I have been keeping away from this list, only scanning it from time to time, partly because I have been heavily involved with an organisation promoting more psychological approaches to the mystery disorders known as schizophrenia or psychosis, partly because I did not want to get caught up in the difficult choices of US politics.
The early morning BBC financial programmes provide some perspective. Yes the dollar is resuming its fall. Yes all the different interests and sub-sections of capital, have anticipated and discounted the subtle different implications of the election result. Yes shares in stem-cell research have fallen. Yes shares in big pharma have risen a little, relieved that a Kerry administration is not there to be tempted to regulate their prices.
But more importantly actually the Chinese, as previous correspondents have indicated, probably felt that Kerry would have been a bit more protectionist and interfering in their exchange rate policy, whereas Bush barks loud but actually he is less protectionist.
Besides, the admin has signalled that a dollar that continues to fall perhaps has to be expected. So the contradictions can be finessed: the issue is how much money does China, Japan and the east want to deposit in the US to avoid the dollar falling even further. The high intelligentsia of capitalism can discuss this, shuffle sums of money around and cope with the necessary correctives in this awesomely robust flexible world capitalist system.
But I am reminded of the words of an economist of Indian descent I was chatting with on holiday earlier this summer, now retired from Oxford University, but drawing on a perspective that was not euro-centric (nor marxist): - throughout history, he said, it has always been the case. The great empires expand in power including financial power to the point where everyone else wants to hold their currency as a store of wealth. They then find themselves in the position that they have lost control of their currency - the decisive proportion of it is held by other people. (I can't remember the statistics he gave about the present proportion of dollar holdings in the world but the argument seemed clear enough).
So from my niche outlook on the universe, it seems to me that the election has been won by a clever clown, better at body language, on the votes of the self-righteous smug, who were secretly afraid that if they changed horses now the debacle (actual defeat) in Iraq would be even more chaotic than it will now be. Bush will preside over a defeat in Iraq which in the course of history will make Somalia look like a tea party. But he will do it in the name of victory. A quick conquest of Falluja (after all if Iraq can be conquered by the US forces, Falluja can certainly be conquered). Then an extraction.
Pre-emptive work ready for the mid-term elections.
And the very gently decline of US financial hegemony, which is the smoothest and least controversial way that Bush and his section of US capital can retain a political dominance without unacceptable clashes with world capital as aggregate capital.
Why this long post?
Because, my take on the abominable two party system (I agree with many of the points in the McReynolds statement forwarded a few days ago) is that radically minded democrats (small D) have somehow to transcend it, in countless little ways that look reformist. How to change the forms of bourgeois democracy from a demagogic and almost fascist system financed by capital, into a system that does not focus on an election once every four years, is that apparently impossible task.
I would have voted Democrat (big D), but I suggest that it is important US subscribers to this list from whatever persuasion do not see the election result as a defeat, although there will be patronising and deceptive calls for unity. I do not see this over-long contribution as saying anything unique, but I had wanted to keep in touch. Maybe a voice, however subjective, from outside the US might provide a peg for a discussion that I am sure no one really wants to be recriminatory or sectarian.
Meanwhile, whatever the wobbles in the long term trends, I rejoice in the secular slide of US imperialism, ironically presided over by a showman of the smug self-righteous right.
Regards
Chris Burford London
