It is a strange sort of an article for the Militant.
My attention was caught by the remark, “Nobody knows, nor can know,
how this financial crisis will unfold,” Socialist Workers Party
National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in 2008.
Strange, strange talk. How this financial crisis unfolds is exactly
like it has unfolded over and over again under Capitalism. Whether
the economy is going up or down, the Captains of Industry manage to
rake in profits. But capitalism, especially this corporate
capitalism, behaves like a smooth flat stone sailing across the water.
It rises and sails ahead, then dropping to slide along the water's
surface, only to skip forward again, and so on until suddenly, for no
apparent reason, it drops beneath the surface of the water.
Sure, we don't know exactly when Capitalism will skip its last skip
and drop beneath the surface of the water, but we can say with total
assurance that there will come that day, when for no visible reason,
Capitalism will fall to the bottom, taking with it all it has stolen
and horded away.
The skipping stone depends for its progress, upon the strength of the
arm that released it. Capitalism depends upon the strength of those
workers who supply it. While the stone and while capitalism are
skipping along, they seem as though they could go on forever. But
when both have used up the energy required to propel them, they will
disappear out of sight.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/3/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am not sure I see the point of this article.
http://themilitant.com/2017/8102/810203.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 2 January 9, 2017
(front page)
Trump support grows while Democrats face
divisions, fights
BY MAGGIE TROWE
Since his election, Donald Trump has broadened his support based on
appeals to the working class as he continues to assemble a Republican
administration. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is splintered,
facing a fight for leadership and perspectives. As Trump prepares to
take power, millions of workers are engaged in a broad discussion of how
to go forward as the bosses and their government place the burden of the
continuing capitalist crisis on their backs.
Trump’s approval rating has risen to over 50 percent as he has agreed to
union contracts at some of his hotels, publicly engaged in arm-twisting
to force aerospace giants Lockheed and Boeing to slash their bills to
the government for F-35 warplanes and a new Air Force One, and announced
plans to dissolve his charitable foundation and put family holdings in
trusts.
Trump backed down his supposed buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who said Dec. 22 he was thinking of building up Moscow’s arsenal of
nuclear weapons. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand
its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses
regarding nukes,” Trump replied publicly. The next day Putin backed off.
U.S. “consumer confidence” hit its highest point in more than 15 years,
even though long-term participation in the workforce is the lowest in
modern history. “The gain in confidence was entirely due to rising
expectations” following Trump’s election, Reuters said Dec. 27.
This puts wind in Trump’s sails as he looks to confirm his cabinet
nominees and enact legislation after the inauguration Jan. 20.
He will face a fight. After the post-election hysteria around vote
recounts and an Electoral-College-coup attempt flopped, heterogeneous
elements in the Democratic Party are now planning to try and block his
administration at every turn. In response, he’s looking to divide
Democrats and draw some of them toward him.
For example, he intervened in the sharp debate on U.S. policy around the
recent U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements on the
Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. As the Barack Obama
administration abstained, allowing passage of the vote Dec. 23, Trump
denounced the move. “At the U.N., things will be different after Jan.
20th,” he tweeted.
New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, his party’s incoming Senate
leader, also denounced the administration vote, called it “extremely
frustrating, disappointing and confounding.” Democratic senators from
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon
and Delaware also opposed Obama’s decision.
Foreign policy moves like this offer Trump opportunities to push forward.
With the Democratic Party in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s defeat,
leaders of different currents within it, with their eyes on the 2018
Congressional elections, are scrambling to learn from the lessons of her
loss and take over.
In an op-ed piece in the Dec. 26 New York Times, David Paul Kuhn
disputed those who say Trump won because he galvanized support from
racist white workers.
The fact that the civil rights movement overthrew Jim Crow segregation
and changed social attitudes in the country forever was reflected in the
election of Obama. “Barack Obama won more support among white men in
2008, including the working class, than any Democrat since 1980,” Kuhn
said.
“By 2016, Mr. Trump personified the vote against the status quo, one
still not working out for them,” he said.
“[M]uch of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a
jerk,” Kuhn said, pointing to concern over his demeaning views on women.
“Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought was
more on their side.”
Sanders ‘revolution’
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the Democratic nomination stolen
from him by the rigged Democratic super-delegate setup, is one of the
leading contenders to seize the leadership in the party. Asked by
talk-show host Conan O’Brien Nov. 29 if he would have beaten Trump,
Sanders said, “I wish to God that I had had that opportunity.”
“The goal now is to mobilize millions of people around a progressive
agenda,” Sanders said in a Democracy Now! interview released Dec. 26.
“It would be a tragic mistake to believe that everybody who voted for
Donald Trump is a ‘deplorable.’ They’re not,” Sanders said.
During her campaign, Clinton called workers who backed Trump
“deplorables,” as well as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamophobic.”
The soon-to-be commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism will face the same
intractable crisis of the capitalist system as his predecessors. On a
world scale, capitalism is in a long contraction of production, trade
and employment that no policies, including Trump’s plans for tax cuts,
eased regulations and infrastructure spending, can change.
No solution to capitalist crisis
“Nobody knows, nor can know, how this financial crisis will unfold,”
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in 2008, as
the “Great Recession” unfolded. “But it’s not the result of ‘mistaken
policies.’ It is a product of the workings of the laws of capitalism
itself. It’s a consequence, not a cause, of finance capital’s
development.” Barnes’ article is included in The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People.
Since the 2008-09 crash, “there is a growing openness among working
people to talk and debate with each other about the broadest social and
political questions facing our class, our unions, and our allies,”
writes SWP leader Steve Clark in the book’s introduction. “Workers
everywhere are looking for an explanation of capitalism’s grinding and
destructive decline, and, even more importantly, how to chart a way
forward to combat its consequences.”
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