American democracy prepares to tighten the screws

From the Democrat Obama to the Republican Trump,

different methods for the same imperialistic objectives

(«Proletarian»; Nr. 13; Autumn - Winter 2016)

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The Electoral Victory of Republican Trump has surprised the greater part of the American and European  Intelligentsia who thought that the victory of Hillary Clinton was certain, all the more so in that she had received the support of not only the outgoing President Obama but also of the major means of American information.

Yes, we can! was the slogan which symbolized the accession of the first Black politician to the presidency of the United States. And although all the surveys, beyond temporary oscillations, continually gave the advantage to Clinton, this is the same slogan that summarizes in reality the campaign of Trump: Yes, we can, we can win despite the polls, despite the fact that until the end the Republican Party was rather hostile toward Trump. The political organization of the United States is organized in such a way that electoral democracy (a voice for each elector) bends to various specific interests (the States, the financial-economic lobbies). The fact that some States having a less numerous population with the right to vote, weigh more than the others, constitutes an imbalance that can completely change the final result. The most recent examples are those of G.W. Bush who had thus been able to snatch the victory from his opponent and the victory of Trump against Hillary Clinton, although both she and Al Gore obtained hundreds of thousands more votes in total than their opponent. This veritable masquerade, bourgeois democracy, not only systematically mystifies the large masses by making them believe that through it they can decide the political , economic, financial, social and military guidelines of governments, but it even manages to surprise the major bourgeois accustomed to manipulate the elections according to their interests in the short term or the long term!

The billionaire Trump is not a newcomer to politics; at the end of the 70’s he was one of the main supporters of Ronald Reagan in the presidential elections; subsequently, according to the needs of his business interests, he has been a member of the Republican Party, the Reform Party, and the Democratic Party, before returning to the Republican Party. His latest entry into the political arena which saw him elected as President of the United States, shows that in an America still suffering the consequences of the crisis of 2007 (of which the detonator was the bursting of the subprimes bubble – i.e. the real estate sector where the Trump family has always waded), the violent contradictions that have characterized and which have struck the broad layers including of the middle classes, have opened the door to the more reactionary tendencies. Tendencies which «demanded « to be represented by personalities external to the traditional political establishment, not involved directly in the institutions, but sufficiently well-known in order to be able to attract the favor of large masses disappointed by Obama’s politics.

Trump, with his eclecticism, his triviality, his sexism, his racism, combined with his success in business and his reality show experience, has thus become «the man of the Day»; his tenacity in pushing to extremes his duel with Clinton, a true representative of the establishment, has ultimately paid off and he has won. He had previously attempted the same thing in 2012 before abandoning the attempt due to bad poll results. But in 2016 things have been different. When they have been called by the electoral circus to «choose» the new President, the petty bourgeoisie ruined by the crisis, full of hatred toward the undocumented immigrant proletarians, and fiercely attached to the possession of weapons to defend their private property; along with the most highly skilled labor aristocracy, and small farmers manhandled by the fiscal authorities, plunged into insecurity in their jobs, threatened with a miserable life, have given their support to the one who said more loudly than the other that he was a partisan of the lowering of taxes, opposed to arms control, to the reforms of «Obamacare»,  partisan to the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants and, on the level of external policy, opposed to «aid» to foreign countries, to agreements with Iran and China and partisan to the fight against terrorism – equated with Islam.

The imperialist bourgeoisie in the U.S. has found in Trump the character produced by its electoral theater; he is a billionaire and he is therefore part of the big bourgeois class; he is versatile enough to  be able to incarnate, depending on the situation, the inflexible or the negotiator, the slave-driver or the magnanimous; he carries on as if he is in a bar and talks like a bargain basement yahoo; Yankee to the core, he is permeated with the ideology of Great America power which, at a time when the USA is experiencing a certain decline at the international level, will be used to prepare the «American people» to suffer even more tomorrow than today, but for a great ideal, the ideal of an America that the whole world must fear.

It is still impossible to know what the political and economic program of Trump will really be, once he is installed in the White House, and he probably does not know the answer himself. He is in the process of forming his governmental team and he must make the compromises needed to have the support of Congress, given that the elected representatives were not favorable to him. But it is more than certain that his government will defend his own interests as real estate magnate and the interests of economic lobbies who supported him and who will get more opportunities for their business, but at the same time the global interests of American capitalism. Will he meet with difficulties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East? Without doubt, as Obama has met with in spite of the apparent agreements and the rounds of handshakes with the leaders of these countries. Will he find an area of agreement with Putin? Probably, because they may find common interests in the Middle East and Asia. The international situation is destined to change, not because of the decisions of the «unpredictable» Trump, but because the current world disorder prepares the formation of alliances that will compete in the third world war – war which is not yet on the agenda, but whose arrival could be accelerated by the next International economic crises.

Today the working class is still totally absent from the American scene (and not only American). Absent as a social class defending its own demands and making its social weight felt. The economic crises that have marked the past forty years have not been sufficient to lead to the formation in the American working class of proletarian nuclei able to represent its class interests and constitute the basis for the development of the revolutionary proletarian struggle in the most important capitalist country in the world. The American proletarians are largely disinterested in social and political issues; or they are left deceived each time by the preachers of the moment, political or religious, but always draped in the illusory bourgeois ideology according to which each is responsible for his own destiny, that for each, «where there’s a will there’s a way». It is impossible to guess how much time it will take for the American workers, women and men, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, to feel that they are part of the same class, a class exploited by the bourgeoisie (it also male, female, white, black, Hispanic, Asian), a class which lives in a permanent antagonism with the conditions of exploitation to which it is subject, but whose members are pushed to respond by bourgeois means and methods: competition between proletarians, individualism, worship of the dollar god, respect for the rich and the power it gives them.

It is only by recognizing themselves as a separate class, with a historical perspective completely opposed to bourgeois perspectives; understanding that only the anti-capitalist class struggle, therefore anti-democratic and anti-bourgeois, can allow it to effectively combat exploitation, poverty and hunger; that only through this struggle is it possible to fight against the war mobilizations of the bourgeoisie; it is only by understanding the need to oppose the class struggle that the bourgeoisie conducts each day against the workers, by the class struggle of the proletariat united beyond the differences of nationality, race, sex, age, qualification; it is only under these conditions that the American working class can conquer their human dignity, free themselves from the condition of being a working beast and become the actor of its own future: a future marked by the end of any exploitation and any oppression, whether racial, sexual or national.

The bourgeoisie sustains, and it demonstrates in its own way, that there does not today exist an alternative to its society of money, of the market, private property, capitalist competition, domination by the stronger: indeed capitalism dominates everywhere in the world. But it can perpetuate its domination, in spite of the crises and wars, only if it manages to have on its side most of the exploited masses, although they are massacred, hungry, reduced to misery everywhere in the world (given the understanding that the United States is certainly not a country where exploitation, misery, unemployment, hunger and massacres are unknown!).

Will it take crises much worse than those which until now have shaken the United States for the working class of America wake up from its long torpor, emerge from its intoxication with democracy and individualism? Without doubt; and it is written in the history of bourgeois society: «The development of modern industry Therefore undermines, cuts from under its feet, the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable».

These words of the Communist Manifesto of Marx-Engels may provoke laughter among many people, just as many smirked at the words of Lenin before the October Revolution in Russia. The date of the funerals of bourgeois society is not written down: we are materialists, not visionaries. But it is toward these funerals that the communists are working and struggling, certain that it is capitalism itself which will create the objective conditions that will lead irrepressibly, regardless of what country in which this will first happen, for the proletariat to raise its head and take to the path of the class struggle and of the revolution.

 

November, 19th 2016

 

 

International Communist Party

www.pcint.org

 

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