Anti-Capitalism and the challenge to rule by money.

One of the main tasks of Anti-Capitalism is to recognize and expose the methods capital uses to block the majority from full, democratic participation in the political and economic systems that govern our society. The iron law of capital is that it gravitates to wherever it can take the greatest profit. It confounds, by any means possible, whatever stands in the way of profit. Nothing else matters--let the worker be beggared, the empire set loose to slaughter millions, or the planet baked to mass extinction. Only with unwavering vigilance and effort does anything stand in capital’s path.

One of the results of capital’s pervasive control over human values is alienation, which means the worker’s estrangement from the system that produces goods and services and assigns them value, but it also refers to the worker’s estrangement from the political process. Worn down by the futility of influencing choices made by the political class, the alienated voter retreats into abstention or turns to the crude and easily manipulated politics of identity, conditions that serve to prevent challenges to the ruling class by short-circuiting even the possibility of a deeper, class-based consciousness.

This is not an accident or unintended consequence of the capitalist system, but one if its most potent weapons. Along with techniques like erasing militant labor history from public education and preventing leftist voices from being heard in the mass media (all the better to eliminate the idea that working people can, and have, successfully challenged capital), alienation fosters political control. Just as the thoroughly captured political class wants to prevent any challenge to capital by erasing history and eliminating dissent, they also want to keep your vote from mattering, except as it may accrue to one of the two acceptable factions of the capitalist class.

The most vivid demonstration of the alienation of the voter from traditional electoral politics is the stunning decline in identification with the major parties.

Alienation benefits the two-party system.

At first blush, it seems counter-intuitive. How can falling voter identification benefit any political party, let alone both the parties that dominate American politics?

As this poll demonstrates, major party identification has gone from about 67% in 1988 to 56% in 2014. Independent identification, once negligible, then long at a level somewhere near that of the major parties, has rocketed past both major parties since the middle of the Bush administration. The total rejecting both Democratic and Republican parties is an astounding 56% higher than the average identification with either party.

Nothing in the current political atmosphere, where the two of the most disliked individuals ever to win their parties’ nomination fight for the presidency, promises to change this. While the ultra-polarizing contest between the ruling class’s consensus candidate and the insurgent white nationalist has sent many Independent leaners running into one camp or the the other, the contest will soon be over, leaving the major parties’ essential nature unchanged.

Finally given some breathing room, the Republican establishment will almost certainly move to dispose of their bright orange albatross (look for a joint project by business Republicans, the DNC, and the mass media to tie Trump fatally to his record of sexual assault), giving them the chance to restructure the machinery that reliably channels their aging dupes’ anger into a manageable resource. The Democrats will continue wrapping themselves in the mantle of a friendly capitalism that cannot mask its cynical identity politics and vicious greed. Apocalypse averted, Democratic and Republican leaders will have nothing new to talk about and nothing new to attract partisans from an understandably unimpressed millennial generation, the only source of new blood available.

The Age of Disgust grinds on.

How is the loss of identification, the sense that a voter is not merely willing to consider a party, but ready to become a reliable member of the team, helpful to the major parties? If you see through the lens of normative politics, it’s hard to say. Normative politics assumes the purpose of the parties is to present a coherent, principled program to the voters in such a way as to give that party the majority it needs to execute the program. Since the parties are more accurately seen as machines for channeling different constituencies into the hands of the two relevant factions of American capital, the normative understanding naturally fails.

The key is to see instead through the lens of power; popularity doesn’t matter. By power, I don’t mean the power of a mass party that effectively listens and responds to nearly half the electorate in order to accomplish its program, but the power of the respective elites who control the parties on behalf of capital. It is to their benefit to have as small a club as possible policing the primary process and as small a club as possible competing for the career and monetary rewards that come with their connections. The stability of the system that produces their rewards is paramount.

The notion that these agents of the ruling class care about anything but power is a delusion, one irrevocably destroyed in the case of the Democratic party when recent leaks that exposed conversations they were having among themselves when they thought no one was listening. Of course the Republicans are no better on this score. One of the reasons Donald Trump is so despised by the Republican elite is that he threatens to change the terms of the deal they thought they had negotiated with the ruling class. The stability of the reward system is in danger.

The Republicans sealed their fate this election by failing to police their nativist base and by failing to anticipate a white nationalist insurgent. The Democrats faced a harrowing challenge to a widely disliked but establishment-approved candidate whose polling numbers versus the Republicans—already daunting—promised to go even lower when threatened by a populist who represented lost the New Deal values the neoliberal elite thought they had done away with once and for all. Neither party has any intention of letting this mess happen again.

Alienation is one of their most potent weapons to prevent a repeat, and the target is you.