The 2024 election is a competition between warlord capitalism and corporate capitalism. That is the thesis behind a recent article by Chris Hedges on his Substack. I want to say that this is the most insightful writing I have seen about the 2024 race so far.

This is the reason I love Substack and am grateful to have a platform here myself. I doubt any major American publication would have ever printed Hedges's article. It's too close to the truth of the matter. But thanks to Substack we can all have a look.

I have great respect for Chris Hedges. I learned a lot from his book American Fascists. And I frequently learn more whenever I read his insightful analyses of the American political system.

His article "The Choice this Election is between Corporate and Oligarchic Power" is stunning. On one side the Democrats, championed by corporate power, which requires stability and technocratic expertise. On the other, the GOP, representing oligarchic power, which thrives on chaos and dismantling government. These two groups of political investors, he says, have bought up our politicians, our academics, and the press.

Hedges writes, "Both dismantle regulations, destroy labor unions, gut government services in the name of austerity, privatize every aspect of American society, from utilities to schools, perpetuate permanent wars, including the genocide in Gaza, and neuter [the] media... Both forms of capitalism disembowel the country, but they do it with different tools and have different goals."

In the essential book Golden Rule, writer Thomas Ferguson describes the Investment Theory of Party Competition. Ferguson's Golden Rule, is not that we should treat others the way we want to be treated. This Golden Rule, which is also ancient, says that he who has the gold makes the rules. What Ferguson is describing in his book is how political investors, not voters, make up the actual constituencies in American politics.

Ferguson writes, "The real market for poliitcal parties is defined by major investors, who generally have good and clear reasons for investing to control the state." The prize in any election is power. This is why the owning class spend millions and billions to influence the outcome in any given electoral contest. But the needs of the electorate are really not part of the equation at all, sad to say.

If competing blocs of political investors have shared interests about any issue there will be no competition on that subject between the two major parties. Writes Ferguson, "... if all major investors happen to share an interest in ignoring issues vital to the electorate, such as social welfare, hours of work, or collective bargaining, so much the worse for the electorate."

For example, during the Great Depression capital-intensive industrialists and investment bankers got behind FDR's New Deal because it was in the interest of export-driven industry to do so. By the time foreign competition started heating up in the 1970s political investors decided it was time to globalize production, slash wages, gut regulation, and cut taxes - otherwise known as the Neoliberal agenda. As a result the New Deal was abandoned and Neoliberalism was embraced by both major parties. That is what happens when political investors agree. But they don't always agree.

This is precisely what Chris Hedges is describing in his article. Kamala Harris represents corporate power while Donald Trump is the avatar of oligarchy. Hedges writes, "This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interest or protect their rights."

Hedges describes oligarchic power as "warlord capitalism," the desire of the rentier owning class to lay waste to any impediments to their accumulation of massive wealth. They thrive on "creative destruction," the parasitic harvesting of wealth taken mostly from the working class. The warlord class makes its money from forcing workers into the gig economy, raiding pension funds, and trading lower quality goods and services for higher profits. The warlord class is made up of private equity, billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the wife of dead billionare Sheldon Adelson.

In the article Hedges interviews economist Michael Hudson about his book Killing the Host - which featured prominently in my September 13 post The Rich are Parasites. As Hudson says in the article, "People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done."

On the other side, corporate power, what Hedges refers to as "housebroken capitalism." This variety of capitalist requires steady government and fixed trade agreements because their investments take longer to pay off. Think Fortune 500. Our beloved corporate overlords. Always efficiently finding ways to relieve American workers of their jobs, cut their pay, or reduce their benefits (it’s almost open enrollment time!). Your pals.

Housebroken capitalism is a nice way of conceptualizing liberalism, which is the left end of the pro-capitalist class. Liberals still believe capitalism is the best possible system, they just think it is the government's job to sand down the rough edges. Housebroken capitalists, best represented by neoliberal politicians like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, are totally cool with dismantling New Deal protections. It was Democrats who got NAFTA through, repealed Glass Steagal, eliminated the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, shredded the old welfare system, offshored millions of American jobs, shoved ungodly amounts of money into the military, and piled up massive deficits while still neglecting basic infrastructure.

Hedges sums everything up by saying, pick your poison. Voting Harris or Trump is simply a vote for "one form of rapacious capitalism over another. All other issues, from gun rights to abortion, are tangential and used to distract the public from the civil war within capitalism."

Plainly this political-economic system must be dismantled. Alexis de Toqueville once mused on the collapse of monarchy, saying "the class that was then the governing class had become, through its indifference, its selfishness, and its vices, incapable and unworthy of governing the country."

Thomas Ferguson concludes his book with this thought: "The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system. It is merely to poor."

Please check out Chris Hedges's remarkable article. Also, don't forget to like, comment, and restack this post.

Let's make them pay.

Source: Scott Bennett