Donald Trump: The unanticipated apotheosis of neoliberalism

All the president’s men: The contradictions and continuities of the capitalist state

Neither the capitalist class nor the Republican establishment wanted Donald Trump as president of one of the leading imperial powers. As Charlie Post has shown, this is not because the Grand Old Party of capitalism, or sharks such as the US Chamber of Commerce, steeped in racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia, was merely queasy about a man with a proven record of sexual assault and other exploits. It is because Trump’s political platform included worrying detractions from the neoliberal status quo. Trump’s opposition to free trade agreements and his hard line approach to immigration control concerned the ruling class. Again, this is not because the capitalist class is pro-immigrant, but for the simple reason that with closed borders and mass deportations capital would be without a pool of vulnerable people whose very vulnerability and “illegality” would provide excellent conditions for their exploitation (Post, 2016).

There have been a range of developments since Trump’s “coronation” that highlight this deep contradiction between a capitalist class being at odds with the head of the capitalist state.

It, however, must be said at the outset, that despite not having had their way with the actual figure of the President, it is not as though the capitalist class has lost control over the American state. In the aftermath of the elections, the watchdog organization, Public Citizen, noted,

the Chamber [of Commerce] involved itself most heavily in races for the U.S. Senate, spending a total of $25.8 million in 10 Senate races … for the first time, 100 percent of the Chamber’s general election spending benefited Republican candidates. The Chamber’s 2016 election spending makes it clear that … the Chamber has become an arm for the Republican Party. (Karlin, 2016)

All the more reasons that a section of the state, represented by Trump, Bannon, and their cronies, are now coming up against the vast unelected bureaucracy, military apparatus that is also the capitalist state. As one commentator bluntly stated, Trump is “struggling to just control the White House, let alone the executive branch … and reports of infighting among his top staff are worse than any president in modern history” (Goddard, 2017). Despite (or if our analysis is correct, because of) Republican control over the Senate, the President has made little headway in getting his political appointees in place. Even his signature Executive Order, the travel ban for Muslims, has been openly criticized by members of his own party and is now being stalled in courts.

Trump is thus having to relent in many ways. His appointments of Rex Tillerson (Exxon Mobile) and several former Goldman Sachs executives in the administration are proof of the long-term interests of capital holding sway over the thug- gish and narcissitic vision of Trump himself. Indeed, even the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, recently went on CNBC to express his concern over so many members of his firm holding key positions in the federal government!

There are, then, fault lines between the person of Trump, the social forces he champions, and the institution of the US presidency. It is worth remembering that the Democratic Party is making a distinction between these two forces—valiantly opposing the former only in order to support the latter. Nancy Pelosi has made clear (https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/nancy-pelosi-says-democrats-have-a-responsibility-to-find-co?utm_term=.yqgNNoZeE#.wk6WW3MAN) that Democrats “have a responsibility” to find “common ground” with Trump. This is entirely unsurprising because the Democrats are as much wedded to the maintenance of the neoliberal order as their cohorts across the aisle and no bourgeois politician underestimates how crucial the unelected institutions of the state are to the maintenance of ‘free’ trade and bourgeois democracy. Indeed, the rise of Trumpism has been largely enabled by the last 40 years of bipartisan support of neoliberal policies which have devastated real incomes, birthed staggering inequalities, and produced the moment we are now in. Even the “Muslim ban,” as Glenn Greenwald rightly points out, was only made possible because Trump had available to him 16 years of virulent Islamophobia, pursued by both parties, which have been American ruling class’s “central fuel driving the war on terror” (Greenwald, 2017).

How the Trump regime will unfold will depend on the balance of power between the two forces within the capitalist state, between Trump and the apparatus that he thinks he controls, and crucially upon what we do on the streets, against both.

This is why we should be clear on which social forces back Trump and how we, for our part, can reclaim an insurgent politics for our times.

Playing race against class: Neoliberalism’s challenge for us

The morning after Trump won, the Washington Post led with the story that Trump had won 58% of the White vote, outperforming “in majority-white areas.” Similarly, the Guardian embellished on this bete noir of the “white working class”: Apparently, it was the “angry” white working class that helped Trump to a “stunning win” (Swaine, 2016).

Undoubtedly sections of the white working class voted for Trump. The day after the election results, in an effort to document the moment, I spoke with a range of working-class women in Indiana. Some of their comments on Trump captures the deep veins of contradiction that ran through sections of the US working class who voted for Trump.

‘Mary’ is a housecleaner on $12 an hour and no benefits. She is mother to four children, one of them disabled. She is white and about 30. She voted Trump, because, she told me, she “could never vote for Hillary. She sounds like my boss, John. I feel she is lying all the time.”

“No one in my town has jobs” Mary continued,

Warren county, Fountain county, every house has more unemployed people than ever. The Ford factory near Bloomington was where many of my family members worked. My uncle Frank worked there for 32 years. They let him go with 6 months of pay. He had never learnt to do anything else. If Trump lowers the taxes, maybe Ford will come back again? All I want is people to have jobs.

[why Trump specifically?]

you know, he has three bankruptcies to his name, like many people I know, but he always manages to bounce back and have money. maybe he will teach us how to do it. Hillary has never had to worry about money. (Interview with Author)

“Mary” saved her most stunning comment about the elections when I asked her about Trump’s comments about women and people of color: “If I was alone in a room with him” said Mary without a moment’s hesitation, “I would hit him. I can’t stand him.”

Like Mary, many workers of the Momentive chemical plant, in Saratoga county in New York, had voted for Trump because of his economic promises. The workers are currently on strike at the plant, part owned until recently by Trump’s choice for “job czar,” the hedge fund billionaire, Stephen Schwarzman. The workers are striking against wage cuts and the slashing of healthcare and pension benefits. Striking worker Carmine Cervini, 61, in an uncanny echo of Mary’s words, told the media “Trump promised to help America, to get us good jobs. Well here we are, fighting for our good jobs. I voted for him. I’m going to give him a chance” (Otis, 2017).

Commonsensically, there are two explanatory tropes for this class-logic of the Trump voter.

The first is, what I shall call, a class-against-race argument. As the Washington Post report above claimed, white workers voted for Trump because they are racist.

The second trope is similar but with a significant twist, which I shall call the class-above-race argument. A recent Guardian article ludicrously titled, “Trump is no fascist. He is a champion for the forgotten millions,” summarizes it well: “America” this argument goes, “is divided between the elites and everybody else, and Trump’s election was a rejection of the elites.” In other words, it was a “class” vote by the white working class, faced with the depredations of neoliberal capitalism, and general economic decline (Davidson, 2017).

What both these tropes have in common are (a) holding the white working class responsible for Trump’s victory and (b) positing the white working class as privileging bread and butter issues (wages, benefits, etc.) over social issues (racism, police brutality, sexual violence).

The most substantial response to this eternal perdition of the white working class has been provided by Kim Moody. Moody shows that despite the fact that Trump got 58% of the white vote, and irrespective of the fact that he won the key “rust belt” states, it was “upper-income groups” who “were overrepresented in the voting electorate as a whole, and both candidates drew a disproportionate part of their vote from the well-to-do, with Trump a bit more reliant on high-income voters (Moody, 2017).” Indeed, even the Economist (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/04/daily-chart-14?zid=297&ah=3ae0fe266c7447d8a0c7ade5547d62ca), not known for its defense of the working class, concluded that “the idea that it is the mostly poor, less-educated voters who are drawn to Mr. Trump is a bit of a myth” (The Economist Daily Chart, 2016).

But as the comments of the various workers above show, a section, of the white working class, albeit small, did vote Trump. This lived experience of the US working class encapsulate: (a) a general set of social relations capitalism generate and (b) a very specific ideological work neoliberalism has done, both of which we need to be particularly attentive to in this period and that I seek to explore in the rest of this section.

To the first, capitalist social relations generate both collective solidaristic action and other opposing forms of practices that pit sections of the working class against one other. The very nature of accumulation dictates competition within the working class and ensures that previous histories of race and gender are reinvented and recrafted to serve capital. Robert and Johanna Brenner’s analysis of voting patterns within the working class during the Reagan era is relevant here:

workers are not only collective producers with a common interest in taking collective control over social production. They are also individual sellers of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs, promotions, etc. This individualistic point of view has a critical advantage in the current period: in the absence of class against class organization. It seems to provide an alternative strategy for effective action—a sectionalist strategy which pits one layer of workers against another. (Brenner and Brenner, 2016)

Michael McCarthy’s insightful essay on race and the labor market elaborates on this. McCarthy demonstrates that apparently race-neutral, ‘purely economic’ processes are anything but. Periods of capitalist boom and bust intensify existing competition and often threaten the economic position of those workers—in the United States, usually white—who, for historically racist reasons, held better paid jobs. Such competition, although created in a new context, use historically available racist history and tensions to divide workers. “Far from dissolving racial inequality,” McCarthy shows, “these market processes reproduce it” (McCarthy, 2016).

While these processes are always true of capitalism, it is worth paying attention to political forms specific to the neoliberal moment that exacerbates and consolidates these structural imperatives of capital.

While agreeing with the mainstream media’s rust-belt-decline thesis, I would propose that the decline in wages and living conditions for the US working class in the last 40 years of neoliberalism has had a special inflection. I have argued elsewhere how in these decades, capital has waged a class struggle against the working class (both nationally and globally) in two related ways: one, at the point of production or in workplaces by breaking unions and two, by attacking the means by which the worker needs to replenish her labor power: through food, shelter and social services. Furthermore, that since capital has so far been fairly successful in achieving the first, much of working class struggle in the neoliberal period, at least in the Global North, has taken place in the sphere of the second—in fights for food, water, shelter, schools, and healthcare.

The decline or near absence of workplace struggles in the United States, then, does not mean there has been no “class struggle,” rather that the boundaries between “social” and “wage” struggles have been blurred as the working class, having been largely defeated at the point of production, has tried to defend lives, and communities at points of social reproduction.

The mythology of class versus social struggle, however, has been sustained by capital in a number of ways. Prominent in this strategy has been to equate all language of class with white workers, while sectoralizing social issues (read race, gender) as the purview of racialized people.

In reality, the US working class today is pervasively multiracial. Even union membership, as low as it is, shows that Black workers are more likely to be union members than white workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017).

Second, neoliberal rhetoric, particularly in the United States, has violently and grievously severed conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality and other oppressions from class. For every oppression that capitalism produces, the neoliberal moment has produced its uncanny, simulacrum-solution. For instance, for sexism, there is on offer as a solution, lean-in feminism, for racism, there is pull-up your pants.

I call them an uncanny simulacrum to the oppressions themselves because they appear to be their solutions while in reality strengthening their grip on society. Women like Sheryl Sandberg (net worth $1. 3 billion) have been hailed to have reframed “discussions of gender” and “rebooted feminism” (Time Magazine, 2013), while the United States remains one of four countries in the world that lacks any paid maternity leave and whose levels of child and maternal poverty are much higher than other parts of the industrialized world (Bhattacharya, 2013). Similarly, the last 8 years of a Black Presidency has seen an alarming rise in the cold-blooded murder of Black men by forces of the state, while mass incarceration has ensured that there are more Black men in prison than were slaves before the start of the Civil War (Alexander, 2010). Yet, one of the more memorable phrases of the first Black President remains, “brothers should pull up their pants.” As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has remarked about this vision of respectability politics, “[a]s if the best parenting…or the best-fitting pants in the world can bridge the financial gap between the $11,000 a year the U.S. spends on public school students and the $30,000 the U.S. spends to keep someone in prison” (Taylor, 2013).

Let there be mass ungovernability