Anti-Trump Protests
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Just went to the Portsmouth anti-Trump protest where myself and a few sympathisers handed out the SPGB leaflet ‘The Problem Isn’t Trump, It’s Capitalism’. About 100-150 people there (a BBC journalist I spoke to there was estimating 250, which seemed much too high to me). It was organised and dominated, of course, by the Trots and noisily visited by an EDL-type contingent of about 20 skinheads, who were quickly encircled by the police and seen off by the crowd.
Will try to get to the Birkbeck event, Adam, and will bring any spare flyers with me.
I have not seen any of the so called US socialists intellectuals, or progressive organizations hitting the correct target including Noam Chomsky, their major problem is Donald Trump only, when in reality, with or without Trump the same problems will continue, because the heart of the problem is capitalism.
Some are calling fascism to what is not fascism either, xenophobia, racism, economic exploitation, nationalism etc, etc, is produced by capitalism and they existed before the emerge of Fascism in Italy and before the emerge of Nazism in Germany.
Many left wing organizations are also supporting nationalism in the same way that Trump supports nationalism. Andrew Killman and his organization are only after Trump like the leaders of the Democratic Party.
Millions of peoples went crazy with Barrack Obama and the medication was worst than the disease, and during his government millions of workers were deported, children were also placed in cages, families were separated, and war was promoted around the world, several coup d’tat took place in Latin America.
The leaflet designed by the Socialist Party contains the correct idea , our problem is capitalism, it is not a leader, or a politician
I went to that meeting of the “Marxist-Humanist Initiative” yesterday evening. From their point of view, it was a flop. I was the only visitor and duly made sure that the rest of the audience got a copy of our leaflet, all three of them, all MHI members. All the same, it was still interesting as I wanted to know why, and see how far, a group which has certain keys things in common with us (analysis of capitalism, need to end commodity-production) had gone off the rails. I am afraid they really have. They view Trump as a threat to political democracy in the US and urge people there to support the Democrat Party and others either to impeach him or to vote him out.
Their argument is this:
- Political democracy is important to the working class as it provides the best framework for the development of the working class and socialist movements.
- Trump is undermining political democracy and there is a very real danger that he might succeed.
- Therefore socialists should work with others to defend political democracy (the speaker called it “bourgeois democracy”) and defeat “Trumpism”.
The first premise is true but the second is not and even if it were true the conclusion wouldn’t follow.
It is true that Trump has been behaving in a high-handed fashion but stuffing the Supreme Court with your political supporters is part of the US political tradition (all Presidents do this if the opportunity arises). However, it is quite over the top to say that there is an immediate prospect of political democracy being overthrown in the USA.
Trump has to stand for re-election in 2020 and even if he wins cannot stand for a third term, i.e. he’s gone in any event by 2024. There was speculation at the meeting, apparently serious, that Trump might refuse to leave the White House if defeated in 2020 or even, like some African dictator, change the constitution to allow him to serve a third term ! Which planet are they living on?
This is to show an ignorance both of how the US political system works (it is extremely difficult to amend the constitution and impossible if even a quarter of the states are opposed) and of how capitalism works. If Trump is replaced by some Democrat or his Vice President (if he’s impeached he’ll be replaced by the Vice President, Mike Pence, who’s a raving Christian fundamentalist) capitalism will remain. The problems it causes will continue, even fuelling popular support for demagogues like Trump. So will political democracy in US (such as it is) … and US imperialism.
Sad that another group akin to ourselves cannot resonate with a wider audience. Dare I guess that they were all in their senior years.
This deeply entrenched view that we should support the lesser evil is one that we must challenge and do so repeatedly.
I’d appreciate a link to something of depth which answers the lesser evil arguments….i’m a bit unsatisfied with my own attempts to formulate a response.
Professor Stephen Coleman, aka Steve Coleman, used to reply that this was being offered a choice between the evil of two lessers — a good title for any piece on the subject.
Depends what you mean by “senior years”. They only stayed for one drink after as they had to go to work the next morning.
I have started reading a pamphlet I bought last night with the attractive title of “Resisting Trumpist Reaction (and Left Accommodation)” and have come across this passage which shows just how far down the slippery slope they have slipped:
“The anti-neoliberal aesthetic, especially among young Sandernistas, is such that many would rather allow Trump to be elected than to dirty their hands voting for a centrist neoliberal like Clinton. As the 2018 midterm elections approach in the US, we are bound to encounter the same discussions we encountered when we wrote that the extraordinary dangers of Trump and Trumpism make it important for people to understand the difference between voting against Trump and supporting Clinton. “Supporting” constitutes a wider sphere of thinking and action than “voting” does. One can vote against Trumpism, even if that means voting for a centrist, without being in support of centrism.”
I suppose this could be true: you could vote for something even if you didn’t support it. However, this is not how anyone else will interpret your action, especially not the vote-hunting “centrist” (what is a “centrist” anyway?). It will be interpreted as support — and will in fact be support — however tight you might hold your nose when you vote.
Eugene Debs put the case against this rather well: “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.” In other words, if you vote for a centrist and the centrist wins that’s what you will get. Or, if you vote for a capitalist politician capitalism is what you will get even if you don’t want it.
How I dislike pretentious language to make the author look clever.
‘anti-neoliberal aesthetic’
Clinton was presented by the Sanders camp as the candidate of Wall St. (recall while Trump declined to publish his tax returns, Clinton refused to make public her speeches to the banks. Not sure if they have even been released today)
Trump very easily presented himself as the lesser evil, the candidate that could not be bought (regardless of the truth). As a former Secretary of State with blood on her hands and the record of her support for her husband’s failed policies Clinton was a PROVEN evil while Trump presented himself as an outsider, free from the Washington swamp determined to keep America out of foreign wars (how often have American politicians said that)
Some working class voters who intended to endorse (is that a better word than support?) Sanders did switch to Trump for his promises of a New Deal-lite for them in the rust belt regions and declining industries which like all politician promises failed to materialize, although the owners did receive their rewards.
In 2016, (relying on memory) “centrist” was not part of the political vocabulary. It arose post-election among Democrats to differentiate between its “progressive” wing and its “right-wing”, a term that fully exposes the Democratic Party similarity to the Republican wing of the political party duopoly…joined together like Siamese twins
I asked because “centrist” is also Leninistspeak, used to refer to those they regard as wavering between reform and (what they mean by) revolution such as the old ILP in Britain and the POUM in Spain. I see in ordinary political usage it means “moderate” like the LibDems in Britain. I suppose Hillary Clinton might be described as such but the MHI pamphlet calls here a “centrist neoliberal”, which suggests they regard her as moderate “neoliberal”.
Since “Sandernistas” (new word to me) are above all against “neoliberalism” they are not inclined to vote for any “neoliberal”, Hence MHI’s criticism of them on this point. Actually, they go further than this and criticise the whole theory of “neoliberalism” arguing, like us, that the problem is capitalism and that the replacement of “neoliberalism” by what went before, i.e. by a sort of “neo-Keynesianism”, which is what Sanders (and Corbyn) want is not the way-out and won’t work anyway. Andrew Kliman clearly wrote this part of the pamphlet.
His influence is also seen in the section which argues that “white workers” didn’t vote for Trump because they were the economic victims of globalisation. The pamphlet repeats Kliman’s argument that, when you take into account non-wage fringe benefits, working class living standards in the US have not fallen since the 1970s (or, rather, didn’t fall until after the Clash of 2008). This is the prelude to their argument that those “white workers” who voted for Trump voted for him because they were “white nationalists”; they produce statistics to show that outside the South Trump did well in the same areas that Governor Wallace, who stood for the Republican nomination and for a couple of times as an independent for the presidency in the 1970s, on a segregationist platform.
The MHI’s conclusion from this analysis seems to be to write off Trump’s voters as in effect proto-fascists and concentrate on persuading Sandernistas and Greens (they really don’t like them for splitting the anti-Trump vote) to vote for “neoliberals” to outvote them. Meanwhile any talk of socialism (as the abolition of wage-labour and commodity production which they agree with) takes a back seat. I suppose that makes them “confusionists”.
Trump the war-monger?
Despite his sabre-rattling
“Trump played down Iran’s downing of a U.S. military surveillance drone on Thursday, saying he suspected it was shot by mistake and “it would have made a big difference” to him had the remotely controlled aircraft been piloted.”
“I think probably Iran made a mistake – I would imagine it was a general or somebody that made a mistake in shooting that drone down,” Trump told reporters. “It’s hard to believe it was intentional, if you want to know the truth,” he added, saying it could have been carried out by someone who was acting “loose and stupid,” and minimizing the incident as “a new wrinkle…a new fly in the ointment.”
Is this a serious reluctance to go to war or a delaying tactic so to place more forces into position. Trump going into 2020 campaign I believe the former. But who knows…Bolton and Pompeo are just as ” loose and stupid” as the Iranian war-hawks so anything might happen.
Is there a “centrist extremist”? Then perhaps Trump could be called that in the present face-off.
Sandernista been used since 2016 by progressive Democrats. Worth watching for understanding that part of the Democrats base is The Young Turks (TYT) web channel.
Britain’s ambassador in the United States has described President Donald Trump and his administration as “inept” and “uniquely dysfunctional” Ambassador Kim Darroch, one of Britain’s most experienced diplomats, said Trump’s presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace”
“We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept,” Darroch wrote
He wrote that the “vicious infighting and chaos” inside the White House – widely reported in the US but dismissed by Trump as “fake news” – was “mostly true”.
Darroch criticized foreign policy on Iran as “incoherent” and “chaotic. He said the president’s assertion that he called off retaliatory missile strikes against the Iranian regime after a US drone was shot down because it risked killing 150 Iranians “doesn’t stand up”. “It’s more likely that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look come 2020,”After Trump told the lawmakers they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” his net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72%.
Overall approval remained unchanged. 41% of the U.S. public said they approved of his performance in office, while 55% disapproved.
We shouldn’t be discussing this here of course, but we are. (I don’t know if it is technically possible to move this to “General Discussion”? )
Anyway, what Trump is doing is playing “identity politics” (the target “identity” group being “white” Americans). It’s all very well minorities engaging in this, but it’s dangerous and potentially counter-productive as others can appeal to it too, with more chance of success if the “identity” is the majority. Better to emphasise what workers have in common, not what differences can divide them.
We shouldn’t be discussing this here of course, but we are. (I don’t know if it is technically possible to move this to “General Discussion”? )
It is now in ‘General Discussion‘
Seems strange that Trumps should imply that those who complain about should return to “the totally broken and crime-infested places from which the came from”, considering how much he complained about what was going on in the USA before he was President and the fact that the Wikipedia entry on his mother states:
” Mary Anne MacLeod was born in a Pebble dash Croft house owned by her father since 1895 in Tong on the Isle of Lewis. Local Historians and genealogists have described properties in this community at the time as “indescribably filthy” and characterised by “human wretchedness”.
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