WHATEVER POLITICAL FORMATIONS THE LEFT FORGES IN THE FUTURE, ANTI-CAPITALISM MUST BE AT ITS HEART
As the US election hurtled into a second day clouded by uncertainty as decisive ‘rust belt’ continued counting, one thing seemed clear: this is not the runaway victory Democrats were hoping for.
Their campaign has failed to sweep Trump away and the threat of right-wing nationalism has not been dealt with. Even as a Biden presidency and clear popular vote victory looks likely, the Republicans will almost certainly retain the Senate, meaning political deadlock for years and no movement on key issues.
In many ways it is a terrible result for those across the West who believe liberal capitalism and centrist political platforms are the answers to right-wing populism. They may claim victory, but the political dial hasn’t really changed. America is deeply polarised.
Even with Trump’s response to Covid, politely described as a ‘mishandling’ with over 233,000 people dead and infections still soaring in many places, the President has still mobilised tens of millions of voters, surpassing his 2016 totals.
One analysis I read even put him doing better than in 2016 in counties where Covid related deaths had been high and it also appears he’s got a better vote share among non white voters than any republican in decades.
Trump is now claiming victory, which actually means that he thinks he will probably lose but is unwilling to give up power. He is talking about going to the Supreme Court but has previously told far-right militias to ‘stand by’, this at a time when such groups have already taken to shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in the street. Trump doesn’t control the US security state to the extent they can be mobilised on his behalf, and he may not want violence, but the aggression he is deliberately stoking could well get out of control.
Nobody should have any illusions about US democracy – a system that asks voters to choose between two wings of American capitalism whilst destroying democracy elsewhere. But it should be a basic demand that every vote has to be counted. If Trump attempts to steal the election, it will be a huge attack on the very idea of democracy itself. No one should be dismissive of that.
Biden – the ‘never Bernie, not Trump’ candidate.
But how did we get here? Trump was always going to contest the election in any way he could, but that would have been made almost impossible had the Democrats taken Florida early on and were clearly outperforming Republicans across the board. Biden was eyeing a decisive victory, and many thought national poll leads would lead to a comfortable win. His failure to come good on that promise has led us here.
Biden was a bad candidate who dealt in bland platitudes about the dark versus the light, hope versus fear. The Democratic party establishment rallied behind him as the ‘Stop Bernie Sanders’ candidate. In the election he became the not-Trump candidate, offering no clear political agenda and was often pushed out of the picture entirely by a far more aggressive and energetic Trump.
The fact that Biden is still likely to win is not a testament to his strengths but Trump’s own weaknesses and his failure to deliver on his promises to workers in America 4 years ago. If Covid hadn’t happened, Trump would have had a far better chance. The fact that Democrats have underperformed in the senate and the house is another indictment after the deadlock over a rescue package for Americans during the pandemic.
In electoral terms, Biden’s campaign was hopelessly out of step with voters. A series of Fox News exit polls on election night showed that majorities favoured tougher action on climate change, a bigger welfare state and a form nationalised health care, something the Democrats refused to offer.
And while Biden gestured some support for Black Lives Matter and the huge movement for racial justice – which was the second most important issue to voters, according to one poll – he distanced himself from it as well, condemning certain aspects of the movement. He also chose a vice presidential candidate in Kamala Harris with a track record of incarcerating black people while being soft on the police.
Biden himself has been accused of rape and sexual assault and has a policy record of cutting benefits and making it easier to criminalise poorer areas with large black and minority communities.
No one can blame a third-party candidate, or the Sanders left – the overwhelming majority of which fell in line with Biden.
But the problems go beyond the campaign and the candidates themselves. They are about the major crisis liberal capitalism and its political representatives have faced since the financial crisis of 2008. These are not going away, and a Biden presidency only promises to compound the bitterness so many people feel about official politics.
The election of Trump and indeed Brexit should have been a wake-up call about the state of disillusionment with the system itself and the threat posed by the right to capitalise on this.
The failure of liberal opposition to right wing nationalism.
Instead, the liberal centre peddled fantasies and myths about what was going on and too many people believed them. We were treated to years of Twittersphere outcry that Russian interference was the real reason Trump had won, or it was all because of fake news websites and social media. The Democrats pushed for a pointless impeachment that only served to highlight how closely tied their own candidate was to a corrupt political system. In Britain, it was the cause of a second referendum that became the path of hopeless delusion for centrists.
In both instances, the upheaval was also put down to the decisiveness of the ‘white working class,’ who had apparently turned en masse against immigration and now saw this as the most important issue of all. This was used to argue that the left must adopt an anti-immigrant stance and make racist gestures towards this illusive voter base.
All in all, these fantasies were put forward by liberal, pro-capitalists to detract from the fact that the system they had built had failed and become despised by millions of people. The economic dogma of Clinton, Blair, Bush, Brown, Obama, and Cameron was increasingly and correctly seen by ordinary people as corrupt and built only for the benefit of the very richest.
But instead of recognising this, even in a small way, the bastions of neoliberalism spent every ounce of energy denying it and destroying the possibility that their system could be challenged.
When the radical left in the form of Bernie Sanders put together a political programme of free universal health care, free tuition, a green new deal paid for by the billionaire class he was crushed by the Democratic establishment in 2016 and again in 2020. Many senior Democrats would have preferred four more years of Trump, hence the slogan: ‘never Bernie.’
What we got instead was a candidate in Clinton who backed job-destroying trade deals and one in Biden who offered nothing to a population in crisis.
In the middle of pandemic, imagine if the American people had been given a choice of not only free health care, but decent sick pay too. In a country with more billionaires than anywhere else and several of the world’s richest individuals and companies, where millions are in poverty, barely anything was said about making the rich pay for the crisis. As forest fires raged, climate breakdown and a Green New Deal should have been front and centre in the fight against Trump.
In the end voters were effectively promised a continuation of where Obama had left off – another round of the neoliberal politics. But this was always a disaster waiting to happen, and it is precisely these conditions that led to Trump’s victory in the first place.
The need for a clear anti-capitalist agenda.
The left has to offer a clear anti-capitalist political programme to people in this moment. What links the biggest failures and crises we face today is an economic system built on the accumulation of profit above all human or environmental needs. If we don’t take aim squarely at this system, we will forever find ourselves waking up to the news that millions of people have put their faith in right-wing politicians who promise a break with the status quo. And, as we’ve seen recently, lurches to the right may well find expression in the streets as well.
After having mobilised large sections of voters in states like Pennsylvania, Trump still has a huge base and may well go further to the right in opposition. He is far from defeated. And if he is seen as the only alternative to a Biden presidency, we could enter a very worrying period.
Anyone who thinks that Wales is free from Trumpism should think again, and the bland political offering on the table at next year’s Senedd elections provides a window for the far right to gain traction. A radical campaign for independence could act as a counterweight to the threat of being co-opted by the Welsh political establishment. As has been written about on this website, independence can be about a break with a system that’s failed so many people in Wales, or can simply be about a continuation of our current political model, not so different from devolution under Welsh Labour.
In the general election 2017, the left came close to realising the potential of a platform based around socialist ideas. But by 2019, Corbyn had been ground down by years of attacks from the right and went into the election backing an establishment attempt to overturn the referendum. Far from being too left wing, Corbyn had become to be seen as too close to a form of politics people had grown to despise. The lessons from the defeat of Corbyn and Sanders are that failing to challenge the political centre is lethal.
Whatever political formations the left forges in the future, anti-capitalism must be at its heart. We should not be under the electoral orbit of the likes of Joe Biden or Keir Starmer, where we end up making excuses for the failures of neoliberalism instead of resolving to upend it and build a fairer system in its place.
This also means moving away from the idea that electoral parties and elections themselves are the main arenas in which we can progress socialist politics and working-class struggle. Now isn’t the time to wait for the next election and vote for the least-worst option, but to organise on the streets against our governments now. Black Lives Matter has shown how this can done. We should be prepared to support those in the US who do take to the streets in the coming days and weeks against Trump’s attempts at subverting the vote. It should be them, not Biden or the Democrats, who we should offer our solidarity to.
We must build an anti-capitalist political movement that is independent from the dead end of liberal centrism, and that takes aim at a failed system and puts forward a vision based on true democracy, equality and environmentalism.
SC Cook is an editor of voice.wales
