There is one question that is being asked around the world,
by both the working-class and the bourgeois: what will the world look like under the Donal Trump presidency? The
world is truly at a precipice today, where currently only a handful of countries
around the world are not in war or engaged in a proxy war. The political divide
between the left and the right parliamentary parties have widened considerably
with the ultra-right fascist groups winning more seats in parliaments and the
left wing parties increasingly depending on grass roots movements and street
protests for political power. The environment, the climate, is at a tipping
point due to greenhouse gases. Change, economically and politically, has become
increasingly fast and is now being discussed in every workplace lunch room,
during every break, and front and centre on televisions and radios in every
home. Now, with the election of Trump as the president and commander and chief of
the most powerful economic engine and military on earth, everyone is holding
their breath to see what comes next.
The answer to what Trump means for the United States and concomitantly around the world can be understood in relation to the neoliberal engine
that has driven the US economy for the last four decades. This supply-side
economics - cuts and austerity based economic policy- is embedded into the
contradictions that are already ossified into the engine of capital. There will be some important political choices
that Trump can make in relation to trade and foreign relations, however his
administration functions within a neoliberal political and economic machine
that he cannot divert from (nor that he would want to). In this way, the path
of neoliberalism will remain uninterrupted, but will now continue with a
greater intensity due to the exponential compound growth of global capitalism,
and will accelerate its draconian impact at the cost of working-class:
socially, economically and psychologically.
Under Donald Trump, the wage suppression of the
working-class in the United States will continue against the rate of inflation
and increasing production, thus further shrinking the purchasing power of the
working-class. The use of credit cards to fill the gap between the supply and
demand in the market will also continue, increasing the indebtedness of the
working people. Further, the contradiction between the production and realization
of capital will also widen. The places that produce many of the goods consumed
in the US, such as factories in South Asia, will have even more pressure to reduce
the wages of the sweatshop workers and expose the workers to further deplorable
working conditions. This will be in order to keep the goods that are produced
as cheap as possible to meet the disposable income of the working people in the
US and other Western countries. This will be the continuation of the Primark
and Walmart phenomenon selling ever-cheaper goods to make lower wages more
acceptable.
Other trends that will continue under Trump will include
further erosion of the welfare state, which already almost bereft of all
funding, will be cut further. This will include the privatization of Medicaid that
currently supports millions of Americans with healthcare. Other changes will include
the lifting of health insurance caps that Obama had put in, which will have a
deleterious impact in relation to social reproduction of labour. The worker will
have ever more difficult time procuring enough purchasing power to pay for
rent, food, housing and education.
Privatization of what we now consider as public ownership
will also continue - meaning increasing monetization of what we now consider as
“free”. This will include a growing number of companies that will capitalize on
empty rooms in a house (such as Air B&B), or the trek in the family car to work
(car sharing), the space for storage in a house, and even leftover food after a
family dinner could be sold on the market for a price. All and everything will
soon have a price-tag attached to be sold. The market, under Trump, will continue
its trend to monetize all “use-values” into “exchange-values”. All things,
spaces, biological processes (such as the human DNA) and ideas will only
realize their value through market mechanisms. This is a trend that Trump
cannot and will not curtail.
Another continuing trend will be in the development of new
technology (at an increasing rate) and its impact on the working-class. The
increase in productivity of labour via the computerization of the workplace, will
also mean the replacement of workers with machines (as witnessed in industrial workplace
and in supermarkets). This will continue to place downward pressure on
working-class wages and benefits, their ability to for strike action, and an
upward pressure on the rate of unemployment. Further, the turnover rate of
current technology will also increase ever shortening the planned obsolescent
of technologies such as phones and laptops. It will also continue the “need
creation” aspect of the market, introducing new and innovative tools and
gadgets that the working people never thought they would ever need.
At a psychological and social level, the working-class alienation
from his/her human nature will further increase. Alienation at the workplace
will include the working-class being denied access to the very products of
his/her own produce. Relationships between co-workers and management will
increasingly become contractual. The working vs. living divide will only
increase with the working day increasing in its intensity and duration. There
is also the human alienation in relation to nature with the degradation of the natural
world now matching the fast-paced growth of global capital.
In order to support capitalism’s accelerated expansion, at compound
growth, and to support its profit engine in the coming years under Donald
Trump, politics of creating further divides in the working-class will be
utilized more than ever. Racism, gender discrimination, xenophobia and the dehumanization
of the other, will be increasingly hardwired into the daily praxis of the state
(the police and legislative bodies). This will be used to continue the fragmentation
of working-class unity in order to quash movement against the neoliberal order,
such as movements against austerity, for higher minimum wage, and universal
benefits including healthcare and tuition-free higher education. This has been
a campaign promise of Donald Trump.
Another campaign promise of Donald Trump was to “bring the
jobs back” from demand-side economies like China. However, this is very
different from emancipating the working-class from the international division
of labour organized to benefit capital. Decoupling the American economy from
the world market today, in the hopes of “bringing the jobs back”, is not only
an empty campaign promise, but an economic suicide for the U.S. The 40 years of
neoliberal economic trend has been to remove all potential barriers in the
circulation of capital in order to crush working-class political power from the
point of production (where a commodity is produced) all the way to the point of
realization (where a commodity is sold). These barriers included disempowering
worker associations through removing trade tariffs (companies moving to cheaper
and unorganized labour sources). It is very unlikely now to think that Donald
Trump, himself a beneficiary of the neoliberal order, is going to reverse the
four decade trend that was solely created to make people like him rich in the
first place.
Today a left-wing revolutionary party needs to have a
response, politically and economically, to capitalism’s monopoly on job
creation and sole vehicle for “needs” satisfaction in society through the
exchange-value market system. A left-wing party that needs to be, above all
other things, intrusive. I use the word “intrusive” to characterize a political
party that does not gag the working-class with labels and name calling but
challenges its ideas and seeks class
struggle and emancipation from wage slavery as a common denominator for unity. What we have today is a traditional
left that is labelling the 60 million people that voted for Donald Trump as unequivocally
racist. Excluding the hardened KKK racist movements that undeniably exist in
the U.S, this point of view is quiescent when it comes to the pernicious economic
impact of 40 years of neoliberal order on the working-class. This includes
decades of de-industrialization, stagnant wages and benefits, erosion of the
welfare state and ultimately the workers’ associations. The traditional left is
also quiet when it comes to planning for the future, so what is to be done next
despite the Trump presidency and the so called “60 million racists” in America?
Only an intrusive left-wing political
party, supported by wide scale street movements, can now challenge the Trump
presidency and the neoliberal order. Only such a political party can challenge
the administration that will follow the incessant path of the neoliberal order
in its total alienation of the working-class politically, economically and
psychologically.
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