Matters of Concern to the Polity

Let Us Not Permit Change to Be the Casualty in the U.S. Once Again

- Pauline Easton -

Garden newly planted at the site of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis is being tended
by the local community.

The main feature of the all-around crisis which is deepening in the United States is that all state institutions, including its governing institutions, bureaucracy, military and political system, are broken. The divisions in the ranks of the rulers are profound indeed, while they are more antagonistic than ever to the people despite the pretense of many to be on the side of the people, on the side of justice.

The major political parties and their media are held in contempt by the multitudes, while pervasive disinformation leaves the polity with a deadening sense of anger confounded by indifference, a feature of depoliticization intended to leave the people open to the worst demagoguery. Political and economic elites claim the right to speak in the people's name because they constitute a self-promoted "chosen few," a "natural aristocracy" who are entitled to rule and claim the privileges of office. This elite grants itself immunity as protection against incursions on their "right" to hold the monopoly on force by which they rule.

This is what we see on the occasion of Juneteenth 2020, which marks the 155th anniversary since the abolition of slavery in the United States, about which the great Afro-American leader W.E.B. Dubois said: "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery."

The degeneration in the United States is such that the clash between Condition and Authority is more glaring than ever before. U.S. President Donald Trump is holding his first re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- the site of the worst racial massacre in U.S. history in 1921. Convoking such a rally is a public health nightmare at a time when there are more than 2.2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 120,000 deaths in the U.S. It is also a deliberate brutal provocation worthy of the Ku Klux Klan, which shows the depths of depravity to which the U.S. ruling class has sunk and is wallowing in today. Powerless to stop the rally, Tulsa has declared a curfew, which will do nothing to control the endangerment of public health and will serve to keep the people's protest in check by criminalizing their demands for Justice Now! 

However, the people all over the United States, joined by peoples all over the world, continue to speak in their own name and their striving for empowerment reaches new heights of resistance to police and military violence. The past week saw more actions raise the demands of the movement, including during Pride parades and Juneteenth celebrations, that included demonstrations by longshoremen in some 30 U.S. ports. The world also witnessed more deaths of black youth said by local authorities and media to be "suicide by hanging" but suspected by many to be lynchings.

Ruins following the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, during which more than
300 African Americans were murdered.

Meanwhile, it is clear that at present the powers that be are unable to agree on a saviour who can deliver the people, the bureaucracy and the military to serve the claim that the U.S. is the "indispensable nation" entitled to dominate the entire world. Trump's "disapproval rating" is said to be higher than 55 per cent. Reports claim that a majority of Republicans -- 63 per cent -- believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. What is important, however, is to focus not so much on the character or personality of the candidates seeking election but rather to examine the logic of the machinery behind the selection and election process. The machinery refers to the political system based on the Constitution. How the likes of Donald Trump can seize the presidency of the United States, said to be the greatest democracy in the world, cannot be understood apart from analyzing the U.S. Constitution and its political system in the context of the actual historical situation.

How else can one explain what is taking place? The main U.S. media outlets are desperate to stop reporting on the demands of the protesters. Their cynicism is such that they present unfolding events in the manner of a circus worthy of the depraved Roman Emperor Nero who not only murdered his mother, his first wife and possibly his second, but is said to have been such an ineffective leader as to have played music while Rome burned in a great fire.

ABC News reported that "The President already moved his rally back one day to avoid conflicting with a national holiday celebrating the end of slavery. In short, you can expect plenty of protests. The risk of clashes is so apparent that Tulsa has called on the National Guard and FBI to provide security on top of the usual Secret Service flock. Trump's rallies have never been just rallies, but this one feels more like a powder keg. [...]

"There's still 137 days until the election. What happens in Tulsa this weekend could prove to be among the most pivotal of them. The pundits will speak in urgent tones about the virus. The country's top police forces will fight to keep the protesters and supporters contained in separate pens. Thousands, maybe millions, will tune in at home to watch what happens with the powder keg. And Trump will take to the stage, all ease and smiles, to do what he loves best: speak his unfiltered mind."

This is how the disinformation of the state operates. The aim is to forget that it is not about Trump and his personality and antics. In the actual historical situation, the conflict between the forces and social relations of production underlie the deepening economic crisis, instability and disequilibrium. The productive forces, including the modern working class, exceed by far the bonds of the capitalist social relations of production to which they are allegedly safely tied. This is especially true of the unfolding scientific, technological and industrial revolutions, whose development is in the main driven by competition among sources of capital. Without benefit to the people, these productive forces have grown to such an extent that the sustainability of the natural-social environment is threatened. Such threats result from capitalist social relations that fetter the productive powers. Society's fettered productive powers are actually a block to their organization by society to satisfy the claims of its members in order to meet their needs at a level consistent with the stage of social development.

If this problem is not sorted out, great tragedies face the people. The U.S. government, with its military and bureaucracy, does not have an interest in sorting out these questions to the advantage of the people. The same is the case for Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other countries, said to be advanced democracies whose nation-states as constituted long ago have passed away, because only the claims of the owners of capital are deemed legitimate, which means that they compete to lay hold of the monopoly of force. This is how the claim to legitimacy is established by these decadent and corrupt forces as well as, according to them, the authority to use this force in the name of society.

The owners of capital place their claims on society by virtue of holding the right to the monopoly of force of the state machinery. Likewise, by claiming legitimacy and the authority to control the right to use the monopoly of force and coercion, the owners of capital restrict and limit the claims of the working class and people. But the claims to legitimacy are necessarily undermined if people in their conditions of life are completely restricted in terms of the satisfaction of their needs. On this basis, the claims of those who hold the authority that says they legitimately control the monopoly of force in the name of society are called into question.

This is what is happening today. It is what lies at the heart of the demands of the people in the United States when they call for the police to be defunded and disarmed.

In an attempt to avoid this situation, large sums of money are being spent in the U.S. to solve the problem of how to give the presidential election, which will unfold over the next 137 days, an air of legitimacy. Billions of dollars are being spent in search of a saviour, in a seemingly public manner for a seemingly public office. The search itself is supposed to bestow legitimacy on the selection process but it seems beyond the grasp of the ruling circles to find someone who can dress up the demand for the right to a monopoly on the use of force with a covering of legitimacy. The state machinery desperately needs a saviour with the attributes of stewardship -- to oversee the relations and arrangements of the vast bureaucracy, military and governing institutions, and stalwartness -- the promise of loyalty to the owners of capital as a class. Their problem is that in the current crisis-ridden situation, from the perspective of the elites, presidential leadership demands acting and deciding with an "energy" that is pre-emptive, and which has been ascribed to presidential dictatorship that has given rise to Donald Trump, a president who is pre-emptive in navigating unstable conditions in disequilibrium. But establishing such a president in a defining historical moment is fraught with danger.

Trump has not turned out to be the master conjurer the U.S. rulers hope for in these times of crisis with a divided government and the intense conflict among contending sources of capital. It goes to the heart of the problem in the United States -- the problem of legitimacy. If those who govern appear as a self-interested clique, the claim of a legitimate authority to wield state power with its monopoly of the instruments of force and coercion begins to look like the usurper's conceit. The existence of alternative claims to legitimacy and authority presage a sovereign power that no longer passes for being whole and undivided. In such a situation, neither those who govern nor those who are governed accept the old ways of life and of doing business; neither can continue as before.

The fact is that the condition of civil war which has appeared in the United States is no longer farfetched. The constitutional foundations of the governing arrangements and the productive forces can no longer be harmonized. The 18th century constitution does not provide the foundations for a political system of such a calibre that it can deal with the all-around crisis emerging from the clash of the productive forces and capitalist social relations. Today, it is the working class which must constitute the nation. The Constitution as it emerged from the American Civil War does not provide a modern conception of democracy which eradicates racism because this constitution did not abolish slavery. It merged the slave system with the system of wage slavery. The harmonization of the conflicting individual, collective and general interests that emerge in society due to the clash of forces and relations of production can no longer be reconciled.

Even though the U.S. emerged from the period of world depression, world war and the defeat of fascism in a manner which allowed for the leadership necessary to deal with those historical situations, today the social fabric of the United States is ripping apart  as never before. No amount of criticism of presidential usurpations as deviations from the perceived constitutional framework will prevent the extreme backlash of the ruling class to the demands for justice, nor will it give rise to illusions that the rulers are fit to govern.

The resistance struggle in the United States continues to militantly uphold the demands of justice and give expression to the peoples striving for empowerment even as the rulers, their pundits and media provide a circus to disinform them. It is therefore more necessary than ever to calmly view and analyze the actual historical situation so as to find the line of march which informs the polity. It is our responsibility together to make sure that change which favours the people is not once again the casualty in the United States.

(Photos: Xtine Cameron, Paul Becker, David Geitgey)

This article was published in

Volume 50 Number 22 - June 20, 2020

Article Link:
Matters of Concern to the Polity: Let Us Not Permit Change to Be the Casualty in the U.S. Once Again - Pauline Easton

    

Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  editor@cpcml.ca