The Putsch of January 6, 2021

Normally, after my draft returns from the editors, I make a few last-minute changes, sometimes correct factual errors, and then send it back for final editing and posting. In this post, my deadline for the initial draft was Jan. 4. I considered updating the draft to cover the events of Jan. 6 but it was clear that would involve changes way beyond the usual last-minute updates I sometimes have to make. I therefore decided to leave the post as is, minus some minor editorial changes, but add this special section. The following post should be read as a description of the U.S. political situation on the eve of the attempted putsch of Jan. 6. There will be more on this subject in next month’s post.

After the the Electoral College elected Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris to the presidency and vice presidency of the United States on Dec. 14, Trump appeared to be out of legal options in his attempt to cling to office. But there was one more legal hurdle to clear before the presidential election was formally complete. This was the counting of the electoral vote and announcement of the results to a special joint session of the House of Representatives and Senate by the president of Senate, which was Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence.

At this point, if a member of the House mounts a challenge to the electors of a given state and is backed by a member of the Senate, both houses of Congress have to vote on the challenge. If the challenge is approved by both chambers, the electoral vote of that state is declared invalid. This year, a number of extreme right-wing Republican congressman and some senators announced that they would indeed mount such challenges in a series of swing states that were carried by electors pledged to the Harris-Biden ticket.

Such challenges, though they have occurred occasionally, have always been overwhelmingly voted down. This year, it was clear that the challenges would also be defeated. First, because as far as the Senate is concerned, they did not have support of Republican leader Mitch McConnell, and second, because the Democrats have a majority of the House of Representatives. Trump not only would have had to overcome McConnell’s resistance but split off some Democrats in the House to have any chance of prevailing.

But Trump hoped that the Electoral College vote could be nullified on Jan. 6, which would then move the election to the House of Representatives where Trump would be “elected” to a second four-year term. Or perhaps Trump hoped Vice President Mike Pence could simply announce that not Biden-Harris but Trump-Pence had carried the Electoral College.

When Pence tried to explain to him that the vice president has no such power under the U.S. Constitution, Trump was reportedly enraged and came to view Pence, who had hoped before the Nov. 3 election to become Trump’s anointed successor in four years, as a traitor just as Trump views so many other high officials who have come and gone over the last four years.

With time rapidly running out, Trump decided to play one final card. In the preceding weeks, thousands of MAGA supporters had arrived in Washington waiting to act on the president’s command. On Jan. 6, the command came. As the two houses of Congress were convening in the Capitol to carry out their ceremonial function of certifying the presidential election, Trump addressed a crowd of assembled fascists, some armed with guns, in front of the White House. He announced that they would march to the Capitol. Trump, however, instead of joining them retreated to the White House to watch the show on TV. The fascist mob not only marched to the Capitol, it stormed the Capitol.

The End of the Trump Era

Just as he promised he would, Donald Trump has refused to concede the U.S. presidential election to Joseph Biden. However, on Nov. 23, Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration, or GSA, finally allowed the Biden transition team to begin preparations for Biden’s assumption of the U.S. presidency on Jan. 20, 2021.

Between Nov. 3 and 23, Murphy had stubbornly refused to grant access to the Biden transition team on grounds that, in Ms. Murphy’s judgment, it wasn’t clear that Biden had won the election. Her decision to begin cooperating with Biden’s transition team was seen as a de facto admission by at least some in the Trump administration that Biden had won the election.

Widespread relief was felt in financial circles that a contested election outcome leading to widespread unrest in the streets, if not outright civil war, had been adverted. The stock market celebrated by rising to new all-time highs and the U.S. dollar rose against gold. However, Trump himself along with many if not most Republican politicians still refused to concede the election. Trump continued to claim that he had in fact won and that Biden and the Democrats had stolen the election through massive fraud.

In a normal U.S. presidential election, the losing candidate concedes the election and congratulates the winner within hours after the polls close on election day. If the election leads to a new president, the outgoing and incoming presidents and their aides work closely with one another until the transition is officially completed. Since the 1896 presidential election, when the losing “silver” Democrat William Jennings Bryan conceded to the victorious “gold” Republican William McKinley, the concession statement from the losing candidate has become an unwritten part of the U.S. Constitution.

This election year had unusual complications because of COVID-19, which made voting at traditional polling stations extremely dangerous. As a result, many voters voted by mail. This had the paradoxical effect of making voting easier for many voters. Perhaps of even greater importance, the racist and bigoted reelection campaign of far-right incumbent Donald Trump led to an extreme polarization of the U.S. electorate. Usually, the differences between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are obviously not very deep, if not virtually nonexistent. As a result, most voters, though they generally prefer one candidate to another, do not care that much whether their preferred candidate wins or loses.

But not this time. While Joseph Biden created even less excitement than the usual Democratic candidate, Donald Trump in contrast was either hated — the clear majority view in the U.S. and even more so in the world — or loved by his bigoted white racist supporters. The result was the largest turnout of voters for a U.S. presidential election in decades. As a consequence, the large number of mail-in ballots, combined with COVID-19, messed up the computer algorithms that since 1952 have enabled the networks to accurately call the election with only a minority of the votes counted.

Trump Loses, Party of Order Wins

On Saturday, November 7, at about 11:30 a.m. eastern standard time, the Associated Press finally declared Joseph Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, the victors in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Biden is now the unofficial president-elect. However, he will not officially be the president-elect until January 6, when the newly elected Congress certifies the results of the vote in the Electoral College, which meets on December 14. Then, at noon EST on January 20, Biden and Harris will be sworn in.

Joseph Biden will be at 78 the oldest person by far to assume the presidency, breaking the record set by Donald Trump who was 70. Kamala Harris, 56, will be the first woman and first person of color to serve as vice-president of the United States.

Once the AP declared a winner in the presidential election, the losing candidate — this time the incumbent Donald J. Trump — was expected to offer within a few hours a concession speech. The speech Trump would have been expected to give if he were a normal president would have gone something like this: “The American people have spoken and made their choice. I have just telephoned president-elect Biden and sent him my heartfelt congratulations. Once again, American democracy has demonstrated its strength. Let no foreign foe be mistaken. We are one people and we will rally around President Biden, who is president of not only the those who voted for him but of the entire American people. God bless America and God bless the American people.”

However, in the hours following the AP’s unofficial anointment of Joseph Biden as president-elect, duly seconded by virtually every major capitalist media organization from the strongly anti-Trump New York Times to the staunchly Republican Fox News, Trump indicated that he would continue to pursue legal actions, which virtually all observers agree are hopeless, in a last-ditch attempt to reverse the outcome.

The importance of the concession speech

There is no written constitutional provision that the losing presidential candidate must concede. But it has become an unofficial part of the Constitution since Democrat William Jennings Bryan conceded the 1896 presidential election to Republican William McKinley.

The Current Industrial Cycle (Pt 3)

A deepening political crisis

On Aug. 23, African-American Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake is expected to survive but is paralyzed from the waist down. This latest police outrage triggered a wave of demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement in Kenosha and elsewhere. Two days later, a Trump supporter and police wannabe named Kyle Rittenhouse shot to death two Black Lives Matter protesters with a rifle he was carrying. Rittenhouse, who lives in Illinois, is a member of a fascist militia group that came to Kenosha for the announced purpose of defending the property of business owners from Black Lives Matter protesters.

The cops were seen thanking the fascists and offering them water. After Rittenhouse killed the two protesters, he walked up to the cops with his hands up. However, the guardians of “law and order” refused to arrest him. He was finally arrested and charged with murder only after he returned to Illinois. U.S. President Donald Trump then weighed in. Trump defended the young fascist killer claiming that Rittenhouse faced certain death if he had not acted to defend himself. Trump also attacked the alleged violence of “left-wing” — Black Lives Matter — protesters but defended the violence of Rittenhouse and other murderous right-wing counter-protesters.

The Crisis (Pt 11)

Is capitalism approaching its limits?

In the first years of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg expressed great alarm when she discovered that Marx’s formulas of expanded reproduction in Volume II of “Capital” suggested that capitalism can in principle go on forever. These formulas appeared to contradict Marx’s famous Preface in “A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy.” There Marx wrote: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed [my emphasis — SW] and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.”

If, however, capitalism can engage in expanded reproduction without limit, how can capitalism ever develop all the productive forces “for which it has room”? Didn’t Marx himself mathematically demonstrate that capitalism can develop the productive forces without limit? However, a closer look reveals this apparent contradiction to be an illusion.

In the Volume II formula, the productive forces expanded only quantitatively but not qualitatively. There is no growth in labor productivity or what Marx called the organic composition of capital — the ratio of constant capital, which does not produce surplus value but merely transfers its value to the commodities it helps produce, and variable capital, the sold labor power of the workers, which replaces its value and produces additional surplus value.

It is also assumed that the correct proportions of production, including the correct proportions between Department I, which produces the means of production, and Department II, which produces the means of consumption, are maintained without explaining how they are maintained. And — almost always overlooked — among the correct proportions between the various branches of production that must be maintained is that between the production of money material and all other branches of commodity production.

In reality, the concrete history of capitalism has been marked by growth in labor productivity. The rate at which productivity grows is largely regulated by the competition between the industrial capitalists and the workers. To maximize their profits, the industrial capitalists as the buyers of labor power try to pay the workers the lowest possible wage. The workers as the sellers of labor attempt to get the highest possible wage right up to the mathematical limit where surplus value — and therefore its monetary form, profit — disappears altogether.

If Marx’s formulas show expanded capitalist reproduction running forever, it must be assumed that the quantity of auxiliary materials and the ores out of which money material is produced, and the supply of labor power that produces the means of subsistence for the workers, must be available in infinite quantities. If this is true — which it obviously is not — then the population, including the fraction of the population that consists of workers, can grow to the mathematical limit of infinity and capitalism can indeed go on forever. Otherwise, it can’t.

The Crisis (Pt 10)

The police and the state

On Sunday, June 7, the Minneapolis City Council, by a veto-proof majority, voted to disband its police department over the opposition of the Democratic mayor. This doesn’t mean that Minneapolis police are about to be abolished. To believe this would be naive. For one thing, the abolition of the police would violate the Minneapolis City Character — the equivalent of a city constitution, which mandates the existence of a police department. And even if the Minneapolis Police Department were to be formally abolished, there are many other police agencies such as the Sheriff’s Department and the Minnesota State Patrol that could step into its role.

The significance of the City Council vote lies elsewhere. It represents an attempt by Democratic Party politicians to halt the growing movement in the streets demanding the abolition — not the reform — of the police. Once this is done, the Democrats figure that they can count on the courts to render their vote to “disband the police” harmless. It will then be back to business as usual.

But the real significance of the demand to abolish the police is that, even at this early stage, the incipient U.S. revolution cannot but begin to realize that the state consists of a body of armed men, and now some women, plus material extensions such as prisons. The state exists to defend capitalist private property in the means of production. It cannot be reformed. It must be smashed and replaced by an entirely new system of “public safety.” All this is in line with the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the state.

The demand to abolish or “de-fund” the police is being raised not because the demonstrators have read the Marxist classics — very few have — but because their practical experience in what is, in essence, a class struggle points in the direction of getting rid of — not reforming — the police. Since the May 25 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, which was duly recorded on cell phone video, anti-racist demonstrators have put the demand to abolish the police into the mainstream of political discussion in the U.S. for the first time.

The Crisis (Pt 6)

U.S. unemployment hits Depression levels

In April, the U.S. Labor Department U-3 measure of unemployment hit 14.7 percent. The U-3 rate had been used over the last year or so to claim that unemployment was the lowest since 1969. In fact, it is designed to greatly underestimate the real level of unemployment. Even some Federal Reserve Board officials admit that the real rate of unemployment is over 20 percent and fast approaching the all-time quasi-official estimate of 24.9 percent that occurred at the very bottom of the Depression in March 1933. Nobody denies that the number of unemployed in the U.S. is in the tens of millions — around 50 million if you believe AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

However, it is claimed by Trump and most economists that the current unemployment crisis is the result of the deliberate shutting down of the economy made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. What is occurring, according to this logic, is not the long-feared Depression II but the “Great Suppression.” Though unemployment generally declined after March 1933 — except for the sharp but short-lived Roosevelt recession of 1937-38 — “full employment” did not return until the U.S. had entered World War II in 1941. This time, it is claimed by Trump and many economists, in contrast to 1933 there is no underlying economic crisis. Therefore, “full employment” will return much more quickly. The pandemic will have run its course within months, as Trump claims, or at most within several years, as claimed by more cautious economists.

Therefore, the argument goes, while still a terrible situation it is not quite Depression II. Though unemployment may be as bad as during the Depression, it won’t last nearly as long. Anyway, Depression-level unemployment is the necessary price we have to pay to stave off the much greater evil of millions of deaths in the U.S. alone from COVID-19. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump, who had been planning on running on “prosperity and full employment” as shown by the Labor Department’s U-3 unemployment rate, is leading the charge to “open America for business.”

The Crisis (Pt 4)

May Day strikes

On May 1, International Workers’ Day, a wave of worker and renter strikes swept the United States. Workers protested the dangerous conditions in which they are forced to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the companies struck were Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, Target, Instacart, Shipt, and Whole Foods. The May Day strikes show the increasing influence the internationalist traditions of the world workers’ movement is having on the U.S. working class, especially among the lowest paid and most exploited workers. The current medical-biological-economic-employment crisis has only deepened this tendency.

Also, and this should be noted, the internationalist implications of the global May Day holiday stand in complete opposition to the traditional AFL-CIO union leaders, Bernie Sanders, and many progressives and newly minted “democratic socialists” going down the disastrous road of economic nationalism and China bashing. Trump and the other economic nationalists, both Democrats and Republicans, are trying to divert attention from the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic by the U.S. government — both federal and state — to China. More on this in the coming weeks.

‘Party of Order’ versus Sanders

As we saw last week, Bernie Sanders has for many years operated well within the limits of capitalist, or — to use traditional Marxist language — bourgeois, politics. He has done nothing to organize an independent workers’ party or an independent workers’ media, either print, radio-TV or Internet. Nor is he internationalist like the working-class leaders of the past, such as Sanders’ personal hero Eugene Debs. Rather, Sanders is an economic nationalist and an imperialist dove.

Why then is the Party of Order so hostile to Sanders? As its leaders know full well, capitalism has in many countries survived presidents and prime ministers far more radical than Bernie Sanders. No knowledgeable person believes that U.S. capitalism would be in danger of being abolished under a Sanders administration.

The Crisis (Pt 3)

The king of commodities

On April 20 (2020), the May futures contract for the delivery of oil fell to a negative $37 per barrel. Since the 1970s, some have suggested that oil has replaced gold as the money commodity, reflected in the term petrodollars. We can now see that this idea is based on a misunderstanding. Oil as the commodity that stores energy as well as serving as a raw material is perhaps the king of commodities as far as its use value is concerned. However, this doesn’t mean that oil is the money commodity, which in terms of its use value measures the value of all other commodities.

What would happen if global production and circulation suddenly became paralyzed? We are now finding out. With production and transportation sharply curtailed around the globe, what is the use value of oil now? Marx explained in Chapter 3, Volume I of “Capital”: “Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism [credit — SW], no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities [such as oil — SW] can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money.”

Since oil has storage costs, the owners of May 2020 oil futures contracts were for a day willing to pay buyers to take it off their hands to free themselves of those costs. This shows that not oil but money is the king of commodities. In the words of Marx, the value of oil has vanished in the presence of its independent value form. Even Trump’s move to buy all the oil that the U.S. government can physically store has not prevented the oil price collapse.

When the value of a commodity as important as oil vanishes — though it isn’t only oil that is being affected — in the presence of its own value form, the credit system is thrown into crisis. Credit is based on the assumption of a given price structure. When commodities become unsalable or at least unsalable at the expected price, the credit system begins to break at a thousand and one places. For example, banks lend money to oil companies. If the oil companies can’t sell their oil at profitable prices, they will not be able to pay the banks. How will the banks pay their creditors, which include their depositors? And what about the pension funds loaded up with oil and bank stocks?

The Crisis (Pt 1)

A personal note

In February, I was hit by a staph infection that had spread to the blood. This was the first serious illness of my adult life. Before this infection, I had been free of any illness more serious than the occasional cold or seasonal flu. I was really knocked off my feet and had to be hospitalized.

This was no fun. But no evil is without positive features. I got to see the medical system for the first time in my adult life from the inside. At least here on the West Coast, the medical system is staffed by a mix of many nationalities with a bias toward the Far East — the very group that President Trump with his racist attacks on the “Chinese virus” has made a target of his demagoguery. I was served by medical workers from France, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other nations.

Then as fate would have it in one those bizarre coincidences that life occasionally brings, the whole world was swept by the ghastly COVID-19 pandemic. Financial markets crashed and then much of the global economy was shut down including industrial production and world trade. Most importantly, employment entered a downward spiral. More than 10 million people in the U.S. have been forced to apply for unemployment insurance within two weeks, implying double-digit Depression levels of unemployment.