Achilles and Ajax play a boardgame

 

Ex Trivio

1  Trump Descending

“This is something which has never happened to a President before, it is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Trump

The administration of America is as complex an undertaking as ever seen in history. There is a common sense resistance to its enormity which is usually professed with anecdotal instances of waste, corruption, and stupidity. Its targets are chosen politically. 

But the concept of this administration, of the American state, of the American empire must admit that its size and complexity reflects the enormous contradictions of a political economy of private ownership in a world where the vast majority depend on just that economy while owning practically none of it.

When opponents within his own party as well as the other denounced Trump as unfit for office this is what they were talking about. Small-time moguls hatch their deals in a world that, while also capitalist, has little else to do with either the ownership or the administration of this system. They and he lack the hard won expertise or colossal wealth that are the usual qualifications for this post. He also lacks, despite claims, any level of political genius.

The policies by which America is administered are hashed out in constant competition between weighted points of private interest. Never mind how they are weighted. At any one time a texture of agreement is in place and in the care of a system of officials whose reference is to this texture for acting rather than their private interests. Corruption, naturally, exists but it is just that, corruption, not system. 

System maintenance requires education. Positions require certification. The number of people involved is a large slice of the population, larger than the ruling class but far smaller than the working majority. As a class it lies between, on one hand, the owners of everything and, on the other, those whose work is supervised in its entirety or who otherwise fend for themselves. As a class it never included Trump, never recognized him as qualified, and never tolerated him. When the time came for him to cajole support for his putsch the response was unanimously negative.

Not that there is no support for him. Where his support extends into the police, the military, and Republican officeholders it is infra legal, positioned in an unofficial web to overthrow the established order. Why? What situation are we in where the White House can organize a coup, organize it with such a lack of skill, and have it fail almost entirely by its own hand?

Trump appears to have believed that by satisfying those who already own everything with tax cuts, loose money, and deregulation he would be given complete command over the administrative system. He could leverage his passionate support among the Kleinbürger to invent an election landslide. He could create enough chaos that an opening would appear through which he could march on Rome.

It never happened. Trump's mass base is frightened enough, their status is fragile enough, they are ready to call down heaven's wrath. But the bourgeoisie is not. For them safety is still found in the familiar.

2  Two Parties

"We badly need a Republican Party. We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system." 

Biden

Trump's failure leaves the Republicans in a mess. His reelection was conducted under the banner of a last ditch resistance to socialism. But the socialists haven't taken the field. The final battle he proclaimed is a crisis of capital. His opposition party, the Democrats, has a mass base that it can rely on for now and it has retained the confidence of capital. But a two party system, the American two party system, requires room for accumulation. Without it only one survives.

That was Trump's message in 2016. The Republican Party must become the single party or it will disappear. Their insurance policy was to be judges of demonstrable loyalty. Together with control of the countryside, support of extractive capital, and the repressive arms of the state, it would be enough within the 18th century remnant structures of America to turn the tide. To wipe away the power of the administrative state. But the instruments were not adequate. Both the Trump faction, unsurprisingly limited, and the party it struggled to master tripped.

The reelection campaign was able to successfully raise the specter of an aggressive left by using the summer's demonstrations. Taking place everywhere other than where Trump's supporters were congregated, he could paint an image not contradicted by his listeners' experiences. Everywhere else it fell flat. Everywhere else he was seen as a liar who fucked up the pandemic. Instead the party has been forced to express its will to power as a refusal to acknowledge the vote against it. It dreams of conspiracy and it whips its persisting forces at the state level to squeeze its opponents numbers enough to cling to what is left of its position.

But the reason the Republican Party lacks credentials to govern a one party state is the weakness of its class base, not the faults of its leader. Despite proclamations to the contrary the party lacks ground in the working class. What it has is in contradiction with its satraps. Its classical ideological infrastructure is in contradiction with its new ideology and efforts are underway for a duplication of the entire mess. But the party cannot be both incipient fascism and bipartisan imperialist. Choosing Trump was a symptom of its decline, its continuing clutching to a fallen boss is unavoidable.

Within the GOP all reactionary currents are given shelter now. If capital loses faith in its own governing there is where it will find the troops for a fascist state. Some pieces of the bourgeoisie are ready for this but they lack, for now, a critical mass of support. And they have no assurance the critical mass will not be with its opposition.

So we are left with the one of the two parties that doesn't want to govern on its own. The nightmare that the GOP instilled in its voters of a Democratic Party controlled by the far left is false. As a party the Democrats are entirely faithful to capital and to empire. It is the Republicans who, by processing faith in a political-economy that doesn't actually exist, have broken with the political order that sustains American capitalism.

The one party rule of GOP prophecy is the expression of their own disqualification and the admission that the working class will not sustain capitalism in America without the historic compromises that are intellectual property of the Democrats. At the same time it is among the Republican rank and file that the fantasy of a seizure of power by a revolutionary party gathers its greatest enthusiasts.

But the Democratic Party will never give up the search for its political sibling. Without it the party is face to face with a class that will not cooperate with what will be asked of it as the pace of crisis accelerates.

To see the outlines of this situation we need to look at the evolution of empire in the past century.

3  Three Empires

Milley told a group of senior leaders, "Here's the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they're boogaloo boys, they're Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in."

attributed to Gen. Milley

This is the story of three empires. They are not the empires of kings and queens where one nation conquers and exploits its colonies alongside its rival empires. Although they are born of such empires. These are empires that each claim the entire globe. They arose when the old ones were discarded, undone by the great war. There were three because, as Vico has it, three is the number of excess. And, as they all claimed to be universal, three were indeed too many.

The first to fall was the empire of death. Defeat in the great war deposed the old monarch of its homeland but preserved the old social structure. It was stripped of all its conquests and left to embrace the only realm that remained, havoc. The cruelty that others were allowed in their hinterlands this one inflicted on its neighbors.

It was defeated by an alliance between the other two. Its land was divided and its claim to the world went underground. It emerges where imperial power is threatened, a demonic ghost of empire. Brought to its end by suicide it bequeathed the world, with its rockets, the scientific means for global suicide.

The next to suffer collapse was the empire of the party. It arose by deposing the ruling class of an imperial power, exhausted by the great war. Its universal claim was founded in the labor movement. They who were nothing were now to be all. But the great war had rejuvenated capital and the workers' party remained subordinate to it, either directly or by the necessity to compete with its power. The alliance of the party with capital defeated the Axis but left capitalism in place with its own universal imperial form, an empire of capital. 

The postwar confrontation between the two remaining claimants to universal political power took its form from the underlying confrontation between labor and capital. As long as capital is in the possession of a single class neither it nor labor can be independent of the other. Although the cold war always had the potential to destroy human civilization it was never a confrontation between cleanly divided opponents.

In the empire of capital there was also the party. The witch hunt was, and is, a pantomime of capital exorcising the demon of worker control that it can never shake because it is capital which has summoned it to begin. And in the empire of the party the administrative apparatus cannot relinquish its role in accumulation, an accumulation that, however separate, will remain subordinate to global capital.

This social falsehood stripped the party of its universal claim and led to its ideological breakup and political dissolution. But the party persists. As a system for capital accumulation it is even demonstrating success in comparison to its old rival. But it does so within the old national formation with no more claim to the allegiance of the workers of the world than the Freemasons.

Which brings our attention back to America, homeland of the empire of capital and its political fairground. Here the party which was most dedicated to the witch hunt, which never failed to shout down its opponents as weak in the defense of the empire, which prayed nightly for the triumph of capital, that party has pledged itself to a figure who slanders the entire imperial superstructure. This is not by chance.

The abolition of the only remaining rival to world dominion was celebrated as the triumph of capital but just as capital requires labor to exist its empire lacks support with no opponent. The balance of military power remains as it was and continues to lose relevance economically. Political power, on the other hand, has been transformed. The former homeland of the party has publicly abandoned its claim. Over time it has adapted to a classical form of empire and maneuvers over a classic sphere of influence.

It is the empire of capital, now without global limits, that is the last to grasp its own disappearance. The claim to universal imperial authority was always no more than a claim, a false universal. It was sustained by the conflict with other false universals. When there were three empires they were made solid by the ability to make war. When there were two left standing war became impossible and they both began to dissolve. What now remains for the homeland of the only empire that has never been forced to admit it's gone?

The imperial scaffolding of American power remains. Its mass political support is split. Not as it was between two parties but between one party that encompasses its traditional ideological form and another that comprises its fascist negation. The refusal to admit that the world has shed its false empires is key to the survival of the Democratic Party. Its ruling class stratum relies on the economic advantage, to the extent it remains, of the US position at the head of a fractured capitalist alliance. Its voters count on the classical payoff of empire, marginal exemption from the austerity required in tribute from all those who it doesn't need to cement its political authority.

This alliance possesses an enormous ideological structure but its practice is accounting. And its accounts have adapted to a non-imperial world. Its ideology, however, whether sincerely believed or just recited, only keeps itself busy by controlling those political parties that are loyal to the alliance and can still rally mass support. In the old imperial heartland of America that's the Democratic Party.

In its postwar heyday the two party system provided stability to an unstable economic form. To hold the loyalty of organized labor and the administrative mass, the middle class of legend, it relied on levels of growth that are no longer possible. What is growing now is catastrophe. On the right catastrophe feeds a revival of allegiance to the empire of death, a preference for apocalypse over actual humanity. While on the left what is needed is sensed but only immanently. 

In our world three empires contended. The world has been assembled in the process. Any claims of victory falter before the accumulation of ruin that all can see. From three empires what is required now is a positive absence of empire. The process is underway at levels seen and unseen (when what is unseen becomes seen it indicates there is more to come). Our situation is unfolding but not incomprehensible provided we can read through the imperial filters that have been handed down to us.

“I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.” 

C.L.R. James

[ex trivio - out of the street, from the mob; from trivium - the meeting of three roads]