During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.”
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, 1852
Introduction
In my blogs, I have been arguing that a new working class has been developing in post-industrial societies with an imperial history. It is located in the large cities where the economy of post-industrial societies has become concentrated and is most dynamic. In the UK, London’s contribution to the nation’s GDP increased from 20% to 24% between 1998 and 2019. In that period, London’s population increased from 12% to 14% of the total UK population. Thus, in 2019, 14% of the country’s population contributed nearly a quarter of its wealth. This increasing concentration of wealth creation in the main cities is a consequence of the dynamics of the capitalist economy at the global level. The manufacturing and mining activities that used to drive the industrial economy and were concentrated in the geographical areas now politically described as the “red wall” constituencies in the UK and rust belt districts in the US, migrated to emerging economies, primarily China. The engine of UK’s economy moved to the big cities, principally London. It is now in service industries and increasingly uses immigrant labour. This became the new working class, defined as made up of those who are currently the greatest contributors to the profits of business.
This economic shift wasn’t the result of government policies, but of the movement of capital to where it is most profitable to invest. In the post-industrial economies, the productivity of labour is greatest in the big cities, and this attracts capital investment because higher productivity means bigger profits.
The political developments that have taken place in the period can only be understood in the context of this economic dynamic. The changes have created the “left behind” of the declining areas. Their unhappiness at the inability of their Labour political representatives to arrest the deterioration of their conditions has driven Boris Johnson to take political advantage by promising to “level up”, the same strategy used by Trump in the US when he promised to bring jobs back to the rustbelt areas. It is unlikely that Johnson will succeed in reversing the logic of capitalist dynamics, but it works as an electoral political slogan for the moment.
The Labour Party’s political base has migrated to where the new working class has developed, as I have demonstrated in my Soundings article Class and Nation in the Age of Populism. In these areas, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party wasn’t unpopular. The Labour vote strengthened under Corbyn in the 2017 general elections, and held up in the 2019 elections, even though the media systematically presented Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity as a national phenomenon.
I have used this framework to analyse the extraordinary phenomenon of the growth of the political appeal of socialist ideas in the United States, particularly amongst young people. This trend has been recently identified as existing also in the UK by an opinion poll commissioned by the free market promoting think thank Institute for Economic Affairs (EIA)-see 67 per cent of young Brits want a socialist economic system, finds new poll. This finding is greatly worrying the EIA. In the US, this has led to several young politicians of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds who describe themselves as working class democratic socialists and adopt a form of class politics gaining electoral appeal in areas where the new working class is concentrated. They have defeated traditional “moderate” Democrat politicians in several primary and general elections to the amazement and consternation of the political establishment.
In my last blog post The Recent Democratic Primary Election for Mayor in Buffalo, New York and the New Working Class I analysed the success of the black self-described democratic socialist India Walton in winning the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo against the long standing incumbent Democrat Byron Brown.
Byron Brown is what the insurgent new US Left refers to as a corporate Democrat, one of those Democratic politicians who rely primarily on business donations to fund their electoral expenses. As Buffalo is such a Democratic stronghold that the Republicans haven’t bothered to run a mayoral candidate there since 2013, everyone assumed that Walton would be the first democratic socialist to run a major US city. However, Brown refused to admit defeat and presented himself to election as a write-in candidate. On November 2, the provisional results of the general election were announced. India Walton had obtained only 41% of the vote, and the write-in candidates 59%. Although there were other write-in candidates besides Brown, he was assumed to have the overwhelming bulk of the write-in votes and claimed victory. India Walton eventually conceded.
In what follows, I will discuss the anatomy of this event.
A Socialist Dream Deferred in Buffalo
The above title of this section was taken from an article on the election result in the Intelligencer, a web offshoot of New York magazine. It expresses well the disappointment that the result created for the young people aspiring to achieve a fairer and more democratic society.
The outcome was achieved by a mobilisation of the great mass of establishment politicians, their corporate, trade union bureaucrat and media backers to stop Walton. This is highly reminiscent of the campaign that Jeremy Corbyn faced after he was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party.
Byron Brown, a lifelong Democrat, started his campaign to be on the ballot as write in candidate by stating that he would welcome Republican support. He got it enthusiastically. According to the conservative New York Post:
The New York State Republican Party sent mailers to thousands of Buffalo voters urging them to back the write-in campaign of moderate-Democrat incumbent Mayor Byron Brown over socialist India Walton, who beat him in the primary…
They see Brown, a four-term incumbent and former co-chairman of the state Democratic Party, as a better alternative to having a progressive Democrat backed by the Democratic Socialists of America run the Empire State’s second-largest city.
The local Buffalo news site WGRZ, an NBC affiliate, added that
The independent nominating petition he (Brown) turned in to the Erie County Board of Elections … tells the tale: Among those gathering signatures last week in an effort to get Brown’s name on a ballot were suburban Republican Party officials, Conservatives, and at least one member of the region’s robust community of right-wing extremists.
In fact, nearly one-third of the signature pages Brown turned in Tuesday were carried by members of right-leaning parties — most of them Republicans, most of them residing outside the city.
Brown had the support of prominent Democratic politicians even though he was running against the official candidate of the party. The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, refused to endorse India Walton after she became the Democratic nominee, likening her to David Duke, a prominent neo-Nazi white supremacist leader of the Ku-Klux Klan. US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer avoided expressing support for the official Democratic candidate for as long as he could. He refused to answer a journalist’s question as to why he hadn’t expressed his support, telling the reporter “today’s the day to talk about what’s going on in Washington, it’s not a day for politics.” However, under pressure, he did eventually endorse Walton in the last few days of the campaign. Several other prominent Democrat politicians endorsed Brown and some donated funds to his campaign.
Byron Brown’s political career had been progressed through a close association with fellow New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo has recently resigned under pressure due to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. According to media collective site Protean, the partnership promoted a property development project for the regeneration of Buffalo, known as the “Buffalo Billion”, “a multi-phase public-private partnership scheme bankrolled by the State of New York, masterminded by Andrew Cuomo, and carefully shepherded by his local consigliere, Byron Brown”.
Endorsement for Brown also came from the overwhelming majority of local trade union organisations, including several unions related to the construction industry. Notable exceptions were the Buffalo teachers’ and nurses’ unions which declared for India Walton. Walton is a nurse.
Brown also enjoyed the support of New York State Troopers Police Benevolent Association and Western New York Association of Retired Law Enforcement Personnel. Buffalo police commissioner Byron C. Lockwood allowed serving police officers to appear in adverts supporting Brown, some wearing T-shirts identifying them as police. Byron Brown had acquired world-wide notoriety in 2020 when a video showing Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old man, being pushed to the ground by a Buffalo police officer during a killing of George Floyd protest resulting in a cracked skull went viral and Brown publicly supported the police.
All three of Buffalo city’s major newspapers endorsed Brown.
Campaign finance
Byron Brown amassed a campaign fund of US$1.8 million, twice that of India Walton, mainly through corporate donations.
The New York Times declared that corporate and business groups, including real estate interests, had been pouring money into the campaign via independent expenditure groups.
In an analysis of Brown’s financial backers, the Washington Monthly newsletter stated that “a collection of Trump supporters and GOP donors” were “pouring millions of dollars into the mayoral race between two Democrats in an overwhelmingly Democratic city”. The same article stated:
“A super PAC 1 funded by New York’s real estate brokerage industry, which in 2018 spent millions trying to help Republicans take control of the State Senate, has also poured more than $300,00 into the race to re-elect Brown. And Douglas Jemal, a Washington, D.C.–based developer with a growing portfolio of commercial properties in Buffalo, is another Brown donor. He was pardoned of wire fraud by Trump in his last day in office.”
Towards the end of the campaign Byron Brown burnished his defender of law and order credentials by publicising India Walton’s history of minor brushes with the law. According to US left journal Jacobin,
“she was charged with $295 worth of food stamp fraud in 2003; she owed $749 in back taxes in 2004; she was stopped for driving with a suspended license; she visited her cousin before he went to jail; she failed to show up for a court summons sent to the wrong address; she wrote a rude Facebook post; and her car was towed just last month over unpaid parking tickets.”
Jacobin pointed out the huge injustice that was incurred by the publicity given to these minor infringements of a poor person compared with the silencing of Brown’s history of facing accusations of financial corruption. Jacobin commented:
Brown exploited the fact that Walton was something exceedingly rare in today’s politics: an actual working-class person who hadn’t graduated from the Ivy League, or spent a decade or more obsessively planning her political career. Having lost her nonprofit job after running for office, Walton was delivering food for DoorDash and living on loans from her mother as she campaigned these last few months.
Analysing the results
I have done a district by district analysis of the election results and compared them with those of the Democratic primary which I discussed in my last blog post in order to try to identify the class and racial basis of Brown’s success. Here are the results
In the discussion that follows I have treated the write in vote as being the number of votes for Byron Brown. This isn’t strictly speaking correct as there were other write in candidates. However, all the indications are that the vote for other write in candidates will have been derisory. Electoral officials stated that it will take weeks to sort out the write in votes.
A few aspects are immediately evident. Brown achieved a high degree of mobilisation of the well-off white middle class in his support. All the Buffalo districts have similar populations of about 30,000 each. Thus, the total number of number of votes cast in the district is a good indicator of relative voter turnout. The average number of votes per district was approximately 6,500. In the table above, two districts stand out has having a particularly high voter turnout: Delaware (11,109) and South (9119).
In the South district, Brown had by far his best result with 85% of the vote. South district is the whitest and second wealthiest of Buffalo. 87% of the population self-identifies as white with only 5% as African American. Two thirds of its households have an income greater than US$35,000, the median income for the city as a whole. Nearly a third have an income of more than US$75,000 a year.
In my discussion of the result of the Democratic primary elections in June, I had identified Delaware district as an anomaly because, although it is the wealthiest district of Buffalo, Walton won it with her second highest vote, 63%. I said:
Delaware is the wealthiest district of the city. 42.4% of the population are in households with incomes of more than $75,000 and 29.2% of more than $100,000. Its population is 80% white, 10% black or African American and 7% Hispanic. Its poverty level is the lowest in the city, and so is its unemployment level at 3.5%. Over three quarters of residents have pursued higher education (78.2%). Over one quarter of the population has an advanced degree (27.3%).
These are highly intriguing figures and I have been unable to find any explanation for the high Walton vote here, other than possibly that the district contains Allentown, an area described as having a high concentration of artists and bohemians.
In the general election, this primary result has been overturned. Brown obtained 58% to Walton’s 42%. A large number of white voters who presumably did not identify themselves as Democrats were moved to vote for Brown.
Walton only won in three districts: Niagara (56.4%), Masten (53.2%) and Ellicott (51.6%). Niagara, as I pointed out in my previous post,
is the most diverse of Buffalo: 50% identify as white (including Latinx white), approximately 20% black or African American, 12.2% as Asian and 12.2% as belonging to a race different from those mentioned in the survey. It has the highest Latinx population of any district at 21.6%. It has a large number of recent immigrants and refugees. A quarter of the residents were born outside the U.S. and 40% speak a language other than English at home.
The district has a high level of poverty, 35.4% living below the poverty line, but it also has a significant proportion of the population with high incomes: 21.6% have a household income of more than US$75,000. The educational level of the population is high, with 55.9% having been in higher education and 15.5% a post-graduate qualification.
Thus, Niagara district population would fit well my concept of the New Working Class
For Ellicott I previously wrote:
is the district that contains Downtown Buffalo and has the highest concentration2of black and African American population at 59%. Downtown Buffalo experienced an exodus of a large proportion of its white population to the suburbs, particularly to the affluent neighbouring town of Amherst. The district contains the highest proportion of senior citizens in the city at 16.7%. Older African Americans have been identified largely as conservative Democrats and were considered largely responsible for the defeat of Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primaries. Ellicott has a large Hispanic community (15.1%). It is a poor district with more than a third (33.1%) of its population living below the poverty line.
The Masten result is particularly interesting for there Walton had lost in the Democratic primary, with 39% to Brown’s 55%. Yet, in this general election, the result was reversed, running counter to the overall trend. This time Walton obtained 53.2% of the vote. Masten is 82% black and 10% white and is the poorest district of Buffalo, with over a third of the district’s residents having an income below the poverty line. It seems that Brown’s campaign appealing to the republican right turned significant numbers of the poor black population away from him. But that was more than made up by his mobilisation of well off Republican white voters, primarily in Delaware and South districts, who had previously not bothered to vote because a Democratic win in Buffalo was a foregone conclusion.
Conclusion
These results lead to the inescapable conclusion that the scaremongering that Brown undertook in a campaign that can only be described as scurrilous, portraying Walton as a danger to society and to law and order, created the unholy alliance that Marx described in the quote at the beginning of this post as the “party of order”, marching together in defence of “property, family, religion, order”, that same ‘party of order’ which was created in the UK to successfully defeat and remove Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership of the Labour Party.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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.
11 November 2021
US electoral law limits the amount of corporate or trade union donations that candidates can receive to fund their election campaign. However, a super PAC (Political Action Committee), a fund independent of the candidate but aiming to support him or her by autonomous activities is not subject to any spending limit ↩
This was a mistake. It has the third highest concentration of Black/African American population. The highest concentration is in Masten (82%) and the second is University (63%) ↩
I calculated the correlation coefficients between the ethnic composition of the district population and the vote for each of the candidates. The correlation coefficient between the proportion of the white population in the district and the write in (Byron Brown) vote is 0.72. The correlation coefficient between between the proportion of total non-white population and the write in vote is -0.73. The correlation coefficient between the proportion of total non-white population and the vote for India Walton is 0.73. ↩