Class is ever the issue, and under neoliberalism, class struggle is a necessary construct to understand how neoliberalism is a ruling class political project that curbs the power of labor.
One instrument with which we are now quite familiar in the US #GOPTaxScam, is the use of legislative lawfare by a ruling class to instrumentalize the redistribution of wealth. But Class Lawfare cuts many ways on “many sides”, unlike class warfare.
David Harvey outlines the stakes which are being undermined by Trumpism in the appointment of incompetent and reactionary administrative agency heads whose goal is to destroy their sector of the State. This was but one component of a political strategy to disempower labor by appealing to nationalism via a vague racialized traditionalism, and using mobile finance capital to enrich the ruling classes.
Dismantling a flawed regulatory state is only a first step amidst the ideological appeals including the most bizarre of tactics, resurrecting immigration exclusion as a counter-terror strategy, and racial repression because the majority population is somehow being oppressed by minorities. That similar strategy finds its most baroque expression in making cultural sectors into a villain even as a finance capital buffoon became POTUS*.
Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.
So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”.
The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.
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With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.
Instead they chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.
At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.
www.jacobinmag.com/...
As with most actual warfare in history there are hybrid and asymmetrical elements, much like the current theories of battlefield warfare. There is historical struggle and its political economy of violence persists in more virulent forms in the 21st Century.
The rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic is being investigated psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics.
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William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century British philosopher, famously postulated that, when bamboozled in the face of competing explanations, we ought to opt for the one with the fewest assumptions and the greatest simplicity. For all the deftness of establishment commentators in the US and Britain, they seem to have neglected this principle.
Loath to recognize the intensified class war, they bang on interminably with conspiracy theories about Russian influence, spontaneous bursts of misogyny, the tide of migrants, the rise of the machines, and so on. While all of these fears are highly correlated with the militant parochialism fueling Trump and Brexit, they are only tangential to the deeper cause – class war against the poor – alluded to by the car affordability data in the US and the credit-dependence of much of Britain’s population.
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Today, establishment opinion-makers, who scornfully rejected the pertinence of social class, have contributed to a political environment in which class politics was never more pertinent, toxic, and less discussed. Speaking on behalf of a ruling class comprising financial experts, bankers, corporate representatives, media owners, and big industry functionaries, they act exactly as if their goal were to deliver the working classes into the grubby hands of the populists and their empty promise of making America and Britain “great again.”
The only prospect for civilizing society and detoxifying politics is a new political movement that harnesses on behalf of a new humanism the burning injustice that class war manufactures. Judging by its callous treatment of US Senator Bernie Sanders and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the liberal establishment seems to fear such a movement more than it does Trump and Brexit.
www.project-syndicate.org/…
In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and the like. To convert the working class to Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or "vanguard", of dedicated revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet precipitated in part the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
So what is to be dumb?
Who are class enemies/class allies:
Version One: They’re just Security State dupes
Version Two: They’re just Finance Capital dopes.
The US Treasury chief, Steven Mnuchin, has sparked a wave of criticism and mockery after photos appeared of him and his wife, Louise Linton, holding up a sheet of new dollar bills.
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They were heavily criticised in September when it emerged that he had asked for the use of a US air force plane to fly him and his wife around Europe for their honeymoon.
Version Three: They could be a “new class” or movement that is even a vanguard, but haven’t we heard that before...
Millenials are not a lumpenproletariat, even as they adopt many of its sensibilities, yet for every 1968 avant-garde, there is a 1988 arrière-garde of asymmetric strength.
Class warfare is not class lawfare, even as it presents a fun-house mirror of social relations. Even then a state, at some moment, should be smashed, or at least challenged in its ideological asymmetry, see OWS or BLM.
OTOH we have seen agents provocateurs make a mess of things at the electoral level, raising contradictions, but to what palpable end. Trump’s success may be to ensconce systemic RW repression for another generation.
I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left don’t like to hear that.
But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into the hands of neoliberalism?