a
Introduction
Like everyone else I know, I have been shocked by the first few days of the Trump presidency. The man seems to be worse than my worst expectations. The raids in migrant communities and the images of shackled immigrants being herded on to planes carefully staged to provide fodder for the media and far right social networks are scary, for this is deliberately designed to stir up the worst of human instincts and to mobilise support from his base. Vigilante action against “foreigners” and dark skinned people, gays, transexuals, women will be energised. These are undoubtedly the political methods of fascism. The gains obtained as a result of several decades of struggle will have been undone in a few days. The confusion of the US and Western political establishments, and the immediate positive reaction of stock markets was no less concerning. The Left has been stunned into impotence, unsure at which of the many outrages it should direct its attention.
This is a nightmare that I have seen coming ever since the Brexit referendum poisoned the UK political climate, confused the British left and shocked me into a crisis of national identity. I have been trying to understand what has been happening in the pages of this blog and seeking to find the social locus for a counter-mobilisation.
The bulk of this blog post sets out some ideas I have been developing for trying to understand what is happening. I will use them analyse the results of the 2024 US presidential elections in subsequent posts.
The polarisation that virtually all political commentators have noted with alarm, stems primarily from a generalised popular disillusion with a system that no longer delivers rising standards of living to ordinary Americans, whilst wealth is rapidly becoming concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires. Deindustrialisation has led to the devastation and depopulation of areas that were previously the core of the country’s economy and the centres of economic growth.
Western part of the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, Michigan.
It left their remaining population, previously regarded as part of the country’s working class, feeling “left behind” as the main economic activity becomes concentrated in service industries in the main metropolitan areas. Work in these areas is performed by a highly culturally and ethnically diverse labour force, many of whom are highly educated and well qualified. They don’t fit the archetypal self-image of American identity and what it means to be an American worker. They are viewed by the population of the peripheral areas, which geographically encompass much of the country, as part of the foreign elites who have stolen the America that used to give them the meaningful and well paid jobs which now have gone to China. Immigrants are part of this foreign invasion. They vote for Trump in large numbers.
The crisis has an economic basis, but expresses itself in cultural terms, as a crisis of national identity.
In order to win elections, traditional centre-left parties try to appeal to the cultural prejudices of the “left behind” by promising to curb immigration, whilst being unable to deliver to their real grievances which are economic in nature.
An example of this, relating to the UK, is this story that appeared in the Guardian this week.
Productivity is much greater in the metropolitan areas, as the figures I will give demonstrate, and this is the main driver of capitalist investment. This leads to the peripheral areas continuing to be “left behind”. This cultural pandering to prejudice and failure to address real need, is politically disastrous and feeds the forces of the far-right.
I wish to argue that in order to fight rising fascism, it is essential to recognise the existence of the new working class, help make it self-aware and mobilise it to fight the growing forces of fascism. This is the primary task of the moment, rather than winning elections on the basis of promises that cannot be kept.
It’s the economy, stupid
Bill Clinton may have been right when he uttered those words. The basis of my analysis comes from thinking about how a country’s GDP is composed:
In a stagnant economy, workers, who are the recipient of wages, and capitalists, the recipients of profits and rents, have to fight over the product of the economy in order to improve their condition. If imperialism promotes growth, they both can benefit. In countries which have benefited from imperialism, national identity and the concept of the “national interest” have been based on the common benefits that both workers and capitalists have received from imperial exploitation. This is expressed in many examples of working class allegiance to the flag.
WHITE TENANTS SEEKING TO PREVENT BLACKS FROM MOVING INTO THE SOJOURNER TRUTH HOUSING PROJECT ERECTED THIS SIGN IN DETROIT, 1942. Note the prominent display of the Stars and Stripes
SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Racism is a necessary, if perhaps subconscious, element of national identity to justify morally imperial exploitation. The demise of Western imperialism is creating a crisis of national identity because the common benefits that kept labour and capital at relative peace, despite diverging interests, no longer exists. Immigrants are challenging the acquired sense of national identity and become the main butt of the anger generated by stagnation and declining standards of living.
Class as Economics- then and now
In the above discussion, I have divided society into two main classes, workers and capitalists, in economic terms because that is the primary way in which the economic product is divided and therefore the primary basis of economic interest. However, the popular view of “working class” is mainly a cultural one, derived from ideas developed as a result of industrialisation. It is of people in blue overalls and cloth caps who speak with strong regional accents that are referred to as “working class accents” and have low levels of education. Many of their descendents continue to live in the previously industrialised areas and exhibit many of the original cultural characteristics. They have been “left behind” also because those of their relatives who succeeded in obtaining education have migrated to the metropolitan areas and have become members of what I have identified in economic terms as the new working class. They are the main recipients of the wages and the providers of the profit that make up the bulk of the country’s GDP.
The concept of working class arose largely as an economic one. It was universally applied to those who performed the tasks that were essential for the growth of the economy in the industries that were driving that growth. This was a fundamental concept of Marxism, but it was shared generally. The Labour Party, whose ideology was never Marxist, saw itself as the party of the (industrial) working class.
In the United States the situation was more complex, insofar as the Democratic Party started life as the party of the Southern slave owners and only transformed itself into the party of the Northern (mainly white) working class through trying to mobilise political support against the abolition of slavery amongst Northern industrial workers by appealing to their sectional interests. It pointed out that freed slaves would become potential wage labourers and competitors in the jobs market, driving down wages. From the beginning, black workers in Northern industries were perceived as migrants from the South. Race and class became, ever since then, closely intertwined in US political and identitarian history. The parallels with the current anti-immigrant frenzy, and the questioning of who are the real Americans, are inescapable. In the UK, as far as I am asware, race only explicitly became a major political issue after the arrival of the Windrush immigrants.
The exception was the antisemitism that was used by Oswald Moseley to create the British Union of Fascists. This was defeated on the streets of London in the Battle of Cable Street by the mobilisation of the working class in the East End.
After the deindustrialisation that began in the 1970s and accelerated from the 1980s, in economic terms, the populations of the areas that were previously the heart of the industrial working class communities, could no longer be considered part of the core of the working class. The centres of economic growth became the service rather than the production industries and they were located mainly in the large cities. At the same time, the wave of immigration that had started in the mid-1960s continued apace- see Fig.1 below.
I have taken 1960, the year in which US global economic dominance was near its peak as the base. In 1960, the US provided 40% of the world’s GDP.
In 2010, it was 23% (see here). In 1960, China had 1% of Global GDP. In 2010, it had 18% (see here).
In 1960, manufacturing accounted for 16% of US GDP. By 2010, it had gone down to 12%. US manufacturing employment peaked in 1978 when it constituted 22% of total nonfarm employment. By 2010 it had fallen by 40% to 9%. Thus, the changes had disastrous consequences for the US’s economic standing in the world. It heralded not only the decline of US imperialism, but of the West as a whole, as all other Western nations experienced similar processes.
In 1960, manufacturing contributed 25% of US GDP and 28% of employment. By 2020, its share of GDP had dropped to 11% and it provided a mere 8.5% of employment. In 1960, foreign born population of the US constituted 5.3% of the total. By 2020, it had gone up to 13.7% overall, but was much greater in the large cities which now constituted the centres of economic growth. The most recent figures available, give the foreign-born population in the 5 largest metropolitan areas of the US, ranked in order of population as follows:
Source: Migration Policy Institute tabulation of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s pooled 2019-2023
The metropolitan area with the largest proportion of foreign-born population is Miami where 42% is foreign born.
In order to think about national identity, we have to remember that this figure does not include the descendents of post-war immigrants who were born in the US and have therefore divided identities.
In 2020, the top 50 metropolitan areas of the US contained 55% of the country’s population, but provided 70% of its GDP. The top 10 metropolitan areas were home to 25% of the population, but contributed 37% of US GDP. New York metropolitan area alone provides nearly 10% of US GDP.
Thus, from an economic definition, the core of the working class of the US came to reside in these metropolitan areas and was culturally and ethnically diverse.
The new working class in action during the Black Lives Matter protest
Identitarian politics- who are the True Americans?
“Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of native-born workers. Up to 1848 one could speak of a permanent native-born working class only as an exception… Now such a class has developed and has organised itself on trade union lines to a great extent. But still it occupies an aristocratic position and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants. But these immigrants are divided into different nationalities, which understand neither one another, nor, for the most part, the language of the country… To form a single party of these requires unusually powerful incentives. Often there is a sudden violent elan, but the bourgeoisie need only wait passively, and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.”
Friedrich Engels, 1892 quoted in Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920, Cornell University Press (1986).
Trump’s slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First” are aimed at mobilising Americans against “foreigners”. This places identitarian politics in command and relegates politics based on class to obscurity. It raises immediately the question of who are the true Americans who will profit from the rebirth of America to the exclusion of everyone else? Immigrants, by definition, are excluded and war on immigrants is the logical corollary of the slogans. The slogan appeals to those who feel strong allegiance to the nation and its flag. Who are they?
The quote from Engels at the start of this section, which at first sight may appear a logical explanation of the problems faced by class-based politics, seems to me to contain within it the central problem of Marxist analysis, that of taking for granted the concept of nationality and conceiving of politics primarily in national terms, whilst at the same time claiming that workers have no nation. Engels implicitly accepts that American workers are those born in the United States and have thus acquired American identities. He thinks this will help them develop a unified class consciousness that immigrants will find difficult to adopt.
Yet, American identity is primarily a European cultural construct born out of European imperialism. American identity carries within itself the hierarchies that were first established in Europe. Northern European Americans are superior to Irish, Italo, Hispanic, Greco and Luso Americans and predominate in the American ruling class.
See, for instance, this story of how italian Americans became white.
Bottom of the pile are Black Americans who are descendent of slaves. They were enslaved because they were considered savages and therefore sub-human. Native Americans have been mostly and, according to this ideology, justifiably exterminated because they too were savages. Such elements of identity continue to exist, at least subconsciously, in much of the population whose ancestry lies in Europe. It was no doubt subconsciously present in the mind of Derek Chauvin when he killed George Floyd. Blacks, descendent from slaves, are on a par with Native Americans, as the generations of Americans brought up on Hollywood cowboy films know full well. American national identity created top down by the hegemonic ideology of its ruling class is a product of European imperialism and reproduces its hierarchies. A viewing of the tv series The Sopranos will readily illustrate this.
It seems to me that American identity has been absorbed by much of its working class because it too has benefited from imperialism. The fact that it has enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world derives from this. It is this that has attracted immigrants to the US, but it takes time, potentially several generations, for them to acquire full American identity and leave behind their roots. I have personal experience of this process for I grew up in the Azores, Portuguese islands which have been major exporters of cheap labour to North America, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. They were looked down upon by what Engels calls the “aristocracy of labour” in the US native population and called “yellow boots”.
Cadillac factory in 1902-3 located at 450 Amsterdam Street in Detroit, Michigan.
– there are no black workers.
Source: https://wayne.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/auto-industry/id/1222/rec/16
The acceleration of immigration to the United States to feed the labour market in the post-war boom constituted a threat to American national identity which was only kept under control by the rising standards of living that growth created.
Fig. 1 Historical evolution of the foreign born population of the United States
Source: Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, ‘Immigration in American Economic History’, Journal of Economic Literature 2017, 55(4), 1311–1345 https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20151189 , p.1315
However, emigrants often considered themselves superior to those they left behind and sought acceptance and integration in the host country. This was only slowly and partially granted. Hence the hierarchies in the American working class, with the first waves of immigrants occupying the place of what might really be considered a labour aristocracy.
Source: Ibid, p.1316
The Role of the State
A degree of social cohesion and a shared cross-class sense of national identity in the imperial nation is dependent to a considerable extent on the state being seen as representing the ‘national interest’ and acting internally as arbiter of the conflicting interests of capital and labour. In “democratic” societies most citizens have a sense that their interests are represented in the actions taken by the state and this reinforces their national identity. Elections and changes in government make small economic changes either in favour of capital or labour, but rising standards of living partly due to imperial exploitation, created the conditions for political stability. In the post-war boom, starting with the Roosevelt reforms, Keynesian economics largely dominated government economic thinking for both parties. Economic growth creates labour shortages, and this strengthens the bargaining power of labour which is able to organise and fight for a reasonable share. Strikes help ensure that some of the proceeds of growth go to labour. In 1960 there were 222 strikes in the US involving 1,000 workers or more lasting, on average 23 days. Of these 17 involved more than 10,000 workers. But the growth was based on imperial exploitation.
Deindustrialisation and Its Consequences
Arguably, deindustrialisation had an even greater impact on the internal cohesion of the US than it did on the position of the US in the world. Real growth stalled.
The growth that occurred during the 1990s, the Clinton years, was mainly fuelled by debt as real wages stagnated- see here. Income inequalities greatly increased.
The US Gini index increased from 34.7 in 1980 to 41.5 in 2019 (see here).
The share of the national income that went to labour declined by 5.8% between 1980 and 2017. Whole areas of the country were devastated as industries disappeared and lost population. The loss of population depressed housing costs in those areas and attracted new low paid immigrants to the areas. This provoked the flight of the remnants of the white industrial working class away from those areas. The most affected were the so-called Rust Belt States where industry had been concentrated: Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wiscosin. But other areas were also affected.
Political consequences
An understanding of the consequences of these events requires bringing together what appear to be disparate factors. Trumpism and its slogans mobilise essentially nationalist sentiments in people. But, to the great anguish of the political establishment, populism implies a generalised distrust of established authority. This has been driven by economic distress caused by stagnant and declining standards and loss of hope for the future. Traditional politicians are despised because they are correctly perceived as promising much and delivering little to a distressed population.
Declining standards of living and normal social relations disrupted by the rapid economic changes leave many feeling purposeless and left behind. Stagnation and lack of growth is uneven, for growth has taken place in metropolitan areas whilst the stagnation or decline is confined to the peripheries.
The clearest indicator of areas in distress attracted to Trumpism is a declining population. In many of these areas, the loss of native population has been partly mitigated by the arrival of foreign immigrants with different cultures and customs. The very rich are getting richer very quickly and indulge in conspicuous consumption in cities. New jobs with prospects of rising incomes require levels of education much higher than those that have been lost and are located elsewhere. Or they are service jobs that pay much less than the jobs that have been lost and have been taken up by immigrants. Prosperity exists, but only elsewhere, and is out of reach both economically and geographically. It is reserved for “the elites” who live in the big metropoles. Things are getting worse and the past, when America was great and they were contributing to its greatness by doing meaningful jobs, was much better than the future is likely to be.
Politicians who recognise these feelings and position themselves as outside “the establishment” prosper. If, like Trump, they are successful in business, they personify the American dream of becoming a self-made success (even though Trump wasn’t self-made). Myths, religious or otherwise, play a considerable role in feeding an imagined future kingdom of heaven where their troubles will be over.
In the previous sections, I have pointed out that for a ‘national interest” to be recognised as such, it is necessary that people feel that “we are all in this together”, and that their interests are being represented in the actions of the state. When this is no longer the case, the state is seen as representing only the interests of the elites and a libertarian anti-state discourse appeals. This, in any case, chimes with the ideology that has become integral to American national identity of celebrating self-made individualism.
American identity, imperialism and the working class.
American national identity was built on the back of US imperialism.
The way that imperialism contributed to the creation of American identity is most powerfully described in the book by Matthew Frye Jacobson titled Barbarian Virtues.
The proceeds from imperialism benefited most citizens and facilitated rising standards of living during the golden years, even if unevenly. The decline that is now being felt is largely due to a partial loss of empire. Therefore “Make America Great Again” appeals as a myth to mobilize the imagination that regaining lost prosperity and lost pride is possible.
There is little evidence that the US working class as a whole ever questioned the imperial element of American identity, despite the best efforts of its most politically conscious elements. The AFL-CIO supported every major US imperial war, (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Iraq); and every major US intervention (Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Guyana 1955, Venezuela 2002, Iran 1955, Panama 1980 and Grenada 1983). This is normally viewed by the Left as the betrayal of the real interest of the working class by a trade union leadership corrupted by a dominant ideology, but Barbarian Virtues shows that this consciousness was not exclusive to the trade union leadership and extended to much of the working class that had elected the leadership. In Marxist thinking, it is supposed to reflect “false consciousness” on the part of the working class instilled by an ideology created by the rulers. Marx , however, never used the term.
What Marx said, and is quoted in Wikipedia, was:
“The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker… This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.”
This quote makes perfect sense when the interests of workers are viewed in purely national terms, where wages compete with profits for slices of the nation’s GDP. But, what if the size of the nation’s GDP is partly determined by imperial exploitation? Is there not a common interest between the nation’s workers and capitalists in opposing anti-imperialist movements?
The Marxist theory of unequal exchange seems to indicate that this is the case.
But in the US, black members of the working class never could fully sign up to American identity because, as descendants of slaves, they were subject to discrimination and mostly excluded from prosperity to this day. American identity, promoted most obviously through the cowboy movies that captured my imagination in my youth, was inherently white. The very same movies also captured the imagination of black author James Baldwin.
In the classic 1965 Oxford Union debate with William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, an early promoter of the US far-right thought and still influential with Trump, Baldwin explains that a Eureka moment for him in the understanding the nature of racism in America occurred when. as a kid watching John Wayne chasing the red indians and identifying with John Wayne, he suddenly realised that he was actually one of the Indians.
Thus, arguably, American identity is primarily white European. Within it reside the hierarchies of Europe, with their different levels of economic development.
The same hierarchies reside in European identities. These were most clearly displayed in the Greek economic crisis of 2015, after which the European Union subjected Southern Europe to years of austerity. Germans supported the German government who presented the Greeks as freeloaders who wanted to be bailed out by the industrious Germans who had been successful through their own efforts. Greeks, Portuguese and Spaniards were forced by the European Union, urged by Germany, to suffer many years of economic austerity. This left many well qualified young people unemployed. They forced to emigrate to Northern European countries to find a job. The NHS in the UK was amongst the beneficiaries.
In subsequent posts I will be supporting these arguments through a detailed analysis of the results of the US 2024 presidential elections. I will show by identifying where the strong anti-Trump vote lies, that the base for any progressive politics is in the large metropolitan areas where the new working class is making the greatest contribution to the country’s GDP. I will also show that Trump is appealing to the remnants and the descendants of the old white working class who now feel “left behind” and are attracted to the idea that the cause of their distress are the foreigners responsible for the decline of America.
It seems to me that Bernie Sanders has the right idea when he points out to all members of the working class, new and old, that the real culprits are the billionaires, not the immigrants.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.