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THE RED CRITIQUE |
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The Dictatorship of Capital
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The
mid-term elections have made it official: the US is a one-party state—a
dictatorship of capital. Unlike the Communist party that represents the
workers, the Republican Party represents the owners. The class struggle is
globalized: the two camps are now confronting each other on a global
level: the United States owners and the world workers. Capitalist
states and their apologists have, of course, always distinguished
themselves from communist states by emphasizing the single party-ness of
the communist states. For the proponents of the free market, the best
evidence that communist countries are "totalitarian" and
"anti-democratic" has always been that they are governed by
single party states. Thus, while all Cubans (under conditions of a
devastating decades long U.S. embargo designed to annihilate their
economy) have access to healthcare, education, and can boast a 95%
literacy rate, Cuba has been regarded as a "brutal dictatorship"
for its single-party system by the richest nation in the world—in which
citizens are denied healthcare, 15 million children are struggling with
hunger, and in which high school students will graduate with less than an
8th grade reading level. Up until
now, the illusion of a "multi-party" system was kept
alive by the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, which previously
engaged in vigorous "social policy" disputes with Republicans,
has always quietly supported the ruling class along side of them, through
capitalist reforms. The extensive social policy of F.D.R.'s "New
Deal" was advanced by the Democratic Party to save U.S. capital
(which was on the verge of total collapse) from the growing hostility and
outrage of American workers against class inequalities, and to ensure, for
a fledgling U.S. capital, a much needed compliant and increasingly
productive domestic labor force from which capital could extract
surplus-labor for profit. The "welfare reforms" supported by the
Clinton Administration—which dismantled the last vestiges of
welfare—were merely an expression of the fact that U.S. capital had
amassed so much wealth from the exploitation of U.S. workers that it
suffered a crisis of profitability from overproduction, and was compelled
to drive the standard of living (the necessary labor) of workers down to
make more room in the working day for surplus-labor. "Social
policy" in capitalism has always been a way to transfer the congealed
labor of workers into the hands of the ruling class. But now,
with the all but "official" collapse of the Democratic Party,
there has been a collapse of the illusion that the U.S. state is anything
but a dictatorship of owners. The
"explanations" of the collapse of the "multi-party"
state offered by politicians and the corporate media in the wake of the
elections have been trivializing non-explanations: they have either
focused on the "back-boned" political savvy of the Republican
Party or a "lack of organization" in the Democratic Party and
its inability to offer a "strong program" to citizens. All of
this masks the fact that election strategies have never been the basis of
change. The silence of the Democratic Party on the issues of corporate
scandals, the huge tax cuts for the rich, environmental destruction,
health care, the rollback of democratic rights in the national security
state and war is not an effect of a poor election strategy, but a silence
driven by shared economic interests. When the basic question of the
profitability of capital is at stake there is no decisive difference
between the two parties. Now that
its "single-party-ness" is officially established, the U.S.
state can dispense with all pretense to "democracy" and the
social well-being of citizens and get down to the business of
concentrating the wealth of the world into the hands of a few. The
"policy disputes" that once marked the difference between the
two parties have either emptied and decayed into hollow habitual
objections or altogether disappeared. The single-party state is united in
its abdication of all political power to a capitalist oligarchy,
spearheaded by an oil tycoon who is now being hailed in the right-wing National
Review as "The Conqueror". The state is now a garrison state
to protect the imperialist interests of U.S. capital at the expense of the
world's workers. Even members of the capitalist oligarchy can no longer
deny that any pretense to democracy and the social well being of citizens
has been dropped by the single-party state of owners. In a recent
interview (to be published in Esquire), a former top aid to the
Bush Administration, John J. DiIulio Jr. (appointed by Bush to head the
White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) states that:
"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on
in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is
everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's
the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis" (The Drudge Report 2002, December
1, 2002). DiIulio has since "apologized" for his criticism,
under the pressure of White House Spokesperson Ari Fleisher, who knows
that democratic debate has no place in a single-party dictatorship of
capital. What is
revealed by the collapse of the multi-party system is that the modern
"democratic" state of "multiple parties", "civil
rights", and national "self-determination"—at one time
seemingly "immortalized" in the "United Nations"—has
become outdated and has outlived its historical usefulness to imperialist
capital. The "freedoms" of the modern "democratic"
state, which were once necessary for the protection of the developing
bourgeoisie (and helping it secure a domestic labor force to exploit), are
becoming too restrictive for U.S. monopoly capital and, therefore, have to
go. This is not a simple matter of a shift in political
"policy". Rather, it is a historical matter of economic
necessity for the ruling class. U.S. capital is
in a deep crisis of profitability (overtly marked by the collapse of the
telecom industry and the recent corporate scandals). Along with its
(failed) strategy to buffer a decline in the rate of profit by
appropriating millions of dollars from the retirement funds of U.S.
workers, U.S. capital is in a ruthless pursuit of new profitable
investments and new conditions of production by obtaining the rights to
appropriate the oil and labor of Central Asia and the Middle East—which
bourgeois democracy gets in the way of. To
state this more clearly: The
readiness of the ruling class to dispense with the now outdated
("democratic") relations because they threaten profitability is
a dramatic index of the deepening contradiction between the relentless
global expansion and development of the productive forces that makes
possible the meeting of all people's needs, and the efforts to ensure that
production remains organized around private accumulation (profit). It
is in this context that the emphasis now paid to the need for
"national security" to protect "our (democratic)
way of life" should also be understood: as part of the ideological
means by which the single-party capitalist oligarchy popularizes the
narrow class interests of U.S. monopoly capital as in the general
interests of "all Americans". "Our way of life" has
been a way to bribe American workers into quiet consent: to produce a
labor aristocracy which does not mind the acquisition of cheap Iraqi oil
through the slaughter and exploitation of "other" workers in
order to compensate for the "decent" living wages (by far the
lowest in the advanced capitalist nations) that are denied to them by
their "own" ruling class. But
behind the cultural slogans, and behind the economic mechanisms producing
the consent of workers to the relations of exploitation, the economic
relations of "American" capital tell a different story: not one
of "democratic self-determination" of "our way of
life" but of the parasitism of U.S. capital's dependence on the
exploited labor of the world proletariat. This parasitism of U.S.
imperialism—its theft of the surplus-labor of the international
proletariat—and the concentration of production into fewer hands that is
part and parcel of imperialist conquest not only is not in the historic
class interests of the world working class in the struggle for a society
free from exploitation of their collective labor, but is not even in the
"immediate" interests of any workers. The rule of monopoly capital has led not
to an increase but a decline in the standard of living of the
majority of workers, including those in the U.S. where the productivity of
labor is the highest in the world and where the wage gap has increased so
dramatically that CEOs who made 39 times the average worker's wage 30
years ago now make 1000 times the average worker's wage. "Our
way of life", to put this another way, is the way of life of the ruling class—production for
profit—which has always been a code for maintaining "them" in
"their way of life"—as a cheap pool of readily exploitable
surplus labor and a secure market for the products of the West. Far from
bringing the promise of prosperity to all, the dictatorship of capital and
its aggressive maintenance of private property relations to profit from
the surplus-labor of workers ultimately "rewards" the increased
productivity of the international proletariat with stagnation and decay of
their conditions of life, with economic immiseration for the overwhelming
majority and the constant threat to their basic life security. While the
concentration of production in capitalism leads to increased productivity
of the international proletariat—to the socialization of the productive
forces around the world—the maintenance of relations of production
based on private property (in which the few own and control the means of
production and command over the surplus-labor of millions), requires
increasingly drastic measures of economic, political, and military assault
on workers. If there is any question that the U.S. state is a dictatorship of capital against all workers, one only has to look at the readiness of Bush to threaten West Coast dock workers with a military assault if they strike for a safe workplace and other improvements to their living and working conditions. Like the dismantling of civil rights, of the welfare state, of bourgeois democracy…these are the historically necessary attempts, under capitalism, by a now unveiled dictatorship of capital to maintain increasingly outdated private property relations and try to "resolve" the crisis of profitability at the expense of workers. The only way to free all workers from exploitation (the theft of their surplus-labor) and the increasingly aggressive attack on their conditions of life in order to maintain relations of exploitation, is to free workers from this historical necessity for profit under capitalism. What is needed to struggle against the brutal dictatorship of capital—production for profit, which is always production for the few at the expense of the majority—is a dictatorship of the proletariat: production for need and freedom from necessity for all. THE
RED CRITIQUE 6 (September/October 2002) |