Saturday, February 1, 2025

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Jim Kavanagh

After all the ridiculous right-wing accusations that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “socialists” or “communists” or “Marxists,” we might as well take the opportunity to extract the lesson in Marxism implied in Joe Biden’s farewell address.

By way of preface, I’ll point out that accusing political opponents of being “Marxist” did not start in the era of Barack Obama and did not always come from the Republican right. One of the strangest such incidents occurred during a 1976 presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in which implications of Marxism were unexpectedly used to smack down an opponent. In trying to defend the recent Republican unemployment record, Ford demurred that unemployment during previous Democratic administrations was lower because more men were in the army fighting the Vietnam War: “I must remind him [Carter] that we’re at peace and during the period that he brags about unemployment being low, the United States was at war.”

To which Carter replied that Ford was “insinuating that ...unemployment could only be held down when this country is at war. Karl Marx said that the free enterprise system in a democracy can only continue to exist when they are at war or preparing far [sic] war. Karl Marx was the grandfather of Communism. I don’t agree with that statement. I hope Mr. Ford doesn’t either.”

Gerald Ford had indeed echoed the argument of Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, in Monopoly Capital, that roughly the same proportion of the workforce was either in the military, unemployed, or dependent on welfare in the 1960s as during the Great Depression, with the difference that a higher percentage were in the military in the 60s. Carter apparently recognized this source, and said—not that that Ford’s statement was false, but. essentially: “That’s a Marxist argument, so it can’t be entertained. As I’m sure Mr. Ford will agree.” Mic drop, American style.

Well, I’ll take the occasion to do a reverse Jimmy Carter, drawing out the Marxist implications in this excerpt from Biden’s farewell speech in order not to dismiss but to take them seriously:

That’s why in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.

Actually, Joe, an oligarchy has taken shape in America. a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”  Yes, “we’ve seen it before,” and neither the “trust busters” of over a century ago nor the New Deal and post-war policies ended that oligarchy, although the latter did for a while ameliorate its effects.

The main tools for that amelioration were the limited welfare-state (hardly “social-democratic”) policies of Social Security, Medicare, and highly progressive income tax rates. In 1945, the highest marginal tax rate—meaning not on all income but only on the margin of income over $200,000 (equivalent to ~$3.5 million today)—was 94%.

It stayed above 90% until John Kennedy, under the slogan "a rising tide lifts all boats," ran for president on reducing taxes and LBJ realized that promise with the Revenue Act of 1964, which reduced the highest rate to 70%.

Let’s not forget, as Business Insider says, that post-war period of high taxes until JFK’s “reform,” was “one of the most successful eras in US economic history. The middle class boomed, the economy boomed, and the stock market boomed. And all with the top marginal income tax rate over 90%. This suggests that the Republican mantra about high marginal tax rates killing the economy is, well, a bunch of crap.” And let’s not forget, either, that it was not a Republican, but liberal Democratic icon JFK who inaugurated the tax-cutting agenda the oligarchy has been pushing hard ever since.

JFK’s Democratic tax cutting was, of course, tripled down on by Reagan’s Republican slashing of the highest marginal rate to 28% by 1986, After a few Clinton-Bush-Obama bumps, it now sits at 37%.

Here’s the full picture:

From 94% to 37%. Not a bad take for somebody—i.e., those with incomes above $3.5 mil. Makes one think that maybe there’s been an oligarchy—a dangerous concentration of wealth and power—in place all along, served by Democratic and Republican presidents.

Taxes are a single part of a bigger socio-economic picture that portrays how the always-existing oligarchy has relentlessly increased its concentration of wealth and power since the days in which there was a collective war effort in alliance with an avowedly communist full-employment state, and widespread socialist and communist movements in the United States, Europe, and countries liberating themselves from colonialism.

As the following graphs show, the acceleration of inequality took off after 1980, when Reagan took power in the U.S., Thatcher in Britain, and “Socialist” parties in Europe succumbed to their charms and their “neo-liberal”—i.e., revanchist capitalist—siren song. The U.S. oligarchy felt more comfortable flexing its muscles against even the softest of inequality-ameliorating New Deal policies and attitudes. After the demise of the Soviet Union, European countries went into full-on retreat from social-democracy to neo-liberalism..

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/

So, Joe, it’s not that an oligarchy “of extreme wealth, power and influence that threatens our democracy” is “taking shape” in America. That oligarchy—the capitalist ruling class—"took shape” a long time ago, and has been constantly shape-shifting to take advantage of changing political possibilities for exercising its power, and changing personnel and methods of wealth extraction.

In Democratic administrations, the oligarchy exercises that power more surreptitiously, behind the soft soap of hope and diversity, but nobody does it better for helping them concentrate their wealth and power.

Here’s how the oligarchy fared under the Biden administration:

So, "We've got to do that again," as Joe puts it, because, despite the “Trust Busters” over a hundred years ago and the New Deal-to-Great Society play that ran out over forty years ago, the capitalist class never lost ultimate economic and political control of the country.

The best recent opportunity to discipline the oligarchs came with the financial crisis of 2008, which brought Barack Obama and the Democrats into complete control of the government, with an overwhelming mandate to change the social economy of the country to the advantage of the working class. Obama took that opportunity to invite the masters of finance capital to the White House and warn them he was, "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." He then went on to re-arrange the economy to make sure they were made whole and further empowered and were able to buy up all the foreclosed homes, while the working class got screwed and further weakened and thrown out of their homes.  He also, thus, arranged for himself to get the nine-figure, deferred-bribery, gentleman-of-leisure life he so richly thinks he deserves.

Here’s how the oligarchic concentration of wealth and power proceeded under the Obama administration:

There's never been a clearer example of a political party—the Democratic Party—working hard, in situation where something else was eminently possible, to save and strengthen the concentration of oligarchic wealth and power. The failure of all that paved the way for Donald Trump, buttressed by incessant attacks from an Establishment people rightly grew to despise, to ride in on a wave of popular support by posing as the guy who promises to bring the pitchforks. Those pitchforks, we are to believe, will be wielded by his mob of billionaires, from Musk to Adelson, and managed by his hard-soap, austerity-promising Republican Party. From the mellifluous, diversity, “Hope and Change” con to the tough-love-talking, “Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off” con.

All of which is to say the United States never stopped being, as Biden’s farewell address implies, but cannot state, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Yup, that is the Marxist concept Biden’s discourse produces but does not recognize.

That concept doesn’t, obviously, mean “one-man” rule; it does mean one-class rule, even—indeed, preferentially—exercised through an appropriately circumscribed apparatus of elections, rights, and free (to be owned by oligarchs) media. It means the class that controls the capital wealth of society, the class that controls the production and distribution of the social surplus created by social labor and appropriates most of that surplus for itself (the “bourgeoisie”), holds ultimate power in the polity—in both parties, in the Congress, judiciary, the bureaucratic Deep State, and the media apparatuses that shape perceptions and ideologies. The ruling class is the Big Daddy, who will indeed smack various sectors of its state apparatus in line for politically opportunistic reasons, but whose belt enforcement will always end up as an order to the working class to tighten theirs, as he keeps engorging himself.

Because the ultimate political power of the capitalist oligarchy—the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—was never eliminated, the oligarchy is always capable of reversing any gains the working class might make from progressive reforms like the high marginal tax rates mentioned above. The period of aggressive belt whipping and belt-tightening of the working class we are entering with the Trump administration is the culmination of a ruling-class program laid out in the Powell Memo of 1971 for relentless attack on any “socialist” tendencies that encroached on the American “free enterprise system.”

That program has been methodically and successfully developed through all subsequent Presidential administrations, because, as Joe said, “They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules.” There’s Biden directing us to Marx again, who puts it this way: “despite all their blood-curdling yelps and the humanitarian airs they give themselves, they [all U.S. politicians] regard the social conditions under which the bourgeoisie rules as the final product, the non plus ultra of history, and that they are only the servants of the bourgeoisie[my emphasis].” That is, they never challenged the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in which the rules everybody plays by are the rules the oligarchy sets.

Within the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, whatever “democratic” rules and institutions and whatever “reformist” policies are allowed, at the end of every day they must ensure the substantive disempowerment of the majority of people. ‘Cause that’s what the appropriation of great gobs of wealth by the capitalist few requires.

Biden gives us the opportunity to see why Marx said that one of the three things “I did that was new” was to recognize “that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must be eliminated—the ultimate “punishment” for the oligarchy—and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat—a polity in which the working class (the great majority of people) has decisive control over the capital wealth of society, the production and distribution of the social surplus, and absolute political hegemony, allowing for the real and constant social empowerment of the majority of people. Otherwise, the capitalist system will inevitably give the oligarchy increasingly unequal economic power, which they will inevitably use to take more political power, which they will inevitably use to take back any reformist territory the working class has provisionally won. As in: 94% to 37%. Those are the rules of their game, That’s how the ruling class rules. That’s how it ultimately dictates.

For Marxism, the fight for socialism is not a fight for amelioration, but for power. Not for “safety nets” to soften the worst social effects of capitalist wealth extraction, but for political and economic control to end capitalist wealth extraction and change the social conditions entirely. The distinction between Marxist and other forms of socialism hinges precisely on the concept of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie/proletariat, on whether one recognizes that one or another class decisively controls a polity and insists on the need to replace one class’s rule by another’s, or whether one thinks there’s a stable compromise that can be reached with a capitalist ruling class that will ensure the constant improvement of most people’s lives. How’s that working out?

The  Fight Ahead

Of course, ameliorative reforms within a capitalist polity are important to fight for because they reduce working-class disempowerment, even if provisionally, when the political and ideological conditions do not support a more radical confrontation.  It's important to note that capitalism relentlessly produces inequality, and it’s necessary constantly to fight to control that effect. As I’ve noted, tax policies have been a crucial tool in that regard, as the smartest of ruling-class politicians understand. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a Marxist or socialist; on the contrary, he was very good at understanding, in his context, how best to prevent what was the real threat of socialism to his class. It’s all about pacifying the pitchforks, and the belt-whippers are going quickly to find that’s not the most effective tactic.

Regarding the 94% and tax rates specifically, it’s very important to understand, as my DeepSeek response said “1946–1963: The highest tax rate was 91%, one of the highest in U.S. history, aimed at reducing income inequality post-World War II.” That is exactly right: The purpose of taxes, then and now, is not to “pay for” anything; it’s for other social purposes—most importantly, for the left, to control inequality (and inflation). Taxes on high-income brackets were set over 90% in the 1940s because, in a world coming out of a depression, where socialist ideology was popular and socialist countries and movements were rising around the world, the inexorable tendency of capitalism to create inequality had to be checked—for the sake of preserving the capitalist system.

Everybody in the know within the capitalist system understood and accepted this, including Chairman of the New York Fed, Beardsley Ruml, who wrote, in 1946: 

[A] principal purpose of federal taxes is to attain more equality of wealth and of income than would result from economic forces working alone. The taxes which are effective for this purpose are the progressive individual income tax, the progressive estate tax, and the gift tax. What these taxes should be depends on public policy with respect to the distribution of wealth and of income. … 

These taxes should be defended and attacked it terms of their effects on the character of American life, not as revenue measures…The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue.

As we enter the period of Musk-Millei-esque spending-cut demands and debt-deficit hysteria, it is extremely important that leftists go into the coming battle armed with the same correct understanding of the purpose of taxes within a fiat-currency capitalist economy that a Fed Chairman had 80 years ago—that the purpose of taxation is not to “raise revenue” to pay for government programs, but to “attain more equality of wealth and of income” than capitalism’s inequality-producing “economic forces working alone” would ever achieve.

If leftists try to confront the austerity agenda with “Don’t cut social programs. Raise taxes to pay for them!”—thereby accepting and playing within the irrelevant rules of the outdated game they want us in—the left will lose. Stay out of, completely refuse, the game of how to find enough money with taxes! You’ll never raise enough taxes to pay for everything—and you don’t have to! We have an economic system where the federal government creates money at will. We have to stop acting like beggars and realize—become aware of and make real use of—the power a fiat currency system already gives us. We don’t need billionaires’ money to “pay” our bills.  We don’t levy highly progressive taxes on the rich to pay for social programs; we levy high taxes on them because they are too rich, because gross inequality of wealth and therefore political power corrupts social life and undermines democracy.  

Indeed, a more correct and infinitely more popular position is to explain that most people pay too much tax, and income taxes, which are not used as program-paying “revenue,” should be eliminated for most working people, whose incomes do not exacerbate inequality. The left has to understand and argue for that position. What we need is an economic system that prevents billionaires, and a political system that billionaires cannot buy—i.e., an actual democracy. There’s no avoiding the fight for that.

So, I thank Joe Biden, or whoever wrote it, for an unexpected farewell discourse about “oligarchy” that’s easily opened into a discussion of the crucial Marxist concept of class dictatorship and of the nature and purpose of progressive tax policy in a modern monetary system.

These may well be the last words we hear Joe Biden speak publicly, and I’m pleased to turn them into something he and his predecessor/successor can choke on.

_________________

Posted by The Polemicist (Jim Kavanagh) at 2/01/2025 02:00:00 PM
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