Abstract
By the time you read these comments, Joseph Biden will have been inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States and a political coup based on President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ claim the election was “stolen” will have failed. This second scenario was not very likely to succeed, but there are real problems that this reflects: (1) the endless attack on the election process—while never the most representative and certainly, given Republican efforts at voter suppression, biased—is a serious assault on what passes for Democracy in the world’s biggest capitalist economy; and (2) it portends a very disruptive 4 years for the Biden presidency as once again Senator McConnell and the Senate Republicans will likely stonewall all legislative efforts at passing any meaningful (albeit limited) progressive programs dealing with the challenges facing this country. At this point we have already seen the pernicious nature of the Senate as they fuss over providing immunity for companies that force workers to come to work during the pandemic and refuses to consider aid to local governments at all levels. At best any program put forward proposes inadequate assistance to workers and their families and even suggest there be cuts to the meager benefits essential to survive.
How did we get to the situation in the United States were so many people supported Trump during his term in office (though with historically low approval ratings), and then over 70 million people voted to give him a second term? That fact, and the constant drumbeat the next administration will face that they were not legitimately elected in spite of all evidence to the contrary (at present we need not go down the rabbit hole of what constitutes representative democracy in a capitalist society, or why there is a system like the Electoral College—itself a vestige of our slave owning past—that can overrule the popular vote), promises a very difficult time when the circumstances require a massive public spending agenda. One problem is that as a public we are sadly ignorant of how our society operates. While things improved over the past 4 years (in part, as the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports 2 , due to the assault on government by Trump), still 6 out of 10 people cannot name all three branches of government. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is so much confusion over how the system operates to make policies, and by an acceptance by many that as president someone like Trump should be able to have his way without Congressional or Judicial oversight. We should lay blame for this situation at the feet of a steady five decades assault on public education, on critical thinking, and on the devaluation of science and knowledge more generally and the emergence of a culture of “alternative” facts presented to support outlandish claims.
The immediate consequence of this tendency is evident as we look at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dismissed as a flu by Trump and his minion, efforts to promote safe practices to stem the spread regularly are scoffed at by both public officials and Trump supporters. Wearing a mask and keeping socially distant has become a political litmus test as well as a manifestation of toxic masculinity. What has been the result? The United States represents approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet as of the end of 2020 it has about 28% of the world’s reported cases of COVID infections, about 35% of new cases reported each day, and right now about 25% of the world’s reported new daily deaths. 3 To put this into perspective, the overall share of cases are over five times this country’s share of the world’s population, the share of new cases each day over eight times more, of all death about 4.5 times, and of new daily deaths each day almost six times its population share. Truly, the world’s richest nation has without question the most deadly and inadequate response to the pandemic.
What is even more disturbing is the fact that the United States (like other countries) does not have an accurate measure of the extent of the virus—something that is essential both in trying to stem its spread and in anticipating when economic and social activities can safely resume. According to estimates calculated by The Economist 4 one in five people in the United States are likely to have been infected by COVID-19. “America’s official tally of covid-19 cases surpassed 15m, around 5% of the population. Nearly 1.3m of those were recorded in the past seven days. But the true scale of the outbreak is almost certainly many times larger. By combining new research with official death tallies, The Economist estimates that 60m-82m people have been infected in America so far, around 3.2m of them in the past week.” Not only are the number of infected persons seriously undercounted/underestimated, there is a serious undercount of the ravages of this pandemic so that “. . .nearly a quarter of deaths in America attributable to covid-19 may go unrecorded as such.” What makes this situation so perilous is that “[m]any people who are infected have no symptoms and never get tested. When they do, tests regularly give false positives and results may not even enter official tallies.”
With the expanding health crisis is a growing economic crisis, one that began with the initial surge in the late Spring 2020, was never properly managed, and has only intensified with the recent resurgence of the pandemic and corresponding economic shutdown. The pandemic has made it clear that a reliance on private employer provided health insurance rather than a public health system (unlike those in most countries, whatever one thinks of them) is a total failure when tens of millions lose both their jobs and their insurance in a health crisis! Millions are behind on rent or mortgage payments, inadequate governmental support has left many millions more without funds to meet every-day needs (and there are no real prospects for governmental support in the near future), and now a looming foreclosure and eviction crisis threatens over 20 million people in the United States with homelessness. This disaster, approaching criminal proportions, can be easily laid at the feet of our outgoing President and all those who have ignored the danger because of how they trivialized the situation (and as reported by Bob Woodward, this was in spite of the fact that Trump knew of its seriousness and potential for real disruption 5 ). Yet, it is now the problem we inherit and must tackle over the next couple of years. This political and social deadlock does not portend well for our society going forward.
Decades of globalization, neoliberal policies and the imposition of austerity all in the service of the appropriation of the social surplus by an ever-shrinking segment of society reveals the long-term harm done to humanity. Nothing reveals the socio-economic crisis the world is facing better than the fact the Unites States, perhaps the richest country in the world, is now experiencing its worst hunger crisis in generations. By some estimates, 14 million children regularly miss meals, and between 25% and 30% of Latino and Black families experience severe food and nutrition insecurity. This is not just a COVID-19 effect—by the end of 2019 an estimated 37 million people in the United States struggled with hunger and malnutrition. At the same time, technological advances in US food production, dominated by corporate farming, means that the United States produces more than enough food to feed every person—so what explains this persistent inequality? Widespread poverty prevents large numbers of Americans from sufficient food because either they can’t afford to purchase enough food, or they live in “food deserts.” in communities without adequate commercial outlets for fresh and healthy food. The question before us is how to move forward, envision a different society, and effect meaningful change.
Democratic goals and processes are inherently worthwhile, and they are more attuned to the interests of the vast majority than those economic strategies associated with the mainstream and the international financial markets. The implementation of democratic and redistributive economic strategies depends less on their internal consistency than on political limitations. The most important constraint to democratic economic strategies is not resource scarcity, and certainly not theoretical limitations. What limits their implementation is the lack of sufficient political capacity to enforce alternatives based on the joint efforts of governments, political economists, the workers’ movement, and civil society.
Public policy must play a key role in a democratic economic strategy, not just because of the imperatives of resource mobilization, international influence, and the law, but because the state is a fundamental tool for collective action. The state is the only social institution that is at least potentially democratically accountable, one that can influence the pattern of employment, the production and distribution of goods and services, and the distribution of income and assets at the level of society as a whole, in order to align economic activity with the demands of the majority. The only way to overcome the overlapping weaknesses of the poor is through their political mobilization.
This should be welcomed as it is essential in order to counter the strength of capitalist interests, and the drag of all kinds of inequalities upon the condition of the poor. Mass mobilization can offer the poor avenues for the expression of their needs, and it will give political leverage to governments pursuing greater economic and political democracy. This set of suggestions is not meant to offer a program of action, but only to point to a direction of travel, and to illustrate the potential implications, in practice, of the analysis of poverty inspired by Marx, in contrast with the intellectual and practical poverty of neoclassical economic and mainstream political science thinking, especially in the current conditions of spreading authoritarian neoliberalism.
There can be no left politics without strong mass movements, especially if we expect practical achievements and not just rhetorical proclamations. Of course, we are in the dire situation we are in partly because of the weakness of the working class. But political debates around the improvement of the situation of the class, the importance of the decommodification of social reproduction, and so on, can only strengthen the left. A more specific response is that it is not for academics or conferences to “write recipes for the cookshops of the future,” as Marx once said about himself. At most, we can think logically consistent thoughts, perhaps also grounded on history, but the implementation of a revolutionary program, in however many stages may be required—that is a practical problem that we cannot influence any more than anyone else can. The point, as Marx argued, is that there can be no political democracy without economic democracy, and economic equality is essential for political equality. Political democracy without economic democracy ends up being a program to protect the rights of property—a situation that returns us to greater inequality and persistent poverty. Democracy and equality are mutually essential to allow everyone to become an equal member of society, and to realize their potential. Ultimately, these goals are incompatible with capitalism. Sadly, the end of the Trump Presidency and the beginning of the Biden era does not offer much in the way of real potential for economic and social policies that will address the fundamental relationship that drive inequality, poverty and privation.
How to get there is the same practical political problem that the left has been addressing for generations as it attempts to realize its historical ambition to free people from the dictatorship of moneyed interests, from destitution due to large-scale poverty, and from inequality engendered by wealth and multiple privileges. The reality is that only a class project can be truly emancipatory. The challenge, under the conditions of the society molded by a heavily financialized and authoritarian neoliberalism and in crisis because of finance, inequality, poverty and environmental threats, is to draw on the left traditions of struggle against capitalism as a system, and to connect local struggles that make sense to people on the ground, with a general transformative program pegged around the working class as the only social group possessing both an immediate interest in resisting capitalist exploitation but also, at least potentially, the collective power to end it.
Currently working-class action is at its lowest level for two generations, and labor has been suffering its heaviest defeats over several decades. But if a Marxist analysis is good for anything, it is to tell us that the end of capitalism will come about through the collective efforts of all working people, or not at all. As a more immediate goal, we should aim to destabilize neoliberalism; this will require attacking its material basis through a set of democratic economic policy initiatives supporting a shift to more equal distributions of income, wealth and power, and advocating higher levels of material welfare for the poor to promote human development and alleviate poverty. These are fundamental conditions for democracy—not a conventional neoliberal democracy, but a radical democracy that must be incompatible with capitalism. This strategy must be supported by a politically re-articulated working class as one of the main levers for its own economic re-composition.
The difficulty is that this virtuous circle cannot be just wished into being. Its elements cannot be addressed purely academically, or by the organization of another political party, or through alliances between the already existing forces of the left. The construction of a new economic, social and political model destabilizing capitalism will require mass mobilizations strong enough not just to demand change from governments, or even changes of government, but strong enough to transform the state through organized mass action. This requires at some point taking over the state from within, through the appropriation, neutralization and re-invention of progressive institutions.
Without a revolutionary perspective and theory, people will continue to be oppressed as witnessed by the countless examples of people who appeared to win their struggle yet failed to emancipate themselves from the new enemies. We have to learn from their tragedies. A socialist progressive solution cannot survive indefinitely within a larger capitalist framework. In the past socialism surrounded by capitalism can become authoritarian in order to defend its political and economic regime. So how should we construct an alternative true socialism? This is the task which all Marxists must embrace in order to break from the cycles of oppression and poverty which now grips this country.
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Sociology examines society through the presentation of evidence, qualitatively and quantitatively collected, usually grounded in the written word—presentations that journals like this one typically promote. Within the last several decades there is a growing acceptance of visual representation and communication within the discipline. These representations of scholarly findings have been successfully centered on the recognizable forms of photographs and documentary filmmaking. There are alternative forms of visual presentations of critical scholarly work, forms which we hope to encourage through the establishment of a section in the journal we call Graphic Sociology, and with the appointment of Amanda Garrison as our Graphics Editor. Graphic sociology is a way of representing social problems, inequalities, power relations, and the many real “truths” of people whose stories make up “the social” that is at the heart of sociology. Starting with this issue, Critical Sociology presents alternative forms of visual representations of the lived experience as a form of academic scholarship. We invite other graphic artists critically exploring dominant relationships and practices in society to contact Amanda at