Joe Biden’s Marxism

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Jim Kavanagh

After all the ridiculous right-wing accusations that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “socialists” or “communists” or “Marxists,” we might as well take the opportunity to extract the lesson in Marxism implied in Joe Biden’s farewell address.

By way of preface, I’ll point out that accusing political opponents of being “Marxist” did not start in the era of Barack Obama and did not always come from the Republican right. One of the strangest such incidents occurred during a 1976 presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in which implications of Marxism were unexpectedly used to smack down an opponent. In trying to defend the recent Republican unemployment record, Ford demurred that unemployment during previous Democratic administrations was lower because more men were in the army fighting the Vietnam War: “I must remind him [Carter] that we’re at peace and during the period that he brags about unemployment being low, the United States was at war.”

To which Carter replied that Ford was “insinuating that ...unemployment could only be held down when this country is at war. Karl Marx said that the free enterprise system in a democracy can only continue to exist when they are at war or preparing far [sic] war. Karl Marx was the grandfather of Communism. I don’t agree with that statement. I hope Mr. Ford doesn’t either.”

Gerald Ford had indeed echoed the argument of Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, in Monopoly Capital, that roughly the same proportion of the workforce was either in the military, unemployed, or dependent on welfare in the 1960s as during the Great Depression, with the difference that a higher percentage were in the military in the 60s. Carter apparently recognized this source, and said—not that that Ford’s statement was false, but. essentially: “That’s a Marxist argument, so it can’t be entertained. As I’m sure Mr. Ford will agree.” Mic drop, American style.

Well, I’ll take the occasion to do a reverse Jimmy Carter, drawing out the Marxist implications in this excerpt from Biden’s farewell speech in order not to dismiss but to take them seriously:

That’s why in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.

Actually, Joe, an oligarchy has taken shape in America. a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”  Yes, “we’ve seen it before,” and neither the “trust busters” of over a century ago nor the New Deal and post-war policies ended that oligarchy, although the latter did for a while ameliorate its effects.

What Trump Teaches, Again

 What Trump Teaches, Again

Jim Kavanagh

 

It happened, again.

After the Trump victory in 2016, I wrote an essay with the title, “Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches” and it’s the basis for what I’ll say here, with appropriate updates and additions. See the original for a fuller analysis.

As in 2016, except worse, Donald Trump won the presidential election because of the rage of working people—of all colors and genders—over the Democratic party and administration’s failure to substantially improve the material conditions of their lives.

Working people were fed up with watching the party that claims to represent their interests allow their material conditions to worsen, even as that party lavishes attention and resources on foreign wars for “democracy” and domestic programs for “inclusion” while castigating them for not being woke enough to embrace those virtues that don’t pay the rent.

David Axelrod, an architect of the problem, described it nicely on election night on CNN: “The Democratic Party has become more of a suburban, college-educated, professional party and it still feels allegiance to working…But it approaches working people like missionaries or like Margaret Mead would approach the natives.”

Well, the natives are restless. “Democracy” means people having and exercising power. They just did. And the missionaries just got cooked. 

I really hate to say it, but even conservative commentator David Brooks can see the problem. His latest NYT op-ed, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” has a slew of cogent zingers like: “As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet…His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot”; and “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it…Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself”; and even “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”

Bernie Sanders himself, who two weeks ago said Biden "has been the most progressive, pro-worker president since FDR," now recognizes, and is in high dudgeon about, the problem with the Democratic Party he surrendered his “disruptive” movement to:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. 

Too bad, as Bernie admits in his statement, the Democratic Party is not going to confront and rectify this problem, because it’s not a “problem” but an effect of the party’s fundamental mission—to preserve capitalism (and Zionism).

The Democratic Party takes any disruptive threat to the prerogative of capital in its false “embrace” to kill it—which is precisely what they did with Bernie’s “disruption,” and with Bernie’s help. 

By Any Means Necessary Discussion of Nationwide post-George Floyd Uprising and My "Over the Rainbow" Article (6/9/2020)

At George Floyd's Funeral, Biden Offers Lots of Words, Little Action

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Jim Kavanagh, a political analyst and contributor to Counterpunch and ThePolemicist.net, to talk about his latest article, “Over the Rainbow: Paths of Resistance After George Floyd,” the awkward and largely-symbolic responses by Democrats to the mass uprising, and why both the party and the black capitalist class appear to be attempting to co-opt the language of protesters while refusing to commit to core demands like defunding the police.

For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left

Veronique de Viguerie

Something’s happening here…

Class Act

The “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) movement has upended French politics, at least.

It has delivered a sharp and refreshing smack in the face to the smuggest of smug, entitled neoliberal brats, Emmanuel Macron, forcing him to retreat on substantive tax and minimum wage issues. It has also raised a raft of issues from wealth inequality (including demands for higher taxes on the rich) to a rejection of austerity and the dreaded Frexit.

Most importantly, it has acted outside the gatekeeping of traditional opposition parties and institutions--including those of the left, which have all been thoroughly decaffeinated and beguiled by the fantasia of Third-Way EU becoming “Social Europe.” The Yellow Vest movement is millions of people out in the street, engaged in militant, confrontational protest, talking to and acting with each other unsupervised, telling the governing elite: “Va te faire foutre!”.

A self-mobilization of the working class: This is the specter of Europe past, which Third-Way politicians and intelligentsia thought they had once and for all banished to the netherworld a few decades ago. The Yellow Vest movement, now spreading to other counties, is striking a new body blow to the teetering edifice of neoliberalism that has been built on the bones of the working-class lives in Europe and America over those decades.

This explains why the American mainstream media has avoided focusing on the Yellow Vest movement. The left, on the other hand, must be overjoyed, right?

Well, it’s more like: Comme-ci, comme ça.

Why? “Identity politics” is, of course, the term that immediately comes to mind, though that term oversimplifies, particularly regarding the French context. As C. J. Hopkins put it: "Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising.” Scares and confuses.

Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches

It happened.

Yes, I was surprised. Since I spend a lot of time in western Pennsylvania, I knew there was more support for Trump than the media let on, but he just seemed too incompetent, incoherent, and disorganized a candidate to defeat the Clinton machine. I enjoyed torturing my friend who has been very close to Hillary for decades with scary stories about Trump surging. But in our early election day texting, I confessed that I thought it would be called for Hillary by 11PM at the latest. I was as wrong as everyone else.

I did not vote for either Hillary or Trump, and was resigned to taking my chances with either horrible outcome, but I was implicitly anticipating the dangers of a Clinton administration. I also thought, however, that there might be one positive effect of Hillary’s presidency. Contrary to what might be considered the usual leftist line that electing the explicitly ultra-reactionary Trump would foment the revolution, or at least radical discontent, I thought that, in the American context, Hillary being president would help the left the most.

If Trump wins, I argued, and his policies fail miserably and obviously, Democrats and liberals would spend the next four years saying: “See, you should have voted for Hillary,” and channeling oppositional energy into a familiar anti-Trump, anti-Republican, “Let’s make sure we elect a Democrat in 2020” politics—as we saw after Bush’s election in 2000.  The Democrats would once again present themselves as the system’s way out.

On the other hand, I thought that, if Hillary were to win and wreak her expected havoc on America and the world, Democrats and liberals would not be able to blame the Republicans. It would be the left that could say “See what you voted for?” The system would have failed in its Democratic guise. Because this might finally persuade more progressive-minded people to break with the Democratic Party once and for all. It was Hillary’s presidency, not Trump’s, that would open new paths for the left.

Now we have Donald Trump as president. His election is a disgrace, and we know what a disaster his administration will be for the country and the world. Mr. Anti-establishment, “drain the swamp,” tribune of the forgotten, is already filling up his clown car cabinet with the same-old tired Republican reactionaries and incompetents (Sarah Palin, Giluliani, Christie, Bolton), not to mention turning to industry and Wall Street lobbyists (and here) and, of course, Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin) to run the Treasury. As business news site Quartz so aptly headlines: Trump criticized Clinton for her Wall Street ties, but he’s the best thing to happen to big banks.