06.10.2004

Weimarisation

Martin Schreader reports from the latest developments in the US elections

In my last column, I briefly spoke about the situation in the United States today - as “a bourgeois-democratic country, but [with] no bourgeois-democratic wing that will defend the basic rights enshrined in the constitution” (Weekly Worker September 30).

A comrade from Hungary first brought up with me this description of the US as a ‘democracy without democrats’. He also gave me another term for it: Weimarisation. The more I thought about this term, the more it struck me as an accurate description of what we have seen develop in this country for over the last 30 years.

The term itself comes from the Weimar Republic of interwar Germany. Four years of world war (which all but spent the German working class) and the failure of the 1918 November revolution laid the basis for the establishment of Weimar. The next 14 years were defined by a humiliating peace, economic crisis, social polarisation and, most notably, the rise of Hitlerite fascism.

While not exact in its forms, the overall dynamics that led Germany through Weimar could be seen at work in the US since the end of the 1960s.

The defeat of American imperialism in the forests and fields of Vietnam, combined with the mass social and political movements of the period (not just the anti-war and women’s movements, but also the emerging lesbian/gay liberation movements, the ‘black power’ movements and similar nationalist currents), pushed the US into a generalised crisis at the beginning of the 1970s.

The early 1970s saw the working class enter the struggle, with massive strikes by workers in heavy industry and the service sectors. Even the police, the armed enforcers of capitalist ‘order’, felt compelled to bite the hand that feeds them and strike for better wages and working conditions. By 1974, this crisis reached its peak, with the collapse of the Nixon administration (ostensibly due to the Watergate scandal) and the subsequent power vacuum it created.

By this point, every objective prerequisite for a workers’ revolution had been fulfilled. Not only had the ruling classes realised they could no longer govern in the old way: working and oppressed people were taking to the streets to show they were unwilling to continue living in the old way. Society was polarised, with the middle classes choosing sides. All that was missing was a clear political direction and organisation. That absence was to prove fatal for the organised working class.

The electoral victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked a re-stabilisation of the capitalist order, based more directly on the state apparatus (the ‘bodies of armed men’) than on the institutions of democratic functioning. This fundamental shift away from the democratic fig leaf was communicated to all classes via the crushing of the air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.

At the same time, two other currents began to manifest themselves that went hand in hand with Reagan’s attacks on unionised workers: the undermining of social services (eg, welfare), and the clamour for a ‘strong state’. It was under Reagan that the myth of the so-called ‘welfare mother’ began; it was also under Reagan that the ‘war on drugs’ (a euphemism for the imposition of a police state in oppressed communities) was launched.

Few people outside of the far left attempted to organise against these attacks. Most of the ‘official’ organisations of working and oppressed people issued a few mealy-mouthed statements, but would not put their supporters in the streets. Instead, they channelled the discontent into ... the Democratic Party. (It is worth noting that it was about this same time that the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council, which currently runs the party, was formed.)

Going into the late 1980s, we began to see the rise of rightwing terrorist organisations operating within the US. Anti-abortion rights terrorists began bombing women’s clinics and staging mass blockades. Traditional fascist groups like the Ku Klux Klan began holding public rallies and events throughout the country. It was not until the early 1990s that any kind of consistent counter-protests started.

By the beginning of George H Bush’s administration in 1989, there was already emerging within the capitalist class a generalised understanding that bourgeois democracy was far too expensive. The intensification of the ‘war on drugs’ under Bush senior, and the launching of two wars (Panama, Iraq), continued the regimentation of American society started by Reagan.

Apart from the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the term of Bush senior was one of the most reactionary periods in US history to date - only to be superseded by what was to come. However, the course of this reactionary development was interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and central European ‘people’s democracies’. The desire to gobble up these new markets became the first priority of American imperialism ... for the time being.

Many of these dynamics continued into the 1990s. The ‘welfare mothers’ Reagan spoke about now saw Bill Clinton ‘end welfare as we know it’. The ‘war on drugs’ fed the growing prison industry, including Supermax prisons and the increasing use of prison labour; the expanded death penalty now became an ‘effective death penalty’. Rightwing terrorists went from bombing clinics to bombing the Olympics and the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Both parties carried out these assaults on basic social and democratic rights; few in the ‘official’ leaderships, including among the politicians of the Democratic Party, bothered to mount a challenge. This was not because only a small section of those leaders recognised what was happening. Rather, it was because most of those officials began to understand that those services and rights were too expensive (in the view of the capitalist class) to maintain.

The only factor that moderated these attacks was the growth of the economy - a product of the expansion into new markets in Europe and Asia. But this growth could not be sustained, and would inevitably lead to an even greater social and political crisis.