Warnings from America. posted by Richard Seymour

A brief column by Gary Younge yesterday drew attention to some studies indicating that wealth is more likely to be transferred by inheritance in the US than in Canada and much of Europe, while higher education is very much an elite affair. No surprises there, and no surprise either that the Republicans are pressing for the abolition or substantial reduction of the estate tax, while conducting a massive ideological purge in the academia and weakening support for poorer students. They intend that polarisation to become even more entrenched. Much as in the UK, the capitalist class prefers education to reproduce class distinctions rather than efface them, which is they are always whining when too many people get good results - how does an employer distinguish? But look at this:



While the richest one per cent have been raking it in as they have not done since the age of the robber barons, "the vast majority of American incomes have not kept up with inflation for the past six years." Meanwhile, "A recent Congressional Budget Office report shows that, between 1979 and 2003, the top 1 percent of households enjoyed a 129 percent gain in after-tax income after inflation. That compares with 15 percent for the middle one-fifth of all households and 4 percent for the bottom fifth." Further, "So much of the fruits of economic productivity growth from 1966 to 2001 went to the top 10 percent that little was left for the other 90 percent, notes a new paper by Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon and student Ian Dew-Becker." Well, this is to be expected. On the one hand, capitalists do not introduce labour-saving devices or demand improved labour productivity in order to spread the wealth. On the other, the offensive of the Reagan years was about nothing so abstruse as a hostility to 'big government': it was about restoring capitalist class power in the US by eroding and dismantling gains made by the working class and left in previous decades.

It used to be astonishing - to me at any rate - that 22 million Americans live in trailer parks, that is homes that are usually one step up from the street. But how does it feel, I wonder, to add a detail like this?: "The New York Times recently reported a boom in building mega-yachts, some as long as a football field. Big yachts have multiplied from 4,000 a decade ago to 7,000 now. Only a few slips can accommodate the biggest boats, each of which can cost $200 million. (Many boat owners use tax breaks, some provided in a 2003 tax bill, to slash costs.)"

There was a brief chatter about class and race after Katrina, and to the extent that race is still occasionally discussed in any meaningful way, it is as a substitute for class, as a means of avoiding the pachyderm in the sitting room (as if it is possible to discuss racism without considering class - as if every baleful aspect of working class life, from poverty to homelessness to police repression, was not worse for non-whites). The CSM article draws some fairly apocalyptic - but by no means improbable - conclusions. Edward Wolff of New York University says that America's democracy is very fragile, but is more susceptible to reactionary backlash than revolution. As what the CSM calls the "middle class" becomes more and more deprived, it is supposed they will become less tolerant of the poor and programmes for them. Congress, "reflecting public opinion", will cut these back. Efforts to "limit immigration" could expand, while reactionary politicians would win more votes and, as the class system ossifies, the new oligarchy exerts more and more control over Washington DC.

This all depends on whether the American working class is able to rebound from these assaults, and of course that will depend to a large extent on how successful immigrant workers are in resisting the assaults on them. Radicalisation in the US, as Mike Davis notes in this interview with SW, has historically been rooted in the revolts of migrants, "Germans and Irish in the 1880s, Slavs, Finns and Italians in the 1900s, Jews in the 1930s and so on". The current immigration debates are obviously crucial in that respect. Unfortunately, much of what counts for the American left as represented by commentators such as Randi Rhodes and especially Thom Hartmann, has taken a disgraceful, stupid and reactionary line on migration. Hartmann bleats on his Air America slots and in his columns that immigrant workers drag down American wages, and cites Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers as having resisted migration to the US and shopped migrants. If only the American left could return to the good old days of wog-bashing. It is incredible bilge on his part, of course, since a) the UFW was actually composed of many immigrants, b) they shopped those who would not unionise, c) migration only brings down wages when it takes place under conditions favoured by capitalists - when migrant workers are intimidated and bullied, and don't know their rights, not when they fight back and win better conditions and union rights and push up wages as Miami cleaning workers recently did. Bush doesn't intend to end migration, he intends to make it a more terrifying process for those who get to the US, and make their position more insecure. One thinks of the scene in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada where border guards capture and beat a number of migrants, while three escape. One of the guards says "well, somebody's got to pick strawberries".

But of course, the migration issue does not only inflect the class divide in America: it is increasingly tied up with one consequence of neoliberal imperialism, what Mike Davis calls the Planet of Slums. As recent UN reports highlight, most future population growth will be in the South, particularly in slum cites with poor or no amenities. They will add to the growth of the informal working class, an atomised and irregularly employed class of people. Some of those who are able to will migrate - most will, as they already do, migrate on foot to nearby countries. Some may make it to Fortress Europe or Lockdown America, only to be reminded that their role is to be exploited by capital, and killed by imperialism. It ought to be a common sense on the left that those who do decide to migrate here, and manage to get in, should be defended rather than demonised since it is both inhuman and against our class interests to allow the reactionaries to have a scapegoat while giving capitalists an easily exploitable pool of cheap labour. By shedding its civilised integument, reintroducing the racist hierarchy known as formal empire into polite conversation, polarising the class divide and aggressively pursuing new avenues of exploitation by military or pacific means, capitalism has obliged people to find new modes of power and organisation and provoked a new wave of oppositional movements. But it is also reintroducing poisonous political energies, and without a clear class response, one expects savage and brutal reaction. This, I suppose, is what Chomsky, Pilger and others mean when they speak of a fascist potential in the United States. To defend their class power, to prevent the emergence of external rivals, to provide surety of future strength, and to defend their ill-gotten gains, the US ruling class might easily turn in that direction given a substantial enough crisis.