From Trump to Vistalegre

FROM TRUMP TO VISTALEGRE.

The systemic crisis that began in 2007 remains unresolved. It does not seem that we are at the gates of a new process of accumulation on a global scale that could allow the capitalist economy to get out of its slack. Public money bailouts for strategically located financial institutions continue to occur (as in the case of Italy) or are threatening on the horizon (as in the case of the German Deutsche Bank), without restoring the path of stability. The Eurozone crunchs whipped by a gale that does not stop, ranging from the Brexit, which puts it in question, to the very probable electoral advance in this year of ultra-right forces that defend its fragmentation and the end of the euro. The refugees are crowded at their doors, in subhuman conditions, and the mass revolts, still lacking a deep revolutionary sense, are happening on their eastern border, as in Bulgaria and Romania in recent months.

The world today is increasingly multipolar but also more chaotic, tilting between spasms and turbulence, given the apparent inability of Americans to control the Middle East and the Chinese to develop a middle class that can replace the dwindling demand of Western countries , overwhelmed by austerity measures, the liquidation of the welfare state and the precariousness of work.

Under these conditions, the new global emperor (Donald J. Trump) takes controversial measures,as  the media tells us. Let us not deceive ourselves, what underlies, very deeply, in the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and in the ensuing controversy, is the existence of a deep fracture within the American ruling class.

Donald Trump did not go to the government to be an anti-system, although he has pumped certain populist flags in his election campaign. Donald Trump, and his government of millionaires, Goldman Sachs executives and oil tycoons, represent a certain political line of a particular fraction of the ruling class, in hard struggle with another fraction, in which we find, for example, the kings of Sillicon Valley or well-appointed multinational services such as Starbucks.

Trump's policy is neither anti-system, nor does it pretend to be. The aim of Trump is to imitate as much as possible the economic and labor management of its main competitor, which is about to reach him: the People's Republic of China. China is expected to reach the US GDP in a few years, and is about to develop its nuclear capacity to become "on a par with Russia and the United States." The commercial war with China is served, and perhaps in the medium term, the confrontation escalates further in pre-war terms (let's not forget that Steve Bannon, our Emperor Donald's favorite adviser, stated in an interview shortly before he came to power , that in about 5 or 10 years, an open military conflict with the Asian giant would be unleashed by control of the most dynamic commercial zone of the planet: Asia-Pacific). The softening of the quasi-war escalation with Russia, fueled by Obama, after the humiliating, for Americans, advance of Putin's forces and interests in Syria and Turkey, is nothing more than a strategic turn aimed at dividing the two emerging giants linked by the new Silk Road, as was the Obama agreement with Iran, which Trump now seems ready to default on. The implosion of the Eurozone, in the face of its own contradictions and the inanity of its ruling class, could bring the booty to be shared among the new contributors-competitors, but it does not seem entirely probable that, in an increasingly chaotic world that kind of alliances reach to stabilize.

Trump's anti-immigration drift does not seem destined, despite all the demagogic drift that accompanies it, to the total expulsion of foreigners (let us not forget that Obama has already deported more irregular than all previous US presidents together), but to impose a higher Labor discipline and the cheapening of its workforce, sunk in the shadow economy, in the image and likeness of what was actually done by the Chinese Government with its hakou system, which allowed treating as illegal citizens the more than 150 million of workers who left the field in China to go to work in the large transnational factories of the Chinese coast in recent decades. A racialized management (in the American version, something quite traditional in that country) of the labor force that has made it possible to reduce labor costs enormously and subject it to a quasi-militarized discipline.

The economic protectionism of the American president, on the other hand, is, like the Chinese, a regulated protectionism around the interests of the national ruling class. So while China keeps limiting the opening of its financial system to international flows and fostering the free market in its export sector, Trump seems willing to do the opposite, thus wiping out Obama's timid regulation of Wall Street businesses, but attempting to return the automobile production to the country, and seeking to negotiate bilateral free trade agreements, instead of multilateral ones, that allow it to regulate what and before whom opens its economy.

But what is really fundamental, given the maremágnum produced in recent weeks in the United States, is that the American ruling class is fractured about the strategy to follow as it has not been in the last 50 years. That explains why the protests (which, on the other hand, show a vitality of American society that no one had spoken us until now) have received so much global media attention and not simply repression and silence. That explains, too, that prominent representatives of the American legal world or the cultural establishment, challenge Trump's decisions, as it has not been done in decades.

This growing conflict between Zuckerberg and Tillerson, between Soros and the big oil companies, threatens, of course, to generate, in turn, one or several open fractures in the overall class of leaders. Tensions with China and other emerging countries, those derived from European decomposition, those of the ambitions of the new militant realms of the ultra-right, which seek to replace the old liberal and social-liberal elites, open a scenario of conflict in the interior of the ruling class that, as we have seen in the United States, could open the social space sufficient for the emergence of new alternatives hitherto subjected in the darkness of a regime without fissures.

Social crisis and a fracture of the ruling class. We lack a condition for the crisis to reach the degree of revolutionary crisis: the autonomous and massive organization of the exploited, fueled by a discourse and an aesthetic to match the circumstances. This element does not seem to be in sight for the moment on the stage, but let us not forget that, precisely this changing scenario, is the ideal for a determined advance of the forces of change.

But what about the Kingdom of Spain? Is that decisive advance prepared? In Spain, what is really worrying is not the political stability revisited by the forces of the regime thanks to its pacts, since it has proved to be extremely vulnerable to the global turbulences, whether economic or ideological; But the marked bet, whose consequences we began to see at the moment, of the majority of a whole militant generation for the policy of the chair, media brilliance and absolute futility about raising awareness and organizing the working majority.

Vista Alegre 2 and the soap opera of the media leaders float on the margins of the world, in absolute futility, when a whole regime of management of the global system is about to mutate, if we do not avoid it or move in another direction, catastrophically, before our very eyes. Endowment with a revolutionary subjectivity capable of intervening implies the popular construction and empowerment of the working class, the extension of their networks and their experiences, their own organizations, and the creation of discourse on the great changes that are to come.

Let us forget about the leaders and their sludges and the tricky gymkhana of the new professional politicians, let us begin to construct a counter-power from below ourselves, directly and autonomously. It is not about managing the growing disaster, nor finding a soft chair when the music stops. The goal of someone who wants to change the world is not to sit comfortably on a bench.

José Luis Carretero Miramar.