Surrounded

Sailors of the Kiel Mutiny

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Sun-Tzu

Great part of the information obtained in War is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is of a doubtful character.Carl von Clauswitz

As the primary season for the 2016 election began the Republican Party trotted out a normal campaign with normal candidates and normal policies. Whether out of any real strategic understanding or merely as a show to serve his purposes in the event of a defeat, Trump proposed, instead, an openly fascist direction for the party. By slicing off all hard right sections of the party he was able, first, to prevent any normal candidate from assembling a critical mass and then, finally, push them all out of the way.

Coming from outside the GOP, Trump, and by Trump I implicate all who circle him for their own and his reasons, was able to see the hollow state of the party and the opportunity to reconstitute it around a fascist program. But I should be more precise. Where does Trump’s program break with the normal of his party and of the Democrats as well?

The aim of fascism is to protect a capitalist order which can no longer rely on the legal norms of the bourgeois state to sustain it. It attempts the criminal eradication of any organized defense by the working class of its interests to relieve the pressure on a capitalist system in crisis. And crisis is the watchword of Trump’s administration as it was of his campaign.

Recurrent in his rallies was the message that if he did not succeed this time there may never be another another chance. And here we have a clue to the nature of his crisis. 2008 marked a break in global capital. Measures taken at the time have not resolved the situation but papered it over with promises to be extracted from the living standards of workers from every country. Even so, for those at the upper reaches of the economy I can understand a sense of foreboding but don't believe they are panicking about their position. In the homeland of the American empire there appears to be a continued preference to rely on traditional power structures rather than leap into the unknown of fascism. Particularly under the leadership of Trump.

There is, however, a case to be made for the impending demise of the GOP. As a mass party its appeal has been declining and as an instrument of the ruling class it has become increasingly unnecessary. Trump found an audience among the party's leftover base, those who are exposed to the ill winds of austerity and also uncomfortable with the neighbors who were taking shelter from the storm beside them.

With no revolutionary movement as yet in view Trump's flock has to content themselves with the Democratic Party as their sworn foe. It is the historic mantle of the Republicans, relentless champions of capital against its class enemy, against socialism in the disguise of the party of the New Deal. It is this identity which ensures that the GOP, having taken up the crusader's cross, can never return to its pre-Trump formation.

So we have a cluster on the right based on remnants of the 20th century Klan under the direction of a television imago of wealth. They are well drilled as an audience but are unproven in political battle. They have been deployed prematurely against an enemy that is, at this point, hardly more than a projection of their class anxieties.

2008 showed, as a crisis of credit, the hollow center of global relations of production. Every year since the last decades of the previous century has shown the critical situation we are in with regard to planetary systems. And the last hundred years demonstrates the extreme danger from our overdeveloped ability to wage war against ourselves. Anxiety is universal but we are still in the early stages of a crisis which will proliferate everywhere and continually present new facts on the ground.

Trump and the Republicans are not mistaken about who has them surrounded. They serve to remind us, as that party has always done, that it is the political program of the working class, socialism, that threatens capital’s grasp on power. But their concept of socialism is antiquated and spectral. They have the worst sort of general staff, one with no certain intelligence of its opponent. Not surprising. Their opponent, the workers of this country and around the world, have not yet taken the field in the form required to protect their interests and that of humanity.

Now who must do something about it? This is what I believe: the days of special political parties are over. The political organizations which will take part in the change of today will consist of the large majority of the population. For, except for those who are part of the special interests which continue to hold on to power, the large majority of the population in every country, advanced and backward, is involved in what is taking place, and is, to use the words of the Times Literary Supplement, a “sort of traitor” to the governments which are over it. The large majority of people have to form some sort of political organization and bring this to an end.    C. L. R. James - World Politics Today, 1967

Brigitte Bardot & Sacha Distel - La Bise Aux Hippies (1967)

My mind is blown,

Jenny Rock - Mal

Snakes ! ?

Snakes? Snakes on the island?

On Fireball Island?

The Curse of Vul-Kar. But snakes?

Getting off this snaking island.

Loaded with snaky treasure.

Everything Begins to Move

Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point of contradiction do they become active and lively towards one another, receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation of self-movement and spontaneous activity.  

G. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, bk 2, ch 2, c

When you jam the contradictions up against each other, everything begins to move.  

C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics, p 217 

What terms can be found in the State of the Union? What about "legislation v. investigation"? Well, I'm as eager to crack a case as any irregular but, no. How about this? "We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country". Just not feeling the contradiction here. Obligatory applause from Republicans and uncomfortable silence from Democrats. Let's dig a little further down.

“No issue better illustrates the divide between America's working class and America's political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.”

I think we can do something with this. 

The wall took root in Trump’s mind as a mnemonic. Its existence has oscillated in time, geography, and qualities. It’s a metaphor and we should take it as such. 

The city begins with a wall. Capitalism dismantles the wall around the city but the metaphor remains, especially where the reach of the city is tenuous. The further the distance from the city the greater the suspicion of strangers and the more the appeal of protection from them. But the reference is to the working class. It’s the only one and, other than a couple of invocations of the middle class which are, as always, an evasion, it is the only reference to class at all. This is more than casual ideology. It is the ground of Trump’s political strategy.

Going into the 2016 election the Republican party had done little to rebuild its stature following the financial and military debacles of the Bush administration. The Trump campaign gave shelter to the most retrograde parts of the Republican electorate and openly called on everyone who was willing to side with the powerful against the opposition, against the “invading socialist society”. In communities which capital has abandoned in its long term global restructuring of production the fairy tale was spun of a golden age which would return once capital was granted three wishes.

The metaphor of the wall was key to all of it. It represents the protection which the bosses will provide against the enemy outside. An enemy that is no more than another worker trying to sell the same thing, labor, to the same bosses. The “political class” is not a class at all but a straw man to deflect the militancy of the working class away from capital.

Trump, who takes great satisfaction from the enthusiasm of his rally audiences, appears to believe there are workers who will show the same enthusiasm fighting his political enemies. He may mistake the heavily armed agents who round up the undocumented or who guard the pipeline projects from those protecting their water supplies for just such workers. But he should note they are no different from the agents who have arrested many of his campaign staff.

Any admission that the wall is unnecessary would further expose the policy which underlies a Republican party desperate to deny the erosion of its position; expulsion and intimidation of whatever part of the working class is unwilling to bargain for protection. But the party has no protection to offer other than to those who can already afford the walls and gates and guards that are theirs not by membership in a political class but because they own the means of production and exercise political control of the state. Even though they may be embarrassed about an idiotic executive.

Dead End

Wouldn't you be wary of attending a reading of the will at this address?

I know I would.

But some of us did very well.

Know what I mean?