By ELEUTÉRIO FS PRADO*
To spread its brutal destructiveness, capitalism needs a figure like Trump.
1.
American supporters of liberal democracy have been grappling with this question with a great deal of anguish. If Donald Trump appears to them to be a populist, an authoritarian, a liar and even a neo-fascist, how could he have won the presidential election in the United States, a supposed bastion of liberal democracy in a world prone to dictatorships?
See what two famous economists have to say, winners of the Risk Bank Prize (usually called the Nobel Prize in Economics), given annually to professionals in this area who advocate for the continuation of capitalism.
Here’s how Daron Acemoglu explains it: “In a January 2024 Gallup poll, only 28 percent of Americans (a record low) said they were satisfied with “the way U.S. democracy was working.” Now, American democracy has long promised four things: shared prosperity, a voice for citizens, expert-guided governance, and effective public services. But U.S. democracy—like democracy in other rich (and even middle-income) countries, for that matter—has failed to deliver on these aspirations.
But it wasn’t always this way. For three decades after World War II, democracy delivered such goods, especially shared prosperity. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages rose rapidly for all demographic groups, and so inequality declined. But that trend came to an end sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, inequality has soared; moreover, real wages for workers without a college degree have barely increased. As a result, about half of the American workforce has seen the incomes of the other half increase.”[I]
Here is Joseph Stiglitz’s explanation: “As the shock of Donald Trump’s victory has sunk in, pundits and politicians have begun to ponder what it means for the future of the United States and for global politics. Understanding why such a divisive and unqualified figure won again is crucial for Democrats. Did they move too far left and lose the moderate Americans who make up the majority? Or has centrist neoliberalism—pursued by Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton—failed to deliver on its promise, creating a demand for change?
To me, the answer is clear: 40 years of neoliberalism have left the US with unprecedented inequality, stagnation in the middle of the income spectrum (and even worse for those below it), and declining average life expectancy (highlighted by the rise in “deaths of despair”). The American dream is dying; although President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have distanced themselves from neoliberalism with their embrace of industrial policies, as representatives of the establishment they have remained associated with its legacy.[ii]
2.
The conclusion that follows from these statements is quite clear: for both, Trump's victory occurred because the necessary conditions for the existence and continuity of liberal democracy were undermined in the United States as the institutions and economic policies of neoliberalism began to prevail there.
The two explanations, still situated – and with merit – in the field of political economy, are not wrong, but they fail, first of all, because they do not present the structural reason for the advent of neoliberalism. And this discovery can only be made through an advance in the field of criticism of political economy. Without this critical movement that goes from the apparent functioning of the system to its laws of tendency and counter-tendency, it seems that the adhesion of political forces to neoliberalism comes from autonomous deliberative acts that can be revoked at any time by other equally autonomous deliberative acts.
As is well known, this ideology, normativity and political practice came to light in the late 1970s and spread from then on – overwhelmingly – as a complex response to the profitability crisis that began in the late 1960s, which affected not only the North American economy, but the world economy as a whole.
The following figure clearly shows that average profit rates in the US fell for more than a decade (from 1968 to 1981) due to the reduction in the capital-product ratio (implicit increase in the organic composition of capital), as well as the difficulty in increasing the profit/capital ratio (i.e., increasing the rate of exploitation) due to the power of the unions, which at the time was very strong.
It also shows how neoliberal policies, which weakened workers' power in various ways, yielded positive results for capital in the following decade (from 1981 to 1987). Without reaching the previous level, the profit rate recovered and, with it, the investments that drive capital accumulation.
As we know, neoliberalism has been successful in containing the rise in real wages of the working class in the US and other countries in general, that is, in keeping them below productivity gains, as the following figure shows. However, these descriptive statistics are insufficient to assess the losses of this class.
As we know, since 1980, workers have lost union and government protection, access to long-term employment, quality of life and even, for a large part of them, the pride of identity of being successful in a society centered on capital relations. But that is not all. With neoliberalism, workers have partially lost their class identification, as they are urged or even forced by circumstances to see themselves as self-entrepreneurs.
Furthermore, as already suggested, the explanations given by Acemoglu and Stiglitz above are based on the assumption that the social individual acts as homo economist both as a worker in the economic sphere and as a voter in the political sphere. By taking this “puppet"of the system as a subject, and moreover timeless – they are unable to grasp what is happening to the subjectivity of workers under the constraints of neoliberal normativity. Now, to clarify this point – an important difference in explaining the result of the recent presidential election in the USA – it is now necessary to resort to psychoanalysis as social criticism.
3.
Political economy and, above all, vulgar economy, construct abstraction homo economist from the appearance of the generalized commodity system only to explain its functioning. This is so because those who actually act as personifications of commodities in general and of the commodity “labor power” in particular (i.e., the workers), behave and have to behave as self-interested individuals.
“Man is,” says Stuart Mill, laying a foundation first, “a being determined, by the necessity of his nature, to prefer a greater portion of wealth to a less in all cases.”[iii] However, the personification that thus appears is also the basis of working class identity.[iv] – this class, however, only exists in fieri. It is only through struggle that this class constitutes itself in action, as such. Now, it is this power that neoliberalism combats by individualizing the worker.
If this political economy apprehends economic actors as subjects, the critique of political economy shows that they are subjects subjected to the compulsive and infinite logic of capital accumulation. Psychoanalysis since Freud, in turn, shows this “subject”, thus constructed from birth and in the family, as a contradictory being, in whose psyche the loving/solidarity drives and the aggressive/individualistic drives fight among themselves and combine.
Now, the latter gain prominence in the economic life of these “subjects” because they work there in a “system” – as Tone Tomšič says – “that can be described as an organized anti-social sociality”.[v]
Now, this system, which is based on the unlimited accumulation of capital, despite requiring cooperation in the sphere of production, promotes intense and extensive competition, especially in the sphere of commodity circulation. Now, since this “subject” is confronted with forces that it does not control and is even unaware of, it is permanently in a position of little power or even in a precarious condition.
As a result, the psyche of many, those employed or self-employed who do not dare to fight the system, is often filled with resentment.[vi] Behold, they “cowardly” submit their desire to the logic of the system, but they want to charge something for this submission; therefore, they maintain feelings of resentment, hostility, revenge, jealousy, envy towards others chosen as guilty.
Although Friedrich Nietzsche noted that this affect predominates in modern society, he did not associate it with capitalism. On the contrary, he considered it to be an unhealthy, pathological psychological reaction to the inexorable social conditions of a society that produces defeats, inequality, failure, etc., that is, that tends to produce many losers. As is well known, he contrasted the resentful individual with the heroic individual who faces his destiny with gallantry.
Tone Tomšič clearly shows that this critique is mistaken because it fails to challenge individualism and the logic of competition: “Contrary to Nietzsche’s perspective, the affect in question is not simply a “pathological” reaction (…) to inequality, injury and injustice. From a more structural point of view, resentment is a manifestation (…) of economic relations of competition; since they express the compulsive functioning of these relations in individuals and social groups. Since resentment imposes a poisoning of difference, it marks the social being with mutual hostility.
If social being carries the meaning of “being-with” and eventually of “being in common,” then resentment signals the antisocial subversion of social being into “being-against,” a mode of being that corresponds to the capitalist effort for the total “privatization” of the social and the common, or more generally, an effort to expropriate political subjects of their bodies, their lives, and ultimately of every structure that would provide them with the conditions (material and immaterial) for the reproduction of life.”[vii]
4.
Now, all this back-and-forth argument was necessary to find the origin of the second gap previously pointed out in the explanations given by Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoglu for the advent and victory of right-wing extremism in the last US election – as well as, in part, for the lack of votes on the traditional right. To say that Donald Trump won because Joe Biden and the leaders of the US Democratic Party abandoned the causes that interest workers is insufficient and, in fact, superficial.
The real reason for this drift is that neoliberalism, by pushing individualism to the extreme, by imposing relentless competition on working “subjects,” exacerbates and multiplies resentment. Not so much because it has not delivered on what it previously promised in terms of economic expansion and well-being. Not so much because it has subtracted the voices of workers from political competition. But mainly because neoliberal entrepreneurship and individualist resentment are thus well-connected. And the latter requires a cover-up for the lack that the “subject” feels through “good” lies and irrational violence. This is where the possibility of the rise of the extreme right arises.
Donald Trump’s popular voters are recriminating people who have “forgotten” that they have subjected their desires to the system of capital relations and who have begun to compensate for their dissatisfaction with their own mediocre performance in this system by directing selective hatred toward others who are blamed (immigrants, people who fight for rights, leftists, certain foreign peoples, etc.). By voting for a vengeful politician, they obtain pleasure, that is, perverse satisfaction.
Donald Trump is a small but great man, “small” because he presents himself as an ordinary man like his followers, and “great” because, beyond them, he seems powerful and is capable of crushing those who have been singled out for false blame and thus hated. In this vein, instead of progress, capitalism is now spreading brutal destruction, as occurred in Nazi Germany and is already happening prominently in the Middle East under the agency of Israel/USA. It was to deepen this trend that Donald Trump won.
* Eleutério FS Prado is a full and senior professor at the Department of Economics at USP. Author, among other books, of From the logic of the critique of political economy (anti-capital fights).
Notes
[I] See Acemoglu, Daron – The fall and rise of American democracy. In: Project syndicate, 3/12/2024.
[ii] See Stiglitz, Joseph – How Trump victories exposes the failures of neoliberalism. In: SocialEurope, 2/12/2024.
[iii] See Stuart Mill, John – On the definition of political economy and the method of investigation proper to it. In: Stuart Mill, Sao Paulo: April, 1974.
[iv] Here, for simplicity, it was decided not to segment the working class into petite bourgeoisie, proletariat and lumpenproletariat.
[v] See Tomšič, Samo – The antisociality of capitalism. In: Libidinal Economies of Crisis Times. Ed. Ben Gook. Bielefeld: Verlag, 2024.
[vi] About this see Kehl, Maria Rita – Resentment. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2020.
[vii] Op. Cit.
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