Why there will be no socialism (for now) in the United States
By Dr. Salvador Capote
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Please see the translator’s explanation below. Thanks.
The incoherence within the two major parties of the United States has never been greater than in these times. Roughly speaking, the Republican Party is divided between Trumpists, with their far-right extremism, and conservatives who follow the traditions of the “Grand Old Party” (GOP), while in the Democratic Party a left-wing has been strengthened whose most conspicuous figure is its independent ally, Senator Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden represents the mainstream, while Bernie Sanders represents the left of the political spectrum.
For some decades now, mainly after the collapse of the socialist camp and the end of the Cold War, both conservative and liberal elites no longer felt threatened by a global confrontation and considered that the time had come to eliminate the institutions that supported the working class and to finish the job of destroying the unions. Their tool of choice was the outsourcing, or threat of outsourcing, of factories and jobs to other countries where wages, taxes, restrictions and environmental and other regulations were considerably lower. Without any compassion whatsoever, they brutally closed the door to any demand for wage increases or improvement of working conditions, many sources of employment disappeared as well as the know-how of many technologies and, as a scapegoat, workers were made to believe that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, were the cause of all their ills.
This was the main cause, although not the only one, that when the coronavirus epidemic broke out in the United States, the country found itself polarized, divided, with a growing institutional, economic and social crisis that the pandemic itself would deepen.
The current political landscape is very complex and has the potential to eventually drift towards extreme situations that are difficult to manage. A greater leading role by the organized labor movement would be essential at this time but, unfortunately, this is not its finest hour, since the working class is divided along ethnic, racial, religious, partisan and regional lines of fragmentation, with strong antagonism between the old WASP (“White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant”) lineage and the more recent waves of immigrants, mostly Spanish-speaking and their descendants.
There is also a kind of “labor aristocracy” made up of mid-level corporate executives, professionals and bureaucrats, with interests opposed to those of the labor movement. A subtle and long-established way of neutralizing and confusing workers is to make it easier for them to buy shares in the companies in which they work and thus make them believe that they belong to the business class.
In such a country, anything that has a class dimension necessarily has an adverse impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population and, in the United States, it necessarily has a racial dimension. The disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, for example, mainly affected the African-American population of New Orleans, and COVID-19 is currently hitting minorities much harder.
While the members of the American oligarchy escape the virus by isolating themselves in their mansions or luxury condominiums and dedicate themselves to golf or playing with their electronic devices or watching television programs or, like the ancient Greek aristocracy, to creative leisure, the workers, especially those in the service sector, almost always minorities, cannot stop working and have no way of escaping infection with the virus. The figures leave no doubt as to the classist and racist dimension of the way in which the government’s response to the pandemic has been structured. In Chicago, for example, African-Americans make up about 30% of the total population but 70% of those who die from coronaviruses.
The systemic crisis in the United States is deepening and no one is able to predict when it will hit bottom. The responsibility of trying to reverse this process falls on Biden’s shoulders. In this sense, the election of Biden was the best option from the point of view of prolonging the viability of the system, since with Trump the country would surely have continued on the path towards polarization, confrontation and autocracy. I have only referred to the challenges that Biden will face in terms of domestic policy, but he will face equal or worse challenges in the country’s foreign policy, since the United States is rapidly losing its world hegemony and it has already been announced that the Chinese economy will surpass that of the United States in a few years.
Triumphant in the 2020 presidential elections, the Democratic Party emerges as a hybrid that, on the one hand, continues to be financed (as much or more than the Republican Party) by big millionaires and large corporations, with its strongest social base made up of sectors of the middle class and, on the other hand, offers a discourse and electoral promises that favor minorities, the poor and the marginalized.
It is hard to believe that President Biden, a veteran of the old partisan guard who, as we used to say in the Cuban countryside, is a rooster who has already fought on both fences (in the small village and in the big city), is capable and willing to carry forward a very advanced plan of progressive reforms. Notoriously, many of the left-leaning voters who voted for Biden actually did so with the intention of voting against Trump.
An experienced politician, Biden adapts his speech very well to the audience he is addressing, with very different tones and content that take into account the characteristics of his audience. In general, Biden assumes a certain sympathy towards popular causes, as happened on the occasion of the events in Minneapolis, for the murder of George Floyd, or in Kenocha (Wisconsin), for the murder of Jacob Blake, both African Americans, but he keeps the distance imposed by his classist background. With this background, we must ask ourselves what guarantees there are of compliance with the Biden-Sanders agreements published in July 2020 (“Unity Task Force Recommendations”) in which Biden committed himself to include as part of his agenda many of the important demands promoted by the senator from Vermont and by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which, let us say in passing, are more reformist than revolutionary in nature.
Although Biden’s economic platform compared to Hillary Clinton’s is much further to the left, largely because of the need to unite the party in view of the elections, and this need for unity is maintained, no spectacular changes are to be expected, although the fulfillment of some commitments such as reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, the push for new and larger stimulus packages while the pandemic lasts are to be expected, reactivation and expansion of the “Affordable Care Act” (Obamacare), and the implementation of new social assistance programs, but nothing so substantial as to make people believe that the country is already heading towards socialism, let alone communism, a thesis supported, in their ignorance, by fanatical Trumpists, capable of considering the current president, the paradigm of the capitalist establishment, as a left-wing radical.
The strong pressures that undoubtedly exist within the party towards structural changes, are counteracted not only by the ideological formation of the new president, but also by those coming from the “generous” Wall Street donors to his electoral campaign, to whom Biden guaranteed that there would be no deep transformations in the banking system. Wall Street donations to Biden exceeded $74 million, more than the sum of what Obama received in his two presidential campaigns.
No, there will be no socialism (for now) in the United States. No, not until there is a party in power that is the authentic representative of the workers, and this, in turn, will not be possible until there is an extensive and solid unity of the working class; which, of course, does not prevent us from fighting to obtain, and obtaining, favored by a bicameral majority, the approval of laws such as, among others, the one that would force the inclusion of genuine worker representation on the boards of directors and supervisory boards of corporations.
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Translator’s comment: The author is someone I’ve never met. He is a Cuban-American living in Bentonville, Arkansas, according to his Facebook profile. He posts short and pithy interpretive essays on Facebook and Radio Miami TV. He has lived in the United States for a very long time (but just how long I cannot say because I do not know), but he always has something sensible and thought-provoking to say. Those who are wondering, after all the years of social support cutbacks and racist repression, why there is STILL no broad-based left-wing political opposition here in the United States, will, I think, find a lot here in Dr. Capote’s explanation to reflect upon.
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