How Capitalism Killed Nutrition: A Review of 'Ultra-Processed People'

By Luka Kiernan

Republished from Red Flag.

Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.

The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 

The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.

Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 

This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes up to 60 percent of the average diet.

A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent VicHealth study. In the UK, working-class children are getting shorter on average, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 

From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.

There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident consumes eight kilograms of these substances a year. 

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These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.

For instance, a 2019 study by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 

According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 

Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.

Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 

He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 

Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 

In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has tripled (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated a conclusive link between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to massively increased risks of heart attack and stroke.

Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 

In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are more than twice as high in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.

The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 

In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.

The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests emitted more CO2 in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 

There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.

In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.

Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.

However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 

Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.

The Fight for Migrant Rights in the U.S.: An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

[Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg]

By Brendan Stanton

Republished from Red Flag.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.” He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Q: After the polarisation under former President Trump, what has shifted in the politics of the border and migration during the Biden era?

A: The short answer is that it’s gotten worse. There were some 400 executive actions taken by the Trump administration that affected immigration, including family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, expanding the border wall and ending temporary protected status for many groups. Much of this framework has been institutionalised under Biden. 

This is despite the fact that, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the whole discourse of the Democratic Party was towards dismantling the inhumane and punitive measures of the Trump regime. While Biden wasn’t on the left wing of that discourse, he characterised Trump as harmful to immigrants and refugees and promised a pathway to legalisation for migrants in his first 100 days. This shifted immediately after the Democrats won, and they quickly walked back any discussion.

It’s worth also mentioning that Biden technically ordered a month’s moratorium on deportations early in the administration. But the order was overruled by a Trump-appointed federal judge on the day it was issued. The administration used this as an excuse to abandon the promise completely, but it was quickly pointed out by immigration scholars that there were multiple ways in which the administration could have worked around that ruling to stop deportations. 

Although vocally opposing Title 42 [a Trump-era measure allowing authorities to turn away migrants at the border on public-health grounds], one of his first acts as president was using it to conduct a mass deportation of Haitians from south Texas. Even while the Trump policy of family separation at the border was stopped, the Biden administration announced that it’s going to begin the process of reauthorising family detention.

The Democrats’ real orientation around border politics was signalled by Kamala Harris when she was sent to Guatemala in 2021 to tell Central Americans, “Do not come to the United States”. This signalled the institutionalisation of Tump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which defunded the legal side of the asylum process.

This, of course, didn’t stop people from migrating. Just like under Trump, it created conditions where large populations are forced to live in overcrowded encampments, on the street and in other uninhabitable areas on the Mexican side of the borderlands. 

The Democrats played an equal or even greater role in building the immigration enforcement apparatus than the Republicans. They have no left or progressive or reformist orientation towards immigration, and they face pressure from the right when the Republican Party redeploys all the racist tropes like “our border is under attack”, or “we’re being invaded” during each election cycle. So they consistently diverge their rhetoric during elections, and after elections they converge with Republicans again. 

That’s how we’re in a situation where far more people were deported in Biden’s first year than under the previous four years of Trump.

Has there been any opposition from the likes of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or other people who made a name for themselves calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security division in charge of deportations?

There was this interesting period in 2019, when a lot of these people on the left of the party were going to detention centres and giving speeches. Ocasio-Cortez gave a very moving account of the horrors of a detention centre, and said we have to close the “concentration camps”.

But as soon as the Democrats won, it all evaporated. She and other “left” Democrats stopped calling these horrible places “camps” and started promoting the idea that with Democrats in office, there’s going to be reform. That reform never happened, but there has still been a shift in terms of softening rhetoric or not talking about it at all. Since the abandonment of immigration reform after the election, there has been no movement within the Democratic party to change the status quo. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in campaign mode leading up to 2024, the Biden administration makes similar promises as before. But for now, it’s shifted far to the right, taking the whole party tent and the stakes to the right with it. 

A couple of months ago, a story broke about undocumented children working in quite dangerous conditions for major US corporations. Have there been any significant changes around labour protection in the wake of that scandal?

It actually created an internal conflict within the Biden administration. Some officials who were monitoring the child refugee crisis were calling the administration’s attention to how many of these children were being absorbed into the workforce as early as a year and a half ago. People higher up, like Susan Rice, one of the chief advisers of Biden, knew this was happening. They basically quashed it, said it was not a priority, and so it took outside reporters to break the story.

It’s important to understand what immigration enforcement is designed to do and what it’s not designed to do. It’s not designed to stop people from migrating or to prevent people from falling into these conditions. It creates pathways for this to happen by essentially creating systems of regulation for a growing segment of the workforce in this country. 

Being exposed for their awareness that child labour is flourishing once again in the United States is a public relations problem for the Biden administration, but it hasn’t provoked a political crisis. It’s also because the Republicans and the right don’t have a problem with this issue—they’re not going to try to make it an issue. 

Even within organised labour, it’s not clear that there’s any effort to address the issue of child labour. Like so many other things, it’s either under-reported or swept under the rug really quickly. It’s a reflection of how little opposition there is inside the US to the politics of immigration enforcement.

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How do you think socialists and leftists should understand the class dynamics of border politics?

We can walk through that child refugee scenario from beginning to end and explain how this is a political function of capitalist policy. 

Between 2011 and 2016, almost 200,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, came to the United States. Two major factors played a key role in this. One is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement first implemented in 2006. By 2010, there were radical economic changes like the opening up of these economies to unrestricted foreign capital investment and the privatisation of much of the economy. 

There was a systematic displacement of people who could no longer afford to work the land, or whose jobs in manufacturing were displaced by foreign capital. This foreign capital is invested in extreme forms of labour production associated with maquiladoras [US-owned factories], basically laboratories for increasing productivity, repressing wages and keeping unions out. 

This destroys many of the social aspects of the economy, and by 2011 we saw the first significant effects of these policies displacing people. 

Earlier, in 2007, the US initiated a region-wide security strategy called the Mérida Initiative, through which it gave money and political support to Mexican and Central American governments to expand the border enforcement apparatus of the United States further south. The US trains police and militaries in these countries to engage in the Drug War and also control migration, 

Alongside the other realities of the War on Drugs, which contributed to the growth of drug cartels, this has destabilised the region. The illegal drug industry is now one of the major industries of the Western hemisphere, and these cartels have grown in rhythm and tempo with the criminalisation of drugs and the growth of enforcement mechanisms. Instead of the cartels being contained and defeated in Mexico through this regional militarisation, they’ve been pushed further into Central America. 

In 2009, the US greenlit the overthrow of the left-of-centre president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. This set up the rule of the far right for the next several years, including Juan Orlando Hernández, a strong US ally who was also on the payroll of the cartels. While he was president, a lot of the funding and technology he received from the US for the drug war went towards repressing indigenous populations and social movements. Lots of people were displaced, and hundreds of labour organisers, socialists, LGBTQ people, indigenous organisers and other leftists were killed. 

So all that’s happening down there while we have the building up of the border enforcement apparatus, and the children who ultimately make it through to the United States end up in the workforce to survive. How do we understand the end of that scenario without understanding how every sort of step of this process is predicated on strengthening the ability of capital to exploit? 

The overthrow of a left-of-centre president in 2009 helped embolden a far-right government to destroy the left, attack all these vulnerable groups and displace countless people. When thousands of these children and teenagers start appearing in meat production facilities and construction jobs in the US, it’s a manifestation of US regional policies. It’s not necessarily a conscious act that someone masterminded, but it’s the outcome of decisions that advocate for the interest of capital. 

This creates larger and larger pools of exploitable workers, on both sides of the border, who are hard to organise, including workers who are regulated by the state. That impacts wage thresholds and impacts the whole labour economy. And when immigrant workers rise up, as they did in 2006, that leads to an increase in the repression of the state. 

In light of these border dynamics, in what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?

There has to be a rejection of criminalisation and border enforcement. That has to be a demand for all workers. In 1986 it actually was, when unions backed an amnesty for undocumented workers. This led to a surge in unionisation among newly legalised workers, who were much more class conscious than the rest of the population. Legalisation was a huge boost for the union movement at a time when it was otherwise declining. It also means supporting workers as they organise on the other side of the border.

I’m going to try to paraphrase Marx. He said something like, you don’t know what the problem is until a solution presents itself. In the context of the North American class struggle, capital has invested so much by shifting production south of the border and dividing production into cross-border supply chains. Therefore, the working classes in the US and Mexico have become fused together in ways that are much more apparent. More of these workers, especially workers in Mexico, recognise that class struggle is by necessity transnational, and there have been flashes of this potential and some sustained processes of a transnational labour response. 

There are some maquiladoras in Tamaulipas [a north-eastern state bordering Texas] making parts for General Motors that are going to be used for assembly in Tennessee or in Detroit, and there are also GM plants making whole cars in Mexico. 

The workers in these factories in Mexico have to be very savvy organisers, because in Mexico you don’t just organise against the employers, you organise against the fake unions that are muscle for the employers. You often have to organise directly against local and state governments and sometimes the federal government. 

In 2019, these workers in Matamoros [across the border from Brownsville, Texas], in extreme conditions, coordinated a series of wildcat strikes all at once. Rank-and-file women and men workers organising these networks got over 35,000 workers and shut down 48 factories over a month and a half. All of them won a 20 percent pay increase and a significant rise in their annual bonuses. A big part of why they won is because shutting down their factories disrupted parts supplies all across the US and Mexico, costing bosses an estimated US$50 million per day. 

That same year, United Auto Workers union members went on strike at GM, shutting down almost all production in the US and Canada, but not in Mexico. So GM decided to shift more production to Mexico to avoid further disruption and undercut these workers. In this context, workers trying to organise a union at the largest GM plant in Mexico, in Silao, Guanajuato, said that they supported the strike and the demands of the United Auto Workers in the US. They asked for the UAW to support them and bring them into the union or at least help them build an independent union so they could strike, start the process of shutting down Mexican auto production and completely shut down General Motors production. 

Unfortunately, the UAW ignored them and accepted a largely concessionary contract. But in the fallout was some recognition that they blew this opportunity. How could they not support the organisation of auto workers in Mexico, when GM is actively using these disorganised workers to undermine them? A couple of years later, the UAW began to support these Mexican workers in their unionisation efforts—they won and even expanded to other non-GM auto plants. This didn’t create equal wages. but it was a recognition by the UAW that they can’t afford not to support Mexican workers organising. 

In this process, more workers, especially militants fighting to build fledgling unions, recognise that they have to build international solidarity and engage in class struggle across the border. They recognise they’re not fighting just the employer but all of these other forces. It’s interesting to see how these workers are recognising that, as capital is operating at a North American scale, they too have to organise against it at a North American scale and not let the border divide them.

What is social class?

By Danica Rachel

Republished from Red Flag.

A recent Essential poll found that 79 percent of Australians believe social classes still exist in Australia. This is unsurprising, given the distribution of wealth. For example, the Australia Institute’s Inequality on Steroids report estimates that the top 10 percent of Australian income earners received 93 percent of the benefits from all economic growth in the decade from 2009 to 2019.

Of Essential poll respondents, 49 percent consider themselves to be middle class, 30 percent self-identify as working class and 4 percent as upper class. This raises a question: what is a social class? 

Definitions typically revolve around income. “Middle class”, we’re often told, means earning something like the median income—about $65,000 a year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There’s no consensus on how much below or above this figure someone can earn while still being in the middle. 

This is a vague way to define class and is ripe for misinterpretations and distortions. An article published in the Australian last year described yearly earnings between $120,000 and $160,000 as “middle income” in an attempt to defend the high-end tax cuts due to be implemented by the federal Labor government next year. 

In reality, according to the most recently available statistics from the Australian Taxation Office, people making this much money are comfortably in the top 15 percent of Australian income earners.

More sophisticated classifications refer to education levels, cultural interests and family occupations as well as income. But again, the outcome is imprecise. Anyone with a university degree becomes middle class, and “working class” often becomes a synonym for “lower class”—that is, anyone economically worse off or with lower formal education levels than those in the “middle”.

 Socialists are more precise. While income can often be an indicator of social class, we define the latter in terms of people’s relationship to society’s economic infrastructure. That gives us three categories: the capitalist class, the working class and the middle classes.

Capitalists are the parasites at the top. They’re the executives, CEOs and board members who own and/or control the big companies, and with them the machinery, farmland, office buildings, media outlets, electricity grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports and so on. They own the “means of production”, which they put to use with the singular purpose of generating profit.

Workers, on the other hand, don’t own any means of production. They might own personal property such as a car, a phone, maybe a house. But while workers use their personal property to meet their daily needs, capitalists use their private property as capital—a means to generate wealth through exploiting workers. 

A worker might grow some veggies in their garden to cut grocery costs; an agricultural capitalist uses thousands of acres of farmland to turn a profit. A house owned by a worker is just a home, but it becomes capital when owned by a real estate investor, used to generate wealth on the market.

The threat of poverty, homelessness and starvation gives workers no choice but to sell the only thing they can: their capacity to labour. They are deprived of control over much of their daily lives, having little say over the work they do or the workplaces in which they are employed. Even simple dignities like meals and bathroom breaks in many places can be taken only when allowed by the boss. 

The number of people fitting this definition of “working class” is difficult to quantify. Diane Fieldes, writing in the 2005 anthology Class and struggle in Australia, estimated that the working class makes up a substantial majority of the population—more than double the 30 percent figure in the Essential poll. 

“Middle class” also takes on a different meaning in this framework. It describes those who sit between the working class and the class of big capitalists. There are many different categories that fit in here: small business owners, middle managers, union officials, academics and state bureaucrats, to name a few. They can have different and contradictory relationships to the means of production—some are small capitalists, others just bureaucrats. What they generally have in common is that they control their own work or the work of others. They certainly make up a lot less than 49 percent of the population.

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The Marxist definition of class is much more useful than loose definitions based on income or education. 

First, it gives us an understanding of how capitalism works. Workers and bosses don’t exist in isolation; they are intimately connected through exploitation. Capitalists own the means of production, but need workers to operate machines, maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, serve customers and so on. The workers are the ones who produce the goods or services that their bosses sell for profit.

But there’s the rub. For the boss to make a profit, they have to sell the products for more than the costs of production, which crucially includes what they pay their workers. So the workers have created value, but that value has been seized from them by the capitalist, and only a fraction returned as a wage. This isn’t just the case with blue-collar workers, but also applies to workers in retail, hospitality, healthcare, IT, administration and elsewhere. 

Whether a business is successful depends on how much profit it can make, and therefore how much its workers are exploited. Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism—and every cent of them comes from exploited labour. By understanding exploitation, we can understand how 93 percent of wealth went to the top 10 percent last decade.

Second, the Marxist definition shows that classes have counterposed interests. What’s good for capitalists is whatever makes their profits go up. This often means, for instance, paying workers less, cutting costs wherever possible and lowering workplace safety standards. What’s good for workers is the opposite: being paid more and having more rights at work. Thinking of class simply as where someone sits on the spectrum from “low income” to “high income” obscures this tension.

Third, defining classes by their relation to the means of production tells us who has power in society. The capitalists own the most important section of the economy, so they make all major decisions about what society produces and how it will be produced. And because of this control, governments must keep them onside. Otherwise, they might move their investments overseas, threaten the economy, or even outright depose governments.

But profits are generated by workers, which gives them a different kind of power. When a workplace goes on strike, its production stops, and therefore profits cannot be made. The bosses go to great lengths to avoid this happening. They’ll pit workers against each other and spread lies about unions to stop workers organising.

Finally, we can see who is needed to run society—and who runs it day to day. The capitalists portray themselves as the deserving few who are indispensable. But their profits and wealth are the fruits of workers’ labour. Workers, not bosses, construct buildings, run hospitals, and stock shelves. Workers run the world, but under capitalism they are forced to run it for the capitalist class.

Another world is possible, where workers run the world for ourselves, because of the simple fact that the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.

Global Ruling Classes Welcome Fascist-Led Government in Italy

By Luca Tavan

Republished from Red Flag.

The Italian general election was a historic win for the far right. A coalition of the three major parties won 44 percent of the vote, enough in Italy’s byzantine electoral system to form a clear majority in both houses of parliament. Most importantly, it was driven by the meteoric rise of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in the post-Mussolini fascist tradition, which secured 26 percent of the vote, making it the single largest party in parliament. 

For many, the ascension to power of a fascist party in the centre of Europe seemed unthinkable. But decades of grinding economic crisis, state-sponsored racism and the discrediting of parties of the neoliberal centre have created a dangerous situation of far-right advance. With Europe on the brink of yet another recession, the prospect of further descent into authoritarianism and barbarism is alarming. 

If you listen to the capitalist press and politicians, however, you would think that there’s nothing to worry about. A headline in the Australian exhorts: “Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist”. The Australian Financial Review carried the line, “Victory to Italian right is no lurch into extremism”. This is despite Meloni’s pledge to institute a naval blockade to stop refugee ships, roll back abortion and LGBTI rights and dismantle social welfare. 

Speaking to an Italian journalist at the Venice Film Festival, US former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even praised Meloni: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”. It’s remarkable to speak of “breaking with the past” as Mussolini-nostalgists return to power in the birthplace of fascism. 

A statement from Lorenzo Codogno, a former director-general of the Italian Treasury, reveals the real reason for establishment nonchalance in the face of fascism. “They want to be perceived as a party that you can do business with and can govern the country.” Business has taken a look at this coalition of far-right racists and fascists, and decided it’s a government they can deal with, potentially making a great deal of money. 

Aided by a wave of apologetics from the media, Meloni has attempted to sanitise her image to present a respectable face. During the election campaign, she reassured voters that her party had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”. But Meloni has maintained a commitment to fascist politics throughout her life. At the age of 15, she joined MSI (Italian Social Movement), the party founded by leading fascists who survived the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1943 and wanted to work for its return. Along with a series of other former MSI leaders, Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 as the latest iteration of this project. 

In her autobiography, I am Giorgia, she espouses the “great replacement theory”, claiming that the left is attempting to destroy Western civilisation by flooding the continent with African and Middle Eastern migrants and undermining traditional family structures. In local government, Brothers politicians have passed legislation making it harder for migrants to access social housing, and proposed laws that would make it compulsory to bury aborted fetuses in cemeteries. 

Meloni will rule in coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, who as interior minister in a previous government blocked the entry of NGO ships carrying rescued refugees to Italian shores, and Silvio Berlusconi, the infamously corrupt and venal media magnate whose Forza Italia was once the leading light of the populist right. 

While the far right has been advancing in Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, Meloni’s victory is a significant milestone. It’s the first time a party with neo-fascist roots has led a government in a major European economy. This gives a boost to the rising tide of far-right politics internationally. 

Meloni’s victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the major win for the far-right Sweden Democrats. She has been a vocal supporter of the Spanish Vox Party and Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. Both Meloni and Orbán were guests of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of the American right.

Meloni’s victory was assured by the craven support that every party of the political mainstream gives to unpopular and brutal neoliberal policies, which have created massive poverty and youth unemployment and savaged living standards. The 25 September election was triggered by the collapse of the Draghi government, an unelected technocratic cabinet headed by a former European Central Bank president to oversee further cuts to social spending. 

Every major party from the centrist Democratic Party to the Lega participated in this “national unity” government. Meloni’s group was the only significant force that remained outside of the coalition. As the government slowly but inevitably collapsed, the Brothers gained credibility.

The high level of abstention in the election was another important factor in Meloni’s success. The rise of the right can be put down to widespread revulsion at the political mainstream, rather than a popular endorsement of Meloni’s program. Fewer than 64 percent of the eligible population voted, the lowest turnout in history and down from an average of 90 percent in the post-WWII period. Meloni increased her vote largely by winning voters from the other right-wing parties. 

Despite a history of shallow anti-establishment rhetoric, a hallmark of the far right, Meloni will likely continue Draghi’s economic agenda. Meloni has also reassured the capitalist class that her government will support NATO. Internal divisions could emerge within the coalition over the war in Ukraine—Salvini’s Lega has ties to Italian capitalists with heavy investments in Russia, and he has questioned the continuation of sanctions. Meloni will have to balance the fragile and conflicting interests of her coalition partners with her desire to remain a reliable ally of European capital at large.

What is certain is that the new right-wing coalition will intensify attacks on workers and oppressed people. It can’t be ruled out that they will attempt to curb civil and democratic rights. The Brothers have already signalled their desire for legislation to ban what they term “totalitarian” or “extremist” ideologies, by which they mean communism and Islam.

The far right’s victory is a harbinger of things to come. A recent opinion piece by Edward Luce in the Financial Times noted: “Western liberalism is still skating on thin ice”, with war and looming recession in Europe, a protracted energy crisis and far-right electoral advances making for destabilising factors in world politics. 

The capitalists realise that in a crisis-ridden and polarised world, far-right governments may increasingly be an option for defending their power and privilege. They think that they are playing a clever game by normalising the new government in Italy. They believe that they can keep the fascists under their thumb, use them to absorb discontent at unpopular austerity measures and advance their economic agenda. 

History tells us that fascists like Meloni, who are inspired by the monstrous dictatorships of the 1920s and ’30s, may harbour even darker aspirations for the future.

Five Points About the Climate Crisis

[Pictured: Deforesting in Tasmania, Australia. Photo by Matt Palmer]

By Jerome Small

Republished from Red Flag.

This article is based on a speech given by Jerome Small, Victorian Socialists Northern Metro candidate in the upcoming state election, at the 30 July United Climate Rally in Melbourne.

Point number one is acknowledging whose land we’re on: the First Nations people, the Wurundjeri people and the entire Kulin nations, and the Aboriginal people around this state and around this country.  More than 200 years ago, these First People had a social system imposed on them that turned land into a commodity, that turned human beings into a commodity, that turned everything in the world into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit.

That social system decided very quickly that it was more profitable to run sheep on this part of the world than to let human beings live on it as they had always done. And the genocide ensued. That social system continues to decide that it’s more profitable to rip coal and gas from the ground than to let Aboriginal people live on their country. That dispossession continues to this day.

So it should be both an inspiration and an education for all of us that, despite everything that that social system has visited on First Nations people, they are still here and still fighting for justice. That should be a reminder to all of us that sometimes the very survival of people depends on resistance, depends on fighting, depends on organising.

That social system is still with us, of course, and still turning the planet and everything on it into a commodity, regardless of the consequences. Which gets to my second point—that capitalism has brought us to a dire situation.

We’ve heard about wildfires in countries, like the UK and Poland, that are not accustomed to seeing wildfires, due to the massive heatwave in Europe. We know a bit about this from the Australian bushfire summer of 2019-20. It’s not hard to find accounts of firefighters attempting to fight flames 70 metres tall. Next time you’re in the city, find a fifteen-storey building. That’s 70 metres, give or take. It’s terrifying. We’re talking about flames that high—in some cases twice as high, up to 150 metres.

That’s not the scariest thing, though. The scariest thing isn’t the 33 people who died from the flames that summer, or the 400 people who died from the smoke, or the 1 billion animals that died from the fire and the smoke and the after-effects. The scariest thing isn’t that 7 percent of New South Wales, an area bigger than several European countries, burned in that year.

The scariest thing is that, according to the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, that year of 2019—the hottest year ever recorded in Australia—will be the average temperature of a year in Australia once we get 1.5 degrees of global warming. All those flames, all that death, all that ash—they’re saying will be our average temperature.

And Labor is looking at 1.5 degrees out its rear vision mirror as it zooms past, on its planet-incinerating 43 percent target. This gets to my third point: Labor and fossil fuels.

It’s hard to picture the scale of the fossil fuel export projects that Labor is prepared to approve.

I went to the Latrobe Valley last week. As you enter the town of Morwell, you can see on your right-hand side a massive pit 100 metres deep and the size of the Melbourne CBD, all the way from Docklands through to the MCG. It was an open-cut coal mine that for 60 years fed Australia’s highest emitting power station, Hazelwood. The best estimate I’ve seen is that all of the coal fed into that power station produced 400 million tonnes of CO2. A huge contribution to global heating.

But the Scarborough gas project in Western Australia, which Labor is prepared to sign off on, will release 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2— three and a half times the amount that came from that enormous pit next to Morwell in the Latrobe Valley. Then there’s the Beetaloo project, which is a similar size—and that’s just the first of the massive gas fracking projects that Labor is prepared to endorse in the Northern Territory. Add Narrabri in NSW. Add Beach Energy down in the Otway Basin in Victoria. Thank you, Daniel Andrews, for your contribution to runaway heating.

That tells us everything we need to know about where we’re headed under Labor. They have no intention of interfering with a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for profit, regardless of consequences.

This gets me to the fourth point—what have we got going for us, in the face of all this? In my opinion, quite a bit.

We’ve got the huge majority of humanity who do not make billion-dollar profits from cooking the planet.

We’ve got many people in the Latrobe Valley. There’s a stereotype that the coal regions are wall to wall coal-loving blue-collar workers. That’s bullshit, and it’s an insult to say it. You go to the Latrobe Valley and, just like any other part of the country or the world, there’s a significant argument taking place. There are people in that community—and in those power stations, in fact—making arguments about the need to get out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. That’s something that we have going for us.

We’ve got the potential for mass movements like what the climate strikers showed us in 2019 around the world: some of the biggest protests that have happened in this town for a hell of a long time. We’ve got that going for us.

We’ve got civil disobedience going for us. Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion, whether it’s Blockade IMARC, whether it’s Blockade Australia, we’re going to need a shit ton more of that.

We’ve got the truth going for us—but the truth is never going to be enough. We need organisation to turn all of that into a mass movement.

One thing that we also need, if our movement is going to succeed, is radical politics. That is my final point. That’s something that a lot of people here from different perspectives share. And that’s something that the Victorian Socialists are very much building in the few months ahead in the election campaign.

Yes, we’ll be talking about reversing privatisations. Yes, we’ll be talking about zero-emissions electricity grids by 2030 and a zero-carbon economy by 2035—because I think that’s the only thing that we can be talking about if we’re serious about stopping the temperature rising far past 2019.

We’ll also be talking about a vision of a society that is not a social system that turns everything into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit, even as the bodies pile high.

We’ll be talking about a vision of a society founded on solidarity and cooperation, which comes out of the struggles of today, and which doesn’t rely on billion-dollar corporations running our energy system and running the world. A society that says to those corporations: Do not pass go, do not collect $11.7 billion from the federal government this year. Your time is up. You’re done. Get out of the way.

You can take your 43 percent greenwashing target, you can take your coal and gas, and you can go to hell with them because we’re taking our world back. We’ll be talking about ordinary people making history over the next few months. And organising to do just that.

What would be different about a socialist economy?

By Ben Hillier

Republished from Red Flag.

The New York Stock Exchange is perhaps the premier institutional expression of the capitalist economy. It’s hard to conjure an image of American capitalism without including the Wall Street sign at the corner of Broad, or the stone streetscape of the exchange with its US flags, or the bronze “charging bull” statue at Bowling Green. 

Wall Street is for some a wondrous emblem of American exceptionalism. For most of us, it is a picture of moral desolation and criminality. Indeed, since it became the centre of US finance in the nineteenth century, Wall Street has repeatedly been the target of protests by workers who recognise it as a place where their enemies organise to rip them off and destroy their lives. 

So when you think “socialism”, you might, not unreasonably, conjure images of the storming and burning of stock exchanges everywhere. Yet a socialist economy would likely retain the machinery of Wall Street, albeit for refashioned ends. To understand why, and how a socialist economy might work, it’s important first to grasp just how remarkable the capitalist economy is. No human society before it has come close to developing the science, technologies and industrial capacities that we now take for granted.

Take the production of one of the most important things for human survival: food. Prior to capitalism, economies were primarily agrarian, the continued existence of any given population being almost entirely dependent on seasonal crop yields. Survival was a year-by-year proposition, famine just one flood, one drought, one failed harvest away. “A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births”, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. 

Today, thanks to capitalism, scarcity is a thing of the past. The amount of food available to an individual in France, for example, is estimated to be more than double what it was prior to the revolution of 1789, even though the population has more than doubled, from 28 million to 68 million. Across the world, the volume has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 60 years, from fewer than 2,200 calories per person per day to more than 2,900, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The recommended daily caloric intake being between 2,000 and 2,500 per day suggests that there is more than enough food available for everyone on the planet.

There’s an obvious problem, though, isn’t there? All around the world, billions of people are going hungry. At the extreme end, the humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are undernourished. Even in the richest of countries, there’s an issue. In Australia, for example, more than one in six adults and more than 1 million children routinely miss meals, according to Foodbank, a charity.

This minor detail—more than enough being produced but billions of people struggling—is replicated in almost all areas: housing, incomes, health care, education etc. The problem is that, while capitalism excels in producing masses of things, it fails dismally in distributing them in any equitable way. 

“The workman is the source of all wealth”, an article in the Lancashire Co-operator noted of nineteenth century England. “Who has raised all the food? The half fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver ... [Yet] the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich.”

Things haven’t changed much from those early years of capitalism. According to the financial group Credit Suisse, the richest 1 percent of adults on the planet together own nearly A$300 trillion in personal wealth—which is about 46 percent of the world’s total personal wealth. But the poorest 55 percent, close to 3 billion people, have just 1.3 percent of the wealth—on average less than A$2,000 per person.

It’s not just that the distribution of personal wealth is unequal, it’s that the productive infrastructure—the factories, the mines, the office blocks, the arable land, the telecommunications systems, the transport networks and so on—is owned and controlled by the rich and used to enrich them further.

One of the first goals of a socialist economy would be to put all of these important economic resources under the collective ownership and control of workers. By doing so, the majority of the population would gain the ability to decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be.

This brings us back to those stock exchanges. Every day, the Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney executes nearly 2 million trades. The system is remarkably efficient in pairing buyers and sellers of a diverse array of financial instruments. By and large, this is just wealthy people making themselves wealthier by buying and selling claims to the ownership of companies and other things. They, or their brokers, simply get online, look at what’s available to purchase, and trade away. 

In a socialist economy, this sort of technology, instead of being used to link capitalist traders around the world, could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city in a country, and every country in the world. Instead of endlessly trading claims to ownership of different companies, the trades would be simple declarations of needs and availabilities. That is, any given region would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day, whatever the case may be). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there were shortages and alter production accordingly.

It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms with ports with food manufacturers with warehouses with supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. 

So as you read this, somewhere a supermarket line manager is scanning a series of barcodes and entering a corresponding quantity of units for each item; tomorrow a truck will turn up with several pallets of whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. If you went back in time 200 years and tried to explain this to someone, they would likely consider you utterly mad. Yet here we all are, living in a world in which a stranger in a truck turns up with a mountain of goods after someone points a laser gun at a series of black lines on a small piece of paper. Marvelous. 

The process today is overseen by the small number of owners of the production and distribution chains who allow their workers to make orders and process deliveries only if they believe their company will make money. That’s the limit to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human need. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to driving the trucks to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and distribution to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. 

Under capitalism, bosses like Jeff Bezos reap the rewards of their impoverished, exploited workers, then turn around and say, “I want to go to space”—and it happens. Under socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labor and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste. First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. Again take food. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organizing to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labor producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again. Industrial-scale planned obsolescence reportedly originated in the early twentieth century with the Phoebus Cartel in light globe manufacturing, which decided to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around 1,000 hours. The idea is now embedded in pretty much every industry. It’s such a waste of labor and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products. (Did you know that some 24 billion pairs of shoes are sold every year?) 

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the labor associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: US consulting and research firm Forrester predicts that it will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, outlaid by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

It’s madness.

A socialist economy would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to: “First, what do we all need? Second, what do we want? Third, how many resources do we have? Fourth, what are our priorities?” A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions (“How do I make people want to buy this product, how can I generate a profit?”). 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Finally, a socialist economy would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is. As noted above, it is. But again, this has serious limitations. Take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy using existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The poet Bertolt Brecht put it best in his poem “In praise of communism”:

It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple.

You’re no exploiter, so you’ll understand.

It is good for you. Look into it.

Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.

It is against dirt and against stupidity.

The exploiters call it a crime.

But we know:

It is the end of all crime.

It is not madness but

The end of madness.

It is not chaos,

But order.

It is the simple thing

That’s hard to do.

Ben Hillier is the author of Losing Santhia: life and loss in Tamil Eelam and The art of rebellion: dispatches from Hong Kong.

The Fascist Farce on Washington

By Josh Lees

Republished from Red Flag.

Far right protesters forced their way into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to support Donald Trump’s failed attempt to cling to a second presidential term in the face of his election defeat. Many people, from across the political spectrum, labelled the event a coup, or an insurrection. It is the exact threat, apparently, that the pro-Biden establishment and the major US TV networks have been warning about: a major attack on US democracy.

But far from some serious “coup” or “insurrection”, this was a pathetic display highlighting the weakness of Trump and the right. The outgoing president won 74 million votes in November. He has spent nine weeks campaigning to overturn the election result. The rally in Washington was supposed to be the culmination of these efforts. Trump urged his supporters to attend the rally and he spoke at it. Yet the turnout could be counted only in the thousands. The rally was a flop—the “popular” equivalent of a Rudy Giuliani press conference.

Trump failed to win any institutional support for his bid. No section of the military has backed him, nor any other section of the US state apparatus. He has lost every court case filed. Fox News has distanced itself, along with the bulk of the Republican Party establishment. Even those, like Senator Ted Cruz, who objected to accepting the electoral college votes from Arizona, made clear that they were not trying to prevent a Biden presidency. Even Trump’s closest political allies seem to have abandoned him, while they nevertheless try to hang on to his supporters. Trump failed to mobilise any serious numbers on the streets and eventually called on them to go home.

The “storming” of the Capitol was hardly the stuff movies are made about (although I’m sure someone will try). A few windows were broken, and the only person killed was one of the far-right protesters. No real damage to the building was done. Someone sat in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair (the horror!). To call it a riot is generous. Perhaps “theatre” would be a better word.

Their success in gaining entry had more to do with the sympathy that the cops and other security agencies have with the far right than the protesters’ actual strength. While Black Lives Matter protests have been met with thousands upon thousands of riot police and the National Guard, tear gas, flashbang grenades, beatings, mass arrest and shootings, the fascists were met with very few cops, some of whom took selfies with the protesters as they wandered around not really knowing what to do now that they had miraculously gained entry.

We should be clear: the US state backs Biden. Besides their sympathy with the far right, this is the other reason the security apparatus was unprepared for the protesters entering the building—authorities knew that there was no coup, so they were quite relaxed. They will be ruing that it got out of hand—but in the same way all police departments are embarrassed when a protest gets out of their control when they weren’t expecting it. In the wake of the protest, Trump, having encouraged his supporters, is now more isolated than ever. 

The pathetic death-throes of his presidency does not of course mean that the far right in the US is finished. It is much weaker than the Democrats make it out to be (to cynically herd the broad left into supporting their right-wing corporate candidates). But it has certainly grown under Trump. It may grow into a more serious force still. Even if the far right doesn’t grow, its isolation and demoralisation could push some in its ranks in the direction of terrorism, as we saw with the wave of fascist shootings in the wake of successful anti-fascist mobilisations following Charlottesville. So there is a need to build movements against fascism in the US, and it would be great if there were mass protests in the coming days in response.

But a myopic focus on the far right is misorienting—a result of the highly successful campaign by the US liberal establishment to focus on Trumpism as a unique threat to the working class and people of colour, and ignore the structural features of US capitalism that the Democrats uphold and against which so many rebelled in 2020.For the last four years we heard that it was the Democrats versus fascism. Perhaps that broken record is going to play for a little while longer, albeit while the Democrats control the executive and both branches of the legislature.

The main political outcome of the far-right farce in Washington is likely to be a strengthening of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and an attempt to use these events to rally the population around all the key institutions of US capitalism and imperialism that have copped such a battering in recent times.

The US ruling class and its state apparatus backed a Democrat presidency to better “rebuild trust” in US institutions, “unite the nation”—i.e., co-opt and crush internal resistance—and rebuild US imperial might abroad. The Democrats agree with the bulk of Trump’s policies and have often legislated worse themselves, from neoliberal attacks on workers, to racist border policies, killer cops and launching or backing wars. Hence why they have opposed Trump as an aberration—a result of Russian interference and the uneducated “deplorables” who fell for his fake news—who is weakening and dividing their otherwise wonderful country and its institutions. Biden is the saviour to, essentially, make America great again.

The main enemy in the US remains the US state, US capitalism and the new imperial presidency of Joe Biden and his Democratic majority. The more liberal wing of the Democrats is doing its best, as it has all along, to play the role of herding left-wing opinion behind Joe Biden. 

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, celebrated hero of “the squad” among the pro-Democrat left, responded to the events by tweeting, “We will not let our Constitution be trampled on by a mob and threatened by a tyrant. Democracy will prevail”. This is nationalist blather. She and her fellow squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have now called for Trump to be impeached, a laughable manoeuvre to keep the focus off the incoming Biden administration.

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a duo who more personify everything that is rotten about capitalism than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. One has spent his life getting rich off a political career based on campaigning to lock up as many of the poor and people of colour as possible. The other has carried out that agenda as the top cop of California. They are loyal servants of the rich and enemies of the working class, and their key mission is to strengthen the bloodiest empire the world has ever suffered. We cannot forget this amid the breathless talk of imagined coups by small fascist groups.