> On Dec 1, 2024, at 5:04 AM, hari kumar via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> https://mlrg.online/politics/hovering-on-the-brink-of-fascism-what-happened-in-the-november-5th-2024-usa-elections/
I thought that was well worth reading. Thanks for posting it. I have a few
comments.
1. Summarizing JR in their blog you concur that "what happened in the elections
was a ‘defeat’ for the working class." If a team stays home from a game, we'd
say they forfeited the game not that they were defeated. The working class did
not show up for this election, IMO, and therefore wasn't defeated. We have not
yet lost anything that we had under Biden though that seems likely to be on the
agenda next, and the US working class will either be defeated, as we were under
Reagan and the New Democrats, or not. We don't yet know what forms it will take
but the destruction of the administrative state, assaults on immigrant
communities, and environmental protections seem to be good bets. The defeats
will be televised as Trump victories in a reality TV saga that's already begun.
2. The article states "Future discussions over abstentionism in bourgeois
elections – may or may not return." The issue is not abstentionism in
bourgeois elections, IMO, but the lack of an independent working-class voice in
US elections and the corresponding process of welding working class
organizations and activists into the democratic party coalition. Our recent
forum, https://youtu.be/TWPll9erfP0, explored this issue and particularly the
role that the US Democratic Party played in coopting the anti-Trump movement in
2017 and directing it into the 2018 "mid-term" elections (where the US house is
up for elections along with about 1/3 of the US Senate).
3. I thought sections 1 and 2 are particularly useful for people outside the US
who are not currently marinating in this information.
4. The for-profit media and many on the left focus their analysis on the
short-term issues of inflation, immigration, and migration rather than the
"long waves" such as the slow death of the US neoliberal project, the decline
of the white majority demographically every year, the contradictions of a US
militarism that can no longer be paid for out of current US tax revenues, and
an increasingly multi-polar world.
5. I think there is an enormous split in the US capitalist class on Trump and
"America First." The proposed destruction of the administrative state, which
has grown to mediate the intensifying contradictions in the US social order.
The contradictions include promises to expel immigrants and meet the needs of
the US economy, particularly agriculture and food processing, promises to cut
taxes while reducing the national debt, promises to reduce the national debt
when Trump's most important backer, the US financial industry, wants more of
it, and the contradictions of appearing to dismantle neoliberalism while
needing to maintain it - these are a few of the challenges that come to mind.
thanks, Mark
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