Elected in November 2008 with large majorities in both houses of Congress and electrified by the charismatic and brilliant Barack Obama's charge to the White House, the Democrats one year later are facing the potential for a real train wreck in the midterm November 2010 congressional elections.
It's true that the Republicans are even more unpopular than the Democrats. But the political price of a weak and jobless economic "recovery," the massive bailouts of the financial sector and the vacuum of reforms to improve people's lives is paid by the party in power-especially one that's done so little with the power it was given. There are a variety of reasons for this impasse.
President Obama, one year into his administration, faces the worst of several worlds. He's a thoroughly centrist corporate Democrat, who's been painted by the rightwing opposition as a radical left-wing socialist. He's sought to govern by bipartisan consensus, which hamstrings any possibility of serious structural reform, only to be met by the work-to-ruin filibusters of the Republicans and the blackmail tactics of the "Blue Dog" right wing of his own party. (The "Blue Dogs" were recruited by Democratic party chair Howard Dean to run in socially conservative districts.)
Internationally, Obama was burdened with the embarrassing award of the Nobel Peace Prize at the moment he was sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan—a war which he The Democrats' and everyone else know cannot be "won." By mid-2011, he will either be blamed for "losing" a war that was so disastrously launched by George W Bush, or-presuming that the operation is successful enough to begin a partial withdrawal— receive at most lukewarm credit.
The weakening of Obama's authority at home can't help but affect his international prestige and power to deal with a whole range of critical problems-especially relations with China and Russia, and To a degree unparalleled in US history, corporate megabucks drive the political system. Yet there appears to be a weakening of the mechanisms by which the ruling class exercises political discipline in the interests of capital as a whole the attempt to forge a global imperial front against Iran. This may further erode his value to the US ruling class.
Obama was propelled to victory in 2008 not only by massive disillusionment with the catastrophic policies of the Bush-Cheney gang, but equally by the support of corporate elites who correctly saw the McCain-Palin option as disastrous for the economy
25 and catastrophic for US "world leadership" (meaning, of course, imperialist supremacy. Having backed Obama for leadership, however, these elites have done little to support his program of saving their system from its own excesses. Worst of all, of course, were the bankers, who took the bailout money and ran. to be at work. To a degree unparalleled in US history, corporate megabucks drive the political system. Yet there appears to be a weakening of the mechanisms by which the ruling class exercises political discipline in the interests of capital as a is the leading case in point here. The need to reform a profoundly destructive system is obvious to everyone. But the parasitic and fantastically greedy insurance industry, which financed and promoted the "Tea Party" mobs to block any health reform, at the same time wrote the bills in Congress to ensure that uninsured people would be incorporated into the private system with the help of large government subsidies.
The result is a gridlocked legislative wreck, with the Republicans blocking reform of any kind while the longtime grassroots supporters of national health insurance ("single payer," it's called here) are bitterly disappointed by the fact that this option was not even permitted into the debate. The sheer idiotic bureaucratic complexity of the bills that the House and Senate
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26 have produced is alienating to ordinary people, from the pro-single-payer end of the spectrum all the way to the Tea Party folks.
The fact that the costs of the present health care system will be enough to eat the entire US economy alive within a few decades is well known. But the crudest sectoral corporate interests are dominant, at least for the moment. Tens of millions of Americans without health insurance are at infinitely greater risk of hnancial ruin from illness than of being victims of a terrorist attack. For that matter, we're facing greater dangers from driving over or under thousands of bridges that are getting ready to collapse than we are from Osama bin Laden. It's not only here in Detroit that this country is visibly falling apart.
There are moments when capitalist discipline reasserts itself. When it appeared for a day or two that Benjamin Bernanke's reappointment to chair the Federal Reserve might be in trouble, the stock market dropped 500 points and the opposition quickly receded. But for the longterm social emergency in the United States, there appears to be no ruling class program except for austerity, downsizing of services, and the covert privatization of public education in the guise of "charter schools." (The latter course, in fact, is being pursued by the Obama administration with all too little attention.) RELKTIONSHIRS RULET ON CAPTABLE
The question of how savagely the US working class can be assaulted without fighting back remains open. Most of us would have predicted the breaking point to have come before now. As one teacher comrade put it in a recent discussion, contrary to our traditional assumptions, "Facing the choice between fighting back and going out of existence, the labor leadership will mostly choose nonexistence—as along as their own retirements are secure."
The Democrats are a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate capital—not a labor party in any sense-but they rely on labor and social movements for their voting base and to put enough pressure on the
INTERNATIONAL system to make the Democrats' option relevant. Those votes put Obama in the White House, but the behavior of the Democrats in power has alienated their base and left them stranded.
At this moment, students and workers in the California university system-and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the USA—are mobilizing for March 4 actions against brutal cutbacks and fee increases. It's from that kind of upsurge-not from the morass of the capitalist parties-that new hopes can arise. Socialists have always known this, but our job is to help the movements themselves recognize the reality and face the implications.
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THEORY INTRODUCING MARXISM We are introducing a new feature in Socialist Resistance. Each issue will focus on an aspect of Marxist theory. Some of the concepts, particularly in this article, may be challenging to readers who are new to them but we hope that they will stimulate readers' interest and encourage further reading. This article is by Raphie de Santos, who is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party and is a Derivative Financial Analyst Marx & Engels among workers. Painting by A Venetsian The labour At the centre of any economic system or political economy is, as Marxists describe it, a theory of value. A theory of value is necessary to determine the exchange ratio between goods and services and other commodities and how resources are allocated and aggregated generally. The labour theory of value was pioneered by the classical and neoclassical economists to first refute the arguments pur forward by merchants that the only things of value were precious metals such as gold and silver.
The classical and neoclassical theories of value were developed to try to answer questions about the inner workings of capitalism. Is labour the source or measure of value? How is the value of a unit of labour determined? Are prices proportional to the ratio of labour content alone?