Whilst the media, increasingly incapable of seeing beyond the “breaking news”, rejoice at “America’s firm recovery” (“America surprises the world,” was the headline in the Italian daily Corriere della Seraon 24/12/14 - but then there was a Christmas atmosphere afoot…) huge, threatening bubbles – for Capital – are swelling on the horizon. We are not speaking merely of the economic-financial ones, to which we have been devoting a good deal of attention in the series of articles on “The Course of World Capitalism and its Crises”. We are speaking of those “social bubbles”, perhaps less immediately visible (except for the dramatic aspects that media sensationalism inevitably insists on), but pregnant with implications for the future.
If we wish to understand the conditions under which the US proletariat lives and works, or survives and does not work (and thus come to realize, in the contradictions constantly generated by Capital, the prospects for a “firm recovery of class consciousness”!), we should look at the sectors that are most oppressed from a social and economic point of view, and the most numerous: the Afro-American proletariat and the immigrants. Just a few months after “the Ferguson facts” [1], military control of the territory (i.e. the trigger-happy policy of the police) has continued to run up victims: a young black man from Brooklyn (New York) killed while he was on the stairway of his girlfriend’s home, a black twelve-year-old in Cleveland hit and killed because he was waving a toy pistol, another young black man killed because he didn’t obey the orders of a police office… The shocking sequence of cold-blooded killings by the “forces of law and order” all around the United States and the consequent “no grounds to proceed” against the uniformed killers resulted in whole days and nights of anger and indignation, demonstrations and clashes with the police and the National Guard – actually very slight reactions when compared to what happened in the 1960s (but in the ‘70s and ‘80s, too) when a series of riots took place in the country’s ghettoes from coast to coast, but which nonetheless demonstrate clearly and tragically that the “issue” is still open.
A “race issue”? No, a class issue. Capital has always aimed its attacks at specific sectors of the proletariat, resorting to the divide et impera strategy. In the eighteen hundreds, the Irish were the “white blacks” of British Capital, as exploited as the Indians (or, later, the Burmese or the Pakistanis) were; and US Capital has always managed, with considerable and merciless ability, to set one different sector against the other in the huge pool of labour at its disposal: Anglo-Americans against Germans, Irish or Chinese, Italians against blacks, American against immigrant proletarians and so on (indeed, we know how the “lovely Italians” – including, unfortunately, no few proletarians – behave today towards immigrants).
This is a signal that should not be under-estimated and has various implications. If we succeed in interpreting it without limiting ourselves to a specific event or the “breaking news”, it tells us that profound ill-being is growing in the belly of America and that the ruling class is reacting to it in the only way it knows and can: by using state repression. We are not interested in going into the dynamics of these killings, or the specific situations they took place in: what is certain is, that if in some cases harmless young people act tough or are even despising in the face of police threats (or if, after these killings, they decide to “take justice into their own hands” in classical American style, killing two policemen and then pointing the gun at their own heads), this means that the sense of oppression and frustration, exasperation and anger in the Afro-American proletarian, sub-proletarian and immigrant communities is reaching considerable levels. And not surprisingly. “America’s firm recovery” (one of the many that have followed one upon the other over the centuries, accompanied by just as many catastrophic crashes) can only affect and delude small sections of the population: certainly not that vast majority consisting of proletarians, Afro-American and Latin-American, on the lower rungs of the so-called “social ladder” – a social ladder whose lower steps are becoming more and more crowded due to the uncontrollable downward flow of members of the middle classes, increasingly harassed and impoverished, and destined to slip even lower, into the social chasm. The highly praised drop in the unemployment rate (which official figures now give as 5.8%) conceals the bitter fact that a growing number of people, now discouraged and resigned, simply fail to sign onto the lists of the unemployed in search of work and most of the “new jobs” that affect these figures are actually ultra-precarious, part-time, seasonal etc. (as well as underpaid). In addition, it must not be forgotten, as we have already been able to show [2], that the non-labour market in the USA also includes “7 million people in jail or with some restriction on their movements, who are therefore unable to work.” [3].
There is no doubt that US Capital continues to be amongst the top places worldwide. But its decline is inevitable; this can be seen very clearly from the economic data, graphs and tables and from the analyses we have been conducting for decades now. It therefore comes as no surprise that, beyond the superficial optimism, tailor-made for electoral politics, and the trendy articles celebrating the splendid bourgeois neighbourhoods of one city or the other, these “social bubbles” continue to swell day by day amongst the ruined ghettoes of the big cities as well as in the disrupted countryside. Sooner or later they will go up with a bang. It is this that the ruling class, with the far-sightedness that comes from several centuries of experience, is now preparing for by means of its State, with its weapons as well as its economic and financial power. The militarization of society is something that is becoming increasingly evident: police control of the territory under the widest range of pretexts (especially those with particular emotional impact: the fight against drugs, criminality, illegality), more and more pressure on marginal or immigrant communities, criminalization of vast sectors of young people, squatters, the homeless and beggars thrown out of whole neighbourhoods, “chosen” by real-estate speculators and therefore scheduled for “development” – and shoot to kill. Faced with all this, the polemics between the police force and the mayor of New York (the former complaining that there is too much … criticism … of them, the latter obliged to turn cartwheels to be on the side of … everyone) amount to pure demagogy. The executive orders are: exert maximum control and as much pressure as possible.
In fact, an increasingly military nature has been conferred on the US “forces of law and order”, according to a pattern that is becoming clearly global [4]. The exchanges between the army and the “forces of law and order” are getting closer and closer: soldiers trained to control the territory on the various war fronts, with specific anti-guerrilla competences, are taken on by the various national police forces for these very competences, for this “experience” and “training in the field”. Physically, psychologically and ideologically shaped to eliminate the “enemy” in distant lands, they bring this “identity” of theirs into the home environment: the ruling class is well aware that the war is not only being fought on battlefronts thousands of miles away – war is here, too, and preparations are being made for it here at home on the streets and in the squares. It is a class war that is spreading ceaselessly, day after day, as an inevitable consequence of the conflict between Capital and Labour, before exploding with the inevitable violence. Proletarians beware! The ruling class is getting ready and organized. And by doing so, it is pointing out our own path.
***
There is another executive order to take into consideration: or rather, another swindle, especially for immigrant proletarians. Hailed by all the world’s gurus as further proof of Barak Obama’s “democratic progressivism”, the Executive Order on immigration issued on the 20 November last (2014) is none other than one of those periodic legislative tweaks that the dynamics of Capital render necessary on the labour market – and one of the most cynical of them, to use a moral definition which is not typically the language we speak. We have already devoted a long article [5] to “Immigration Reform”, on which a bi-partisan group has been working on for some time now, re-examining the various measures taken during the course of a century or more: from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the more recent reforms of 1986, 1990 and 1996, drawn up, as we wrote in that article, “to contain the migratory flow according to the peaks and dips of the crisis of overproduction of goods and capitals that has submerged us for three decades now.” Whilst analysing the tendencies that were already emerging at the time (spring 2013) in the field of US immigration policy, we stressed that it “obeys two main imperatives: at a material level, that of ensuring, compatibly with the economic cycle, a reserve of cheap labour and a constant ‘industrial reserve army’, which depresses salaries and exercises blackmailing pressure on the rest of the employed proletariat; at an ideological level, that of fuelling the ‘war of the poor against the poor’, setting the different sectors of the proletariat one against the other – the classical ‘divide et impera’. This Executive Order merely proceeds in exactly the same direction.
It has been estimated that around 5 million illegal immigrants will “benefit” from this presidential measure – out of a total that, officially, amounts to around 11-12 million: so fewer than half of them. Of these 5 million, 4 of them should be “undocumented parents of U.S. Citizens and permanent residents who've resided in the country for at least five years” [6], who will thus be able to halt expulsion proceedings and apply for a job permit (however, the Executive Order emphasizes that this “new status” is temporary: never leave your hands tied!); the remaining one million will be dealt with according to the 2012 Dreamers programme, which stops the deportation of those who arrived in the country illegally as children, but not of their parents (and, again, the term used is “deportation deferral”). Both groups will have to renew their applications every three years: the Sword of Damocles continues to hang over their heads… There will, on the other hand, be no extension of visas for farm workers and this is “because of concerns that it was difficult to justify legally treating them differently from undocumented workers in other jobs, like hotel clerks, day laborers and construction workers”! Instead, it will become easier for students born abroad to obtain work permits and they will be able to remain in the country whilst awaiting regular documents, a change desired by big business. In addition, there will also be a programme facilitating entry visas “for people who invest in the United States and those who pursue science, technology, engineering and math degrees”! Finally, the icing on the cake: as well as openly containing restrictive clauses (for example, strict limits on healthcare and more severe repression at borders), the measure foresees the White House approving “better security procedures: checks on the illegal immigrants’ past, so that they will have to pay any fines and taxes previously due”, something that only a very small proportion of them will be able to afford – the others will be plunged back into the hordes of unprotected clandestine immigrants.
In practice, therefore, this highly exalted Executive Order merely recognizes and puts into practice some of the measures already suggested by the bi-partisan group and which aim to reassure and consolidate a particular sector of immigrants, mostly belonging to the petit-bourgeoisie or working-class aristocracy (in a broad sense), leaving the other 6-7 million (at least!) aliens with no legal status (and therefore entirely subject to state and federal powers): those that “count” for capital in fact, because they are open to blackmail in any place and at any time, those from whom cheap labour can be squeezed as long as it is useful and necessary and who can be got rid of without any problems, when they no longer serve the purpose, especially in agriculture and in all those sectors where exploitation is highest and living and working conditions at their worst (the food industry, tourism, building, restaurants, etc.). The 6-7 million includes an unknown number of young people and children without parents – a group recently acquired – who, after overcoming a thousand and one dangers, have managed to cross the border (along which merciless control measures alternate with huge gaps that are as patently obvious as they are necessary to the US economy). This 6-7 million (inevitably on the increase) will continue to remain “invisible”, the hidden engine that has to keep working full speed ahead to ensure maximum output at minimum cost for a capital that is unable to catch its breath and knows only one solution to its own structural limits: “productivity for productivity’s sake”. As the “Guide” published by the Washington Post (quoted earlier) concludes: “in any case, this executive order likely isn't the final word on immigration policy. Undocumented immigrants will have to keep waiting to learn if any protection they receive is permanent”. Once again the Sword of Damocles… So there we are; the same all over the world [7]. As we pointed out in our 2013 article, an ever-widening trench is being dug between A-series immigrants and B-series (or C- or D-series!), fuelling more “wars of the poor against the poor”, making the labour market even more “flexible” and – last but not least, and here the cynicism mentioned above is to be seen – ensuring a considerable pool of votes for the 2016 elections.
***
This is how the social bubbles are swelling on the far side of the Atlantic. When they burst with a resounding bang, US proletarians – whatever the colour of their skin – will find themselves facing the bourgeois State alone, without any program or direction. There is no more to be said. Urgent reinforcement of the revolutionary party and the firm establishment of its international roots can no longer be postponed and this should prove obvious to any communist worthy of the name.
December 2014-January 2015
NOTES
[1] See our article “Ferguson (USA)-Napoli (Italia). La ‘questione’ non è di razza, ma di classe”, il programma comunista, n.5/2014. http://www.internationalcommunistparty.org/archivio/PC-05-2014.pdf.
[2] See our article “Carcere, immigrazione e lavoro salariato”, il programma comunista, n.4/2007.http://www.internationalcommunistparty.org/archivio/PC-04-2007.pdf.
[3] Quoted from Vincenzo Comito, “Un futuro meno brillante di quel che luccica”, Il Manifesto, 28/12/2014.
[4] See Gilles Paris, “‘La police américaine a des tactiques quasi militaires’”, Le Monde, 6 décembre 2014; Domenico Lusi, “La militarizzazione che cambia il volto dei nostri poliziotti”, Pagina99, 15-21 dicembre 2014.
[5] See our article “USA: Immigration Reform, New Bait for the Geese”:http://www.internationalcommunistparty.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1549:usa-immigration-reform-new-bait-for-the-geese&catid=124:web&Itemid=161.
[6] See Max Ehrenfreund, “Your Complete Guide to Obama’s Immigration Executive Action”, The Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2014:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/19/your-complete-guide-to-obamas-immigration-order/. Following data and quotations are from this article. [7] See our article “Clandestini”,il programma comunista, n.6/2013. http://www.internationalcommunistparty.org/archivio/PC-06-2013.pdf.