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Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: Agita, Agit-Prop, and the US gale of creative destruction
Agita and agitprop are the current features of what purports to be Trumpian US policy in numerous areas of contradiction, whether it’s international trade chaos or racist border policies.
Vulture capitalists are investors that acquire distressed firms in the hopes of making them more profitable so as to ultimately sell them for a profit.[1] Due to their aggressive investing nature, and the methods they use to make firms more profitable, vulture capitalists are often criticized.[2]
Some writers would like to attribute child-like motives to current WH policies, considering the use of tweets as “official statements”, however false, infantile, and irrational. SAD! As if preying on mass anxiety was a useful policy.
They are of a piece, considering that like all presidential records, they ultimately will define the false consciousness of a certain proportion of the electorate. Trump’s obvious predation in terms of exploiting child sexuality also manifests itself as financial predation, pillaging financial entities via bankruptcy.
Theories of media effects help us understand how Trumpian agita affects news cycles using the unfortunate role of quasi-state media and legitimation effects, as Trump occasionally manipulates insider information to benefit crony capitalists.
Capitalist uncertainty is a feature of theories of crisis, and Trumpism’s erratic behavior tries to mask the usual RW attempts to destabilize the existing state and impose more draconian authoritarian rule via distortions legal and legislative branches.
White working-class "economic anxiety" is a zombie idea that needs to die Donald Trump was supported by white voters across demographic groups. www.salon.com/...Dehumanizing the Other is a prime feature of WH policy, whether it’s sexuality or race, anonymizing causality to create uncertainty. This is a feature of autocratic cults of personality and certainly concretized in the capitalist “branding” of commodities, where racism is euphemized as a economic nationalism that motivates ethnocentrism. It’s agita, as a so-called “economic anxiety” is no different than racist fears whipped up as demographic change continues with globalized modernization.
White working-class "economic anxiety" is a zombie idea that needs to die Donald Trump was supported by white voters across demographic groups. www.salon.com/...
Following the extensive setbacks to independent working class politics, the widespread destruction both of people, property and capital value, the 1930s and '40s saw attempts to reformulate Marx's analysis with less revolutionary consequences, for example in Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction.[15][16] In this context "crisis" refers to an especially sharp bust cycle of the regular boom and bust pattern of what Marxists term "chaotic" capitalist development, which, if no countervailing action is taken, develops into a recession or depression.[17]
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It continues to be argued in terms of historical materialism theory, that such crises will repeat until objective and subjective factors combine to precipitate the transition to the new mode of productioneither by sudden collapse in a final crisis or gradual erosion of the basing on competition and the emerging dominance of cooperation.
[...]
David Yaffe in his application of the theory in the conditions of the end of the Post War Boom in the early 1970's - made an influential link to the expanding role of the state's interventions into economic relations as a politically critical element in attempts by capital to counteract the tendency and find news ways to make the working class pay for the crisis.
In Marxian economic theory the concept refers more broadly to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism.[3][4][5]According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".[2]
Trump is the poster child for “the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism.” His personal business history represents that path, with nearly going bankrupt and being captured by Russian money and obligation from his earliest contact with Russian operatives. There are tapes.
A recent book by Francois Chesnais gives us a better handle at seeing structural context for the current stage of capitalist crisis and allows us a way to delimit Trumpian clown-barbarism. We’re not yet at the tipping-point of stunts or the end of the Trump regime.Trump’s agitprop manifests itself in a variety of political stunts ranging from the banal to the ridiculous, most recently manifest in his antics at the G-7 and the Singapore summit with the DPRK,, with the backdrop being his media celebrity history often merging his predatory activity as sexual assault and financial assault. And there are tapes.
As Chesnais sees it, the crisis of the last forty years is one of overaccumulation and overproduction, aggravated by a declining rate of profit.
He views overaccumulation as an excess of production capacity in relation to its valorization, indicating problems of realization and the overproduction of goods; this comes alongside the persistent and growing plethora of capital seeking interest and to transform itself into “fictitious capital.”
In his retrospective, Chesnais recalls that the crisis of the 1970s may be explained by the rise in the organic composition of capital and the emergence of overproduction among national economies that, while interdependent, remained self-centered and autonomous.
The system responded to this crisis in three ways:
what Chesnais calls the neoconservative revolution, with the creation and implementation of global policies of liberalization and the deregulation of finance, commerce, and foreign direct investment (in effect, taking autonomy away from national economies);
staunch support for China’s entry into the capitalist system; and,
after the run of crises in the late 1990s, mass recourse to the creation of credit, with the implementation of a “debt-led growth regime.”
François Chesnais, Finance Capital Today: Corporations and Banks in the Lasting Global Slump (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018), 328 pages, $28.00, paperback.
Nevertheless, as Chesnais observes, capitalism comes out just fine. Its expiration date is nowhere in sight. In other words, the current situation may persist for a long time, in an increasingly unstable system that produces little growth and ever deeper inequality, brutally accelerating the exploitation of labor and the expropriation of surplus value. What is at stake, Chesnais concludes, is not the future of capitalism, but that of civilization itself.
Three recent examples demonstrate the irrationality of Trumpian policy and the need to track the contradictions in media representations of it. In the first example, the meme of tariffs is distorted by Trump, only to need disambiguating by the Brookings Institution
Interesting. You know how Trump led a vicious attack on Canada because they put a 300% tariff on dairy?
They don't. It's a never-used legal penalty. We have a huge dairy surplus with Canada. https://t.co/gXhExVUdWr
As a practical matter, no dairy products are sold to Canada outside the quota, so no U.S. exports really pay a high tariff.
In the end, either the President isn’t aware of all the facts about Canadian dairy tariffs and how they could have been ended had his administration stuck with the TPP, or like his misuse of trade deficit statistics to justify import restrictions, he is using another poor justification for offending one of our closest allies.
In a second example, the erratic nature of Trump trade policy gets a variety of contrasting readings that also require attention to other elements of the story, such as Trump family predation in the Chinese market and the most obvious elements such as bribes and trademark chicanery. One needs to be reminded that much of US policy was supportive of Chinese entry into the capitalist system, despite its own kleptocratic tendencies.
Chinese leaders âÂÂabsolutely confusedâ by TrumpâÂÂs demands on trade https://t.co/P4mKaUt6qY
Beyond the feints and jabs, he’s raised so many different issues that it’s hard to know what his priorities might really be.
The strategy is straight out of “The Art of the Deal”: “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” But some doubt that approach translates to negotiating with a global superpower. By all accounts, it has left the Chinese increasingly mystified about what Trump really wants at a pivotal moment when the world’s two largest economies are teetering on the edge of sustained trade warfare.
“They’re absolutely confused,” Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said of the Chinese.
Without clear demands, he argued, Beijing is unlikely to offer much. “The concession has to get them something. And they don’t know what they’re going to get because the U.S. doesn’t have a strategy.”
Chinese officials, for their part, are increasingly blunt about their frustration.
“We appeal our American interlocutors to be credible and consistent,” Li Kexin, minister at the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a speech Tuesday at the Institute for China-America Studies. “When you agree, you mean it.”
And on Friday, Gao Feng, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Commerce, criticized the U.S. as “capricious.”
Trump’s aggressive approach is a reversal from more than a decade of U.S. policy toward China, which involved negotiating on a suite of business issues every year to make incremental progress. Any gains were secured largely by convincing Beijing that a more open economy was ultimately in its best interests — a tactic that worked very slowly and only to a point.
The president’s willingness to antagonize China more directly has largely been embraced by the U.S. companies and workers desperate for quicker and more substantial results. But veterans of international negotiations are skeptical that negotiations will succeed unless they’re more clearly focused.
“Yes, they have a plan. No, I don’t think it will work,” said Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The plan is always push harder, demand everything and offer nothing.”
The underlying structure of China’s economy is the cause of many of U.S. companies’ most intractable complaints, something that won’t change in a matter of weeks or even months.
Beijing makes U.S. companies jump through more hoops than domestic companies. It conducts cyber espionage and steals U.S. trade secrets and intellectual property, like patents. And the Chinese government subsidizes its companies on a grand scale, guaranteeing that they can sell goods below a market-set price.
All of these policies have been identified by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative as the impetus for new tariffs set to be imposed on $50 billion in Chinese goods. But across the ideological spectrum, China watchers are worried the president’s laser-like focus on the trade deficit may lead him to lose focus on seeking structural changes to the Chinese nonmarket system.
“This is a multiyear process that involves a lot of pain,” Scissors said. “If you don’t want to face the pain and take the time, then don’t do it.”
And finally, one needs to see that the agit-prop of mass action needs to be seen in contrast to structural directions among classes, which may see short-run failures to achieve trade union goals as only a prelude to more serious socialist gains.
France stands at a fork in the road. The president’s recent fawning performance in Washington only further indicates the direction of travel if his opponents fail to derail his project. From the rail system to the universities, Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism in French colors is the order of the day. As France marks the anniversary of May 1968, workers and students across the country will be hoping that Macron’s chocolate-coated plans won’t last the long, hot summer. www.jacobinmag.com/...College campuses also saw major mobilizations this spring. In protest against education reforms that introduce selective admissions procedures, hitherto confined to only a few elite institutions, student activists launched a series of occupations across the country. The undergraduate campus of the University of Paris 1, known as Tolbiac, saw a particularly intense occupation that lasted nearly a month before it was evacuated by riot police. Student occupations also took off in Montpellier, Toulouse, Rennes, Nantes, and elsewhere.
While young people and students generally sympathized with these education protests, the movement itself never became a critical mass. Failed last-ditch attempts to disrupt students’ exams testified to this weakness. By the same token, students in Paris were never able to occupy the Sorbonne for more than a few hours. The symbolism would have been rich: it was in the courtyard of this historic university where the events of May ’68 kicked off. But student activists’ inability to rally enough supporters to sustain an occupation in May 2018 — or at the very least, force more than one intervention from riot police — underlined the movement’s insufficient base.
Fallen Flat?
The CGT, the largest of the rail unions, has called for continued strikes in July, as it tries to keep pressure on the government. But just this week, labor’s united front at the SNCF finally collapsed: the UNSA union has decided not to continue striking next month and the CFDT is considering the same. If it follows suit, that would leave only the CGT and SUD-Rail on strike — and the opposition to Macron’s rail reforms in critical condition. (Union elections at the SNCF in November loom large over all the decision-making, with each organization wanting to point to advances.)
If the Macron government breaks the once-powerful rail unions, it will undoubtedly be seen as a major victory. But it shouldn’t be cause to miss the context. The myriad protests and strikes of recent months make clear that the ingredients for a more sustained movement against his government are in place. And Emmanuel Macron remains unpopular — a recent poll found he had just 42 percent approval, on a par with Donald Trump’s ratings in the United States. Continued pro-business reforms do not bode well for his presidency, nor do ongoing provocations that increasingly reveal the government’s agenda. One minister recently said there were “too many” social welfare programs in France. Shortly thereafter, Macron himself quipped that social programs cost “crazy money.”
There is also some consolation for the strike movement. Several weeks after the work stoppages began, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced the government would take over more than half of the SNCF’s massive €55 billion debt — a longstanding demand from rail unions. This can be seen as a concession — a modest one, but an acknowledgement of the power of collective action. More importantly, the rail reforms managed to do what countless prior reforms prior failed to do: bring labor unions and left-wing parties together on the streets.
This course provides an introduction to social crisis with a focus on the present. We imagine five sessions. 1) Introduction, reading Anwar Shaik’s discussion of various theories of crisis 2) Detailed discussion of “underconsumptionist” theories, including Luxemburg and Harvey 3) Detailed discussion of “profit squeeze” theories, Brenner, and Italian autonomists 4) Ecological crisis and capitalism 5) Detailed discussion of crisis of accumulation While the course’s approach is mostly through a critique of political economy, we will also address the relationship of capitalist and ecological crisis. We’ll start with an introduction to leading crisis theories, their strengths and limits, and the central question of whether the causes of crisis are internal or external to capital. We will also try to situate crisis theory in relation to other significant contemporary concerns: immaterial and affective labor, communization, ecology, financialization, and more. This course will be facilitated by Joshua Clover, Neil Larsen, and others to be announced. crisistheory4anticaps.wordpress.com
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![crisis-chart[3]](https://genehowington.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/crisis-chart3.png)
