Geopolitical conflicts, anti-imperialism and internationalism in times of ‘reactionary acceleration’

By Jaime Pastor

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published in Spanish at Viento Sur. Translation from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Within the general framework of the multidimensional crisis in which we find ourselves, now aggravated by the stimulus that Trump’s recent electoral victory represents for the rise of an extreme right on a global scale, it seems even more evident that we are witnessing a profound crisis of the international geopolitical (dis)order, as well as of the basic rules of International Law that have been established since the end of the Second World War. The most tragic manifestation of this crisis (which calls into question even the future of the UN) is found in the genocidal war against Gaza (Awad, 2024), to which are currently added around 56 wars across the planet.

In this context, the imperialist hierarchical system based on US hegemony is openly questioned and challenged by other major powers, such as China and Russia, as well as by others on a regional scale, such as Iran. This global geopolitical competition is clearly evident in certain war conflicts, the evolution of which will determine a new configuration of the balance of power within this system, as well as of the blocks present or in formation, such as the BRICS. In light of this new scenario, in this article I will focus on a summary description of the current panorama, then characterise the different positions that appear within the left in this new phase and insist on the need to build an internationalist left that is opposed to all imperialisms (main or secondary) and in solidarity with the struggles of the attacked peoples.

Polycrisis and authoritarian neoliberalisms

There is broad consensus on the left regarding the diagnosis we can make of the global crisis that the world is currently going through, with the eco-social and climate crisis as a backdrop. A polycrisis that we can define with Pierre Rousset as “multifaceted, the result of the combination of multiple specific crises. So we are not facing a simple sum of crises, but their interaction, which multiplies their dynamics, fueling a death spiral for the human species (and for a large part of living species)” (Pastor, 2024).

A situation that is closely related to the exhaustion of the neoliberal capitalist accumulation regime that began in the mid-1970s, which, after the fall of the bloc dominated by the USSR, took a leap forward towards its expansion on a global scale. A process that led to the Great Recession that began in 2008 (aggravated by austerity policies, the consequences of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine), which ended up frustrating the expectations of social advancement and political stability that the promised happy globalization had generated, mainly among significant sectors of the new middle classes.

A globalization, it must be remembered, that was expanded under the new neoliberal cycle that throughout its different phases: combative, normative and punitive (Davies, 2016), has been building a new transnational economic constitutionalism at the service of global corporate tyranny and the destruction of the structural, associative and social power of the working class. And, what is more serious, it has turned into common sense the “ market civilization” as the only possible one, although this whole process has acquired different variants and forms of political regimes, generally based on strong States immune to democratic pressure (Gill, 2022; Slobodian, 2021). A neoliberalism that, however, is today showing its inability to offer a horizon of improvement for the majority of humanity on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We are therefore in a period, both at the state and interstate level, full of uncertainties, under a financialized, digital, extractivist and rentier capitalism that makes our lives precarious and seeks at all costs to lay the foundations for a new stage of growth with an increasingly active role of the States at its service. To do so, it resorts to new forms of political domination functional to this project that, increasingly, tend to come into conflict not only with freedoms and rights won after long popular struggles, but also with liberal democracy. In this way, an increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism is spreading, not only in the South but increasingly in the North, with the threat of a “reactionary acceleration” (Castellani, 2024). A process now stimulated by a Trumpism that is becoming the master discursive framework of a rising far right, willing to constitute itself as an alternative to the crisis of global governance and the decomposition of the old political elites (Urbán, 2024; Camargo, 2024).

The imperialist hierarchical system in dispute

Within this context, succinctly explained here, we are witnessing a crisis of the imperialist hierarchical system that has predominated since the fall of the Soviet bloc, facilitated precisely by the effects generated by a process of globalization that has led to the displacement of the center of gravity of the world economy from the North Atlantic (Europe-USA) to the Pacific (USA, East and Southeast Asia).

Indeed, following the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008 and the subsequent crisis of neoliberal globalization, a new phase has begun in which a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order is taking place, tending to be multipolar but at the same time asymmetrical, in which the United States remains the great hegemonic power (monetary, military and geopolitical), but is weakened and challenged by China, the great rising power, and Russia, as well as by other sub-imperial or secondary powers in different regions of the planet. Meanwhile, in many countries of the South, faced with the plundering of their resources, the increase in sovereign debt and popular revolts and wars of different kinds, the end of development as a goal to be achieved is giving way to reactionary populisms in the name of order and security.

Thus, global and regional geopolitical competition is being accentuated by the different competing interests, not only on the economic and technological level, but also on the military and values level, with the consequent rise of state ethno-nationalisms against presumed internal and external enemies.

However, one must not forget the high degree of economic, energy and technological interdependence that has been developing across the planet in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as was clearly highlighted both during the global pandemic crisis and the lack of an effective energy blockade against Russia despite the agreed sanctions. Added to this are two new fundamental factors: on the one hand, the current possession of nuclear weapons by major powers (there are currently four nuclear hotspots: one in the Middle East (Israel) and three in Eurasia (Ukraine, India-Pakistan and the Korean peninsula); and, on the other, the climate, energy and materials crisis (we are in overtime!), which substantially differentiate this situation from that before 1914. These factors condition the geopolitical and economic transition underway, setting limits to a deglobalisation that is probably partial and which, of course, does not promise to be happy for the great majority of humanity. At the same time, these factors also warn of the increased risk of escalation in armed conflicts in which powers with nuclear weapons are directly or indirectly involved, as is the case in Ukraine or Palestine.

This specificity of the current historical stage leads us, according to Promise Li, to consider that the relationship between the main great powers (especially if we refer to that between the USA and China) is given through an unstable balance between an “antagonistic cooperation” and a growing “inter-imperialist rivalry”. A balance that could be broken in favour of the latter, but that could also be normalised within the common search for a way out of the secular stagnation of a global capitalism in which China (Rousset, 2021) and Russia (Serfati, 2022) have now been inserted, although with very different evolutions. A process, therefore, full of contradictions, which is extensible to other powers, such as India, which are part of the BRICS, in which the governments of its member countries have not so far questioned the central role of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which remain under US hegemony (Fuentes, 2023; Toussaint, 2024).

However, it is clear that the geopolitical weakening of the United States — especially after its total fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, the crisis of legitimacy that is being caused by its unconditional support for the genocidal State of Israel — is allowing a greater potential margin of manoeuvre on the part of different global or regional powers, in particular those with nuclear weapons. For this reason I agree with Pierre Rousset’s description:

The relative decline of the United States and the incomplete rise of China have opened up a space in which secondary powers can play a significant role, at least in their own region (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, etc.), although the limits of the BRICS are clear. In this situation, Russia has not failed to present China with a series of faits accomplis on Europe’s eastern borders. Acting in concert, Moscow and Beijing were largely the masters of the game on the Eurasian continent. However, there was no coordination between the invasion of Ukraine and an actual attack on Taiwan (Pastor, 2024).

This, undoubtedly facilitated by the greater or lesser weight of other factors related to the polycrisis, explains the outbreak of conflicts and wars in very different parts of the planet, but in particular those that occur in three very relevant current epicentres: Ukraine, Palestine and, although for now in terms of the cold war, Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, we have seen how the US took advantage of Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to relaunch the expansion of a NATO in crisis towards other countries in Eastern and Northern Europe. An objective closely associated with the reformulation of NATO’s “new strategic concept”, as we were able to see at the summit that this organisation held in Madrid in July 2022 (Pastor, 2022) and more recently at the one held in Washington in July of this year. At the latter, this strategy was reaffirmed, as well as the consideration of China as the main strategic competitor, while any criticism of the State of Israel was avoided. The latter is what is showing the double standards (Achcar, 2024) of the Western bloc with regard to its involvement in the war in Ukraine, on the one hand, and its complicity with the genocide that the colonial State of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people, on the other.

Again, we have also seen NATO’s growing interest in the Southern flank in order to pursue its racist necropolitics against illegal immigration while continuing to aspire to compete for control of basic resources in countries of the South, especially in Africa, where French and American imperialisms are losing weight against China and Russia.

In this way, the strategy of the Western bloc has been redefined, within which US hegemony has been strengthened on the military level (thanks, above all, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and to which a more divided European Union with its old German engine weakened is clearly subordinated. However, after Trump’s victory, the European Union seems determined to reinforce its military power in the name of the search for a false strategic autonomy, since it will continue to be linked to the framework of NATO. Meanwhile, many countries in the South are distancing themselves from this bloc, although with different interests among them, which differentiates the possible alliances that may be formed from the one that in the past characterized the Non-Aligned Movement.

In any case, it is likely that after his electoral victory, Donald Trump will make a significant shift in US foreign policy in order to implement his MAGA (Make America Great Again) project beyond the geoeconomic level (intensifying his competition with China and, although at a different level, with the EU), especially in relation to the three epicentres of conflicts mentioned above: with regard to Ukraine, by substantially reducing economic and military aid and seeking some form of agreement with Putin, at least on a ceasefire; with regard to Israel, by reinforcing his support for Netanyahu’s total war; and finally by reducing his military commitment to Taiwan.

What anti-imperialist internationalism from the left?

In this context of the rise of an authoritarian neoliberalism (in its different versions: the reactionary one of the extreme right and that of the extreme centre, mainly) and of various geopolitical conflicts, the great challenge for the left is how to reconstruct antagonistic social and political forces anchored in the working class and capable of forging an anti-imperialism and a solidarity internationalism that is not subordinated to one or another great power or regional capitalist bloc.

A task that will not be easy, because in the current phase we are witnessing deep divisions within the left in relation to the position to maintain in the face of some of the aforementioned conflicts. Trying to synthesize, with Ashley Smith (2024), we could distinguish four positions:

The first would be the one that aligns itself with the Western imperial bloc in the common defense of alleged democratic values against Russia, or with the State of Israel in its unjustifiable right to self-defense, as has been stated by a majority sector of the social-liberal left. A position that hides the true imperialist interests of that bloc, does not denounce its double standards and ignores the increasingly de-democratizing and racist drift that Western regimes are experiencing, as well as the colonial and occupying character of the Israeli State.

The second is what is often described as campism, which would align itself with states such as Russia or China, which it considers allies against US imperialism because it considers the latter to be the main enemy, ignoring the expansionist geopolitical interests of these two powers. A position that reminds us of the one that many communist parties held in the past during the Cold War in relation to the USSR, but which now becomes a caricature considering both the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime and the persistent state-bureaucratic despotism in China.

The third is that of a geopolitical reductionism , which is now reflected in the war in Ukraine, limiting itself to considering it to be only an inter-imperialist conflict. This attitude, adopted by a sector of pacifism and the left, implies denying the legitimacy of the dimension of national struggle against the occupying power that the Ukrainian resistance has, without ceasing to criticize the neoliberal and pro-Atlanticist character of the government that heads it.

Finally, there is the one that is against all imperialisms (whether major or minor) and against all double standards, showing itself ready to stand in solidarity with all attacked peoples, even if they may have the support of one or another imperial power (such as the US and the EU in relation to Ukraine) or regional power (such as Iran in relation to Hamas in Palestine). This is a position that does not accept respect for the spheres of influence that the various major powers aspire to protect or expand, and that stands in solidarity with the peoples who fight against foreign occupation and for the right to decide their future (in particular, with the leftist forces in these countries that are betting on an alternative to neoliberalism), and is not aligned with any political-military bloc.

This last position is the one that I consider to be the most coherent from an anti-capitalist left. In fact, keeping in mind the historical distance and recognizing the need to analyze the specificity of each case, it coincides with the criteria that Lenin tried to apply when analyzing the centrality that the struggle against national and colonial oppression was acquiring in the imperialist phase of the early twentieth century. This was reflected, in relation to conflicts that broke out then, in several of his articles such as, for example, in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” written in January-February 1916, where he maintained that:

The fact that the struggle for national freedom against an imperialist power can be exploited, under certain conditions, by another ’great’ power to achieve equally imperialist ends cannot force social democracy to renounce recognizing the right of nations to self-determination, just as the repeated cases of the use of republican slogans by the bourgeoisie for the purposes of political fraud and financial plunder (for example, in Latin countries) cannot force social democrats to renounce their republicanism (Lenin, 1976).

An internationalist position that must be accompanied by mobilisation against the remilitarisation process underway by NATO and the EU, but also against that of other powers such as Russia or China. And which must commit to putting the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military blocs back at the centre of the agenda, taking up the baton of the powerful peace movement that developed in Europe during the 1980s, with the feminist activists of Greenham Common and intellectuals such as Edward P. Thompson at the forefront. An orientation that must obviously be inserted within a global eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.

References

Achcar, Gilbert (2024) “Anti-fascism and the Fall of Atlantic Liberalism”, Viento Sur, 19/08/24.

Awad, Nada (2024) “International Law and Israeli Exceptionalism”, Viento Sur, 193, pp. 19-27.

Camargo, Laura (2024) Discursive Trumpism . Madrid: Verbum (in press).

Castellani, Lorenzo (2024) “With Trump, the Age of Reactionary Acceleration”, Le Grand Continent, 11/08/24.

Davies, William (2016) “Neoliberalism 3.0”, New Left Review , 101, pp. 129-143.

Fuentes, Federico (2023) “Interview with Promise Li: US-China Rivalry, ’Antagonistic Cooperation’ and Anti-Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 191, 5-18. Available in English at https://links.org.au/us-china-rivalry-antagonistic-cooperation-and-anti-imperialism-21st-century-interview-promise-li

Gill, Stephen (2002) “Globalization, Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”. In Hovden, E. and Keene, E. (Eds.) The Globalization of Liberalism. London: Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lenin, Vladimir (1976) “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, Selected Works, Volume V, pp. 349-363. Moscow: Progreso.

Pastor, Jaime (2022) “NATO’s New Strategic Concept. Towards a New Permanent Global War?”, Viento Sur, 07/02/22. Available in English at https://links.org.au/towards-new-permanent-global-war-natos-new-strategic-concept

— (2024) “Interview with Pierre Rousset: World Crisis and Wars: What Internationalism for the 21st Century?”, Viento Sur, 04/16/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/global-crisis-conflict-and-war-what-internationalism-21st-century

Rousset, Pierre (2021) “China, the New Emerging Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 10/16/21. 

Serfati, Claude (2022) “The Age of Imperialism Continues: Putin Proves It”, Viento Sur, 04/21/22. 

Slobodian, Quinn (2021) Globalists. Madrid: Capitán Swing. 

Smith, Ashley (2024) “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today”, Viento Sur, 06/04/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism-today

Toussaint, Eric (2024) “The BRICS Summit in Russia Offered No Alternative”, Viento Sur, 10/30/24. 

Urbán, Miguel (2024) Trumpisms. Neoliberals and Authoritarians . Barcelona: Verso.

 

Imperialist sanctions, crony capitalism and Venezuela’s Long Depression: An interview with Malfred Gerig

By Malfred Gerig & Federico Fuentes

Published 2 November, 2024

Malfred Gerig is a sociologist from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela) who directs the Political Economy of Venezuela research program at the Caracas-based Centro de Estudios para la Democracia Socialista (Centre of Studies for Socialist Democracy). He is the author of La Larga Depresión venezolana: Economía política del auge y caída del siglo petrolero (Venezuela’s Long Depression: Political economy of the rise and fall of the oil century) In this extensive interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Gerig situates the impact of United States’ sanctions on Venezuela and the rise of Venezuela’s crony capitalism within the context of the nation’s “Long Depression”.

Some blame sanctions for the economic crisis in Venezuela. Others point to economic mismanagement by the government of President Nicolás Maduro. But you pinpoint 2013 as the start of what you term a “Long Depression”, which precedes the sanctions and any shift in government policies. Why?

The first thing to understand about Venezuela’s economy is that this crisis is the result of how capital accumulation occurs in Venezuela, along with the way it was inserted into the world capitalist economy during Venezuela’s “ oil century” and [what Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi terms] the US’ systemic cycle of accumulation.

Venezuela was inserted into the world economy as an oil supplier. As a result, it became a rentier country, because its state claims sovereignty over this natural resource and collects an international rent or payment for use of its property. This generates a pattern of national capital accumulation known as rentier capitalism, which is a sui generis national capitalist economy as its metabolisation of capital is dependent on the surplus that the state captures from the world capitalist economy.

I have divided this period of [Venezuela’s oil century] into two main stages. The first was the boom stage, which ran from the start of this insertion in 1914-17 until the 1970s. For most of this period, Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter. Its economy expanded at an accelerated rate, taking it from the most backward economy in South America to first in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita.

Venezuela: GDP per capita (1890-2020)

But the 1970s marked the start of a crisis period that emerged out of abundance. The crises of rentier capitalism perfectly fit within French physician and economist Clément Juglar maxim: “The only cause of depression is prosperity.” This prosperity came as a result of the 1973 oil crisis and concurrent rise in oil prices, along with the first Carlos Andrés Pérez government’s oil nationalisation and “Big Push” project for rapid industrialisation.

After a crisis at the end of the 1970s, the 1980s began with another crisis. This one has a specific date — February 18, 1983, known as “Black Friday” — when for the first time since the 1930s, a substantial devaluation of the local currency occurred. That date marked a point of rupture and the start of an economic crisis that is yet to end.

The ’80s and ’90s were a period of deep crisis and social marginalisation. By the turn of the century, the social conditions most Venezuelans found themselves in were alarming.

These are the social conditions out of which the pro-poor Bolivarian Revolution lead by former president Hugo Chávez emerged in the late ’90s...

Yes, the Bolivarian Revolution emerged above all with a proposal to invest Venezuela’s oil income in alleviating people’s needs and then transform Venezuela’s economy and its role within world capitalism.

It is worth noting that every Venezuelan government since the 1930s has had its own project for “Sowing Oil”. That is, using the external income generated from oil for national development. Some believed the best way to do this was by satisfying human needs, others thought it required a process of forced industrialisation; but all, more or less, had the same idea. The Bolivarian Revolution was no exception.

It also has to be said that the Bolivarian Revolution benefited from a period I call the “golden age”, which occurred from 2003-04 to 2012. During these years, two major systemic events occurred, which pushed up oil prices: the War on Terror and the US’ crusade to reshape geopolitics in the Middle East; and the rise of East Asia, in particular the boom in oil demand generated by China’s growth. These two phenomena combined to push oil prices up and briefly paper over the crisis.

But with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, problems began to emerge in the Bolivarian Revolution’s macroeconomic model. This was followed by another major event that splits this story in two: the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. His death generated a forced leadership change in the Bolivarian Revolution, amid a rapidly escalating economic crisis specialists knew would require drastic corrections.

Before we start talking about the Maduro government, I would like your opinions on whether economic policy mistakes were made during the Chávez government.

I would say three things about the Chávez government’s economic policy. The first is that its economic policy did not place enough special emphasis on the negative sides of oil. As oil prices began to rise, Chávez was obsessed with the belief that there was nothing pernicious about the country reproducing itself based on international rent. This was the same mistake that other governments made, such as the Andrés Pérez government in the 1970s. Oil is like that: when it is not there, you only see the bad side of it; but when oil prices are high and you can pay for everything or solve everything on the cheap, it becomes more difficult to see the problems.

I would also add two things that were a bad idea to maintain over time: the fixed exchange rate system and the external debt model. From 2002-03, the government adopted a fixed exchange rate system, or administration of foreign exchange, that in real terms was much less malleable than even the dollarisation of the economy. This generated a process of exchange rate overvaluation in which Venezuela had year-on-year inflation rates of about 30%, while the exchange rate remained pegged at a parity of $4.30. This generated a drive towards imports, and a greater demand for international rent to pay for those imports. All this put pressure on productive and industrial sectors to import instead of diversifying their exports.

Of course, there were benefits to the fixed exchange rate system: cheap imports, higher consumption levels, controlled inflation. But the fixed exchange rate system led to a path of dependence that generated economic interests among sectors of the government and business elites, particularly those capitalists involved with imports who ended up benefiting from this system, even though in theory they were the main enemy of Chávez’s project. The result was that Venezuela became even more dependent on oil exports.

Tied to the fixed exchange rate issue was the issue of external debt. Venezuela had enough inflowing foreign currency that it did not need to raise its external debt. But the government carried out a large-scale and poorly-executed program of external indebtedness, which ended up exploding after Chávez’s death.

This is related to the fixed exchange rate system because this made private foreign debt cheaper. As a result, a whole network of zombie [shell] companies were set up, which borrowed externally and paid that debt with cheap dollars obtained from the fixed exchange rate system. This had drastic repercussions on the national economy.

Venezuela: Total external debt and central government external debt (1996-2019)

That said, Chávez’s economic policy may have had its problems, but it led to GDP growth between 2004-08, when there was a two-year recession, before again seeing GDP growth until 2013. The 2008 crisis was not easy to solve, but it was solved. There were problems and difficulties; the issue of electricity generation, for example, was a major one. But it was an economic policy that never led to a mega-depression. It was a coherent policy that never excused itself in any way and always provided answers to technical questions. It was a policy where you knew what the figures were and where there was no lack of transparency.

So, when Maduro takes office in 2013, not only had the golden era that paper over the economic crisis ended, but this was now intertwined with a political crisis generated by a leadership change in the Bolivarian Revolution...

As I said, this model was already, as we say in colloquial terms, pasando aceite [dripping oil] since 2010-11. While the Venezuelan economy grew in 2013, investments suffered a shock. This is a key indicator of recession. Then in 2014, the Venezuelan economy went into a recession that ended up transforming into the worst depression ever seen in a Western country that was not at war. The Venezuelan economy shrank by about 80% of GDP. The result of this in social terms is the mass migration we have seen of Venezuelans who have had to leave the country and the levels of subhuman consumption, malnutrition, lost days of schooling and a host of other issues that the vast majority of the population finds itself in.

Venezuela: Total annual GDP at constant price in dollars (1990-2020)

Then the crisis clearly started before the sanctions imposed by the US?

We have to say two things. First, that this was not a question of bad economic policy, but profoundly serious structural contradictions in the economy. This was not about a bad government coming to power, but a bad government coming to power and having to deal with a very serious and long standing structural crisis.

Second, that the sanctions came on top of both these things — a very bad economic policy and a very serious crisis — and created a perfect storm. Amid this perfect storm, each factor fed off each other, culminating in a nuclear bomb of dispossession, social marginalisation, deteriorating conditions for production, and so on.

The reality is that many things, both political and economic, occurred before the sanctions were imposed. This idea that it was all the fault of the sanctions — which the government has tried to push, above all outside the country because domestically people know it is mainly Maduro government propaganda and blame passing — has gained international traction because it is mixed in with the question of US imperialism.

This is not the same as saying the sanctions are a trivial matter; they are absolutely serious. But when they are used as a weapon by the government to exonerate itself from responsibility for its economic policy and its handling of the crisis — which is largely to blame for this social, economic and political catastrophe — it does a disservice to truth and reality. It is one thing to take the sanctions and the grave social damage they have caused seriously; it is quite another thing to do what the government has done, which is to trivialise the sanctions and use them as an excuse, while in practice doing little about the social impact these sanctions have on suffering humans.

In your opinion, what has the US government sought with its sanctions?

It is worth recalling that the first sanctions started in 2015, but that these sanctions were not remotely comparable to the sanctions implemented in 2019. We have to distinguish between two different sanctions regimes: on the one hand, the comprehensive sanctions regime that starts in 2019; and on the other, the sanctions that came before that as part of a targeted sanctions regime. The targeted sanctions regime pursued a strategy of attrition, while the comprehensive sanctions regime sought a collapse of the Maduro government.

There were a lot of sanctions prior to 2019 targeting top-level government officials over allegations of corruption, economic wrongdoing, and so on. The strategy here was not really about determining whether these public figures were involved in any crime, but to fragment the ruling elite. The US thought: “Here we have economic interests of actors who have investments in the US, who have deep connections to the international monetary system, who need to make transactions, and so on. When we sanction them, this will lead to the government fragmenting.” What happened was absolutely the reverse.

Prior to 2019, the Venezuelan government was also prevented from obtaining fresh currency through loans via sanctions imposed in 2017. However, by then — and contrary to the government’s belief — the problem facing the Venezuelan economy was not one of liquidity but of fundamentals. Any new debt was only ever going to be paid for by consumers and taxpayers, which is what ended up happening.

From 2019 onwards, a comprehensive sanctions regime was imposed, above all through sanctions on [the state oil company] PDVSA and the Central Bank [of Venezuela, BCV]. I have described these sanctions as a “weapon of financial destruction”. This sanctions regime was based on: disconnecting Venezuela from the international banking and SWIFT systems; disconnecting the BCV, and therefore Venezuela’s private banking system, from the international monetary system; and halting trade in strategic goods to limit the inflow of foreign currency. It represented a de facto severing of the country’s ties to the global economy.

It is worth asking why the sanctions implemented in 2019 did not end up causing more damage. The answer is because the Venezuelan economy was already destroyed. Venezuela was already six years into its Long Depression before the comprehensive sanctions regime came in. The comprehensive sanctions regime only came into effect in what I termed the “disaster stage” of the Long Depression, which was its third stage.

Venezuela: Annual percentage variation in GDP (1961-2020)

I want to return to this question of the different stages of the Long Depression, but before then I want to finish with the issue of the sanctions. What impact did the sanctions have in political terms if they failed to fracture the government or bring it down?

Sanctions had the political impact of changing the regime from within. The comprehensive sanctions regime pushed Venezuela’s rentier capitalism towards a neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics and a sui generis Venezuelan oil-based form of crony capitalism. The combination of an economic policy based on orthodox-monetarist measures and a neoliberal spirit — the two things are not the same — led to a regime change from within.

We saw a gradual rise in patrimonialism, which is nothing more than the privatisation of the state by civil servants and administrative cadres. The state becomes a private preserve and the state’s assets and means of administration become a means for civil servants to generate an income. This phenomenon already existed, but when orthodox-monetarist economic measures led to drastic cuts in public sector workers’ income, patrimonialism radically expanded as workers sought to use the tools that the system provided them with to generate an income that the system itself was taking away.

We saw that even the leitmotif of the government changed. This government no longer governs for the same people as the Chávez government. You could say that the Maduro government implemented bad economic policies between 2014-16, but perhaps it did so wanting to govern for the same people that Chávez governed for. But since 2016, and especially since 2018-19, the government no longer governs for the people; instead, the people have been made to carry the burden of the government’s economic policies and its neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics.

What has prevailed, especially from 2016 onwards, is capitalist realism. The dominant idea adopted by the ruling elite back then was that there was no other option but to embrace a kind of criollo [local] capitalism that could allow them to stay in power, but now with the support of certain sectors of society that they were historically at odds with, such as local capitalists. Today, Maduro’s government is a government that, to a large extent, has the support of local capitalists. As it lost the support of the people, the government replaced it with the support of these capitalists.

We could therefore say it was not so much a question of the sanctions leading to a loss of support for Maduro, as the sanctions being implemented because Maduro was already losing support....

I agree: Maduro’s loss of popularity was an incentive to implement sanctions. It is not the same to implement sanctions against a government that has strong popular support, as it is to implement them against a government that has faced four years of the worst economic crisis, that is facing a very serious food crisis where Venezuelans had nothing to eat and have to queue for everything, and so on.

The sanctions started in 2015 because that is when the catastrophic stalemate in terms of power started. That year the opposition overwhelmingly won the National Assembly elections. The lack of support for Maduro’s government was clearly exposed.

That is why the government has since applied what [US political scientist] Norbert Lechner calls “the strategy of a consistent minority” by tilting the political playing field in its favour to remain in power. Since 2015 it has gone down an authoritarian path, which has had different facets. This path ultimately led it to the recent elections on 28 July, when the government took this authoritarianism to a new level.

Many on the left believe the sanctions were imposed on the Bolivarian Revolution as some kind of moral punishment. I do not know if that was the case, but if this was true, the best antidote Chávez had against such weapons of moral punishment was maintaining formal and real democracy. He never gave anyone an excuse to implement sanctions or any kind of strategies of geopolitical encirclement and regime collapse.

Why then do you think the US has started to ease sanctions if the government has become even more authoritarian and has even less support?

The answer has to do with the geopolitical effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [which has pushed up oil prices]. And that the US government is reaping the rewards of these sanctions by having set up an oil exchange program — because the US is not paying for Venezuela’s oil. Under this program, the OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] basically has sovereignty over Venezuela’s oil via remote control.

That is why the US government grants a licence to Chevron, which pays PDVSA with debt forgiveness. In theory, PDVSA receives no fresh currency; what it receives in exchange is a discount on the debt it owes Chevron. There may also be some other benefits for Venezuela; for example, the exchange rate system may benefit from Chevron selling foreign currency in the exchange market as part of its operations in the country.

But in practice, the Venezuelan state’s sovereignty over its oil has been completely suspended. In the past 100 years, the US has never had as much control over Venezuela’s oil as it does right now.

Returning to the Maduro government’s economic policy. You said that by 2018-19, the Maduro government was already clearly a government that no longer governed for the people and referred to three periods within the Long Depression. Could you elaborate on this?

The Long Depression that started in 2013 has three major periods. The first, between 2013-15, is what I call the “period of crisis”. In this period, government economic policy was characterised by inaction: the dominant idea within the government was that there was no crisis and that it could carry on doing the same thing and obtaining the same results.

Initially it even denied there was a crisis, to the point that to talk about questions of technical economic issues, macroeconomics, investment, consumption, etc at the time meant you were a “neoliberal”. Instead, everything was a result of the “economic war” — a conspiracy theory involving everyone from imperialism to the local corner shop owner. There was a complete disregard for questions of basic economics.

This period saw the collapse of the currency exchange market, which generated a very important supply shock to the Venezuelan economy, given its deep dependence on imports. Most of the industrial sectors still active at the time were very dependent on imports. As a result, these sectors contracted.

So, the main characteristics of this period of crisis were a supply shock, the collapse of the exchange rate, and what I call, borrowing from Marx, the impossibility of reconverting money into capital. This was because production was unable to continue at the same scale due to these shocks to the currency market and imports.

Venezuela: Imports per inhabitant at constant price in dollars (1990-2020)

Then we had the oil price shock in 2015. The government once again concocted a conspiracy theory that this was all part of imperialism’s strategy. In reality, it was our partners — OPEC and Saudi Arabia — who sought to keep oil competitive with shale gas. This oil price shock generated what everybody was already expecting: a very serious debt and fiscal crisis in Venezuela.

That is when the first major disastrous economic policy decision was taken: to continue the strategy of paying foreign debt. The government decided to halt imports in order to pay the foreign debt, using the argument that imports meant giving dollars to capitalists to enrich themselves. Sure, to a large extent that was true; but giving dollars to capitalists also means importing food, industrial inputs, etcetera.

As part of this strategy, the government paid US$100 billion in foreign debt. To put that figure in context, at one point Venezuela’s economy was $40 billion; that is, the government paid off an amount of foreign debt twice the size of Venezuela’s economy. The shock that this generated on imports led to a second major supply shock, taking the country’s economic depression to a new level.

This policy also generated another deep shock to production, which pushed Venezuela into a profound humanitarian and food crisis between 2016-17 as agro-industrial and food import sectors totally collapsed. This was the second phase of the Long Depression: the “period of collapse” between 2016-18.

In this phase, the government tried to apply its first chaotic macroeconomic stabilisation program, based on paying foreign debt and cutting imports in order to improve conditions. It was completely naive on the part of the government to think that dressing up to impress international finance would lead to an influx of fresh currency and thus solve the serious structural problems afflicting the Venezuelan economy. Particularly, as I insist, when the problem facing the Venezuelan economy was not one of liquidity but of fundamentals.

The main consequence of this program of being a “good payer” of foreign debt and import cuts was that it became intertwined with a deficit management strategy to facilitate paying foreign debt through the sale of PDVSA debt bonds via the Central Bank. This represented a form of Quantitative Easing (QE) on steroids amid a collapsing economy. It led to one of the worst periods of hyperinflation in Latin America’s history.

This triggered a new phase in the crisis, as GDP began falling by double digits. As with similar experiences in history, this hyperinflation was caused by the debt crisis and political-institutional collapse. With the government still pursuing a strategy of cutting imports to pay debt, Venezuelan households were burdened with the debt payments and their wealth collapsed due to hyperinflation.

This is the third phase, the “period of hyperinflation”, where hyperinflation became a social phenomenon of such harrowing dimensions that people basically forgot all the other economic problems. Hyperinflation absolutely changed society. This is also the period in which the government began, in mid-2018, to implement the orthodox-monetarist program it still maintains.

We cannot even really call it an adjustment program; it is a stabilisation program designed to reduce inflation without taking into account the serious impacts the program would have on economic activity and society.

The program’s main pillar was a draconian cut to public spending, which in 2018 was about 48.4% of GDP, while revenue amounted to 17.4% of GDP, leading to a fiscal deficit of 31%. Under this new program, spending was first reduced by 27 percentage points in 2019, then reduced again to about 10% of GDP in 2020.

Venezuela: Budget income, expenditure and total balance according to IMF (1990-2021)

This orthodox-monetarist policy also included other pillars, in particular a financial squeeze that sent Venezuelan society back to the financial stone age by implementing a legal reserve requirement on banks that at one point reached 93% of reserves. The aim was to cut off secondary sources of money creation. This meant that the level of household credit in 2019 was only 2.2% of GDP. Amid hyperinflation, households could not even use credit cards to take advantage of negative real interest rates to buy the goods they needed. Companies that wanted to invest or continue producing had to use their own capital as they could not get bank loans.

There was also a very serious wage squeeze, as adjustment programs of this nature require a shock on consumption and demand. This was largely achieved through a wage squeeze, especially in the public sector, which covers administrative staff and civil servants but also pensioners as Venezuela has a public pension system. Pensioners today receive the legal minimum wage, which has hit rock bottom: about $2.30 a month. Destroying wages was a means for solving the government’s fiscal problems on the expenditure side rather than the income side, while also destroying demand amid collapsing supply.

Changes were also implemented to the currency exchange market, leading to a unification of exchange rates. The Maduro government had continued with differential exchange rates for about six years. This meant that if you converted the minimum wage at the official exchange rate, it was equivalent to about $11,000 a month — a complete fantasy. No one knows if people were buying dollars at the official rate, but if they were — which is almost certainly the case — it is not hard to see how this created extravagant conditions for mass looting.

From 2018 onwards, the currency exchange market was liberalised. A regime of inter-bank trading desks and successive micro-devaluations were implemented, leading to a gradual dollarisation of society. As dollarisation rose, society had a currency it could now use as a means for exchange, for storing value and as an accounting unit. The bolivar today only functions as a means of exchange, it no longer serves the other two functions that all other currencies have. Prices are marked in dollars because that is the currency that functions as the unit for accounting for all economic activities: for the family when calculating its weekly or monthly expenses; for a large company, etc.

Aspects of this program provided some economic breathing space, but only because the economy had shrunk to such a small scale. By the time this macroeconomic stabilisation program was applied, the economy was much easier to manage. The government could stabilise without any large external financing program, precisely because the economy was so extremely small.

Were there alternative policies that could have been implemented?

There are always alternatives, especially to such a catastrophic policy in terms of impacts on production and society. The government’s policy was basically to activate what Karl Polanyi called “the Satanic Mill” and seek economic stabilisation through social destruction.

In fact, when we seek comparisons to Maduro’s macroeconomic stabilisation program, we see that it most closely resembles the first stabilisation programs implemented in Latin America — in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina — rather than the less orthodox programs implemented in Bolivia or Brazil’s Plan Real. In other words, Maduro’s program is not only more orthodox than the orthodoxy of today but even that of the ’90s.

So, indeed, other things could have been done. The most important of these was understanding that the level of destruction wrecked on the Venezuelan economy had reached such a level that solutions required supply-side economic policies; that is, economic policies that drastically increased investment, generated employment, raised wages, etc.

There were also many alternatives in terms of protecting society from what the government was seeking to do. Instead, society was left to fend for itself because, by that time, all the social assistance programs implemented during the Chávez period and the first years of the Maduro government had been totally dismantled. When the avalanche of social dislocation began, society had nothing with which to protect itself. This is important to stress.

In your book, you argue that this Long Depression has been accompanied by a crisis of government legitimacy. How has the government responded to this crisis?

I characterised this crisis of legitimacy, which above all begins in 2016, as a catastrophic stalemate. That year marks its start because the National Assembly is very important for economic governance. But the strategy of the incoming National Assembly — in their own words — was to remove the president within six months. In response, the government sought to protect itself and govern without the National Assembly.

This led the government down an authoritarian path with different phases, up until the July 28 presidential elections when it took it to another level. Since 2016, Maduro’s government has progressively adopted what Max Weber called a “politics of power for power’s sake”; that is, it abandoned its historical project and the social support base that it governed for and became a government of cliques, a government whose sole purpose was to stay in power.

However, it is important to reject any moralistic reading according to which there are good guys and bad guys in this story. Since 2016, the formal set of rules of Venezuelan democracy have been de facto broken by both sides: the government and the opposition have consecutively attacked this set of rules, in a process by which each move by one side only ever led to a further escalation of attacks against not only the rules of representative democracy, but more importantly protagonist democracy.

The formal hollowing out of popular sovereignty that took place in the July 28 presidential election really began many years before, when both sides of the political class turned against this sovereignty and against providing solutions for the people amid the crisis.

How then can we characterise the government, in political terms, after the 28 July elections?

I characterised this government as an absolutely patrimonialist government that lacks both popular and legal legitimacy, as well as any legitimacy based on legacy. One of the worst political mistakes this government made was to destroy the political capital, or legacy, bequeathed to it by Chávez, precisely because it opted to govern for another sector of society: mainly themselves.

It is a completely authoritarian government with absolutely nothing left-wing about it. It is a government that would love to come to an arrangement such as occurred between [former US secretary of state] Henry Kissenger and [former Egyptian military ruler] Anwar El-Sadat, for example. In fact, it has been seeking this for years, but has failed largely because it continuously places its own obstacles in this path.

There is an idea outside Venezuela that this government represents, to use an old phrase, a “fortress under siege”. That idea is used to legitimise its violation of human, social and economic rights. Such violations are seen as fine because the government remains a besieged fortress supposedly fighting imperialism, at least on the surface.

But this is ridiculous. The Venezuelan people are not an object whose raison d'être is as background actors in some fictitious anti-imperialist storyline. The Venezuelan people are a subject that must be allowed to find a way to express and defend their own interests and sovereignty. This, in my opinion, is the position that the global left must take: above all, taking the side of Venezuela’s dispossessed classes.

We Venezuelans, especially those of us on the left, have been very disappointed with the views of a certain section of the international left. It seems that the suffering of the Venezuelan people, of the families that have had to separate, of the political prisoners, of the people who have had to give up on their life dreams etc, matter little to them amid their completely abstract view of the situation. To simplify the situation in such a way as to believe that there is a left-wing government fighting against imperialism is to sweep under the table all this human suffering. That does not seem ethically correct.

In summary, we have a patrimonialist government that has built a form of crony capitalism, which benefits a social minority based on the dispossession of the majority. It is a government that implements ultra-orthodox economic policies. It is a government pervaded by capitalist realism, according to which there is no alternative to crony capitalism and authoritarianism.

The Bolivarian Revolution under Maduro has become a catastrophe. The Venezuelan people, in line with their republican and national-popular traditions, will no doubt be the ones who resolve this mess. But, today, this government stands opposed to everything good about Venezuela, to our republican traditions and, above all, to our national-popular interests.

2024 US Presidential Polls: An Undemocratic System

Narender Thakur , C. Saratchand | 04 Nov 2024
NEWSCLICK INDIA

The Nov 5 polls involve many issues of concern to the working people, but the electoral system is such that whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to resolve these problems.

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The presidential election process in the United States is unique for a number of reasons. First, it is possibly the only country in the world where a candidate can lose the presidential election even if they obtain a majority of the votes (popular vote). This is the case since a candidate has to win a majority of 270 votes in an electoral college of 538. Each of the 50 states and the capital, Washington District of Columbia, are each allotted a certain number of electoral college votes ostensibly based on population, with each of the states having at least 3 electoral college votes.

This system, supplemented by voter suppression that disproportionately impacts minorities adversely, currently tends to favour the Republican Party, which politically dominates rural or semi-urban states and areas with small populations. Further, within many (but not all) states, the winner of the popular vote of that state receives all the electoral college votes allotted to that state. This results in the irrelevance of the votes of other candidates in that state.

However, the “centrist” leadership of the Democratic Party has tended to acquiesce with this exclusionary system unlike the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. This is evident from the voting records of congresspersons of the Democratic Party in almost every legislation that poses even the mildest challenge to big business. In each such case, a sufficient number of Democratic Party congresspersons can always be found to scuttle the relevant legislation.

In order to try and explain this acquiescence, it may be apposite to underline the second unique feature of the electoral system of the US, namely, that there are only two electorally significant parties, i.e., the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. This two-party system has emerged out of a complex historical process which may be approximately summarised as follows: unlike other countries with many political parties where the reformist leadership of the Left of Centre parties by and large compromises with capital, in the US, capital de facto dominates both these parties to an extent that exceeds what is the case in any other country.

As long as this two-party system and electoral college process exist, it is extremely difficult for any Left wing political movement to become electorally significant. Therefore, many Left forces in the US tend to (but not always) advocate for support to the Democratic Party presidential candidate in order to defeat the Right wing Republican Party, which is currently led by Donald Trump and currently metamorphosing into a neo-fascist organisation.

Due to the joint impact of the two-party system and the electoral college-based presidential election process (which is undemocratic), the voting in a small number of states, known as battleground states, have acquired outsized influence. In other words, in the non-battleground (or safe) states, the number of swing voters who switch their voting choice between the two major parties is not large enough to change the party candidate who wins that state.

In the battleground states, it is the swing voters of these states who are decisive in determining the victor in that state. Therefore, the entire focus of political campaign in the presidential election process is directed toward the swing voters of these battleground states.
The Political Economy Context

The current presidential contest, which is principally between Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party and Donald Trump, exemplifies the issues highlighted in the preceding paragraphs. However, both the process and outcome of the presidential election is the joint outcome of the encounter between the prevailing political economy context and the extant undemocratic electoral system in the US.

Let us, therefore, briefly set out the political economy setting of the current presidential election. First, the imperialist hegemony of the US is declining due to the end of the super imperialist (or unipolar) interlude exemplified, above all, by the rise of China and the return of Russia.

Second, the ongoing process of neoliberalisation in the US has resulted in a severe squeeze on the working people since the 1970s and has disproportionately impacted minorities and women. This has involved stagnation in wages relative to what was the case before the 1970s, decline in trade unions (though there has been some recent resurgence), the rise of a racially and gender wise differentiated precariat, out migration of production capacity especially in activities involving the relatively lower and middle reaches of the technological ladder etc.

Initially, this process benefited big business in the USA since these multinational corporations got these commodities produced in areas principally in and around China (due to labour arbitrage) but the bulk of the profits that were realised accrued to these very same multinational corporations of the USA in the form of rentier incomes (deriving from the actions of international financial capital centred in the US), merchant profits, royalties on “intellectual property” etc.

However, as China ascended the technological ladder (in spite of counter moves of the government of the US), capitalists in the US, too, felt a downward pressure on their profits as regards both merchant profits and royalties on “intellectual property”. Needless to say, this downward pressure on profits was disproportionately felt by small enterprises.

The reaction of both parties to this unfolding political economy context has tended to converge (but not fully) in a regressive direction. The Republican Party, especially Trump, has firstly sought to scapegoat (non-white) immigrants for the travails of the working people along two lines. One, these non-white immigrants, it is claimed, reduce employment and wages of residents. In fact, most of these non-white immigrants end up doing those types of work and at wages both of which are undesirable to working residents of the US. Some high wage jobs are undertaken by immigrants since there are no residents available to undertake these jobs.

Two, it is claimed that the Democratic Party-led government diverts public resources toward these non-white immigrants. This claim is specious since these accounts are at best anecdotal and there is no accounting of the amounts involved as a share of total social welfare expenditure of the government of the US. However, this xenophobia neatly dovetails with the explicit racism of the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party, acting as the “Left” wing of capital in the US is unwilling to counter the Republican Party by making the case for an expanded social welfare system that is financed by taxation of the super-rich. Therefore, the Democratic Party’s implicit racism has tended to involve a step-by-step acquiescence in this item in the neo-fascist agenda of the Republican Party.

Therefore, none of the “centrist” leaders of the Democratic Party are willing to advocate for policies that can directly combat the racism of the Republican Party, including increase of the minimum wage, universal health insurance coverage, public financing of universal child and elder care etc.

As far as the relative decline of the imperialist hegemony of the US is concerned, both parties have basically the same set of policies though the public articulation and temporal sequencing of these policies differs between both parties. Objectively, the US is incapable of strategically contending with both China and Russia simultaneously. Therefore, the government of the US seems to be coming around to the view that military conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia ought to be wound down (without too much loss of face) so that its resources may be relatively concentrated against China.

The ostensible difference in the foreign policy platform of both parties appears more accentuated than is the case due to the fatuousness involved in Donald Trump’s articulation of his campaign points in this regard. The foreign policy record of Trump’s presidential term between 2017 and 2021 is ample testimony of the validity of the proposition of a de facto consensus on foreign policy among both parties.

The relative decline of the US, briefly discussed in the preceding paragraphs, has been geographically uneven within the country. In many states that are in the interior of the country, the decline in manufacturing has not been even partly compensated (in terms of output but not by equivalent jobs in terms of wages and working conditions) by the rise of service sector activities unlike in both the coastal areas.

The Battleground States

In the light of the issues we have highlighted, let us now examine some salient features of the ongoing presidential process in the US with special reference to the battleground states. We examine data regarding electoral college voting, popular vote and recent poll surveys. Besides, we also look into the five socio-economic characteristics of the US states, including rural population, per capita income, unemployment, race, and education level by bachelor degree and above.

Many states have had close presidential votes in the past 40 years. Over the past eight presidential elections, 26 states were won by less than a three-point margin in at least one election. This includes Florida and Nevada, which had tight margins in five of the last eight elections (1992–2020).

Figures 1 and 2 show the number and names of the US battleground states where the winning party was different from previous presidential elections during the period 1992-2020. Figure 1 shows that the highest number of battleground states was in 1992 at 22 but this reduced to six in 2016 and 5 in 2020.

Figure 2 shows 26 battleground states during the period 1992-2020. The highest number of switches in the identity of the winning party are as follows: Nevada (5), Florida (5), North Carolina (4), New Hampshire (4), Pennsylvania (4), Wisconsin (4), Georgia (3), Ohio (3), Montana (3), and Arizona (3), reflecting a range 3-5 for the 10 battleground states and another 16 states reflected a change of 1-2 for the same metric.

The 10 battleground states in the range of 3-5% can be analysed here for the vote shares of both parties during the presidential elections of both 2020 and 2016. Figures 3 and 4 show the vote shares. Figures 5, 6 and 7 show the shares of rural population, per capita income and unemployment rate to examine the voting preference of states.

The share of popular votes for Biden in the top-10 battleground states in 2020 was as follows: Nevada (50.1), Florida (47.9), North Carolina (48.6), New Hampshire (52.7), Pennsylvania (49.9), Wisconsin (49.4), Arizona (49.4), Montana (40.5), Ohio (45.2), and Georgia (49.5). Among these top-10 battleground states, six had more than 49 % popular vote share for Biden, with two states having more than 50% (Nevada and New Hampshire).

The corresponding vote shares for Trump are: Nevada (47.7), Florida (51.2), North Carolina (48.6), New Hampshire (45.4), Pennsylvania (49.9), Wisconsin (48.8), Arizona (49.1), Montana (56.9), Ohio (53.3), and Georgia (49.2).

Six of the top 10 battleground states have more than 49% popular vote shares for Trump. Further in two states, he had more than 50% share (Florida and Montana). It may be not unimportant in this context to examine the share of rural population and unemployment rate in these states.


Battleground States Voting in Recent Polls

Let us now focus on those states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016. These states include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Slim victory margins in elections also indicate that a state could have been won by either party. In 2020, seven states were won by a margin of three percentage points or less. These included the five previously mentioned states as well as North Carolina and Nevada.

Figures 3 and 4 show that Nevada and New Hampshire are battleground states that favoured Biden while Florida and Montana favoured Trump during 2020 with more than 50% popular votes. Figure 5 shows the shares of rural population in Florida (8%) and Montana (48%) and New Hampshire (44%) and Nevada (6%). The share of rural population is one (but not the sole) determinant of support for the Republican Party

Figure 6 shows per capita income of these four state,s namely Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and were won by a margin of three percentage points or less. These states included the five above states, in addition to North Carolina and Nevada.
Rural Populace, Per Capita Income, Unemployment, Race

It is important to examine the shares of rural population of these seven states: Arizona (11%), Georgia (27%), Michigan (28%), Pennsylvania (24%), Wisconsin (17%), North Carolina (34%) and Nevada (6%) as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 6 shows the Per Capita Income of these four states are as followed: Florida ($69,000-20th rank) and Montana ($65,000 -30th rank) and New Hampshire ($79,000 -10th rank) and Nevada ($66,000 -26th rank), reflecting lower rankings of these states in the US.

Typically (but not always) higher per capita income states tend to vote Democrat while lower per capita income states tend to vote Republican. The per capita income of these seven battleground states is as followed: Arizona ($63,000-35th rank), Georgia ($59,000-42 rank), Michigan ($61,000-40th rank), Pennsylvania ($69,000-19th rank), Wisconsin ($65,000-31st rank), North Carolina ($62,000-37th rank) and Nevada ($66,000-26th rank, as discussed earlier). It is not unsurprising that the seven battleground states are distributed around the middle ranks of states in terms of per capita income.

It may also be relevant to point out here that within each state, the relatively densely populated urban areas tend to vote Democrat while the relatively sparsely populated rural and semi-urban areas tend to vote Republican. This rural-urban divide tends to be higher in Democrat-leaning states while this divide is lesser in Republican- leaning states.

The relative economic decline of the US has tended to disproportionately impact rural and semi-urban states. In the absence of any meaningful solutions to this greater decline in rural and semi-urban areas on the part of the Democratic Party, Trump’s neo-fascist demagogy has tended to be more effective among the working people living in these areas

Figure 7.1 shows unemployment rates in the US states during September 2024. The unemployment rates of the seven battleground states are as followed: Arizona (3.5%), Georgia (3.6%), Michigan (4.5%), Pennsylvania (3.4%), Wisconsin (2.9%), North Carolina (3.8%) and Nevada (5.6%). The unemployment rate in Florida (3.3%) and Montana (3.3%) and New Hampshire (2.5%) and Nevada (5.6%- 50th rank as highest). The official unemployment rates tend to underestimate actual unemployment due to the discouraged worker effect. But the conditions of work, including the level of real wages, will tend to impact voting behaviour across states.

The impact of the state-level unemployment rates in the US tend to be refracted through the racial composition of the population of various states. There are four non-battleground states that are not majority white. The share of the white population in these states are: District of Columbia with 40.9%, California-39.4% Hawaii-36.5% and New Mexico – 47.7%. The shares of whites in the seven battleground states are as follows: Arizona (53.4%), Georgia (50.1%), Michigan (72.4%), Pennsylvania (73.5%), Wisconsin (78.6%), North Carolina (60.5%) and Nevada (45.9%).

Typically, the lower the share of the white population, the greater the share of people that vote Democrat. However, the share of Hispanic or Latinx people who vote Democrat are lower than the share of African Americans who vote Democrat.

Education Level and Voting Behaviour

Another indicator of voting behaviour across states is educational attainment. Figure 7.2 shows trends in educational attainments in states of US using the bachelor degree as the differentiator. The share of people with a bachelor degree or higher in battleground states are: Arizona (32%), Georgia (35%), Michigan (32%), Pennsylvania (35%), Wisconsin (33%), North Carolina (35%) and Nevada (28%). The other three states in terms of the same metric are: Florida (33%), Montana (35%) and New Hampshire (40%).

States which rank high in terms of this metric are: Washington District of Columbia (63%), Massachusetts (47%), Colorado (44%), Vermont (44%), New Jersey (43.5%), Maryland (43%), Connecticut (42%), Virginia (41%). Typically, states with higher levels of educational attainment tend to vote Democrat while those with lower levels of the same metric tend to vote Republican.
Opinion Polls in Various States

Let us now turn to trends in opinion polls regarding the presidential elections to be held on November 5, 2024. Figure 9 shows average poll survey vote shares of both candidates in various states. In the battleground states, the average vote share of Kamala Harris, according to various opinion polls, were as follows: Arizona (46.6%), Georgia (46.8%), Michigan (48.6%), Pennsylvania (47.4%), Wisconsin (48.7%), North Carolina (47.4%) and Nevada (47.7%).

As per the same metric, Kamala Harris has the following expected performance in three other states: Florida (44.2%), Montana (39.5%) and New Hampshire (50.3%). The expected average vote share of Donald Trump is as follows: Arizona (48.4%), Georgia (48.8%), Michigan (46.9%), Pennsylvania (48.5 %), Wisconsin (48%), North Carolina (48.7%) and Nevada (48.1%), Florida (51.4%), Montana (57.5%) and New Hampshire (44.7%).

Figures 10 and 11 show the shares of expected voter preferences in CNN poll surveys on September 4 and October 23-28, 2024, in the six battleground states. On September 4, 2024, in the six battleground states, Harris was expected to be ahead of Trump in four battleground states (Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin) while Trump was ahead in Arizona. Both candidates were expected to be tied in Pennsylvania.

In a subsequent CNN poll survey conducted during October 23-28, Harris was expected to be ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin (51%) while both candidates were expected to be tied in Pennsylvania.

The ability of opinion polls to predict US presidential election results have been mixed. It is fairly well established that some supporters of Trump do not accurately reveal their voting preferences leading to an undercounting of his support in opinion polls. Needless to say, this effect is likely to be significant in battleground states. It is difficult to disregard the proposition that support of both candidates in terms of the electoral college is too close to be called conclusively.
Conclusion

The forthcoming US presidential election is one involving many issues of concern to the working people and the capitalists of the country. But the electoral system of the country, working in conjunction with the two-party system, is such that the result of the elections is unlikely to result in any significant move toward resolving these problems. Therefore, Trump is seen by some as a pro-poor candidate principally on “cultural” grounds, while both he and his party are resolutely opposed to every meaningful economic measure to address the problems confronting the working people.

Likewise, Trump demagogically puts himself forward as an “anti-war” candidate. Such false claims made by him seem to have some purchase since the essential points of Harris’ policies are identical to that of Trump while the language of their propaganda differs.

Therefore, while Harris has sought to foreground the threat of the Republican Party to ban abortions but without addressing the economic problems faced by women, Trump has sought to portray Harris as being unfit for office. The challenge for the Left is to combat Trump’s neo-fascism but decisively go beyond the dubious policy proposals of Harris.

Narender Thakur is Professor, Department of Economics, Dr. BR Ambedkar College, University of Delhi. C. Saratchand is professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.