The Phony Crisis, the Real Crisis, and the Whip of Hunger

U.S. law prevents the federal government from allowing its debt to rise beyond a specific limit. As of May 2023, the limit is $31.4 trillion though this will be raised in the coming weeks. If either or both houses of Congress don’t, the federal government will be forced to reduce expenditures and forced into default. Finance capital won’t allow that.

On January 19, 2023, the day the legal limit was reached, the debt ceiling was not raised because of various technical loopholes in the law, but they are not unlimited. This is not the first time for this kind of artificial government debt crisis, which has become a regular feature of U.S. politics since the Obama administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen estimates that the legal wiggle room (technical loopholes) will be exhausted by June 1, 2023. So while an over-the-weekend theatrical default is possible, the chance of an extended default is less likely than the Vatican announcing its conversion to Judaism or Islam.

Is the federal debt crisis just for show? Not at all. A bill will be passed within the next few weeks, raising the current $31.4 trillion debt limit. To become law, the bill must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. The Democrats narrowly control the Senate, but the House of Representatives has a slim Republican majority. The House already passed a bill to raise the debt limit, but it contains provisions cutting the budget. Of course, cutting the war budget is off the table — instead, the GOP wants to gut social programs. The most important provision is to attach work requirements to Medicaid and food stamps benefits, as well as measures to promote the production of more fossil fuels. They also want Biden’s limited student debt forgiveness canceled.

The Fed Meets and Congress Investigates January 6

In June 2022, the news in the United States was dominated by two stories. One was the decision of the Federal Reserve System to raise its target for the federal funds rate by 0.75%. The new rate range is between 1.50% and 1.75%. The second story broke the same week: The congressional hearings into the events of January 6, 2021. On that date, a right-wing mob, supported and inspired by President Donald Trump, broke into the U.S. Capitol. It was an attempt to force Congress to reverse the 2020 presidential election results. Is there a connection between these two? Yes, even if it isn’t a direct one.

Let’s begin with the Federal Reserve story. For most people, Federal Reserve operations are a mystery. The federal funds rate is the interest rate charged on overnight loans that U.S. commercial banks make to one another. The law, as well as financial prudence, require commercial banks to maintain a certain minimum of ready money to cover their deposit liabilities. Many are surprised to learn that under the fractional reserve system, commercial banks maintain only enough cash on hand to redeem a small portion of the money the public has on deposit. If all depositors were to try to withdraw all their money at the same time, every bank would fail. The reason? Most of the money on deposit does not represent actual cash in the form of legal tender — bills and coins — but is imaginary money created by the banks themselves through their loans and discounts. To prevent collapse, a minimal cash amount backs up deposit liabilities.

Commercial banks are for-profit enterprises. To maximize profits, cash on hand is kept to a minimum as it earns no interest. To put it in more scientific terms: The cash commercial banks must keep on hand to redeem deposits does not entitle the bank’s shareholders to a portion of the unpaid labor — surplus value — performed by the working class.

Global Economic and Financial War Erupts

As I write these lines the Russo-Ukrainian war is entering its second month. The main fighting is in the Donbass region. The Russian military is attempting to encircle and destroy a Ukrainian army spearheaded by the fascist Azov brigade, variously estimated as between 50,000- to 100,000-strong. Russia also sent ground forces toward Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with no attempt to storm and seize the city. Kiev is revered by Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians alike as the city of origin of their respective nations.

Putin indicated Russia does not want to occupy or rule Ukraine. Russia has been fighting a limited war. Its demands are that Ukraine acknowledges the independence of the Lugansk and Donestk People’s Republics as well as Russia’s claim to Crimea. Before 1954, Crimea was never Ukrainian. Since the 19th century, it’s had a Russian majority. Russia further demands Ukraine stay out of NATO, be demilitarized, not acquire nuclear weapons or allow NATO to put nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction on its territory, disband the fascist militias operating there and recognize the rights of Russian-language speakers.

Russia hopes to negotiate a peace treaty with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s government meeting Russia’s basic demands. At the start of the war, Russia opened peace negotiations. It would not have done so if it intended to occupy and rule the entire country. Additionally, on March 29 Russia announced as a measure of good faith that it was scaling back, but not ending, its military operation near Kiev and other areas in northern Ukraine.. Regarding the western region, Russia launched cruise missile attacks aimed at military targets but has not moved ground forces into the area.

Afghanistan – Past, Present and Future, a Marxist Analysis

On Aug. 30, the last U.S. and other NATO troops after a 20-year shooting war against the Afghani people withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat. On Aug. 15, even before the last U.S.-NATO troops had left, the Taliban entered Kabul as the “president” of Afghanistan, U.S. puppet Ashraf Ghani, fled the country.

It wasn’t only Ghani who fled. What was on paper the extremely formidable apparatus of the Afghan state including a heavily armed standing army of 300,000 soldiers and a massive police force melted over 11 days into thin air. As Taliban fighters drove into Kabul, there were no police on the streets. The only security was the armed Taliban. As these astonishing events unfolded, the U.S. military seized and maintained control of the Kabul airport as panic-stricken supporters of the U.S. occupation, and other Afghans who have no desire to live under the rule of the Taliban fled to the airport. In one incident, Afghans fleeing the Taliban desperately held on to a U.S. plane. Showing the real attitude of U.S. imperialism to those who do its bidding, the plane took off anyway with the Afghans dropping to their deaths.

Many more Afghans celebrated both the end of decades of disastrous war and the fact that another empire — the most powerful of them all — had been defeated by the people of Afghanistan. At least momentarily, Afghanistan is more united than at any time in its history. President Biden claimed a few weeks earlier — pointing to the 300,000-strong Afghan army compared to the 75,000-strong Taliban — that the U.S. withdrawal would not end like the U.S. war against Vietnam had on April 30, 1975.

In fact, the speed of the collapse of the U.S. puppet government dwarfed anything that had happened in Vietnam. In Vietnam, the puppet government had held on for about two years after the last U.S. troops withdrew. In Afghanistan, the puppet government vanished several weeks before the last U.S. troops could be flown out — to the astonishment of the U.S. government, the world, and even it seems the Taliban itself.

Commodity Money Versus Non-Commodity Money

On March 11, President Joseph Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion package called the Coronavirus Relief bill. It provides for $300-a-week extra in unemployment insurance payments — only half the original $600 provided by the CARES Act passed last year — and only until Sept. 6. It also provides $25 billion for rental relief and utility assistance and $350 billion relief for hard-pressed state and local and Native American tribal governments.

The bill includes a one-time $1,400 payment for low- and middle-income Americans. Also, $20 billion will be spent on COVID-19 vaccinations. Democrats are especially proud of a provision that extends for a year a child tax credit that was part of the CARES Act. They claim this will reduce child poverty in the richest nation in the world by one-half. This tells you a lot about the nature of the U.S. tax system, which pushes many children of working-class families below the official federal poverty line while allowing billionaires like former President Trump as well as giant corporations like Apple to get away with paying virtually no taxes.

Progressives were hoping that the stimulus bill would have a provision raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from the current $7.25. This was important because the bizarre and undemocratic rules that govern the U.S. Senate mean only a few bills can be passed through a process known as “budgetary reconciliation” with a simple majority vote. All other bills need the support of 60 senators. This means that given the composition of the current Senate, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote, the GOP has veto power over most other proposed legislation coming up this session.

For the minimum wage hike to have had any chance of passing in the current session, it would have been necessary to include it in the stimulus bill. President Biden gave lip service to the proposed minimum wage hike but failed to push it. This gave the green light to conservative Democrats to ally with the GOP to exclude the $15-an-hour minimum wage from the bill — effectively killing it. This is the exact outcome the capitalists wanted. Once again, the Democrats and Republicans working together delivered the goods for capital.

The Second Trump Impeachment Trial

Former President Donald Trump was acquitted on an insurrection count on Feb. 13 in his second impeachment trial, though 57 senators out of a hundred, including seven Republicans, voted to convict him. However, this was short of the two-thirds’ majority required to convict a federal official or ex-official on an impeachment count.

Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell admitted that, while Trump was guilty, it was unconstitutional for the Senate to try a former official on an impeachment count after the official had left office. This was despite the fact that there was precedent to do so.

In the days leading up to the five-day impeachment trial, Trump had blackmailed the Republicans by threatening to form a new far-right “Patriot Party.” Such a party would split much of Trump’s MAGA base away from the Republicans, which would make many, perhaps most, Republican politicians unelectable.

Besides the acquittal, the trial was notable not only for its brevity — particularly considering the gravity of the count — but by the agreement between the Republicans and Democrats to not call witnesses.

The issue was not simply Trump’s incendiary speech to a MAGA crowd of tens of thousands gathered in front of the White House on Jan. 6. It could be argued that Trump’s speech, however despicable its content, was protected speech under the First Amendment. You can be sure that if a U.S. president can be convicted in an impeachment trial for exercising his right of free speech, Black Lives Matter activists, leftists of all types, trade unionists, and other progressive activists can be convicted at a criminal trial for exercising the same right.

What made Jan. 6 a failed putsch rather than a right-wing demonstration that got out of hand was not the content of Trump’s speech. It was the fact that National Guard and police forces were withheld for hours even though the Pentagon and FBI as well as the police knew that a dangerous armed demonstration was planned. Indeed, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser had specifically requested on Jan. 5 that National Guard forces be called to the capital in case needed to prevent the impending violence.

The Crisis (Pt 11)

Is capitalism approaching its limits?

In the first years of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg expressed great alarm when she discovered that Marx’s formulas of expanded reproduction in Volume II of “Capital” suggested that capitalism can in principle go on forever. These formulas appeared to contradict Marx’s famous Preface in “A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy.” There Marx wrote: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed [my emphasis — SW] and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.”

If, however, capitalism can engage in expanded reproduction without limit, how can capitalism ever develop all the productive forces “for which it has room”? Didn’t Marx himself mathematically demonstrate that capitalism can develop the productive forces without limit? However, a closer look reveals this apparent contradiction to be an illusion.

In the Volume II formula, the productive forces expanded only quantitatively but not qualitatively. There is no growth in labor productivity or what Marx called the organic composition of capital — the ratio of constant capital, which does not produce surplus value but merely transfers its value to the commodities it helps produce, and variable capital, the sold labor power of the workers, which replaces its value and produces additional surplus value.

It is also assumed that the correct proportions of production, including the correct proportions between Department I, which produces the means of production, and Department II, which produces the means of consumption, are maintained without explaining how they are maintained. And — almost always overlooked — among the correct proportions between the various branches of production that must be maintained is that between the production of money material and all other branches of commodity production.

In reality, the concrete history of capitalism has been marked by growth in labor productivity. The rate at which productivity grows is largely regulated by the competition between the industrial capitalists and the workers. To maximize their profits, the industrial capitalists as the buyers of labor power try to pay the workers the lowest possible wage. The workers as the sellers of labor attempt to get the highest possible wage right up to the mathematical limit where surplus value — and therefore its monetary form, profit — disappears altogether.

If Marx’s formulas show expanded capitalist reproduction running forever, it must be assumed that the quantity of auxiliary materials and the ores out of which money material is produced, and the supply of labor power that produces the means of subsistence for the workers, must be available in infinite quantities. If this is true — which it obviously is not — then the population, including the fraction of the population that consists of workers, can grow to the mathematical limit of infinity and capitalism can indeed go on forever. Otherwise, it can’t.

The Crisis (Pt 7)

An unprecedented crisis

The current economic crisis has many unprecedented features. Most importantly, it was triggered by a pandemic and the resulting business shutdowns and stay-at-home orders. This led to a sharp decline in the sale of commodities. The result has been a collapse of industrial production, world trade, and employment over a period of a few weeks that is unparalleled in the history of capitalism. Because nothing like this had ever happened before, it is extremely difficult to predict what will happen next.

For example, we don’t know the future course of the pandemic as capitalist governments move, even as the pandemic continues, to lift the shutdowns of nonessential businesses and stay-at-home orders. Will these moves to “reopen the economy for business” cause the pandemic to accelerate? Or will the pandemic decline in the Northern Hemisphere, where the largest capitalist economies are located, as summer conditions set in? Many virus-caused diseases decline in the summer months and accelerate in the fall and winter. Will COVID-19 follow a similar pattern?

Even if we assume the pandemic peters out over the (Northern Hemisphere) summer and doesn’t come back this fall/winter, an extremely optimistic and experts say unwarranted assumption, will the U.S. and world economy revive rapidly in a so-called V-shaped recovery? Or will the recovery be slow and torturous, with Depression levels of unemployment lingering on for years? Or will it be something in between?

Three Books on Marxist Political Economy (Pt 17)

Apartheid planet and the new racism

John Smith in his “Imperialism in the 21st Century” sees imperialism as evolving towards a form of global apartheid. Under the rule of the U.S. world empire, the freedom of capital to move across national boundaries in its endless search for the highest rate of profit has expanded. However, workers do not have freedom to cross national borders in search of the highest wage.

Since World War II, the nation-state, the cradle of the capitalist mode of production, has been in decline. One example of this decline is the limited sovereignty of Germany and especially Japan since World War II. Even the sovereignty of countries that were allies of the U.S. in World War II, Britain and France, has been severely restricted within the NATO “alliance,” and in the case of Britain within the “special relationship.”

The U.S. and its imperialist satellite states of Western Europe and Japan have opposed every attempt to establish new strong independent nation-states – though with mixed results – since World War II. In the pre-war era, the then-politically divided imperialist countries sometimes gave limited support to nationalist movements in their rivals’ colonies and semi-colonies. Since World War II, the entire imperialist world has been united against national liberation movements in the oppressed world.

Taking the world economy as a whole, the productive forces have long outgrown the nation-state. This was already shown by the outbreak of World War I more than a hundred years ago. In recent years, the revolution in communications represented by the rise of the Internet and the smartphone is increasingly breaking down global, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.

But the nation-state has refused to peacefully fade away into the sunset as the productive forces have outgrown it. In the period between the two world wars, there emerged within the imperialist world a counter-tendency of resurgent economic nationalism, which found expression in increased tariff and other trade barriers. Economic nationalism was accompanied by growing political nationalism, racist anti-immigrant movements, and racism within the imperialist countries. These trends found their most extreme manifestation in Nazi Germany.

Today in the imperialist countries, we once again see a rise of economic and political nationalism accompanied by anti-immigrant movements and growing racism. This extremely dangerous tendency is currently represented by President Donald Trump and his supporters in the U.S., where it is now in power; the current government of Austria; the National Front in France; the Alternative for Germany in Germany, where it is the official opposition party; and their counterparts in other imperialist countries. Though they are not imperialist countries, similar movements dominate governments of many of the ex-socialist countries of eastern Europe such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic

Trump’s recent decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal” capital was accompanied by Israeli massacres that have left more than a hundred Palestinians dead and thousands wounded in Gaza. Trump’s move cannot be separated from the broader racist trend that Trump personifies.

Israel itself is the product of an earlier wave of racism that accompanied the economic and political nationalism of the period between World War I and World II that ended with Nazi Germany’s attempt to physically exterminate the entire European Jewish population. Zionist Israel, therefore, links the “old racism” with the new.

Is a kind of global apartheid system emerging, as Smith suggests, that is replacing the increasingly outmoded bourgeois nation-state? Today’s political and economic trends suggest the answer could be yes if the coming period does not result in a victory of the global working class.

Three Books on Marxist Political Economy (Pt 10)

History of interest rates

A chart showing the history of interest rates over the last few centuries shows an interesting pattern — low hills and valleys with a generally downward tendency. During and immediately after World War I, interest rates form what looks like a low mountain range. Then with the arrival of the Great Depression of the 1930s, rates sink into a deep valley. Unlike during World War I, interest rates remain near Depression lows during World War II but start to rise slowly with some wiggles through the end of the 1960s.

But during the 1970s, interest rates suddenly spike upward, without precedent in the history of capitalist production. It is as though after riding through gently rolling country for several hundred years of capitalist history, you suddenly run into the Himalaya mountain range. Then, beginning in the early 1980s, interest rates start to fall into a deep valley, reaching all-time lows in the wake of the 2007-09 Great Recession. Clearly something dramatic occurred in the last half of the 20th century.