Out Now!: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, January 2023

“This is the thing about the Left. They’re unified to a fault. They’ll take in any looney, trannie, pedophile. They’ve got their back, they’ve got Biden’s back, they’ve got Fetterman’s back. We have the opposite problem. If someone has one imperfection, if Trump is too braggadocios, if Elon Musk talked to the ADL, if Ben Shapiro doesn’t support Nick Fuentes, we shut everyone down, and we’re all divided. That’s not me. I’m a hippie man. If you want less government and free speech, then I’m with you. We’ve got to unify these anti-government groups because the Left is winning.”

This nasty “bizarro world” harangue, this deluded bit of hate speech comes from Gavin McInnes as he complains about the state of American politics after the disastrous performance of the GOP in the 2022 midterms. We on the Left are nowhere near as crackpot. Many of us argue that an American Fascism is just around the corner, or was ensconced in the White House during Trump’s presidency, or perhaps remains embedded in some deep state apparatus. But unlike the 1960s when we routinely called everything and everyone fascist, much of the current Left sees divisions in American society that can be exploited or pockets of resistance that can be rallied or embers of hope that can be fanned into a prairie fire. The Left today doesn’t see our enemies on the Right as monolithic and we certainly don’t see our own ranks as hegemonic.

Chalkboard #1: Defining Capitalism

The chalkboard series is where I think out loud.

Private property is a key concept under capitalism, meaning the personal ownership of productive property like land, means of production such as facilities, tools, and machinery, and of course capital in all forms. Individuals who own private property are called capitalists, and collectively they are known as the capitalist class. An individual who owns nothing except his or her labor and is forced to sell that labor—usually for a wage—in order to survive is a worker. Collectively, workers are a part of the working class. Capitalists and workers are continuously engaged in a class struggle for social power, during which the working class undergoes recurring processes of composition, decomposition, and recomposition in which class consciousness plays a crucial role in the “class in itself” becoming a “class for itself.” Commodities, markets, competition, and monopolies are also key concepts under capitalism, which requires that capitalist individuals and businesses return a profit in order to survive. Profit can be realized through simple commercial exchange, through a more complex exploitation of wage labor for surplus value which is valorized as capital, or through the forced appropriation of labor and resources via colonialism and imperialism. The entire system of commodity production and distribution is called the capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism as a world system of capital accumulation began in the Mediterranean with the Venetian/Genoese cycle from 1250 to 1510. It dovetailed into the Dutch (Antwerp/Amsterdam) accumulation cycle from 1500 to 1733, which fed into the British cycle from 1733 to 1896, and which in turn overlapped the American cycle from 1865 to 1973. Each cycle went through three interrelated phases in which profit was extracted first from commerce, then from production, and finally from finance. The capitalist world system became truly global during the Dutch cycle, and came into its own as a mode of production with the development of industrial capitalism during the British cycle. Finance capitalism is capitalism in decline, and the American cycle entered its finance phase in 1973.

Finally, crisis is crucial to understanding how capitalism functions, yet Karl Marx never worked out a completed theory of capitalist crisis. Of the contending crisis theories (underconsumption, profit squeeze, falling rate of profit, disproportionality), my money is on the falling rate of profit to account for why capitalism periodically experiences economic and social crises. No determination yet as to whether the crisis in the American cycle marks a geographic shift in the capitalist world system under a new cycle, or some final crisis of world capitalism.