By Richard Mellor in California
In an NBC/WSJ poll earlier this week, over 70% of Americans said that the debates didn’t matter very much to them and 44% said they didn’t matter at all. “I think it’s gonna make for some pretty entertaining TV.”, one respondent said. Another, who has already decided she would vote for Biden, said she “wouldn’t miss it”.
Well, the US electorate got pretty much what it expected. The Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden produced an evening of excellent entertainment, a sort of adventure movie. “It was like an approaching train wreck you couldn’t turn away from,” one friend said. Saturday Night Live could not have bested this show.
Trump was his usual self
Most people who intend to vote this year – and in 2016 close to 100 million chose not to – have already decided who their candidate is, with a modest 11% suggesting the debate might swing them one way or the other. I would say from that point of view, Biden came out the winner, as Trump was his usual self: bullying, rude, racist, a sweaty, red-faced man with a very expensive hairdo.
By now, most people who didn’t watch it will have read or heard the details, so I will limit my contribution to that aspect of it. Trump, referring to the virus as the “China Plague”, is an interesting one, as well as the moderator, Chris Wallace, telling Trump that the next segment will be about race, but if you want to talk about something else that’s OK. A chair cannot offer that bone to a man like Trump. Trump would not condemn fascists and white supremacists, rather, responding to a question on this, telling the Proud Boys, to “Stand back and stand by.” Another threat to use violence. Wallace was awful.
They agreed to the rules of the debate and immediately broke them, talking over each other, although Trump was the main offender. Trump frustrated Biden, which is his method and Biden held his own in the main, but one could see as the game progressed that he was getting tired, making slips and forgetting what the question was.
Shakespeare would be proud
Tragicomedy is a literary device I learned many years ago and Shakespeare himself would be proud had he written this one. I have lived and worked in the US for 47 years; I’ve worked in factories in New York City and for almost 30 years at a public utility on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. I started there as a labourer in 1976 before that term (along with the word “worker”) was retired and replaced with Associate or Team Member.
There are no “workers” in the US. That’s a mugs game. Here in the Bay Area, I have worked alongside people from all different backgrounds; black folks whose families came up from the South after the Second World War, whites from all over the country, Mexicans, Laotians, Tongans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and so on. Entertaining TV the debate may have been, but the reality is, this was an insult to the workers and middle class in this country.
The people I have worked, lived and socialized with for over half a century, deserve better than this, but the two parties of capital cannot produce it.
Material conditions
For decades, the material conditions of the US working class have deteriorated. The American Dream, which was only a dream for a minority, particularly white and unionized workers, but not exclusively, is a nightmare. We have lost ground under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Biden’s position on jobs and offshoring is not much different from Trump’s, basically protectionism in one form or another.
One only has to look at the Smoot-Hawley legislation, to recognize that all this ‘Made in America’ or the foreign equivalent, ‘Made in Japan’, Germany etc, is a disaster. The Smoot-Hawley protectionist legislation was retaliated to by other countries and that increased the prospects of world war.
The world economy is far more integrated now than it was in the 1930s and this strategy turns workers in one country against workers in another, undermines international labour solidarity and derails the international workers’ movement necessary to combat global capitalism.
Both protectionism and so-called free trade are capitalist attempts to overcome the contradictions in their system, like the nation-state and the rapacious quest for markets. Our answer is an international workers movement and a rationally-planned and collectively-managed system of production based on need and in harmony with the natural world. There is no other solution that will not lead to catastrophe.
Sub-prime housing collapse
Just a decade ago, the US taxpayer rescued capitalism from the edge of the abyss, as the so-called sub-prime housing market collapsed. Martin Eakes, a credit union CEO, wrote in the Financial Times in 2007 that the crash could become “the largest loss of African-American wealth in American history.” The US taxpayer forked out trillions.
“I just wanted to be able to eat and sleep in my house and have a roof over my head”, 89 year old Gertrude Robertson told the Wall Street Journal at the time, “Every day at midnight when I go to sleep, I think maybe when I wake in the morning they’ll tell me to get out.”
We are now dealing with a pandemic caused by a pathogen that arises out of a system of production based on profit and this pandemic economy is heading deeper into the hole. Trillions more have been spent and more is needed.
This is the great free market at work.
In the here and now, the life expectancy of white workers is declining in the most advanced economy in the world. Critics have argued that this may be due to drug addiction, which is an attempt to blame the victim, just like poverty and crime in the black working class communities is ‘their fault’. But the question is, what is the cause of the drug addiction? What is the cause of poverty and crime? it is not a personal problem.
Here in the US, the ideology that the individual is responsible for thier own condition, that we are in charge of our own destiny, is very strong. It comes at us through the mass media, the entertainment industry, the pulpit, the universities, all the institutions of capitalism. The tragic consequence of this world view is that when we fail, slip through the cracks or smoke the crack, we only have ourselves to blame. Social crises like these are met with calls of “just say no” from the most privileged representatives of the ruling class.
Racism rooted in society
Someone made the point to me recently that racism begins in the home, but this is false. Racism has its roots in society and all its institutions. Racism and all other forms of social division: sexism, communalism and so on, are integral to class society. It is the propaganda of the ruling class that claims otherwise and a ruling class or elite, whatever name you want to give them, not only own the means of producing the material needs of society, they manufacture the dominant ideas in society also.
I know many of my friends will vote for Biden, despite having little confidence that much, if anything will change, except the racist degenerate sexual abuser in the White House will be gone. I believe that the vast majority of US workers are embarrassed by this man and feel ashamed that he represents them on the world stage.
People will vote or not vote and they will vote their conscience. What will those 100 million abstainers do? I certainly cannot answer that. And we should not forget that there is a major effort to undermine this right that was won from the US ruling class. It was won for different groups at different times and even then, obstacles like literacy tests, taxes, intimidation and violence were used to dent this right.
I have written on more than one occasion that we are in a new phase in this country, that the era in which the two capitalist parties that have dominated political life for over 100 years is over. This not particular to the US: all of the old established parties throughout the world are in crisis, as global capitalism reaches its historical shelf life and the leaders of the working class internationally fail us.
Assaults on workers’ rights will go on
If Biden wins, we will return to normal only in the sense that the assault on the working class will continue, but at a different pace. Criticizing Trump’s abusive and rude approach to US allies and so-called friends (there is no such things a friends between competing nation-states, allies or not) Biden said that we “…need to make America more competitive”. We all know what that means.
In closing, once again I must point a finger at a social force that likes to hide behind the scenes, that has the potential and the resources to offer an alternative to the two septuagenarians and the two capitalist parties. That is the leaders of the 14 million members in the organized labour movement. They will, as they always do, back the Democrat with human resource and money, billions over the decades. It is the role this layer plays. We have referred to them as the ‘dogs that don’t bark’, who contributed considerably to the rise of Trump and the disgust and despair so many Americans feel about politics and the reason why close to 100 million opted out in 2016.
The heads of organized labour also bear responsibility for the increased class battles on the horizon being unnecessarily violent, and at times confused, as the working class and the movement finds its feet.
I didn’t quite stay to the end of the debate last night; it was just too much. Not sure I can take two doses.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
October 1, 2020
