Rai 01-06

The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution (Part 4)

Mark Wain on March 28, 2016

Part 4

The mainstream media have controlled the opinions and thinking power of the country for more than 50 years and they have become an important part of the establishment and proudly so. It is small wonder that their prejudice in favor of capital and its hegemony becomes faulty enough to render a self-inflicted comeuppance.

They write and broadcast reams of praise on Hillary Clinton, the pro-establishment stewardess of Wall Street, and besmirch anyone who dare challenge the establishment and its capital backer. Bernie Sanders comes to mind but Donald Trump, an unvarnished capitalist, could not escape pundits’ impugnment because none of them is an apologetic for capital and the status quo.

The seemingly always effectual political hype of the pundits backfires this year because the gullible have suddenly been wide awake to their dismal economic status and they have started to rebel.

As a new democratic revolution has arrived, people echo their anti-status-quo candidates by speaking out against alienation from the political system of the establishment.

 “So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.”

In 1944, FDR said to prevent fascism in the United States and to put democracy on solid footing it was necessary to add a 'second bill of rights' to the constitution, also called an economic bill of rights. This included the right to a job at a living wage, the right to healthcare, the right to housing, the right to food, the right to education, the right to not have monopolistic firms dominate the economy, and so on.(See http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35946-robert-mcchesney-capitalism-is-a-bad-fit-for-a-technological-revolution)

People don’t differ much in cultural, ideological and political thinking unless they are induced by the governing class to do things contrary to their own interests. Conservatives are especially vulnerable to the propaganda of their political leadership. People’s basic and long-term interests are similar – to have a steady and livable job with neither debt nor unemployment or underemployment burden; mass democracy and people’s sovereignty with no interference or repression from capital’s hegemony. But their demands had been pent up for so long by capital’s economic-status-quo superiority in private profit over labor and its political sole right of being the chief custodian of democracy. “Our voter turnouts and the integrity of our election system rank pretty much at the rock bottom of the world's nations that claim to be democratic.”

Their belated epiphanies against establishment and capital hegemony imply that party-ism, gender-ism and skin-color-ism are no longer the acceptable ideologies of voters. Party affiliation and loyalty, first of female president or first of black president is meaningless if the candidate in question is anti-revolution and pro-status-quo. Both the left and right, progressive and conservative, and moderate and radical among people should fill and level up the ideological and politico-economic chasms brought into effect of disunity by capital to divide all, conquer by a few and fulfill the demands of the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex. As the telltale signs and symptoms of capital-rigged demarcation lines for the people to rail against one another, the so-called progressive Hillary Clinton is not only wooing those Republican voters who do not support Donald Trump but also seeking endorsements from influential Republicans such as Jeb Bush and their supporters and one of the ultra-conservative Koch brothers is supporting Hillary Clinton but not Donald Trump, their fellow Republican. Wall Street Republicans are switching their supports to Clinton. “Business interests are generally not sold on the notion that Trump will be a more business-friendly candidate; there’s a lot about Trump they don’t know...They know Hillary. And they know that she is not antibusiness.” There you have it - so much for voters’ onslaughts based on “antagonism” between the two major political parties. They are more a mutual admiration society than political organizations of conflicting interests. Party-ism has died a natural death thanks to the long economic depression we are in.

It’s a pity that Elizabeth Warren, a progressive senator from Massachusetts, should engage in brawls with Donald Trump, an anti-establishment lone hero in the Republican Party, whose political rebellion is comparable to Bernie Sanders’ political revolution, if not in essence, it is in spirit.

Elizabeth Warren’s attack object proper is not him but Hillary Clinton whose ostentatious disregard for politico-economic well-being of the working poor is contrary to what Elizabeth Warren believes in. Donald Trump is not doing Wall Street’s bidding whereas Hillary Clinton consistently is.

Hillary Clinton, the party darling, has been crew about as experienced, talented, tough and brainy and Donald Trump, the party demon, mud-slung and slut-shamed as inexperienced, crooked, and chock-full of demagogy and know-nothing loose cannon. As a matter of fact, the paragons of Hillary Clinton presidency do not benefit people; rather they renege on her promises as political capital for the fundamental and long-haul interests of the status quo and money. Political expediency, pomposity and shrewdness cannot hide from people’s sharp insights once they have come to life. To be sure, Donald Trump has learning curves to climb. He has the advantage of “not being bought and paid for,” so that his plan and policy-making process will not be biased against the working class. People rather want to elect some political fresh faces or a capitalist who truly fights for the common people’s interests than some political agent of capital with swaggering self-assurance but is disgustingly dishonest with people.

Prevailing of the presumptive capitalist nominee over his conservative rivals illustrates that people’s economic status overwhelmingly determines their political orientation, regardless of pundits’ rumpus. The conservative politics have been elbowed out of the arena of politics.  The political landscape has been forever transformed from the perennial problem of overwhelming militarism, imperialism, American Exceptionalism, regime change and self-saddling with the task of being world’s policemen that the career politician Hillary Clinton and her ilk, in both parties, who are out of touch with the working-class voters have touted for so long, into the progressive rethinking of the U.S. positions in the world and a smaller American footprint abroad. Policies of strictly limited government size, authority and ideas of privatizations of social security, Medicare and Medicaid, public educations, cutting taxes for the 1%, increasing military spending from more than $0.5 trillion a year, free trade and a hawkish foreign policy, pro-life before birth but pro-death after, denial of climate change as a survival strategy and many other so-called values and principles that the establishment cherishes are no longer plausible. The 10.7 million voters so far for Trump in Republican primaries and caucuses say no to the establishment’s positions. That of 3C’s – Command, Control and Communication as Hillary Clinton’s White House creed is likewise obsolete. Her cold war policy experience is out of date and should be abandoned. A Clinton nomination could be a “disaster simply to protect the status quo,” as Sanders’ campaign manager said.

Donald Trump should better be aware that “his supporters will have his head” if he does not fight for the working class as promised “or else keep trying.” The establishment, on the other hand, will pin its hope on wearing him down, forcing him to go along with the status quo – so called norms, and blending into the parties and powers that be. To sum up, everything including tradition, “the extraordinary uniformity in the mainstream of social and political thought” and even the establishment itself is now on the table for discussion, review and debate; the day of reckoning has finally arrived for action ever after 140 years since the close of the Reconstruction period in 1876. Struggle for political power among different social forces has unreservedly come on stage. Direct democracy through online communications and not the plutocratic representative democracy that has failed people miserably start to see its bright daylight after more than 30 years of economic stagnation, inequality, and growing social isolation - addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans, for the working-class white majority.

History will witness beyond any doubt for a new democratic revolutionary.

If people still have any doubt as to whether Donald Trump is anti-capital, even though he was not anti-capital in words, his anti-establishment position implicitly means so, at least in part. Think of substances instead of superficialities. If he is pro-capital, why does the Washington, D.C. establishment want to stop him from being nominated? His capital-unfriendly and masses-caring tendency and outlook say a lot about why he is getting the more supports among the Republicans from the working poor than the middle class.

The two increasingly striking features of class differentiations as shown in the current election year are:  1. between the working poor and middle class, 2. between minorities and the white majority.

The working poor account for about 58% of the U.S. population and climbing and are the least likely participants in voting. Those who earn annual incomes between $100,000 and $125,000 are no capitalist class but are within the rank of upper middle class (middle class account for about 41% of the population and declining).

In some areas, the decline of the middle class raised the proportion of people in both the upper class and lower class. The hollowing out of the middle class is rooted in a mix of technological change and globalization rewarding those people whose jobs can’t be outsourced or automated: high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Nearly half of the metro areas that Pew studied have experienced growth on the low and high end. (See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/13/upshot/falling-middle-class )

Whites on ethnocentrism remain strong after the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s. Out of all white respondents, 57% say they have unfavorable impressions on the minorities of all kind. As to how responsible China is for American “economic problems.” Solid majorities of Democrats (70 percent), independents (72 percent) and Republicans (80 percent) said China is “very” or “somewhat” responsible. With respect to the statement “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life.” Among all voters, 56 percent said that they agreed. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/campaign-stops/how-many-people-support-trump-but-dont-want-to-admit-it; See also https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/05/12/getting-straight-about-the-costs-of-trade/ By Jared Bernstein)

The differentiation between minorities and the white majority has clearly shown in the fact that the former favor Hillary Clinton, the status quo defender, and the latter favor either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, the two dauntless anti-establishment fighters in the face of the corrupt, rigged and dark-money democracy system. Credulity of those minorities who vote for Hillary Clinton plays a role in their voting choice, a more crucial factor is their economic standing has improved somewhat while that of the majority, especially the working poor, has not. Working-class blacks are generally better-off economically today than their parents were, working-class whites are generally worse off. Minorities are getting somewhat richer. The rich are getting much richer. The white working poor are not.  Who will be their hope-givers, other than Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? These observations are reasonable in view of the fact that minorities pick up income from a low level whereas the white working majority slides from a relatively elevated level. The past 30 or 40 years have seen striking economic and health gains for non-white families -- in part, this is a result of the rolling back of discriminatory policies that kept minorities locked out of middle-class life. But working-class whites may look back and see no similar pattern of gains, in part because they weren't as broadly discriminated against in the first place. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/07/the-incredible-crushing-despair-of-the-white-working-class/)

Because of the class differentiations among the working people, class polarization and conflict between capital and labor have become dulled or even marginalized at least on the surface.  It behooves us to reflect on this matter as to the main goals of the new democratic revolution.

“Inequality reflects vastly unequal power; if we are serious about inequality, we have to address the supremacy of capital, directly and forcefully; nationalism in the United States means that gains here are bound to come at the expense of the poorest people in the world; and the proposition that a political campaign waged inside the Democratic Party can lead us toward equality and socialism is dubious,” as Michael D. Yates well said. (See http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35841-let-s-get-serious-about-inequality-and-socialism)

The immediate task is to decrease capital’s supreme power in the political arena by repealing the Citizens United Decision. The next and long-term task is to force it out of governments completely. These are also the two main goals of the new democratic revolution. Democratic revolution is by no means a socialist one.  It is more a continued revolution from the eighteenth-century anti-British-Crown and the nineteenth century anti-South-slaveholders’ revolutions than an epoch-making one. The new democratic revolution can be considered as the third one after those of 1776 and 1861. As the political culture in the U.S. has been heavily polluted by capital, it is a road sweeper than a pathfinder for a new culture revolution.

Capital is doomed to failure once and for all the ups and downs, busts and booms, golden era and great depressions over the past six hundred years. It has outlived its usefulness as a progressive force of production and a tool for the greatest creation of abundance mankind has ever known. A new democratic revolution will take over the messy remnants of the capitalist times by transforming them into rational and sustainable survival kits – states owning the whole property of the country, distributing wealth to all its working-capable citizens and abolishing the private-profit-giving wage labor. The climate change calamity will be stopped; man-made unemployment and underemployment will be replaced by full-employment for all working-capable citizens; wealth will no longer be centralized in the hands of a few.

All these boils down to one thing – success of a new people’s democratic revolution during which all undemocratic traditions are disabused of the old system and political power is restored to its rightful owner – the people. A powerless people mean nothing more than wage slaves of the ancien régime. Capital must be ousted from politics.

Only then workers will become extricable from precarious and hopeless living conditions and be able to avert the caldron of underemployment and low wages.

In http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/what-cant-tech-money-buy  Susie Cagle stated: “Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.”

Capital has become the new King George the III and shareholders, business owners, managers and executives of all types and sizes of capitals have become His Majesty’s ministers. There is likewise a kind of native American aristocracy just as the one before the American Revolution in the eighteenth-century due to a differentiation of social class. As it was raised, the superstructure exhibited palpable inequality. See R.R. Palmer, “The Age of the Democratic Revolution, “1974, P.194. The modern-day new aristocracy possesses not only socio-economic class superiority that demand “descent respect for ranks and dignities of men; for honor and obedience from subjects to their princes, inferiors to superiors, from children to parents, and servants to masters (now called masters of the universe in Wall Street)” but also political class superiority that both the colonial aristocracy and capitalist aristocracy share, namely owing close association with government. “There were intermarried families which monopolized seats in the governors’ councils (now called the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex), in some cases, now, to the third and fourth generation. There were Americans, close to the British authorities, who regarded themselves as the natural rulers of the country…”

Susie Cagle continued by saying: “Whether their money came from oil, hotels, railroads or data, titans of industry have long held enough power to both influence the American political system directly and to hack it when necessary. Old money maintains the status quo, while new money openly endeavors to change it.”

Because the King, ministers and the new aristocracy form themselves into the Trinity of Reigning, people’s sovereignty has completely crumbled to the dust. Technological, economic, social and political forces co-prosper, conspire and coexist to such an extent that democracy loses its true meaning since the 1870s when laissez-faire individualism changed to social control by the state.

“The robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries were kings of infrastructure. The people with towering wealth today are kings of information. The rise of Silicon Valley is best understood as a new industrial revolution in this tradition. In many ways, it’s not at all revolutionary in the strict definition of that term.” “A public relations stunt and an enormous tax dodge.” “They have made a lot of money while most everyone else has not.” “We have allowed them not just to govern themselves, but us as well…” “Mr. Thiel told an interviewer in 2012 that he feared the result of this precipitous wealth gap. ‘In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through Communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse,’ he said. ‘It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.’”

The angst of Mr. Thiel, the serial tech-firm founder in Silicon Valley, about the future of capital is a common knowledge and that’s why the Trinity pours out its full strength to repress any shred of sign of disturbance along the political line of anti-establishment even as friendly and obedient to the King as Bernie Sanders’ call for political revolution and Donald Trump’ call for making America great again. There is indeed a fourth way out of the crisis that has been in the making for more than 140 years, i.e., a new democratic revolution by, of and for the people. This on-coming revolution’s main thrust is to expel capital from politics. Leave politics to people and capital to merchants, sole proprietorships, partnerships, or those that are family-owned and operated or small private businesses. The state is obligated to take over all productive activities from capital and the society to own the means of production eventually.

Universal basic income idea is not new, the late Professor Milton Friedman proposed "dropping money out of a helicopter" on people in Optimum Quantity of Money, Aldine Publishing Company. 1969. p. 4. It did not happen because it could not and cannot solve the income and wealth inequality plight. The reason for inequality to become a sword hanging over the head of capital is not that people do not make money, but that a major portion of money they have made are expropriated by capital as corporate profits, leaving them in permanent penury of money. If capital were to return the expropriated money called the “social surplus product” to their rightful owners under the management of the state, they would not only become the well-to-do but also live happily ever after.

The system does not allow that to happen because capital is the new George III. His Majesty cares not his subjects. Not only he himself, his ministers and the new aristocracy are likewise adamant in their repression against such an unspeakable bleak future. The dilemma is capital has finally become its own enemy – rampant unemployment and underemployment, long-term slump, unmanageable climate change calamity, inadequate investment, over-production by automation，declining value created, falling social and average rate of profit, ineffectual economic and socio-political policies as well as precarious assertion that the rising tide is on its way, etc. 

Adjusted corporate profits fell 3.2% for all of 2015 to $7 trillion [after tax (without IVA or Inventory Valuation Adjustment and CCAdj or Capital Consumption Adjustment)]. By contrast they rose 1.7% in 2014, 1.9% in 2013 and 9.1% in 2012. In 2015 a check of $23,342 can be theoretically returned to each of 300 million Americans without causing any problem of deficits, debts or expenses of welfare or social safety net in general. For a family of four that means it will have $93,368 extra money to spend whichever way the family wants to. A system of universal health care and free education at all levels will no longer be a pie in the sky. Automation caused unemployment problem will be overcome by reducing working hours and work in rotation. Wage labor in which income inequality and competitions for work originate will be abolished; labor power will be no longer a commodity sold to earn sustenance; rather it will become an accomplishment of the individual for the society. The longer you look to these ideas, the more enthusiastic you become about the revolution.

To be sure, the new democratic revolution can reach its goal and win only if it gives rise to and maintain a sustainable and productive economy for people’s long-term interests. The social surplus product should, therefore, be retained in part for reproduction and expanded reproduction. Moreover, the climate change catastrophe calls forth urgent, immediate and worldwide massive production of the renewable and safe energy to substitute the C.O.G. or fossil fuels. To maintain and support a rationally planned and sustainable economy, retaining 50 percent of the surplus product as the state reproduction funds is needed for sustainable growth of the society’s economy.

Capital’s great historic tasks of whittling away of scarcity and producing abundance have finished up. Its future lies in relenting towards a new democratic revolution that will replace its hegemony with the sovereignty of people who will wipe the slate clean of past mistakes committed by capital if it would be wise enough not to offend them. Nationalization of productive capital and its non-productive bedfellows on Wall Street with redemption is the quid pro quo that capital had better not refuse.

End of all four parts.

Postscripts

Although this article was written more than six years ago, its points of discussions were nonetheless valid even today. Two years from now, Donald Trump will likely try hard to get his “usurped” POTUS back. A Hilary Clinton substitute like Joe Biden, etc., will again be defeated just as in 2016 upon oneself.

Its points of predictions, on the other hand, remain to be seen.

Capitalism as a social system has been greatly weakened not only by its own makings, but also by great awakenings of the working class, to wit, the Jan 6, 2021 uprising and the second civil war in the making. [Mark Wain May 19, 2022]