The revolution of the victims of globalization in the USA and the massive counter-attack

This article is based on the author’s new book under the title The New World Order in Action: Globalization, The Brexit Revolution and the “Left”, (Progressive Press, November 2016) which has just been published in a second edition (December 2016) with a new chapter on the Brexit Revolution in the USA.

 

Takis Fotopoulos

(21.12.2016)

The revolution of the victims of globalization in the USA and the massive counter-attack

 

Abstract

This article aims to show that, contrary to the disorienting myths of the globalist ‘Left’,[1] both Trump’s unexpected election as the next US President, as well as Brexit’s surprising success in the UK, in spite of a massive attack against them by the entire ruling elites (economic, political, cultural, media) represent in fact the victory of the victims of globalization against the beneficiaries from it. It is also the theoretical bankruptcy of the globalist ‘Left’ and/or its political conformism that prevented it from recognizing this radical development, which has led to its political demise, with most of its ex-supporters in the working class presently moving en masse to the rising neo-nationalist movements. At the same time, the same ‘Left’ condemned these masses as racist, if not fascist, and has attempted to attract political clients in that part of the middle class that was not pauperized during the globalization, with an inevitably limited success due to the fierce competition it faces in this political arena from the traditional bourgeois parties.

 

 

Trump’s victory in the Presidential Election simply confirmed the fact, recognized even by systemic writers, that the movement for Brexit in Britain, as well as the movement for Trump in the United States and similar movements all over Europe, are in fact all parts of a rising new anti-globalization movement which began in Europe in the last few years and has spread all over the world. This new movement has nothing to do with the old anti-globalization movement that began in Seattle and Genova in the beginning of the new millennium, and which was then systematically undermined and eventually destroyed at the hands of the globalist ‘Left’ and the Soroses of this world in Porto Alegre etc.. It is the same new anti-globalization movement, which led, a week ago, to the defeat of the pro-EU plebiscite in Italy, which in fact aimed to increase the powers of the local executive organs of the Transnational Elites to impose the dictates of the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization. This new movement is a global movement of the victims of globalization—who constitute the vast majority of the world population—for economic and national sovereignty, as the necessary condition for self- determination and radical social change.

Anti-globalization vs. neo-nationalism

However, most of the Left, which traditionally had fought for the liberation of the victims of the capitalist system, particularly the working class, today, has been fully integrated into the NWO of neoliberal globalization, that is, the latest version of this system, and cannot even think of questioning globalization and its institutions — the EU, WTO, IMF, WB, NATO etc.— as well as the multinationals and the elites running it.  Instead, this globalist ‘Left’ simply criticizes what it considers to be the system’s ‘excesses’ (i.e. systemic symptoms, like ‘austerity’) and sides fully with the beneficiaries of globalization — that is, the upper classes and that part of the middle classes which has not been pauperized during globalization — in expressing their desire to improve the present NWO rather than overthrow it. In fact, even that part of the Left which still talks about the overthrow of the capitalist system, strangely enough, does not fight for the overthrow of the NWO as a necessary first step today for the overthrow of capitalism but instead waits, not unlike the millenarianists, for the anti-capitalist revolution! This is usually the inevitable result of a false internationalism developed a century ago during the era of nation-states, i.e. under conditions completely different than the present conditions when economic and national sovereignty is being phased out, even with respect to ‘metropolitan’ capitalist states like Britain and the USA where, in fact, the first ‘revolutions’ of a new revolutionary era took place.

At the same time, in the absence of any Left political expression for the rising ‘from below’ strong anti-globalization movement, the victims of globalization, including the remnants of the old working class, inevitably, moved to the emerging neo-nationalist parties, which of course, are not anti-capitalist parties but at least fight against globalization in a consistent way, adopting in the process, particularly in cases like Le Pen’s FN in France, many of the traditional demands of the Left. As it is well known, the old working class in advanced capitalist countries rapidly diminished during the de-industrialization of the last four decades or so, when a new phenomenon characterizing the globalization era emerged: the multinational corporation. Multinationals moved their activities from the metropolitan capitalist countries (particularly from the USA and UK) to ‘exotic paradises’ of cheap production cost, such as China and India, creating in the process corresponding pseudo ‘super economic powers’ in these countries.[2]

The neo-nationalist parties that emerged in the globalization era usually have little relation to the old nationalist parties that usually appeared at the time when nation-states were being created, often with the explicit aim to help the building of such nation-states. As such, the old nationalist movements were aggressive movements against other peoples—as, for instance is the Zionist state of Israel today which is perhaps the most aggressive nationalist state on Earth at the moment. In contrast, neo-nationalist movements are in effect defensive movements fighting for the restoration of economic and national sovereignty, which is brutally phased out by the transnational elites in the globalization era.[3]

In other words, in the NWO, the peoples’ need for self-determination had no other outlet but the nation-state. Particularly so, as up to a few years ago the world was dominated by nation–states, within which communities with a common culture, language, customs etc. could express themselves. Therefore, the nation-state became today, yet again, a means for national liberation as it used to be in the early 20^th century, a means of self-determination for peoples under colonial rule struggling for their national liberation. The difference is that the struggle for the nation-state today, and generally the struggle for national and therefore economic sovereignty, is seen today not as an end in itself, as in the past, but as the necessary condition (though obviously not the sufficient one as well) for social liberation. Needless to add that this development became inevitable only because the alternative form of social organization, confederalism, which was alive even up to the time of the Paris Commune, had in the meantime disappeared. This is also why, unlike old nationalism, neo-nationalism raises also demands that in the past were an essential part of the Left agenda, such as the demand for greater equality (within the nation-state and between nation-states), the demand to restore social services, the demand to minimize the power of the elites and even anti-war demands.

At the same time, the politically correct globalist ‘Left’ (i.e. the ‘Left’ which, directly or indirectly, has adopted the ideology of globalization) supported all wars of the Transnational elites during the globalization era (from Yugoslavia up to Libya and Syria) and in the USA supported even one of the leading players in these criminal wars— as the ‘least evil’: Hillary Clinton! No wonder this kind of ‘Left’ is utterly discredited to the eyes of the victims of globalization and is theoretically and politically bankrupt. Not surprisingly, also, the same globalist ‘Left’ presently attacks those among the victims of globalization, who used to be its supporters (unemployed ex-workers and so on), as nationalists, if not as racists and fascists. Having said this, it is hardly surprising, given the political origin of many neo-nationalist parties and their supporters, that elements of the old nationalist ideology had penetrated them, (e.g. various Islamophobic and anti-immigration trends), which then provide the excuse to the elites and the media to dismiss these movements in toto as ‘far right’, anti-immigrant, racist etc. However, it can easily be shown that the refugee problem itself is also part and parcel of globalization and of the ‘4 freedoms’ (capital, labor, goods and services) that its ideology preaches. In other words, the anti-immigrant nature of several neo-nationalist movements arises out of the economic consequences of globalization rather than out of any racist or anti-immigrant beliefs of their supporters.

All this means that neither Trump, nor his likes in Europe (Farage, Le Pen, Grillo and so on) can be credited for the creation of the mass popular anti-globalization movement itself, which is flourishing today all over Europe and beyond. In fact, all these politicians simply tried to exploit, for electoral reasons, the rising world-wide movement against globalization, while at the same time diverting it to a parallel movement they promote: neo-nationalism. It is perfectly possible that Trump or Farage and so on may express various parts of capital. Perhaps the oil-based multinationals against the industrial-military complex in the former case and the remnants of the ‘national’ British capital vs. the multinational capital in the latter. It is therefore only to the extent that these politicians express the real demands of the new anti-globalization movement that the victims of globalization can support them, until they find their own natural leaders from within the Popular Fronts that should emerge from this movement.[4]

However, out of various scenarios about the parts of capital behind Trump, Farage et al., and similar pseudo-Marxist arguments, parts of the ‘Left’ make a huge story that therefore we should not side with such movements but instead with ‘progressive’ supporters of the NWO like SYRIZA in Greece. Yet SYRIZA legalized (‘from the Left’) the present effective occupation of the country by the transnational elites as expressed by its organs: the EU, the European Central Bank and IMF. In fact, this occupation, through the barbaric economic violence it imposed on the Greek victims of globalization, has already destroyed physically or psychologically many more lives than the German occupation in the 1940s. The conclusion is that when a people faces an occupation, either it is military or economic, the only way to fight it is to unite with everybody else fighting it, irrespective of political or ideological differences, as the European peoples did in the 1940s and, once the occupier is thrown out, then the same peoples will determine the form of their society. In other words, the SYRIZAs of this world are in fact the present-day quislings. Any honest left-winger, if s/he cannot implement the program for which s/he was elected, simply resigns.

Another by-product of the above analysis is that to simply characterize Trump as a protectionist, (as the globalist ‘Left’ does[5]) betrays, at best, an ignorance of the fundamental differences between protectionism and old nationalism (which were both phenomena of the nation-states era) and neo-nationalism, which is basically a movement that arose out of the economic and cultural effects of globalization, particularly the liberalization of labor markets, so that labor could become more competitive. The victory of Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the USA drastically affected the NWO by explicitly questioning globalization. Both phenomena also constitute major social revolutions from below, against the concerted attack of the transnational elites (political, economic, cultural, academic and media) to complete the globalization process and lead to the creation of a system of global governance.

As regards the divisions within the elites, this is of course far from unprecedented. In fact, the elites are only united as far as the reproduction of the socio-economic system from which they benefit is concerned and there have always existed serious, mainly tactical, divisions between them as regards the means to achieve this aim. It is in this context that we may understand the significance of the present huge counter-attack in the USA which aims, at best, to achieve the reversal of the Presidential Election result in the electors’ meeting on Monday December 19^th and/or to prepare the ground for a possible later impeachment, or, at least, to achieve Trump’s compliance not only with the overall aims but also with the tactics of the elites. Clearly, in almost all these cases the inevitable result will be a major constitutional crisis, apart from the side effects on the US-Russia relations that would reach the worst perhaps stage since the Cuba crisis in 1962. It seems that the old industrial-military complex which run the USA in the entire post war period and—through the multinational corporations and the transnational elites that emerged during the globalization era since the 1970s or so— has become also globalized and is mainly responsible for the economic and military violence that destroyed millions of lives all over the world.

Therefore, the twin problem the elites had with Trump was that he not only was an ‘unknown quantity’ — the biggest crime for the elites — but he also professed policies that firmly put him within the rising world movement against globalization. That is, a movement which had already given the elites Brexit, a genuine revolution of the victims of globalization in the UK. No wonder that in the USA, because also of the much higher stakes involved, the counter-revolution began immediately it became clear that one candidate was adopting many of the demands of the victims of globalization. Particularly so as the elites were well aware of the fact that Trump had drawn mass support and won elections and public opinion not just because he was a ‘populist demagogue’ (as the elites were claiming in public) but because, as even a prominent member of the globalist ‘Left’ admitted,[6] he rejected the free trade agreements which allowed multinationals to exploit labor all over the world.

Of course, as I pointed out above, the differences between Hillary and Trump are much deeper than just free trade. In fact, as it was rightly pointed out, the hard difference between Hillary who “has done nothing but advocate or agree to endless US-led war crimes without any life gain but only mass murder, social ruin and terror which she ignores” and Trump—which is also the difference between him and his Republican predecessors—is “Trump’s denunciation of NAFTA and willingness to have peace with other nations not bowing to Uncle Sam”.[7] This difference, plus—I would add—Trump’s determination to neutralize, if not abolish, TPP and TTIP, are defining the main aim of the counter-revolution against Trump. Needless to add that the globalist ‘Left’ simply ignores these crucial differences and sides with his haters who, as Prof. John McMurtry rightly stressed, “cannot say this [as] they stick to the politically correct repudiations, and call him ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘bigot’ and so on, even if the conclusion does follow from what he says or does. Selected instances are the ruling fallacy here.”[8]

The class nature of the Trump vote, the Brexit revolution and the ‘Left’

As I tried to show with respect to Brexit, globalization is a class issue, reflecting the popular reaction to the class nature of globalization. Furthermore, it was exactly the abysmal failure of the ‘Left’ in the UK and US to grasp this fact (either for dogmatic reasons or because it has already been fully integrated in the NWO) which has led to its theoretical and consequently political bankruptcy. However, one note of caution has to be added here about the meaning of class, as liberal apologists of the system, such as Fukuyama, blatantly distort the term. Thus, as he writes, referring to both Brexit and Trumpism:

“Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries. This, in turn, is driven directly by globalisation and the march of technology, which has been facilitated in turn by the liberal world order created largely by the US since 1945.”[9]

Of course, education does not define class, but only in the narrow liberal view that he adopts, pretending he is unaware of the fact that education is, particularly today, a commodity, which can be bought by those controlling economic power. Class is therefore defined by one’s economic power, as expressed by control of the means of production, income and wealth, as I defined it elsewhere.[10]

There is no doubt that the election of Trump, as well as the vote for Brexit, represented a kind of popular revolution, as each signaled the peoples’ revolt against globalization and the elites’ plans for global governance. Below is a first-hand description of how working class people (who, effectively, have given up voting long ago, both in Britain and the USA, having concluded that elections cannot change anything), decided to try the election process and they won against all the odds! That is, against the combined forces of all parties (even the Republican Party turned against its own candidate!), against all media, against most academics (including ‘Left’ Nobel prize winners), against Hollywood and the entire culture industry and, of course, against the middle classes, apart from that part which became a victim of globalization:

“The Trump effect is more than, as the man himself put it, ‘Brexit plus plus plus’. It is nothing less than a revolution, not just in American and global politics, but in the way we see politics and in the way we do politics. I saw first-hand in Mississippi how Donald Trump had rallied thousands and thousands of people to his banner; a forgotten generation of voters who had given up on elections long ago after being trodden down by the inexorable march of globalisation, but bursting with patriotism and enthusiasm now that they had found a candidate who would speak for them. Mr Trump reached these people by breaking the mould. The legacy media wanted no part of him, and American broadcasting rules allowed them to be even more obviously biased against his campaign than they were against Brexit in the UK.”[11]

In fact, this is far from an isolated incident and every honest journalist who attended similar gatherings in both the UK and US reported exactly the same picture of a revolutionary atmosphere prevailing among the victims of globalization. John Harris, for instance, who visited the Brexit areas as well as the areas who voted for Trump had drawn the same conclusion in an article subtitled “Workers I met in Indiana were as much victims of globalisation as those in Stoke or Merthyr Tydfil”.[12]

Of course, this was not a revolution of the kind we saw in the last three centuries or so, as part of the revolutionary era that began in the 17^th century and probably ended in the last century.[13] It is clear that, following the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism,’ this kind of revolution is not possible any more, at least in any country fully integrated into the NWO of neoliberal globalization with a relatively strong middle class. Yet, this does not rule out insurrections, or even electoral ‘revolutions’, such as Brexit or ‘Trumpism’, where the electorates turn against the entire establishment, rejecting any kind of elites (political, economic, cultural, media etc.) The fact that both Brexit and Trumpism signal a new era, as every revolution has done in the past, was well summarized by another analyst who is also the founder of Leave.UK:

“No more NΑΤΟ massing troops on Russia’s borders to stir up the tensions which justify its existence. No more casual acceptance of mass immigration, persistent low-level terrorism and the erosion of national identity as ‘the normal’ in the West. We’re on the cusp of a new era, and we’ll know soon if the crest of the Trump wave is about to break on Paris and Berlin, too.”[14]

No wonder that the ‘Left’ attempted to diminish the significance of these events and academics such as Noam Chomsky mentioned above and James Petras played a leading role in the disorientation of peoples in their struggle against globalization and the NWO, turning in the process even against the traditional supporters of the Left—under a supposedly ‘Left’ cover.

Thus, Petras, apparently demystifying the result of the last Presidential election,[15] referred to the “myth” of the Trump revolution, while not mentioning once the words “globalization” and “sovereignty”! Yet, sovereignty and globalization are what the entire world movement now developing is all about, which these academics presumably have not heard of. Instead, he talks about the “Trump revolution”, following the familiar devious approach of constructing a straw man argument in order to avoid the real arguments about the revolutionary character of Brexit and the presidential election results.

There is no doubt — and all serious analysts accept the fact — that what happened in the US, as in Britain, was a revolution, but not of course in the sense discussed by these academics who should know that revolutions are not made anyway by individuals (the Farages and Trumps of this world). Surely, a real Marxist, or anarchist, intellectual for that matter, would be the last one to suggest such a monstrosity. Revolutions are made by people and the very fact that the victims of globalization, in both Britain and the US, were mobilized ‘from below’ to rise against globalization is in itself a revolution, given that the essence of the entire NWO is globalization and the running of all economies integrated into this Order by multinationals.

Clearly, therefore, this process has nothing to do with what the British government, or the new US Administration, for that matter, will do, or will not do, in the future. Neither Farage nor Trump nor Le Pen are leaders of this global movement. This is obviously a leaderless global movement expressing concrete demands for national and economic sovereignty, which is exactly the form that the struggle for self-determination takes in the globalization era. Political parties therefore such as UKIP in Britain, the Republicans in the USA and FN in France simply attempt to exploit this movement for electoral reasons and do not in any sense lead it. This is why politicians such as Farage, Trump or Le Pen come in conflict with the elites when they support the demands of this movement. This is also why it is highly likely that the counter-revolution going on at present both in Europe and in the US against this popular movement for economic and national sovereignty and against globalization will manage, eventually, (with all the power still held by the elites controlled by multinationals) to water down both Brexit and ‘Trumpism’. Yet, this will not stop this huge movement of global dimensions, which will simply abandon parties and ‘leaders’ that break their promises in power.

Below is a perceiving analysis of the contradictions involved in this process, which are ignored by the myopic analyses of the globalist ‘Left’:

“[Trump] identified a split between the party’s donors, who tended to benefit from globalization, and its rank and file, who felt victimised by it. And he took the side of the latter. He attacked free trade, mass immigration and military intervention… Mr Trump appealed to working class whites,[16]  taking about 70 per cent of their votes, according to preliminary exit polling… Mr Trump outpolled Mitt Romney, the 2012 candidate, among both blacks and Hispanics, and lost white university-educated women only narrowly… Here is the Republican party’s problem. Thanks to Mr Trump it has received a mandate to speak on behalf of globalisation’s losers. But its personnel consists of the global-economy winners who ran the party before he arrived on the scene… The Republican party has become something it has never been since it was founded a century-and-a-half ago: the party of outsiders. Mr Trump’s toughest job may be bringing his colleagues to terms with that.”[17]

The conclusion is that to scorn the really revolutionary character of these phenomena (Brexit, election of Trump, possible election of Le Pen) on the grounds that their leaders when in power will simply ‘forget’ their promises, as Petras and the likes do, far from being a radical analysis of any sort in this crucial moment in History, is at least disorienting, unless it is aiming to defuse the entire movement, supposedly because it is not revolutionary enough! The obvious implication of such a distorted logic is the millenarian ‘strategy’ of waiting for the overthrow of capitalism, while in the meantime supporting the Hillarys of this world, as, supposedly, the ‘least evil’—exactly as Chomsky, Sanders, the Greens (though not Petras) and similar ‘radicals’ have done…

Revolution and counter-revolution in the USA

The two main myths promoted by the counter-revolution movement in the USA were the supposedly ‘undemocratic‘ character of the Presidential election and the racism not just of Trump but of his supporters as well, in other words of the entire new anti-globalization movement in the USA.

a.    The myth of the ‘undemocratic’ character of Trump’s victory

One persistent myth, particularly exploited by George Soros, the master of ceremonies for pink revolutions par excellence, in order to initiate demonstrations against the election result, was the apparent ‘undemocratic’ character of Trump’s victory, given the small gap between popular votes and electoral college votes. Yet, although this was not of course the first time that the popular vote for the presidential candidate who lost was higher than the vote for the winner, one cannot remember as many demonstrations of protest and for so long after the election, as today. Clearly, Soros’ absence in the past was decisive for this unfortunate lack of support for past losers!

However, it is a distortion of democracy to call the result of the Presidential election as ‘undemocratic’, simply because the popular vote was in favor of the criminal Hillary (by a margin of something between 1.5% and 2% of the total vote). This is not simply because the Presidential electors’ result, as prescribed by the US constitution, went clearly for Trump but, also, because such an argument could have any validity only in the case of a small demos, such as the demos of classical Athens, where the population was small enough (some tens of thousands) that citizens could take all important decisions through face-to face assemblies. Furthermore, the citizenry was more or less homogeneous, given the lack of any significant class divisions, a fact recognized even by Karl Marx, as a result of the mode of production prevailing at the time. This, despite the fact that some degree of economic inequality was present even at the time of classical democracy — a fact which, to my mind, was the main reason of its eventual collapse.[18] Needless to add that there were also significant divisions beyond the citizen body, as both women and slaves were excluded from it, something which, however, was hardly surprising 2,500 years ago (despite some idiotic liberal arguments to the opposite), when the abolition of slavery and the granting of voting rights to women had to wait for another 22 centuries or so to be established in the West!

On the other hand, modern states have populations reaching into hundreds of millions (as in the USA), which are sharply divided socially, according to social class, area they live, education levels and so on. Therefore, the requirement for an absolute majority of all US voters, as far as Presidential elections is concerned, far from being more democratic, would in fact be an absolute distortion of democracy. This is because urban centers, such as New York and California (or London in the UK), in the globalization era, concentrate disproportionate numbers of the total population. Given that the vast majority of the beneficiaries of globalization (or those aspiring to benefit from it) live also in such centers (for the reasons I explained in ch. 8), such mega-population centers possess a built-in mechanism in favor of globalization in any election where counter-balancing mechanisms to take regional or class differences into account are missing.

In this sense, the electoral system in the US presidential elections, or the one-constituency system in British parliamentary elections respectively, do function as counter-balancing mechanisms to the above built-in mechanism for globalization. Therefore, the argument of liberals and the ‘Left’ about the size of the popular vote being ignored by the electoral system of US Presidential elections is not only phony but devious as well. Clearly, in a representative ‘democracy’, such huge population centers could determine, just by their size, the final result on such crucial issues as globalization, making the vote of everybody living outside these centers redundant. On top of this, the inevitable concentration of the service sector (which is a major globalization sector particularly in countries such as US and UK), functions as another factor attracting higher proportions of the beneficiaries of globalization in them.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that the above arguments refer to different cases of representative democracy. Clearly in a genuine democracy, that is a direct democracy where citizens take all important decisions in face-to-face assemblies, the problem will not even arise at all in the first instance. This is because a basic component of such a democracy is economic democracy (i.e. the equal distribution of economic power that complements the equal distribution of political power), which is completely incompatible with globalization and its institutions.

b. Immigration, cultural globalization and the racist card against Trump

As mentioned in ch. 2, globalization does not involve only an economic and political dimension but an equally important cultural dimension as well, of which the immigration problem is a significant aspect. In other words, immigration is not only an economic consequence of globalization. The dominant globalist culture in the NWO effectively constitutes the negation of national culture, as it is based on the globalization ideology of multiculturalism etc., which in fact is the globalist version of classical liberal ideology. Furthermore, cultural globalization is not only some sort of ‘automatic’ effect of globalization, but it is also a deliberate policy of the Transnational Elite. The aim of this policy is helping the expansion of immigration, given that a plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labor is necessary for the expansion of multinationals ‘at home’, e.g. in the USA or Germany. This means that a plentiful supply of cheap Mexican labor in the former case and of Asian and African labor in the latter is necessary, so that the multinationals face more or less the same wages and working conditions, whether they operate ‘at home’, i.e. in their home bases, or abroad, e.g. in China, India and the other countries integrated into the NWO.

It is hardly surprising therefore that Lionel Barber, the FT editor, aptly identified cultural and identity politics as the common thread of instability running through the world right now:

“From Donald Trump’s triumph to Brexit and the rise of a new caliphate in the Middle East, the tension is likely to get worse before it gets better. In the US, Trump played on middle class and working class fears about immigration and cultural nostalgia for a bygone era in America. He brilliantly exploited anger about political correctness, especially among elites, including the mainstream media. Ultimately, as in Brexit Britain, identity politics may have ‘trumped’ pocketbook politics.”[19]

Yet both the globalists in the US (i.e. the Democrats as well as the globalist ‘Left’) and those in the UK did not have any qualms about playing the racist card, in their desperate effort to rule out ‘Trumpism’ and Brexit respectively. The pretext in the US was Trump’s senseless promise to build a wall around America and particularly on the border with Mexico to stop mass illegal immigration from that country. On this, he was conveniently ‘forgetting’ in the process that it was the US elites in the first instance, which, in collaboration with the Mexican elites, created the present dependent development of Mexico, whose growth depends on foreign (i.e. US) investment and trade, as these elites destroyed any possibility of economic self-reliance in that country. Of course Mexico’s dependent development goes back to the history of its relation to the USA in the last century but NAFTA, the agreement between the local and US elites that institutionalized this dependence relationship (exactly as the EU agreement institutionalized Greek dependence on Northern Europe[20]) and opened and liberalized markets, played a crucial role in destroying any degree of self-reliance in Mexico and in creating a mass of unemployed and underemployed people, who were pushed beyond the border to the US to find cheap employment in that country.[21] Ironically, in the globalization era, metropolitan countries like the US and UK, suffer a similar fate in reverse, when their own multinationals have either to import cheap labor from abroad or move themselves abroad in order to win the war of competition with other multinationals. However, what angered the elites was not of course that Trump blamed Mexicans, whereas in fact it was corporations to be blamed. What angered them, as McMurtry pointed out was that:

“The Mexican wall does not fit the borderless neo-liberal program either. But all of it is welcome to citizens’ ears. That is why the establishment hates Trump for exposing all these issues long kept in the closet and covered over by politically correct identity politics.”[22]

In view of the above it is not therefore surprising that Trump campaigned against the effects of America’s free trade deals with Canada and Mexico, and (what he alleged to be) China’s unfair trading tactics. Yet, can we characterize Trump’s attitude antidemocratic or even racist? As a British supporter of Brexit pointed out (from a conservative point of view), “while Trump’s remarks about Mexican illegal aliens were incendiary and deliberately so, there is nothing anti-democratic about the idea of protecting a country’s borders and nothing inherently racist in voting for such a proposal”.[23] Clearly, a people which has lost the ability to control its borders has lost one of the defining characteristics of what it is to be a nation. Yet, as the same author rightly pointed out, the prevailing electoral strategy of the Democrats in the United States and then Labour in the UK was based on the idea of balkanizing the electorate into “communities”, and aggregating their votes. Thus, for the Democrats, it was a matter of identifying “the African-American community” and the “Hispanic community” as political client groups; for Labour — and this was a particular skill of the former London mayor Ken Livingstone — the task was to do the same with “the Muslim community” or “the black community”. It purported to create a less segregated country, but, if anything, it was a recipe for the opposite.

In fact, Trevor Phillips, a prominent member of the London ethnic community in his capacity as former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, aptly explained why he broke with this: “The idea was to corral certain groups of people, to make people like me — someone from an ethnic background — a political category, which they could move around. It was treating me as just a pawn and that the only thing that mattered about me was my color.”[24] In other words, Trevor Phillips implicitly raised the issue of the all-important class element in the identity of a person, irrespective of skin color, sexual identity etc. From this point of view, identity politics, a basic element of liberal ideology, can be seen as a way to obscure class divisions, or, alternatively, as the present-day tactics of the ruling elites to ‘divide and rule’ in the pseudo-democracies of the Western world. So, what about the ‘racist’ vote for Trump? As the same writer stressed:

“it is clear that a substantial number of the votes Trump won in the Rust Belt — thus seizing the formerly solid Democrat territories of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were from those who had voted for Obama in the two previous presidential elections. They could hardly be defined as racists. This has been described as a ‘whitelash’. But if the Democrats insisted on defining other ethnic groups as specific political entities to be ‘corralled’ (as Phillips might put it) then they could hardly complain if Trump targeted something that could be categorized as ‘the white working class’. What is clear is that the Democrats took their support for granted (Clinton never once visited Wisconsin).”[25]

The conclusion is that, in a capitalist society, communities will have to be class-based communities in order to be meaningful (e.g. miners’ communities and so on). Even neighborhood communities are, in effect, class-based communities, as obviously it is the level of income and wealth that ultimately determines who lives in a particular neighborhood. In other words, real communities existed only in pre-capitalist societies, although even within such communities, as we saw in relation to the Athenian demos, one could distinguish between various implicit ‘class based’ communities. At the same time, ethnic communities simply play the role described above by Trevor Phillips, i.e. the role of political pawns, while class barriers develop within these communities as well. Obama’s color did not make any difference as regards the domestic or foreign policies he implemented, as he simply protected the interests of his class and he used his skin color to climb the social and political ladder. Similarly, the sex of Thatcher or Hillary did not make the slightest difference as regards their policies in office.

All this is absolutely relevant to a sort of ‘debate’ going on at present within the ‘Left’ on whether class politics take priority over identity politics or not. The usual answer given by the globalist ‘Left’ is one attempting to reconcile the two kinds of politics under the umbrella of working class politics as follows:

“There are those who argue the left has abandoned class in favour of identity politics. There is certainly a type of liberal who has done this: who argues for solutions such as more women in corporate boardrooms rather than addressing systemic inequality. But socialists argue that class is absolutely central to understanding society’s ills, but cannot be understood without gender, race and sexual orientation.” [26]

However, as it is obvious from the above answer, this crucial question cannot be answered in terms of (liberal in effect) platitudes, as too often nowadays, deliberately or not, identity politics come into conflict with class politics. The clearest example was the Brexit revolution in both the UK and USA. Is it accidental that supporters of identity politics were fully supporting the enemies of a Brexit kind of revolution in both cases ? Or is it perhaps that the fanatic supporters of Bremain and Clinton were motivated mainly by their class position (i.e. the fact that they mainly belonged to the beneficiaries of globalization) rather than from other criteria in voting? Or, to put it in another way, is perhaps the main reason why beneficiaries of globalization voted against Brexit and Trump the fact that, as they had already sorted out their own survival problems within the NWO of neoliberal globalization, they could then afford to vote the way they did, whereas the victims of globalization could not afford to ignore their own survival for the sake of identity politics and political correctness?

As John Wightaptly put it:

“Trump represents a backlash against a liberal establishment that had become so fixated with identity politics it refused to tackle a growing ocean of alienation and poverty across large swathes of the country… It is an economic system that acts as a tyrant over the lives of the mass of people rather than one that serves their needs, producing a race to the bottom involving workers around the world competing for the crumbs from the table of a multinational corporate dictatorship that in its ability to destroy or raise living standards arrogated to itself more power than most governments. The result in the US was manufacturing jobs that once provided a decent income and a sense of dignity and worth in working class communities being exported abroad to China, Mexico, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the Global South. They were replaced by low paid jobs in the new service economy, forcing people to take two, even three jobs just in order to survive.”[27]

The mass counter-attack to suppress the Brexit revolution in the USA

A similar counter-revolution to the one developing in the UK is raging in the USA at the moment. In the UK, the elites have launched a huge campaign financed by millions of pounds and headed (unofficially at the moment) by the war criminal Tony Blair in order to impose a ‘soft Brexit,’ implying a Britain only formally out of the EU. Similarly, the campaign in the USA aims to ‘soften’ Trump’s policies, so that the NWO will remain essentially the same as before, perhaps with some cosmetic modifications. Soros, who has played a leading role in the counter-revolution in the UK, does the same in the USA, always on behalf of the Transnational Elite.

Thus, immediately the election result was announced, scores of anti-Trump demonstrations took place all over America. These demonstrations were as impromptu as the corresponding demonstrations during the Arab Spring, or the Ukraine coup! [28] As Paul Craig Roberts stressed:

“I think I know who they are. They are thugs for hire and are paid by the Oligarchy to delegitimize Trump’s presidency in the way that Washington and the German Marshall Fund paid students in Kiev to protest the democratically elected Ukrainian government in order to prepare the way for a coup.”[29]

In fact, George Soros, the master of ceremonies behind every ‘pink revolution’ in the world, played a role in all of them and is now in action again, both in the UK and USA. Thus, it has been shown that some at least of the anti-Trump protests in the US have been organized by groups that were sponsored by Clinton sympathizer Soros through MoveOn.org. As is well known, “among Wikileaks’ Podesta emails was a strategy document involving the Soros-supported MoveOn.org and grassroots organizing and funding.”[30]

Furthermore neither Hillary, nor Obama, not even Bernie Sanders had uttered a single word to stop these demonstrations, and when the full pro-systemic leader of the US Greens set in motion the recounting process, again, nobody attempted to stop her. As an activist blog noted:

“Is it just me or have you also noticed that Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and President Obama have been silent about the protests? The very people who have the power to stop these protests and riots with just a few well-spoken words have been completely silent on the issue… Bernie Sanders, the one from whom the Democratic primary was fraudulently stolen, the one who backed up Hillary Clinton anyway, has also been uncharacteristically silent, especially for an aging peace-and-love hippie kind of guy… Then there’s the President, who met cordially with Trump. His Twitter account is likewise mute on the subject of vandalism, arson, and violence in reaction to the election.”[31]

The fact that a discussion had already begun on whether the electoral college could deny Trump’s victory shows the extent of pressures on the forthcoming Administration to deter it from making any significant changes on foreign policy, in particular, but, also, on economic policies with respect to ‘market freedom’, (the euphemism for multinationals’ freedom to move capital and labor in and out of the country as they like it). In fact, the US Green leader (Jill Stein) plays exactly the same dirty role on this that European Greens have played under Danny Cohn-Bendit — the ex-May ’68 ‘revolutionary’ who turned to an enthusiastic supporter of all the Transnational Elite’s criminal wars, from Yugoslavia up to Libya![32] Alternatively, one could take the general apathy of Greens everywhere about globalization and its social effects as another proof that the ecological movement, during the globalization era, has been converted into a fully middle-class movement, whose sole reason of existence is the ecological damage going on, while the original aim of the antisystemic Green movement for social liberation has quietly been abandoned, at least since the defeat of the “fundos” at the hands of the “realos”.[33]

In fact, the elites had not any qualms even about using the secret services to doubt Trump’s victory, on the basis perhaps of their familiar false flag operations concerning a supposed Russian hackers meddling in the elections, prompting even the BBC to point out that the present situation “set the incoming commander-in-chief against intelligence services that he will preside over”.[34] It is therefore clear that the real aim of the elites is to crush the underlying “revolution in thinking” that marked the Presidential election. As Prof. John McMurtry aptly put it:

“An underlying revolution in thinking has occurred. Trump has tapped the deep chords of worker rage at dispossession by forced corporate globalization, criminally disastrous Middle East wars, and trillions of dollars of bailouts to Wall Street. He never connects the dots on stage. But by Clinton’s advocacy of all of them, she has made them her own and will go down because of it… But this is not a Republican-Democrat division. It is as deep as all the lost jobs and lives since 2001, and it is ultimately grounded in the tens of millions of dispossessed people which the life-blind global market system and its wars have imposed on America too.”[35]

So, as in the case of Brexit, what is important today is not whether Brexiteers or Trump ‘will deliver’ or not. This is an utterly disorienting question raised by a disingenuous globalist ‘Left’, which insults this popular movement as racist, nationalist etc. The real issue is whether this revolution in thinking going on at the moment, from Britain and USA yesterday, to Italy today, and France tomorrow, will mature into a global anti-globalization movement for economic and national sovereignty and self-reliance, as well as a new internationalism based on the principles of solidarity and mutual aid rather than competitiveness and profit.

 

source: The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Volume 12, No 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2016)

http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/

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