Yes, this is how I read it too and I was surprised at the invective unleashed against Raju (whome I know to be a good man).
Pam
Sent from my iPad
Thanks Jamie - that's spot on and certainly my interpretation of what Raju was saying.
Best wishes,
John
Dr John Roberts,
Sociology and Communications,
Head of Department, Social Sciences, Media and Communications,
Brunel University London
College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences
Marie Jahoda Building, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
T +44 (0) 1895
266377
www.brunel.ac.uk
When I read Raju's piece, I understood its question - its point - in a quite different way to some other commentators.
Some people have understood him to be judging between Trump and Clinton as president of the US. Do we have a preference in this election? Do we care who won? The answer to this is blindly obvious. Trump is a rapist, misogynist, racist; Clinton is not.
Trump thinks Hispanic immigrants are criminals; Clinton does not. Trump wants to exclude Muslims from the US; Clinton does not. For the sake of clarity: I am sickened and deeply upset by the result, just as I was by the British Brexit referendum. If I were
a US citizen I would have voted for Clinton.
But Raju's piece was asking a totally different question: is the Democratic Party an adequate site for left activism and politics in the long term? This is apposite, because many on the US left think it is. Raju argues that it is not, and urges the need for
a socialist party in the US.
This seems to me to be right, and important. The Democratic Party (DC) is a party of the US bourgeoisie. It is, and has always been, imperialist. The genocidal war in Vietnam, for instance, was built under Kennedy and LBJ. More recently, the Obama-Clinton
administration connived in, may be led, and certainly welcomed the military coup against the elected centre-left government of Honduras. This has led to vicious attacks on the working class and indigenous people, including the murder of indigena activists.
Obama's drone warfare in the Middle East, and his Saudi stooge in the Yemen, kills thousands of children, women and men every week.
Directly relevant to the support for Trump by the US white working class is the overall economic policy of the Obama administrations. After the 2008 capitalist crisis, Obama bailed out capital; failed to prosecute the banks for racketeering, as he could easily
have done; did nothing about the millions evicted from their homes; continued with the impoverishment of the working class; and, like British governments, loaded the costs of the crisis onto the working class. He has pursued TPP and the TTIP with Europe -
the corporations' charter, international deregulation of everything. Hardly surprising: his first three chiefs of staff were investment bankers from Wall St.
So surprise surprise, the white working class are beguiled by an alternative: economic nationalism; keep the jobs in the US; keep out migrants. From a European perspective this is utterly predictable. It is exactly what happened in Brexit. The Front National
in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, Oban in Hungary, Five Star in Italy, etc etc have built their now enormous support on exactly that. In every case, they have been enabled to do so by the capitulation of social democratic parties to neoliberalism and
austerity . And for a decade we have seen exactly the same politics in the India (BJP), Turkey (JDP) and Russia (Putin). In other words, the Democratic Party handed the election to Trump on a plate.
I think Raju could have made it clearer what his question was. But his answer seems to me quite right: we need a socialist party in the US, just as we need a socialist party in Britain. And in every country faced where the choice is between globalised neoliberalism
and economic nationalism-xenophobia.
Jamie Gough
--
Dr Jamie Gough
Senior Lecturer,
Department of Urban Studies and Planning (formerly TRP),
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, England
0114 222 6909
I am normally in my office every weekday 1pm to 5pm.
Latest publications:
Gough, J. (2014) The difference between local and national capitalism, and why local capitalisms differ from one other: a Marxist approach,
Capital and Class, 38 (1) 197-210
Gough, J. (2014)
1. Neil Smith’s work. 2. A brief history of ‘the right to the city’. 3. , 4. Interviews with Jamie Gough and Neil Smith by Ozlem Celik: Urban neoliberalism, strategies for urban struggles, and ‘the right to the city’. In special section
on ‘the right to the city’, Capital and Class, 38 (2) 414-52
