The Soviet Union has collapsed; whether China remains socialist has become a matter for research. The question, therefore, arises: why should anyone, other than a person with a religious streak, continue being Left and believing in a socialist future for mankind? This question would indeed have been quite clinching if the recent decline of the Left had been accompanied by a flourishing of capitalism; that would have proved that the Left’s decline was because of a fundamental flaw in its theoretical understanding.
The world today, however, is characterised by a capitalism that is afflicted not just by a massive economic crisis and political repression but it is also actually presiding over a genocide on a scale unprecedented in living memory. The only liveable future one can visualise for mankind today is a socialist future whose arrival may be painful and delayed but is essential for escaping from the present morass.
The economic crisis is obvious. From the finding by the American economist, Joseph Stiglitz, that the real wage of an average male American worker in 2011 was marginally lower than that in 1968 to the overwhelming evidence of an increase in nutritional deprivation in India and in much of the Global South between 1993-94 and 2011-12, it is clear that even the heyday of neoliberal capitalism had seen a process of absolute immiserisation of the working people everywhere; the slowdown in the world economy following the collapse of the US housing ‘bubble’, which has now morphed into a secular stagnation, and mounting unemployment has made matters far worse for them.
The Keynesian prescription of a rise in State expenditure to counter sluggish demand does not work under neoliberal capitalism. State expenditure can increase employment only if it is financed either by a larger fiscal deficit or by larger taxes on the rich; taxing the working people and using the tax-proceeds for raising State expenditure do not increase aggregate demand since the working people consume much of their incomes anyway.
Both these ways of financing larger State expenditure are anathema for finance capital. Since finance today is globalised while States remain nation-states, the latter must defer to the wishes of the former to avoid debilitating capital flights. This rules out the Keynesian remedy for countering stagnation; it makes the nation-states powerless to overcome it. Not surprisingly, there is a strong neo-fascist upsurge all over the world that is supported by monopoly capital. It provides a diversionary discourse so that the hegemony of monopoly capital faces no threat from the ongoing crisis. In India, this alliance between neo-fascism and monopoly capital has taken the form of a corporate-Hindutva alliance.
The neo-fascist discourse shifts attention from the prevailing economic distress of the working people and focuses instead on a hapless minority whom it ‘Others’ and against whom it generates hatred within the majority; this has the added ‘advantage’ from the point of view of monopoly capital of disrupting the unity of the working people and preventing any collective action on their part against its hegemony. At present, capitalism, therefore, has brought both economic distress for the people and political repression that are unprecedented at least over the last half-century. Moreover, there is no possibility of an end to this state of affairs within neoliberal capitalism: the same constraints that prevent State intervention for overcoming the crisis within a liberal bourgeois dispensation also apply when the State is headed by neo-fascists for globalised finance capital’s opposition to fiscal deficits or taxes on the rich does not disappear when the State is headed by neo-fascists.
Donald Trump’s resort to higher tariffs must be seen in this context. Since demand cannot be increased through State expenditure, the only way to increase demand for any particular country is by snatching it away from other countries by pursuing what is called ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, before the fascist governments in Japan and Germany had expanded demand by increasing military expenditure and financing it by massive fiscal deficits (they could do this because finance capital was not globalised but national and could be cajoled into accepting larger fiscal deficits), there had been a spate of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies through competitive exchange rate depreciations following the collapse of the Gold Standard.
Trump has started a similar ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policy using tariffs as the weapon. The success of such a policy for any particular country depends upon whether other countries retaliate; if they do, then all countries become even worse off collectively than they were before the spate of competitive ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies began. In the present case, countries of the Global South are likely to be brow-beaten into eschewing retaliation, even bringing down their own tariffs in exchange for the Americans not raising theirs. This would further squeeze the working people in the Global South, especially farmers in a country like India, destroy food security, and expose these countries to the danger of famines; Africa, where foodgrain self-sufficiency was abandoned earlier, provides a classic example of this.
While the economic distress and political repression unleashed by contemporary capitalism are evident, some may object to my including the Gaza genocide among the crimes of capitalism. How does capitalism, they would ask, enter the picture here? Let us for the moment accept their argument, ignoring the unanimous support that Benjamin Netanyahu is getting from big capitalist powers and the obvious plan of imperialism to use Israel as its gendarme in the Middle-east. Even then, it is undeniable that the Left everywhere is the most consistent force standing up for the Palestinians. Its historical role for mankind’s survival and for the preservation of sanity is unquestionable.
