A New Democratic Revolution
By Mark Wain [also known as Andrew Colesville]
September 11, 2016
https://newdemocraticrevolution.wordpress.com/
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One Introduction
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten Conclusions
Postscript
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Preface
Why do we need a new people’s democratic revolution?
As the world has reached a crossroads in its economic and political situation, a change is in order. Because the mainstream and establishment have exhausted their antidote to the status quo a people’s democratic revolution is therefore urgently called for.
This blog/book will provide readers current information relevant to the developmental tendency of a new democratic revolution while review facts in retrospect to share with readers perceptive of optimism, uplift and positivity.
“It is more difficult to start a revolution in West-European countries because there the revolutionary proletariat is opposed by the higher thinking that comes with culture, and the working class is in a state of cultural slavery.” “We know that revolutions cannot be made to order, or by agreement; they break out when tens of millions of people come to the conclusion that it is impossible to live in the old way any longer.” (Lenin, June 27-July 2, 1918)
In the U.S. and other developed countries, the new democratic revolution is not only political but also cultural and social, because people, in general, suffer greater losses and deep down inside they have incurred a mountain of cultural slavery as well as social backwardness and obliviousness, requiring profound socio-economic and cultural critique. For an example, undemocratic historical development must be thoroughly criticized. We are falling into the darkness of a long depression, no genii can save us. The only way out is to emancipate our own minds that have been controlled and confined by capital-dominated undemocratic traditions accumulated over hundreds of years.
Revolution is a historical development process that comes out of age when many internal and external causes coincide. Historical events come and go, but we must strive hard to understand their causes as well as outcomes, in particular, those which remain hidden.
2016 is a general election year when enormous money, attentions, ardor, debates and spars are called into play. The first half of this presentation is more in line with the trends than the second. By no means, however, these trends and the outcome of the election will restrict the development of revolution to elections. In fact, it will pick up speed and grow in strength as well as size, regardless of who will take governmental offices or fail to be chosen.
Chapter One
Introduction
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/campaign-stops/the-selling-of-donald-j-trump.html
The article quoted above presents two views of D.J.T. (Donald J. Trump) in two parts, each of which disconnects from the other. For an example, the first part emphasizes reality of the U.S. that the pro-establishment forces refuse to recognize let alone fix the problems in reality and that’s where D.J.T. comes in. In the second part the author forgot the reality he tumbled to earlier and taunts D.J.T. with his conduct as usual know-it-alls would. Henceforth the author has made no any mention of reality until at the very end by stating “the cynical worldview” as a metonymy of “a fundamentally different worldview.”
There are many characteristics on which D.J.T. and his followers’ anti-establishment worldview bears.
The establishment is the governing class (also called the political class) supported by capital – or the capital personified ruling class over the working class or the 99 percent of the population. The establishment consists of “top corporate executives, major political figures in public and operatives behind the scenes, media owners, and the most listened-to policy intellectuals who serve them.” See “The Disintegration of Bourgeois Democracy” by Charles Andrews Aug. 22, 2016 http://mltoday.com/article/2522-the-disintegration-of-bourgeois-democracy/91]
The fact that D.J.T. does not have either the ruling class’ backing or major political figures’ support illustrates how antagonistic the anti-establishment insurgents that Bernie Sanders, D.J.T. and Jeremy Corbyn initiated are to the establishment bigots. That the former passes round the hat for campaign contributions on the average of $200 per person holds a vastly different worldview from the establishment’s in view of the fact that the H.R.C. (Hillary R. Clinton) campaign has been bought by big money to the tune as high as close to $ 1bn.
Establishment’s autocracy comes in handy for capital’s hegemony. It serves as an ostentatious and nominal democracy wrapped in a shroud of capital dominancy, which churns out a pay-for-play rigged system. Only the incredulous, thoughtful and good folks understand and support the anti-establishmental mass movement and this phenomenon is without exception among all countries; it is immaterial to them whether the movement is called by other names so long as a new democratic revolution will be one of the final goals for the pro-change, anti-capital-hegemonic and political movement that rallies to the people’s sovereignty banners.
H.R.C.’s generalized remarks that half or at the very least 25 million of D. J. T.’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables” give evidence of how an insuperable barrier has been put in place between the masses and the establishment. It also calls into question how the ruling class polices aptly its establishment governing class of stooges and reigns in their unscrupulousness.
Flunkies including major political figures in public and operatives behind the scenes of the electoral circus democracy are utterly under capital’s monopolized control and they behave like marionettes directed by unseen manipulators. Being one of the most sagacious capitalists, D.J.T. knows very well his class can no longer afford to rely on such a deplorable establishment consisting of ineffectual bumblers and motley groups to mind the shop let alone a nation. He has to do something about it.
Capital is facing the abyss of despair of not merely political but also economical; not only domestic but also global; not only ideological but also doctrinal, social and cultural. The new revolution also indicates a cultural revolution that fits oneself for the demand to transform the undemocratic and banal traditions, habits, and ways of thinking as well as political cultures to their democratic counterweights.
Chapter Two
In the article, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist.html#permid=17995337 Michael Kazin quoted the Populists’ 1892 platform “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few,” those fruits have grown over the past several hundred years by unpaid surplus labor of hundreds of millions of hard-working people to such a gigantic scale or the overwhelming material abundance that, if not being stolen or otherwise they had completely recovered the stolen goods, would have so enriched everyone of this country as to enable all become multi-millionaires. The root cause for the undemocratic status quo is capital and not its political representatives or the populists. Whenever a remedy is to be sought, one has to focus on capital as a social relation that controls and abuses its privilege on the entire society.
The number of manufacturing job in the U.S. has kept falling since the late 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan’s infamous anti-labor neo-liberal “revolution.” In their 1992 book: “America: What Went Wrong?” Donald Barlett and James Steele wrote: “During the 1950s, 33 percent of all workers were employed in manufacturing. The figure edged down to 30 percent in the 1960s, and plunged to 20 percent in the 1980s. It is now 17 percent-and falling. ” In 1999, it further plunged to 10.3%, thanks to the “invisible hand” of the market as the determining force of outcomes. While one third of the plunge is attributed to manufacturing strength decline due to flat investment and trade deficit, two thirds of the plunge of manufacturing job number is due to increased labor productivity as a result of automated production. (See, for an example, http://www.industryweek.com/workforce/why-americas-manufacturing-job-loss-greater-other-industrialized-countries?page=3 ) In fact, increased labor productivity by means of increased fixed capital investment (or organic composition of capital assuming variable capital – wage level – is either unchanged or lowered for given rate of exploitation [ratio of surplus value extracted from labor or profit to wage]) causes decreased rate of profit, which, in turn, bolsters capital to cut investment. Underinvestment initiates not only crises but also unemployment and underemployment – low-wage and/or part-time jobs in the service sector where constant or fixed capital investment is much less than in manufacturing. De-industrialization is a feasible way for raising profitability and even for counteracting its otherwise insurmountable decline.
The flat investment and trade deficit factors imply trade-led job loss and stagnant and eventually race-to-the-bottom wage level. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both rebuke the manufacturing industry for shipping jobs to Mexico and overseas and win over working people’s general approval, and as a result the number of their combined electorate must exceed the sum of other candidates including Hillary Clinton. To be sure, a deeper understanding of the problem should be found elsewhere. Ever-increasing forces of production are indispensable to the existence and development of capitalism. When such a stage of increase has arrived that labor productivity reaches its highest possible level, the system tends to go through with its general average rate of profit ebbing away from its more common phenomena of ebb and flow. Hasn’t such a stage arrived as yet?
For a discussion refer to https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/recessionsdepressions-and-recoveries-0712151.pdf ; https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/the-global-gdp-story/#respond , other papers and books.
The fact that capitalism has reached its late stage of declining rate of profit seems to agree on some common-sense observations, such as flat investment, unfree and unwanted investment outlet – plenty of investment objects, e.g., infrastructure, renewable energy sources, health-care facility, public education, etc. exist but they remain unattractive to capital; disposable capital to the tune of about $1 trillion to 2 trillion; insolvent debt; unemployment and underemployment rates remain far too high for the economy to recover; record low interest rates (some going negative) do not seem to spur new investment interests except on the stock market and in financial casinos, yet investment and not consumption drives a capitalist economy; manufacturing remains under pressure, for an example, durable goods orders in the U.S. drop 2.8% in February 2016; world market has run up to its expansion top, economies of the BRICS countries either barely grow, are slowing down or in deep slumps and money is flowing out of emerging markets – so far close to $1 trillion has fled China alone. Capital looks forward for immediate return more than long-term investments as its horizon has been dimmed by the falling driving force of capitalist production, namely, the rate of profit. To gain immediate higher return, capital resorts to increased labor productivity by means of full-speed automation in production. The price to pay for this endeavor is the increased surplus population or unemployment and underemployment of labor. As a consequence, the (unpaid) surplus value or profit created by higher labor productivity has increased, while the value embedded in commodity has decreased together with its price to such an extent that price deflation becomes a reality as a whole. Capital, over-accumulated and over-idled at the same time, is about to be suffocated by its own success in making monopoly private profits.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the two patriotic vanguards, certainly want to save the system, it is a pity that they may stall for time but most definitely fail to succeed unless they venture their lives for sublation or Aufheben des Werdens of the rotten line of anarchism in the capitalist production.
The much scolded and condemned hideous Donald Trump has touched off strong repercussions not only from the far left but also from the far right, especially the establishment. Is Trump a fascist who will be bound to set up a Trumpist dictatorship? Capital has monopolized the political landscape in a dictatorial manner for more than a hundred years, what could a Trumpist dictatorship gain his ends of the democratic freedoms rigged by capital? As it has bogged down in the quagmire of its own making, further digging through its life-saving democracy of sheer formality means nothing but suicide.
The current situation would call for a political revolution deeper and more radical than what Bernie Sanders has done. The hegemony, to which capital has laid claim for hundreds of years on the premises that whatever it does, it would never let the system go down the drain, is both questionable and broken. A few years ago, no one would think capital’s hegemony could ever be off the hinges, now capital faces petrified challenges that it can no longer bluff its way through business as usual, its existing authority is undermined. A true democratic revolution under the sovereignty of the people, not only in this country but also over the world, will likely break out as a successor to the American and French democratic revolutions of the late 18th century. Their enemies are no longer old monarchies, aristocrats and the clergy, the new kings are the capitalist ruling class under its dictatorship in various countries, the new aristocrats are the establishment, its apologist three-branch governing class, and the new “clergy” consists of the corporate media, mainstream think tanks, elite at colleges and universities, lobbyists and Super Pac’s.
Donald Trump already warned the establishment of riot as he is ahead of his time. Revolution against the dictatorship of capital certainly will involve not only riots but also uprisings by militant social movements against the establishment which refuse to make any change for the better of people’s interests. Its early stage – democratic revolution – will confine its scope to only repeal bad laws, force bad legislative-executive-judicial members to resign, transform the political system into a pro-people and multiparty one and save the dying system. Its later stage – socialist revolution – will expand its scope to destroy the system and replace it anew. It’s an irony that in order to achieve the latter goal, the former one has to be taken as a dress rehearsal for the full-scale revolution; in order to destroy it, one has to save it.
The system’s major stumbling block to progress is capital’s absolute monopoly of production. In order to save the system from demise, when capital has failed miserably to solve the problems of economic as well as political crises, of living conditions of vital importance and enhance people’s political economy, all means of production will have to be nationalized either through confiscations or buy-outs. The means of subsistence will remain largely in private hands but allow of community-owned enterprises during the democratic revolution stage. The second stumbling block is capital’s monopoly on the political system of no change for the betterment of people’s immediate and long-term well-beings. Instead of a representative democracy already fatefully damaged by capital dictatorship, a direct democracy must be established and subject to changes as needed. People should not only vote for representatives but also line items in their federal and state budgets and policies by either yes or no vote or by percentage allocation of their tax return despite of the representative’s own votes by their veto power. Only after people wield political power, the system then can be saved from ruin that the undemocratic hegemony of capital brings on.
Any revolution will cause a crisis spawned by the anger of anti-revolution together with the indifference of looking-on neutral forces. But then, without revolution, people would have no future at all.
April 8, 2016
In https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/29/what-susan-sarandon-said-about-trump-was-out-of-this-world/ MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked whether Susan Sarandon, the Academy Award-winning actress and a Bernie Sanders’ supporter, would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, her answer was: I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens. She continued by saying: Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know explode; the status quo is not working, and I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, with threats to women’s rights and think that you can’t do something huge to turn that around.
Her answer, Mr. Hayes considered being out of this world … political purity could lead to calamity… it defies logic that a progressive would find anything redeeming about the Trump candidacy… monumentally insane to argue that a Trump in the White House would be preferable to a Clinton in the Oval Office.
Hayes is wrong. (For a more enlightening view, see http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/03/with-new-effort-group-hopes-to-show-donald-trump-has-a-multicultural-appeal/ ) Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are anti-establishment and revolution-minded candidates. Their differences lie in the fact that the former is a capitalist roader and the latter is a democratic-socialist-roader. It’s true that Donald Trump says whatever he likes to say and Bernie Sanders says only what his political revolution guidelines permit. They are the ice-breakers in a thousand-foot deep-frozen political world decaying for more than a hundred years. Besides, the masses have waited patiently for quiet long time to wake up to the political siren calls. They do not want to wait for another one-hundred-year before breaking away from the frozen planet of politics and the deafening silence. Revolution is a grand festival of the people who will get experience in practice. Also, as Lenin said: “It is far more difficult—and far more precious—to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist,” we should positively encourage all revolutionaries move forward without delay.
The Rev. A. R. Bernard of Brooklyn, NY said: “The country was at a crossroads, socially and politically. I never thought that an openly announced socialist would ever be on a presidential ticket. And, this is nothing against Bernie Sanders, but socialism is great in theory. But we’ve seen what it is in practice with the birth and collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia and what it left in Europe. ” (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/nyregion/hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders-bring-their-battle-to-brooklyn) His approval of Bernie Sanders’ socialism is remarkable for very few think Sanders’ call upon socialism means much to the solution of the country’s problems, some may even chastise him for desecration of socialism.
The truth of the matter is socialism, just as any other doctrine, is not stationary but progressive; its strategic development is the result of class struggle over the years involving hundreds of millions of people all over the world, whose power of recall and replacement of the leadership never materialized until China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, by then it was too late to rescue socialism from sudden change of properties. After the two major pioneering socialist countries – the former Soviet Union of Russia in the 1950s and the People’s Republic of China in the 1980s – were defeated by their own political elite when under the besiegement of the international monopoly capitalism, socialism as viewed and taught by Karl Marx based on, among others, French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines has failed to sustain its viability. The working classes of both countries lost power to the elite who henceforth restored capitalism for a long time afterward without essential change. Had Marx or Lenin witnessed the battle, what could either of them do to salvage the fiasco situation?
It is a historical fact that socialism revolution led by an all-powerful vanguard of a powerless working class is problematic, if not outright futile, for capital would strangle it in its cradle by means of capturing a fort from inside; on the other hand, participatory socialism led by people is a viable doctrine, nonetheless. In (1972) The Capitalist System – A Radical Analysis of American Society, Richard Edward, Michael Reich and Thomas Weisskopf posited: “Participatory socialism requires the elimination of bureaucracies, not by new state or party bureaucracies, but by a self-governing and self-managing people with direct chosen representatives subject to recall and replacement. Participatory socialism entails a sense of egalitarian cooperation, of solidarity of people with one another; but at the same time it respects individual and group differences and guarantees individual rights. It affords to all individuals the freedom to exercise human rights and civil liberties that are not mere abstractions but have concrete day-to-day meaning, ” (p.4) and in the footnote so cited, they wrote: “By these criteria, no country has as yet achieved participatory socialism. China and Cuba, however, have tried to avoid individual, competitive material incentives by stressing social incentives for economic development; and to some extent they have also placed economic development in the proper context of overall balanced social development. Hence these countries can be contrast favorably with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ” They might as well have added that China’s Cultural Revolution was indeed such a participatory socialist revolution. In terms of radicalization of the U.S. society, they continued: “Our vision of a radical social transformation of the United States clearly involves far more than formal changes in political and economic institutions. Such changes must be part of an ongoing process of change in social and cultural consciousness that will constitute a revolution of social relations among people. ” The new democratic revolution herein proposed is just such a political-cultural-socialist revolution in its infancy.
The establishment loves Hillary Clinton for a good reason – doing their bidding faithfully. But then the masses would suffer more than their fair share. The country cannot afford another aristocrat of the Clinton dynasty to rule it because only the rich, powerful and influential will benefit from any dynasty. Even if Bernie Sanders were to be outvoted by Hillary Clinton who could then be elected the president, she would inflict heavy losses on people’s fundamental and long term interests as capital and people’s interests are completely opposite to each other. On the other hand, revolution will not stop under her reins and may become even more violent than otherwise because her ruthless rule as a pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary hardline politician would set off great unrest among people.
Early missteps Bernie Sanders took on his campaign may hurt his bidding for nomination. Even if he were to lose the nomination, his message of a political revolution would forever and profoundly lie embedded in the minds and hearts of the masses. Hillary Clinton may win the nomination and may even take the office but she has already lost her trustworthiness and honesty among not only the Republicans but among most of the Democrats. She would have been the lame-duck president before taking over the presidency as far as the public opinion was concerned.
Revolution will be the main theme of the political arena, and neither conservativeness and establishment nor business-as-usual and politics-as-usual will ever regain power as held complete sway over the masses as in the bygone years.
What are the specific demands of the revolution that pro-establishment politicians vow to disagree? Other than fundamentally overhauling the corrupt political system including the campaign-finance system by repealing the 2010 Citizens United Decision of the Supreme Court, the specific demands are: cleaning up Wall Street, indicting bandit-like bankers, stopping the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., abolishing or inhibiting the non-working Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade treaties or agreements, levying much higher taxes on the wealthy (the maximum rate for individuals back in 1961 was 91 percent), doubling the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent (tax avoidance schemes have dropped the effective rate to about 15 percent for two-thirds of the corporations; 50 U.S. corporations including Apple, Google and Microsoft park $1.4 Trillion funds overseas to avoid tax), putting an end to Obamacare and enacting a government-run single-payer health care system, carrying out a free public higher education, fighting against: privatizations of public enterprises; cuts to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education, capital’s monopoly on wage levels and its refusal to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15 , eliminating the world’s policeman syndrome of the government, repealing the imperialist shock and awe, foreign regime change and the perpetual warfare quagmire, capping and cutting military budget annually, abolishing military policies that outdate their usefulness in the post-cold-war era, transforming the energy system away from fossil fuels to energy-efficient, sustainable, renewable non-radioactive energy, cleaning up environmental garbage, and making up for the deficiency among people in gaining socialist knowledge and much more.
Why are pro-establishment anti-revolutionaries so confident about their conservative stratagems against the people? Capital is a “master of the universe” in not only using the old tried divide-and-conquer strategy but also polarizing people into partisan groups annoyed with each other and into opposing partisans with growing hostility as Lynn Vavreck described in an article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/upshot/american-anger-its-not-the-economy-its-the-other-party . An age of “party-ism” has arrived in which people should especially be aware of its danger and determined to fight hard to restore unity that has lost to capital’s manipulations behind the scenes. Solidarity of people with one another is intrinsic to their social being because they hold the same long-term and fundamental interests (To be continued.)
Chapter Three
Asked what she thought of him (i.e. Bernie Sanders), Ms. Lazareva laughed with delight. “Oh, I hate him!” she said.
Ms. Lazareva, who hails from Moscow, recalled waiting in line for three hours each morning to get a jug of milk as a little girl living under communism. “If you lived under socialists, you’d hate them too,” she said. “They make everyone poor.”
Although Mr. Sanders, as a self-described democratic socialist, has a vision for America that is distinct from the economic system in the former Soviet Union, the word “socialist” was enough to provoke anxiety in Ms. Lazareva.
She was unmoved. “Everyone will be hungry, everyone will be poor,” she said. “If it will be Sanders, we will have the same here. Everybody who comes from a communist country, Russians, Eastern Europeans, even Latinos from Cuba, feel this way. When you know what will happen, when you see it — you’re Republican.”
***
We have so much for Soviet socialism after capitalism being restored starting from the 1950s.
The reason why she complained about and hated socialism is that the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for the purpose of gaining an upper hand in world hegemony had evidently hurt the latter more than the former, causing severe shortage of means of subsistence. Socialism per se has nothing to do with making everyone poor, in fact it should have made everyone richer if it did not go astray.
Let’s take a look at some other issues.
Trade between China and the United States — which reached $598 billion in 2015 is a problem.
Donald Trump’s 45% tariff proposal on Chinese imports has different effects on different workers in the U.S. Some workers will benefit and others may not. The middle class (or white-collar) workers belong to the latter and the working poor whose income cannot afford imports will feel no impact from Chinese imports whereas those afford the imports will have to pay more after imposing tariff.
In a wide open world market, capital moves around the globe freely in a split second while labor power dwindles down and leaves their lives on. Capital always has the upper hand of the labor no matter in what way the economy turns around. Workers’ job will become scarce even with no import, because, to boost profit, capital tends to replace labor with machinery when not importing goods or doing both at the same time.
Tariff on imports is a superficial cure of the severe wounds caused by unemployment and underemployment. The only healing art is nationalization of capital. Any surplus labor product that exchanges on the market for profit will have to be owned by the nation-state instead of private individuals. Profit-sharing and working-time-sharing among all workers will eventually lead to full employment. The state will pay interests for a long haul to those individuals whose capital has been appropriated or bought out by state.
Universal employment of machinery for production will not only alleviate burdens on human laborers but also allow them to enjoy lives as freely associated laborers and learn new knowledge on new things every day in preparation for social expanded reproduction for the whole society and never again for a few rich and powerful individuals.
The idea of “pledging to pay a percentage of their future incomes in return for funds today” is not much different from the much older reverse-mortgage business model. The difference lies in the loaner to the former does not own the borrower’s property for life, rather only a portion of one’s lifetime earnings. But the trend is such that the “educational industry” is accelerating its enrichment by charging ever more tuition and other fees to workers going into education and training on a yearly basis.
It’s odd, however, that business hiring people gratis undertake no obligation so far as the “human capital” is concerned. All benefits come, after all, from a price one has paid. Capital cannot have both ways – not paying anything for workers’ education. Public higher education must be made free of charge and paid for by capital transforming a major portion of the human labor power as surplus labor into profits. If it refuses to pay for taking possessions of “human capital” then it will have to invest all funds in machinery capital without hiring anyone – no living labor power will be available to produce surplus product that pays capital back, after exchange, the profit, interest, tax and rent, it has nowhere to go but demise. Only living labor power creates wealth for capital, if most laborers are squandered, so will be capital itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/us/politics/primary-process-is-seen-as-in-conflict-with-democracy:
“Both parties have used a convoluted process for picking their nominees,” so as to vote on behalf of capital, rather than the voters. The undemocratic election process has been practiced for very long time and the citizens could not do anything to rectify the wrong-doings of the two party and their bosses. This fact proves liberal democracy of this country is a sham. It explains, in part, why so few voters want to vote in the first place.
Another equally important factor smashing the electoral so-called democracy of the old state machinery is the process designed to prevent from nomination anyone who is not party-approved, i.e., capital-friendly, including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Voters manipulated by both parties have waited until this date to wake up to fight the absolute power of capital for a participatory democracy. Its fight will be escalated from demonstrations to uprisings if and when capital insists on not to give in.
A new democratic revolution is poised for take-off and will become the inevitable trend of the whole era. The goals include, but by no means off-limits to others, the repeal of all undemocratic electoral regulations and rules and all party leadership and operatives must be elected periodically to serve as well as removable.
***
One may want to ask oneself the question why socialism refuses to maintain its hold over the most developed capitalist societies. The answer has to do with the fact that their growth of forces of production seems unlimited until very recently when they have to face up to the ecological, especially the climate change, calamity and over-production-caused unemployment and underemployment.
These quagmires cannot be avoided or escaped from. Capitalism finally reaches its own destiny of greater stumbling at the early part of 21st century. Appearance of Bernie Sanders’ political revolution is never accidental; it arises from a deeply rooted crisis that the world capitalism cannot extricate itself from. No matter how pusillanimous, ineffective or superficial his revolution is, people take it to hearts and go on trying! From Democracy Spring movement and a 36,000-workers’ labor strike by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) against Verizon in this country to Nuit Debout (“Standing Up at Night”) pro-labor movement in France, working people reignite revolutionary torches in response to Sanders’ political revolution as heirs of the long tradition following student-led protests of May 1968 in France, the anti-Iraq-war movement all over the world in February 2003, Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. and Spain’s anti-austerity Indignados movement of 2011.
Shall Marxists repudiate it and even resist its development? A few will, but the majority will not. They will participate in it and propel it forward aiming at the goal of continuous revolution.
The critical bottlenecks facing capitalism have nothing to do external forces; they are purely self-inflicted. Consequently, the system itself is responsible for removals of the stumbling blocks, or better, for removals of their root causes. The internal contradictions dictate the fate of capitalism.
The immediate one is the climate change calamity that has been in the making at least for the past several decades (the U.S. energy industry from 1957 onward knew about rising CO2 in the atmosphere causing global warming and beginning to organize against regulation of air pollution; Exxon Mobil understood the risks but funded groups into the mid-2000s that denied serious climate risks; see http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/science/pressure-on-exxon-over-climate-change-intensifies-with-new-documents ), possibly close to two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution between 1820 and 1840 began in England.
The idea of carbon tax for solving the greenhouse gas emission problems is not going to work. The reasons are that, firstly, it is contrary to the very condition for the system to exist and survive, namely the profit-maximization principle, and secondly, it presupposes the realization of a family of renewable energy sources which can overwhelmingly defeat with higher efficiency and totally substitute the carbon-based operations. None of the two conditions exists let alone prevails.
Carbon-based energy sources are the most profitable ones hence no any other source can take their places when within the bound of the system. Profits come from the labor power mining coal, oil and gas, which are plenty and cheap; while solar, wind and hydraulic operations, once built, can last a long time with very little, if any, labor forces employed, hence much less profitable than the coal-oil-gas (C.O.G) operations. Because of the differences of profitability between these two types of operations, the global C.O.G operations account for 90% of the energy production and the renewable operations for only 10% of which 8.4% comes from the hydroelectric power and solar and wind account for the rest 1.6%.
To rectify such an intolerable situation, public investments in energy production must be called forth, but by whom? There is no hope to wait for the existing system to change in such a way that somehow all by itself the contradiction between the societal common good and the private profitability be resolved.
In a capitalist society, climate change is considered as secondary in importance to profitability as long as abundant labor power are healthy enough to be hired as waged slaves , markets function well, crises come and go and no greater calamity is close at hand. Capital will be aware of its need to stop burning fossil fuels when the above conditions become too difficult to maintain. By that time, it will be too late for the planet and its inhabitants to survive.
Compulsory nationalization, on behalf of the society, of fossil mines, fuels and the carbon-based power plants and vehicle manufacturing has to be done in order to save the earth from total ruin. Financial incentives will not work. Giving advices and preaches do not go very far toward solving the survival problems. Under national ownership of means of production, economic growth will continue and survival is no longer a problem. Economic inequality will be replaced with full development of all individuals.
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Hillary Clinton said, in explaining her plan to create clean energy jobs.
My own thought about her comments is that the plan to bring clean energy jobs back to coal country neglects the fact that clean energy jobs are mostly assembly jobs, very few maintenance jobs are needed and are much fewer than coal jobs. An unemployed miner has very little chance to be retrained for the clean energy work. Her plan is an unfounded hope at the best and wishful thinking at the worst. A solid plan to solve massive miner unemployment problem must invoke changes of system-related foundation, i.e. the nation-state must own all power plants and all coal mines, or simply put, nationalization of means of production through either buy-outs or otherwise confiscations. Those who want to work within the existing system will fail to rescue the unemployed, because capital will never allow investments in and profits from coal or elsewhere to be interrupted or stopped.
Why do the Koch brothers oppose renewable energy?
The simple answer is that they would not make a profit on renewable energy. Main-stream economists think differently. For an example, Paul Krugman asserted: it has already become a fact that falling cost of electricity generation using wind power and solar power put the cost of renewable energy into range where it’s competitive with fossil fuels… storage technology…and the issue paying consumers to cut energy use during peak periods seem to be of diminishing significance. Financial incentives will do the trick to shift from fossil fuels to renewables, a shift to sun and wind instead of fire.
If so, then why global coal-oil-gas or C.O.G operations account for 90% of the energy production and the renewables for only 10% of which 8.4% comes from the hydroelectric power and solar and wind account for the rest 1.6%?
The fact is financial incentives, short of direct state subsidies, are no match for the basic tenet of maximization of profits.
The renewables are energy-conversion machineries using natural sources as “fuels” to convert natural forms of energy into electricity and employing almost no living human labor power from which ordinary capital appropriates surplus value (including profit, interest, rent and tax). What this means is that these are not ordinary machineries, or rather they behave somewhat like perpetuum mobile as Marx describes those that last forever.
In the 19th Century, after the Industrial Revolution, say between 1820 and 1840, “Machinery inserts itself to replace labor only where there is an overflow of labor power… Machinery enters only where labor capacity is on hand in masses.” (Marx: “Grundrisse” translated by Martin Nicholaus, 1973, p.702) Nowadays climate change has rendered energy-conversion machinery necessary without considering replacement of labor power as the purpose. “It is easy to form the notion that machinery as such posits value, because it acts as a productive power of labor. But if machinery requires no labor, then it would be able to increase the use value; but the exchange value which it would create would never be greater than its own costs of production, its own value, the labor objectified in it. It creates value not because it replaces labor; rather, only in so far as it is a means to increase surplus labor, and only the latter itself is both the measure and the substance of the surplus value posited with the aid of the machine; hence of labor generally.” (Footnote, pp.767-768)
Now it’s clear that its circulation capital or electricity as a commodity realized after being consumed by customers (mainly the working masses as direct producers) cannot exceed the objectified labor value in machinery. The diminished exchange value due to depreciation, wear and tear of the machinery that employs no human labor power is a major drawback to the appreciation of capital. In addition, were the renewables wide-spread in use, the number of affordable direct producers (A.K. electricity consumers) would decrease because the renewables would not hire workers. As a result, the price of electricity together with its value would decrease. Capitals of the renewables could not expect capitalist expanded reproductions and they would find they had nowhere to go except bankrupt.
To sum up, in the capitalist world, only a tiny portion of the total electricity production will be of renewable nature. The Koch brothers would rather die than face up to penalty and regulations that oblige them to change their monopoly capital investment in coal to the renewables. On the other hand, in a socialist world, people would enjoy whole-heartily renewable energy because the principle of common good will supersede the principle of maximization of private profits, namely in a few words borrowed from Paul Krugman, “climate change can’t be fought without overthrowing capitalism” or in a few state-capitalist countries, climate change can’t be fought without state-subsidized investments.
The U.S. wastes no time to block and fight against effort to combat global warming. See
(0) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/opinion/wind-sun-and-fire.
(1) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-koch-brothers-dirty-war-on-solar-power-20160211
(2) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924
(4) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/us/politics/carbon-emissions-paris-climate-accord.
The sole purpose of capitalist system is to maintain profit maximization against all odds. If renewable clean energy sources do not offer better investment return than the fossil fuel sources, there is no way for capital to change its investment from the C.O.G. (Coal-Oil-Gas) sources to the renewables.
The secret lies in the fact that value created in any commodity comes from living labor power. C.O.G. capital hires miners, truck and train drivers, and operators. A lot of manpower is spent during the production process which creates precious value of exchange between electricity, the commodity, and its users. Of the value, capital pays a small part (depending on the going rate of the job market) as wages to manpower and grabs hold of a major part for itself as, you guessed it, surplus value from which capital accumulates more capital as profit, pays tax, if any, and interest on debt.
The most significant difference between the two systems is that the renewable system provides no living labor power hence any surplus value or profit for the buyer. The old surplus values acquired in machines had been extracted as profit by the seller of the machines and left no profit for the buyer to appropriate. And this is the only factor causing capital to reject investment in the renewable system regardless of how many financial incentives it may receive.
In the editorial http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/opinion/a-renewable-energy-boom, NY Times states: “One formidable obstacle to the cleaner energy future is technological; second one is financial; a third one is political.”
The main obstacle is none of the above; it is the economic system!
Let’s be frank about it – capitalist system is profit-maximization-based. If renewable clean energy sources do not offer better investment return than the fossil fuel sources, there is no way for capital to change its investment from the C.O.G. (Coal-Oil-Gas) industry to the renewables. Coal has been around since the Industrial Revolution and as energy source it is dirty-cheap compared to the renewables no matter how inexpensive, handy or energy-efficient the latter may have been. Why not?
The secret lies in the fact that value created in any commodity comes from living labor power. Fossil fuels are never produced, for general discussion purposes, as perpetual ones provided by nature as wind and solar “fuels” (or feedstock).
Wind and solar “fuels” are free of charge for any labor power. Where then in the world their value comes from? Can nature create value for humans all by itself? The answer is of course a resounding no. It comes from what Marx calls dead or objectified (or materialized) labor power embedded in the machine of wind or solar power generation as the case may be, i.e., those labor power spent as dead labor in R&D, design, manufacturing, assembly, testing, transport, construction, monitoring and maintenance, etc.
As “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2016”, http://www.fs-unep-centre.org Frankfurt am Main) described, “Renewable sources such as wind and solar (but also geothermal and small hydro) have lifetime costs that are heavily concentrated at the development and construction stage and, by comparison, very modest during the operating stage – because the feedstock is essentially free and the ongoing labor requirement is limited to monitoring and maintenance. Fossil fuel generation, however, has a cost profile that is much more spread-out during project life, with the upfront capital cost a much lower fraction of the total and the feedstock itself, and the transport and handling of that feedstock, a much higher fraction of the total.”
A wind turbine lifetime is at least 20 years – refurbishment or repowering can extend the wind project lifetime. Since it uses negligibly small amount of living labor power, no new value will be created. The only value lies in the machine itself, which can be extracted over a period of about 20 years. At the end of that period, all the dead value imbedded will be siphoned off to nothing. This is in distinct contrast to fossil fuel power plants – with a lifetime of about 40 years at a building cost much lower than the renewables. Its maintenance cost is also low. Furthermore, it never ceases from hiring living labor power to add new value from which generous profits are generated and kept growing by not paying the labor power for this surplus value created. Thus, The World Coal Association estimates that some 900GW of coal generation were operating in 1992, and that this had increased to around 1.9TW by 2015. [1 GW = 1 Giga Watt = 109 Watts; 1 TW = 1 Tera Watt = 1012 Watts = 103 GW.]
There is an insurmountable barrier for capital to switch its investment from fossil fuel power plants to renewables no matter how inexpensive or well-suited for generation of electricity the latter may be. The barrier to progress is capital itself. Only nationalization of all energy production can overcome the barrier of capital; the nation-state has to take over from private capital all means of production or capital goods, to engage in socially oriented production that will make renewables feasible. Any effort to develop renewables as the new means of power production replacing the fossil fuel power production within the scope of capitalist system will fail.
Climate change is but one of the many problems that require radical changes of a dying system if it is to be saved for a time. Others include economic structural crises; gold worker’s productivity-based depreciations, in price and value, of commodity, means of subsistence, and means of production as labor power rather devotes its major portion of working hours to produce surplus value than create new value for the society ; decline of socio-average rate of profit; automation-driven over-production, excess production capacity, over accumulation of capital which necessarily and deliberately creates a surplus population and a long-term reserve army of unemployed labor as well as transforms economic crises into financial crises; temporal decline of capital value in commodity, real estate, debt, stock and other financial assets such as currency etc.
Since mainstream economists as an apologist opinion-leader class have been at a loss to save the system from the danger of demise, now it’s the people’s duty as well as their privilege to take the solution of these problems into their own hands.
In these days opportunity is being driven by the digital economy and a production-based economy is superseded by numbers, just like manual labor has been superseded by using machinery which never asks for a raise.
There are many reasons why it happens, but one of them is the fact that automation has not only reduced the manual labor usage but also reduced labor power value or money wage and the average rate of profit. In order to regain the latter, capital tends to take advantage of the social nature of the internet where it can acquire surplus labor power value without paying any wage hence boost the rate of profit extraordinarily high, if it can realize fully the unpaid surplus value. In the infotainment or the digital economy, web visitors or computer users contribute their (working) time either online or offline viewing advertisements from which infotainment “industries” exchange viewers’ viewing time as value for cash, when capital pays nothing for wages or the labor power spent during their working time. For an example, Microsoft Corporation has gained 71,283% in stock value from 1986 to 2016 over 30 years, i.e. at an annual rate of increase of 2376%. There are on the average about 0.5 billion people using its Windows Operating System; each contributes, say, 2 hours a day working on their Windows machines to create surplus labor value at about $10 a day as profit for Microsoft and other companies gratis in addition to the cost on users acquiring the operating system and paying internet providers; the total working day contribution is about $1 billion, from which Microsoft and other digital corporations such as Facebook, acquired and shared as profits. In addition to Microsoft Windows machines, there are at least 2 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2016; each of them can access as many social networks as one wants. The theoretical profits that corporations accumulate from them are indeed phenomenal. In 2015, Facebook has 1.59 billion active users of which 1.44 billion are smartphone users. Its potential daily income obtained as profits from those smartphone users at say 0.25 hour a day per user at $0.25/hour adds up to about $0.1 billion a day.(Facebook announces that the average visiting time on Facebook is 50 minutes per user which is exceedingly high. It is possible that its user-time measure is exaggerated by counting time from user’s logon through logoff. Most users would not stay on Facebook all the time before logoff. ) In order to realize it, Facebook would have to sell 100% of its surplus value of the “guest” workers to advertisers to realize the daily $0.1 billion or annually $36.5 billion profits. Obviously that would be a tall order. Facebook these days can realize only about a small portion, say 1% (called the realization coefficient g of the surplus value) of the surplus value created by the “guest” workers every day as profit, i.e. $0.001 billion or its annual surplus value created by these “guest” worker is only $0.365 billion, which is small compared with the total annual profit (or net income) of $3.69 billion for 2015. Other than the “guest” workers, its own internal host employees will create additional surplus value. The reason why g is small is that “guest” workers cannot be disciplined in the same way as internal host full time workers can so that for the former gg « 1 and for the latter gh ≈ 1. [The second letter of the variable denotes the subscript.]
In the service sector of which the infotainment industry is only a part, users of social networks, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers/webs and customers of different sorts participate in productive labor as well. They serve a dual role in the economy as both producers and buyers of products they produce. They contribute surplus labor powers as “guest” workers and purchase the infotainment products as consumers by spending money on accessing fees to the internet and subscription fees, if any. In general, in the production sector, workers and buyers of products are distinct from one another.
Other types of capital to make money the soft way include the unproductive and fictitious capital of banks, hedge funds and other financial services firms such as Charles Schwab, TIAA and Fidelity Investments. It is questionable how this type of “virtual-reality” capital can help the economy for and of the working class that loses political power and social standing for the past several decades.
The sunny side of the American economy, as always, is for and of the rich, powerful and influential brought into being by workers faithfully toiling for race-to-the-bottom wages.
The remedy for the problems remains the same – nationalization of these industries by breaking away with old forms, rules, laws and politico-economic scope of capitalist system through a new democratic revolution process. The new revolution can neither be considered as another huge revolving door where fortunes of a few change hands among themselves nor be so awkwardly situated that “ the pragmatic pursuit of incremental liberal policy change” as Hillary Clinton has done carries the day . Democratic revolution means seizing major portion of the political power from, and sharing the economic power with, capital, the king, by the people. Without political power, people’s new democratic revolution is empty; with it people can subjugate capital to serve the whole society and never again only the 1%.
The are many problems that require radical changes of a dying system if it is to be saved for a time, including automation-driven over-production, excess production capacity, over accumulation of capital which necessarily and deliberately creates a surplus population and a long-term reserve army of unemployed labor. To solve the long-term unemployment problem, the state has to take over the private enterprises either by transformation of capitalist industry and commerce through the policy of redemption or expropriation, or both. Any other policies are merely futile fidgets.
Labor productivity of service sector should be similarly defined to that of the production sector. As long as service sector workers spend their working time on producing service products of use value for the society, the output per hour per worker or labor productivity is calculable. A more meaningful measurement for labor productivity is not based on the output produced but on the surplus value that labor creates per hour for capital, called labor valuability (new value owned only by capital but not by the whole society). The surplus value is an unpaid and also unearned labor power measured in terms of working hour by capital which reaps that as its only income. Its income supplies capital as profit plus interest plus rent plus tax payment, if any. Capital’s main interest is not of production per se but profit maximization hence valuability is more useful than productivity, unless one is interested in only the total output created by labor power. It might be added that labor power creates not only surplus value for capital but also paid wage or advanced money compensation by capital as exchange value for the whole society.
Users of social networks, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers, news webs and others participate in productive labor as well. They serve a dual role in the economy as both producers and buyers of products they produce. They contribute surplus labor powers as “guest” workers and purchase the infotainment products as viewing consumers by spending money on accessing fees to the internet and subscription fees, if any. In general, in the production sector, workers and buyers of products are distinct from one another. Other than those “guest” workers, internal employees of the service sector will create additional surplus value. It is useful to introduce the realization coefficient g of the surplus value, which is a measure of actual surplus value realized for a given kind of workers. If, for argument purposes, we assume that the “guest” worker are not as easily disciplined as the internal host employees, the extraction efficiency of the surplus value from the “guest” workers is much less than that of the internal host employees, we would have gg « 1 and gh ≈ 1. In the following discussion, we will neglect the contribution of the “guest” workers’ surplus value and consider only the contribution of the internal host employees, i.e., we will assume gg = 0 and gh = 1, until the assumption is found invalid and the “guest”- worker contribution to the surplus value can no longer be neglected . In general, the surplus value S = Sg + Sh = S· (gg + gh).
Let’s take Facebook as an example. In 2009, Facebook’s revenue was $777 million, its net income was $229 million and its employee number was 1,218. In 2013, its revenue was $7.87 billion; hired 6,337 full time employees and wrung a net income of $1.49 billion. In 2015 Facebook’s revenue grew to $17.93 billion, squeezed a net income of $3.67 billion, and hired 12,691 full time employees.
Assume every year each worker spends 40 hours/week for 52 week or 2,080 working hours. The labor valuability (= net income/employee number/working hour) in 2009, 2013 and 2015 are, respectively, $90/hr., $114/hr. and $140/hr., neglecting inflation. From 2009 to 2015, the linear increase rate of labor valuability is 8.3% per year. In the two years from 2013 to 2015 it is 13% per year. The run-of-mill labor productivity (= labor valuability times the revenue-to-income ratio) in 2009, 2013 and 2015 are, respectively, $305/hr., $598/hr. and $680/hr. Either of the two measures regarding host workers’ output is unbelievably high.
According to http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb/financials
Facebook Annual Income Statement:
(1): 2011, (2): 2012, (3): 2013, (4): 2014, (5): 2015.
Gross Income: 2.85B (1) 3.73B (2) 6.11B (3) 10.28B (4) 15.06B (5).
Surplus value S = Net Income 668M (1) 32M (2) 1.49B (3) 2.93B (4) 3.67B (5).
Other SG&A (Other Selling, General and Administrative) Expense: 707M (1) 1.79B (2) 1.78B (3) 2.65B (4) 4.02B (5) of which about 60% is the wage bill including bonus.
V = Variable Capital: 60% of other SG&A or 424M (1) 1.07B (2) 1.068B (3) 1.59B (4) 2.41B (5).
C = Constant Capital: Depreciation & Amortization Expense 323M (1) 649M (2) 1.01B (3) 1.24B (4) 1.95B (5).
The rate of profit R, or Marx’ formula, the exploitation rate E.R. and the organic composition of capital O.C.C. are calculated as follows:
R ≡ S/(C + V) = 0.894 (1), 0.019 (2), 0.716 (3), 1.04(4), 0.84 (5),
E.R. ≡ S/V = 1.575 (1), 0.03(2), 1.40(3), 1.84(4), 1.52(5), and
O.C.C.≡ C/V = 0.762(1), 0.607(2), 0.946(3), 0.78(4), 0.81(5).
The rate of profit R of Facebook is more than three times (except that in 2012 – an extraordinary year) of the U.S. social average rate of profit (projected to be about 23% during 2013-2015. See below.) The true surplus value appropriated from the labor power of the internal host employees is therefore only 23% of total invested capital or C + V (See below). In 2013, the average hourly salary including bonus at Facebook was 1.068B/（6,337 *2080）= $81 or $169K/year. In 2015 the average hourly salary including bonus was $91 or $190K/year. The variable capital V is only approximate as Facebook does not publish the wages and salary expenses to the public. The reason R is very high is that the unpaid “guest” workers contribution Sg = S·gg to the surplus value S has not been accounted for. The true surplus value appropriated from the labor power of the internal host employees is reduced from S to Sh = S· (1 – gg) = (C + V) ·23% since Sh /(C + V) = 23%. Hence, the realization coefficient gg = 1 – 0.23/R as a share of the surplus value to which the “guest” workers’ contribute. Thus, in 2013, gg is 68% and in 2015 it increases to 73%, both are significant amounts, indeed! “Guest” workers contribute much more labor power to Facebook than its internal host workers since gh = 1 – gg = 0.23/R it is only 32% and 27%, respectively, and the tendency of falling host contribution to the surplus value seems increasingly more significant in the future as R keeps increasing and the U.S. social average rate of profit decreasing from 0.23. When R » 0.23, gh ≈ 0.
Facebook is not a public owned company serving the well-being of the society. It is a private company for private profit whose raison d’être is to maximize people’s viewing times on it only and nowhere else. In order to achieve its profit-making purpose, it has to be an infotainment outlet serving the interests of all kinds of people. As interests and ideas of people differ, so must its info-contents to suit their tastes most of the time. Consequently, its news will have to be fickle and increasingly hard-to-impress. Logic, facts, reasons, truths, and justices are the casualties of manipulations under the mantle of its algorithms, just like those under advertisements.
The best way to avoid the enormous waste of the public time and resources on the infotainment industry is to enforce the requirement that internet outlets must be government-owned to serve the interests and well-being of the 99% and not the money-making interests of the 1%. The accumulated wealth by Facebook measured with its gross income: $2.85B (2011) 3.73B (2012) 6.11B (2013) 10.28B (2014) and 15.06B (2015) from unpaid viewing times of billions of viewers or “guest” workers must return to, and enrich, the public and, as an example, to fund universal health-care and free public higher-education programs because viewers create as large as 73% (i.e., $11 billion) of its net income, yet they get no compensation for their working times.
Excessively unequal distributions of “guest” workers’ surplus value have borne witness to the fact that the infotainment industry has invariably super-exploited users of social networks, viewers of TV, listeners of radios, readers of online newspapers, news webs and others participating in productive labor for the industry. In order to save the dying system, the internet and the infotainment industry should be nationalized. It’s not difficult to do so as the U.S. capital has heavily concentrated in a small number of corporations for more than one hundred years; for an example, “just six corporations own 90 percent of all media in the United States: the vast majority of news and information is produced in an echo chamber.” To alleviate sufferings of the system in the throes, a fresh incremental improvement is to pay the “guest” workers according to the amount of time that they spend each day before they go on strike for compensations in the short run and abolition of the wages system in the long run!
The striking “guest” workers should adopt what capital does the best – using machinery in production to reap profits – to bargain for compensations. As the media are inexorably digitized, to tune advertising out is easy not only on social media but also on commercial TV – an industry worthy of $70 billion per annum. (Television advertising revenues in the United States, according to PwC or PricewaterhouseCoopers, a multinational accounting and auditing firm headquartered in London, England, will grow from $71.1 billion in 2015 to $81 billion in 2019.) If we use 73% of Facebook as the gg of the TV industry in 2015, then TV viewers should claim $52 billion as their rightful compensations.
If “guest workers” want to get their view-time-worth compensation back, they can use ad-blocking software to block the advertisements they do not want to view or watch. The penalty, however, is that the media outlets will take away viewing or reading rights from you. Capital as a social relation has, as always until now, the upper hand of absolute control power.
Have you noticed more and more news websites putting in paywalls and begging readers not to use “adblocking” software?
That’s because advertising revenue represents a large percent of the budget for most media outlets. If you don’t want to pay to subscribe, or don’t want to watch a bunch of autoplaying video ads pop up when you just came to read the news, then they don’t want you reading their stories.
Chapter Four
The mainstream media have controlled the opinions and thinking power of the country for more than 50 years and they have become an important part of the establishment and proudly so. It is small wonder that their prejudice in favor of capital and its hegemony becomes faulty enough to render a self-inflicted comeuppance.
They write and broadcast reams of praise on Hillary Clinton, the pro-establishment stewardess of Wall Street, and besmirch anyone who dare challenge the establishment and its capital backer. Bernie Sanders comes to mind but Donald Trump, an unvarnished capitalist, could not escape pundits’ impugnment because none of them is an apologetic for capital and the status quo.
The seemingly always effectual political hype of the pundits backfires this year because the gullible have suddenly been wide awake to their dismal economic status and they have started to rebel.
As a new democratic revolution has arrived, people echo their anti-status-quo candidates by speaking out against alienation from the political system of the establishment.
“So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.”
In 1944, FDR said to prevent fascism in the United States and to put democracy on solid footing it was necessary to add a ‘second bill of rights’ to the constitution, also called an economic bill of rights. This included the right to a job at a living wage, the right to healthcare, the right to housing, the right to food, the right to education, the right to not have monopolistic firms dominate the economy, and so on.(See http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35946-robert-mcchesney-capitalism-is-a-bad-fit-for-a-technological-revolution)
People don’t differ much in cultural, ideological and political thinking unless they are induced by the governing class to do things contrary to their own interests. Conservatives are especially vulnerable to the propaganda of their political leadership. People’s basic and long-term interests are more or less similar – to have a steady and livable job with neither debt nor unemployment or underemployment burden; mass democracy and people’s sovereignty with no interference or repression from capital’s hegemony. But their demands had been pent up for so long by capital’s economic-status-quo superiority in private profit over labor and its political sole right of being the chief custodian of democracy. “Our voter turnouts and the integrity of our election system rank pretty much at the rock bottom of the world’s nations that claim to be democratic.”
Their belated epiphanies against establishment and capital hegemony imply that party-ism, gender-ism and skin-color-ism are no longer the acceptable ideologies of voters. Party affiliation and loyalty, first of female president or first of black president is meaningless if the candidate in question is anti-revolution and pro-status-quo. Both the left and right, progressive and conservative, and moderate and radical among people should fill and level up the ideological and politico-economic chasms brought into effect of disunity by capital in order to divide all, conquer by a few and fulfill the demands of the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex. As the telltale signs and symptoms of capital-rigged demarcation lines for the people to rail against one another, the so-called progressive Hillary Clinton is not only wooing those Republican voters who do not support Donald Trump but also seeking endorsements from influential Republicans such as Jeb Bush and their supporters and one of the ultra-conservative Koch brothers is supporting Hillary Clinton but not Donald Trump, their fellow Republican. Wall Street Republicans are switching their supports to Clinton. “Business interests are generally not sold on the notion that Trump will be a more business-friendly candidate; there’s a lot about Trump they don’t know…They know Hillary. And they know that she is not antibusiness.” There you have it – so much for voters’ onslaughts based on “antagonism” between the two major political parties. They are more a mutual admiration society than political organizations of conflicting interests. Party-ism has died a natural death thanks to the long economic depression we are in.
It’s a pity that Elizabeth Warren, a progressive senator from Massachusetts, should engage in brawls with Donald Trump, an anti-establishment lone hero in the Republican Party, whose political rebellion is comparable to Bernie Sanders’ political revolution, if not in essence, it is in spirit.
Elizabeth Warren’s attack object proper is not him but Hillary Clinton whose ostentatious disregard for politico-economic well-being of the working poor is contrary to what Elizabeth Warren believes in. Donald Trump is not doing Wall Street’s bidding whereas Hillary Clinton definitely and consistently is.
Hillary Clinton, the party darling, has been crew about as experienced, talented, tough and brainy and Donald Trump, the party demon, mud-slung and slut-shamed as inexperienced, crooked, and chock-full of demagogy and know-nothing loose cannon. As a matter of fact, the paragons of Hillary Clinton presidency do not benefit people; rather they renege on her promises as political capital for the fundamental and long-haul interests of the status quo and money. Political expediency, pomposity and shrewdness cannot hide from people’s sharp insights once they have come to life. To be sure, Donald Trump has learning curves to climb. He has the advantage of “not being bought and paid for,” so that his plan and policy-making process will not be biased against the working class. People rather want to elect some political new faces or a capitalist who truly fights for the common people’s interests than some political agent of capital with swaggering self-assurance but is disgustingly dishonest with people.
Prevailing of the presumptive capitalist nominee over his conservative rivals illustrates that people’s economic status overwhelmingly determines their political orientation, regardless of pundits’ rumpus. The conservative politics have been elbowed out of the arena of politics. The political landscape has been forever transformed from the perennial problem of overwhelming militarism, imperialism, American Exceptionalism, regime change and self-saddling with the task of being world’s policemen that the career politician Hillary Clinton and her ilk, in both parties, who are out of touch with the working-class voters have touted for so long, into the progressive rethinking of the U.S. positions in the world and a smaller American footprint abroad. Policies of strictly limited government size, authority and ideas of privatizations of social security, Medicare and Medicaid, public educations, cutting taxes for the 1%, increasing military spending from more than $0.5 trillion a year, free trade and a hawkish foreign policy, pro-life before birth but pro-death after, denial of climate change as a survival strategy and many other so-called values and principles that the establishment cherishes are no longer plausible. The 10.7 million voters so far for Trump in Republican primaries and caucuses say no to the establishment’s positions. That of 3C’s – Command, Control and Communication as Hillary Clinton’s White House creed is likewise obsolete. Her cold war policy experience is out of date and should be abandoned. A Clinton nomination could be a “disaster simply to protect the status quo,” as Sanders’ campaign manager said.
Donald Trump should better be aware that “his supporters will have his head” if he does not fight for the working class as promised “or else keep trying.” The establishment, on the other hand, will pin its hope on wearing him down, forcing him to go along with the status quo – so called norms, and blending into the parties and powers that be. To sum up, everything including tradition, “the extraordinary uniformity in the mainstream of social and political thought” and even the establishment itself is now on the table for discussion, review and debate; the day of reckoning has finally arrived for action ever after 140 years since the close of the Reconstruction period in 1876. Struggle for political power among different social forces has unreservedly come on stage. Direct democracy through online communications and not the plutocratic representative democracy that has failed people miserably start to see its bright daylight after more than 30 years of economic stagnation, inequality, and growing social isolation – addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans, for the working-class white majority.
History will witness beyond any doubt for a new democratic revolutionary.
If people still have any doubt as to whether Donald Trump is anti-capital, even though he was not anti-capital in words, his anti-establishment position implicitly means so, at least in part. Think of substances instead of superficialities. If he is pro-capital, why does the Washington, D.C. establishment want to stop him from getting the nomination? His capital-unfriendly and masses-caring tendency and outlook say a lot about why he is getting the more supports among the Republicans from the working poor than the middle class.
The two increasingly striking features of class differentiations as shown in the current election year are: 1. between the working poor and middle class, 2. between minorities and the white majority.
The working poor account for about 58% of the U.S. population and climbing and are the least likely participants in voting. Those who earn annual incomes between $100,000 and $125,000 are no capitalist class but are within the rank of upper middle class (middle class account for about 41% of the population and declining).
In some areas, the decline of the middle class raised the proportion of people in both the upper class and lower class. The hollowing out of the middle class is rooted in a mix of technological change and globalization rewarding those people whose jobs can’t be outsourced or automated: high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Nearly half of the metro areas that Pew studied have experienced some kind of growth on the low and high end. (See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/13/upshot/falling-middle-class )
Whites on ethnocentrism remain strong after the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s. Out of all white respondents, 57% say they have unfavorable impressions on the minorities of all kind. As to how responsible China is for American “economic problems.” Solid majorities of Democrats (70 percent), independents (72 percent) and Republicans (80 percent) said China is “very” or “somewhat” responsible. With respect to the statement “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life.” Among all voters, 56 percent said that they agreed. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/campaign-stops/how-many-people-support-trump-but-dont-want-to-admit-it; See also https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/05/12/getting-straight-about-the-costs-of-trade/ By Jared Bernstein)
The differentiation between minorities and the white majority has clearly shown in the fact that the former favor Hillary Clinton, the status quo defender, and the latter favor either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, the two dauntless anti-establishment fighters in the face of the corrupt, rigged and dark-money democracy system. Credulity of those minorities who vote for Hillary Clinton plays a role in their voting choice, a more important factor is their economic standing has improved somewhat while that of the majority, especially the working poor, has not. Working-class blacks are generally better-off economically today than their parents were, working-class whites are generally worse off. Minorities are getting somewhat richer. The rich are getting much richer. The white working poor are not. Who will be their hope-givers, other than Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? These observations are reasonable in view of the fact that minorities pick up income from a low level whereas the white working majority slides from a relatively high level. The past 30 or 40 years have seen striking economic and health gains for non-white families — in part, this is a result of the rolling back of discriminatory policies that kept minorities locked out of middle-class life. But working-class whites may look back and see no similar pattern of gains, in part because they weren’t as broadly discriminated against in the first place. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/07/the-incredible-crushing-despair-of-the-white-working-class/)
Because of the class differentiations among the working people, class polarization and conflict between capital and labor have become dulled or even marginalized at least on the surface. It behooves us to reflect on this matter as to the main goals of the new democratic revolution.
“Inequality is a reflection of vastly unequal power; if we are serious about inequality, we have to address the supremacy of capital, directly and forcefully; nationalism in the United States means that gains here are bound to come at the expense of the poorest people in the world; and the proposition that a political campaign waged inside the Democratic Party can lead us toward equality and socialism is dubious,” as Michael D. Yates well said. (See http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35841-let-s-get-serious-about-inequality-and-socialism)
The immediate task is to decrease capital’s supreme power in the political arena by repealing the Citizens United Decision. The next and long-term task is to force it out of governments completely. These are also the two main goals of the new democratic revolution. Democratic revolution is by no means a socialist one. It is more a continued revolution from the eighteenth century anti-British-Crown and the nineteenth century anti-South-slaveholders revolutions than an epoch-making one. The new democratic revolution can be considered as the third one after those of 1776 and 1861. As the political culture in the U.S. has been heavily polluted by capital, it is a road sweeper than a pathfinder for a new culture revolution.
Capital is doomed to failure once and for all the ups and downs, busts and booms, golden era and great depressions over the past six hundred years. It has outlived its usefulness as a progressive force of production and a tool for the greatest creation of abundance mankind has ever known. A new democratic revolution will take over the messy remnants of the capitalist times by transforming them into rational and sustainable survival kits – states owning the whole property of the country, distributing wealth to all its working-capable citizens and abolishing the private-profit-giving wage labor. The climate change calamity will be stopped; man-made unemployment and underemployment will be replaced by full-employment for all working-capable citizens; wealth will no longer be centralized in the hands of a few.
All these boils down to one thing – success of a new people’s democratic revolution during which all undemocratic traditions are disabused of the old system and political power is restored to its rightful owner – the people. A powerless people mean nothing more than wage slaves of the ancien régime. Capital must be ousted from politics.
Only then workers will become extricable from precarious and hopeless living conditions and be able to avert the caldron of underemployment and low wages.
In http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/what-cant-tech-money-buy Susie Cagle stated: “Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.”
Capital has become the new King George the III and shareholders, business owners, managers and executives of all types and sizes of capitals have become His Majesty’s ministers. There is likewise a kind of Native American aristocracy just as the one before the American Revolution in the eighteenth century due to a differentiation of social class. As it was raised, the superstructure exhibited palpable inequality. See R.R. Palmer: The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 1974, P.194. The modern-day new aristocracy possesses not only socio-economic class superiority that demand “descent respect for ranks and dignities of men; for honor and obedience from subjects to their princes, inferiors to superiors, from children to parents, and servants to masters (now called masters of the universe in Wall Street)” but also political class superiority that both the colonial aristocracy and capitalist aristocracy share, namely owing close association with government. “There were intermarried families which monopolized seats in the governors’ councils (now called the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex), in some cases, now, to the third and fourth generation. There were Americans, close to the British authorities, who regarded themselves as the natural rulers of the country…”
She continued by saying: “Whether their money came from oil, hotels, railroads or data, titans of industry have long held enough power to both influence the American political system directly and to hack it when necessary. Old money maintains the status quo, while new money openly endeavors to change it.”
Because the King, ministers and the new aristocracy form themselves into the Trinity of Reigning, people’s sovereignty has completely crumbled to the dust. Technological, economic, social and political forces co-prosper, conspire and coexist to such an extent that democracy loses its true meaning since the 1870s when laissez-faire individualism changed to social control by the state.
“The robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries were kings of infrastructure. The people with towering wealth today are kings of information. The rise of Silicon Valley is best understood as a new industrial revolution in this tradition. In many ways, it’s not at all revolutionary in the strict definition of that term.” “A public relations stunt and an enormous tax dodge.” “They have made a lot of money while most everyone else has not.” “We have allowed them not just to govern themselves, but us as well…” “Mr. Thiel told an interviewer in 2012 that he feared the result of this precipitous wealth gap. ‘In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through Communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse,’ he said. ‘It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.’”
The angst of Mr. Thiel, the serial tech-firm founder in Silicon Valley, about the future of capital is a common knowledge and that’s why the Trinity pours out its full strength to repress any shred of sign of disturbance along the political line of anti-establishment even as friendly and obedient to the King as Bernie Sanders’ call for political revolution and Donald Trump’ call for making America great again. There is indeed a fourth way out of the crisis that has been in the making for more than 140 years, i.e. a new democratic revolution by, of and for the people. This on-coming revolution’s main thrust is to expel capital from politics. Leave politics to people and capital to merchants, sole proprietorships, partnerships, or those that are family-owned and operated or small private businesses. The state is obligated to take over all productive activities from capital and the society to own the means of production eventually.
Universal basic income idea is not new, the late Professor Milton Friedman proposed “dropping money out of a helicopter” on people in Optimum Quantity of Money, Aldine Publishing Company. 1969. p. 4. It did not happen because it could not and cannot solve the income and wealth inequality plight. The reason for inequality to become a sword hanging over the head of capital is not that people do not make money, but that a major portion of money they have made are expropriated by capital as corporate profits, leaving them in permanent penury of money. If capital were to return the expropriated money called the “social surplus product” to their rightful owners under the management of the state, they would not only become the well-to-do but also live happily ever after.
The system does not allow that to happen because capital is the new George III. His Majesty cares not his subjects. Not only he himself, his ministers and the new aristocracy are likewise adamant in their repression against such an unspeakable bleak future. The dilemma is capital has finally become its own enemy – rampant unemployment and underemployment, long-term slump, unmanageable climate change calamity, inadequate investment, over-production by automation, declining value created, falling social and average rate of profit, ineffectual economic and socio-political policies as well as precarious assertion that the rising tide is on its way, etc.
Adjusted corporate profits fell 3.2% for all of 2015 to $7 trillion [after tax (without IVA or Inventory Valuation Adjustment and CCAdj or Capital Consumption Adjustment)]. By contrast they rose 1.7% in 2014, 1.9% in 2013 and 9.1% in 2012. In 2015 a check of $23,342 can be theoretically returned to each of 300 million Americans without causing any problem of deficits, debts or expenses of welfare or social safety net in general. For a family of four that means it will have $93,368 extra money to spend whichever way the family wants to. A system of universal health care and free education at all levels will no longer be a pie in the sky. Automation caused unemployment problem will be overcome by reducing working hours and work in rotation. Wage labor in which income inequality and competitions for work originate will be abolished; labor power will be no longer a commodity sold to earn sustenance; rather it will become an accomplishment of the individual for the society. The longer you look at these ideas, the more enthusiastic you become.
To be sure, the new democratic revolution can reach its goal and win only if it gives rise to and maintain a sustainable and productive economy for people’s long-term interests. The social surplus product should, therefore, be retained in part for reproduction and expanded reproduction. Moreover, the climate change catastrophe calls forth urgent, immediate and worldwide massive production of the renewable and safe energy to substitute the C.O.G. or fossil fuels. In order to maintain and support a rationally planned and sustainable economy, retaining 50 percent of the surplus product as the state reproduction funds is needed for sustainable growth of the society’s economy.
Capital’s great historic tasks of whittling away of scarcity and producing abundance have finished up. Its future lies in relenting towards a new democratic revolution that will replace its hegemony with the sovereignty of people who will wipe the slate clean of past mistakes committed by capital if it would be wise enough not to offend them. Nationalization of productive capital and its non-productive bedfellows on Wall Street with redemption is the quid pro quo that capital had better not refuse.
A New Democratic Rrevolution 