico and other points South, then onto
Taiwan, then to places like South Korea and then Vietnam and finally
China and India, creating new competitors along the way as inevitably,
each move kick-started the Western-style industrialisation of these
countries.
Parallel to the process of the globalisation of
production and distribution, the financial sector has followed a
similar pattern, aided by the deregulation (de-criminalisation) of all
constraints on the fraudulent scams dreamed up by a host of financial
whizzkids, all anxious to cash in on the cash cows of futures trading,
ie hedge funds and speculation in currencies and all manner of what are
euphemistically called financial instruments.
Ultimately, such
fraudulent activities had to crash supported as they are by the
domination of the so-called fiat currency, the dollar, which in turn
held its dominance by being the only currency with which to buy oil.
And as we have witnessed, once the dollar dived, losing over half of
its value in the space of a decade, it makes the US economy even more
vulnerable to its foreign competitors.
In turn this has meant
that the US has had to increasingly rely on its military supremacy to
maintain its ruling position, but without the economic power to support
it, military force is ultimately useless, short of Armaggedon (and
there’s no guarantee that in its final death spasms, US capitalism
won’t decide to take us all down with it).
Which brings us back
to Obama and the US ‘election’, which in reality amounts to little more
than buying time and with no guarantee that a solution can be found to
what appears to be the end of the road for the capitalist system.
There
are of course those, on both the left and right, who argue that the
sheer innovative power of capital will produce a solution, normally of
a technological nature (eg, some kind of ‘fix’ for the climate crisis)
but ultimately, all depend on capitalism being able to expand—find new
markets, another revolution in production, destroy the competition and
so on. But the world is finite, there are only so many markets, only so
many new low wage countries that capital can relocate to in order to
reproduce itself.
Added to this heady mix we now have the
climate crisis, which I have long maintained the ruling class have been
well aware of perhaps for decades and even hope that it will ‘solve’
the crisis of over-production/under-consumption, and furthermore
‘solve’ the problem of surplus labour without the need to initiate a
Third World War (let Nature take the blame and do the dirty work on
Capital’s behalf).
The dominant ruling classes of the ‘advanced’
countries hope they can ride out the conflagration and emerge
triumphant into a world ‘cleansed’ of its competitors (just as it has
before). This is the ‘Plan’, but will it work? Are they capable of
forward thinking beyond the short-term ‘bottom line’? All the
indications are that they are propelled by the forces of capital
accumulation over which they have at best not only very little control
but very little comprehension.
Karl Marx, who in a sane world
should be their guru and guide, has been dismissed as irrelevant, yet
the causes of the current situation was unpacked by the Master over one
hundred and fifty years ago.
The $9 trillion question is
whether capitalism has run out of road and if it has, what are the
alternatives and even more importantly, are we in a position to
implement them?
The irony of the situation is not lost on yours
truly. Here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, where the
analyses of Marx are finally coming true but without a revolutionary
movement to carry out the transformation.
Thus we have reached
an historically unique moment for which we too have no solution even
though we can identify the forces which have led us to this situation,
truly a paradox of global dimensions. No doubt in the fullness of time,
new forces will emerge, some of which we are already witnessing but not
in the so-called developed countries, the locations where they are
needed the most.
This essay is archived at: http://williambowles.info/ini/2008/0208/ini_120208.html
Writings 
That both a black man and a woman are the ‘front runners’ in the ‘race’ for the presidency speaks reams about the desperate state of the Union these days, not that the up-coming US election has much relevancy to anything of import but the illusion that voting every five years is a reflection of real democracy, has to be maintained.
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